clarice...your case file

*Jinx* · October 04, 2013, 06:50 PM

I honestly don't remember the timeline well either so we'll say it's perfect!
EDIT: Yeah idk why I keep writing "Aktaie" and meaning "Atka" SIGH.

She could scarcely bring herself to look upon him, with his downcast vision and his slump of defeat; he was not the madman she had once known him to be, the witch doctor she had feared in her girlhood and revered in the earliest days of womanhood. He was not the packs' Angakok, who refused the command of all and forged his own path with the pleasure of Sos his only object, nor the wicked Shaman who had always tormented her with chastisement when she failed. Not the secluded monster that had found himself caught in the youngest buds of her fantasy, inexplicably and perhaps improperly. He was not the wolf who had awoken her subconscious desire to please the Dark Bear, the closest of her late father's confidants, and whose worship singularly had likely spared the Bay for as long as it had been spared. He was a broken man, like one she had never once met, and she could not bring herself to look.

But there was fire in him — he was forged of it, in his inner soul — and when he rose to his paws with a flash of his old self she met him with similar primality. Her own nape rose indignantly to match his own and her lips peeled back to loose a snarl in response to him, and that was all; calmness settled over the Shaman, albeit a tight sort of calmness that was reined in by sheer willpower, and she allowed herself to back down as well. His affront was a mystery to her, and her reaction was not quarrelsome, but nearer to kindred. The fury that had blazed briefly in him had found root in her own heart, yet directed elsewhere rather than at the witch doctor, and had forced itself physically upon her without warning.

He launched into an explanation of Kerberos' origins and, more importantly, the fatal mistake of Nanuq Kesuk, which was infinitely more important to her. Kerberos was his own being, no longer defined by his origin, though she never would have guess he was Lecter's, and admittedly there was a wave of jealousy that found its way through her belly, but she forced it down. Jealous that Kerberos was Lecter's child? Jealous that the gods had not seen fit to have her birth two years prior to its real date, that she could have superceded Nanuq, slain Aktaie, and fiercely protected the honour and dignity of her much-loved Shaman?

A frustrated growl rumbled in her throat as she looked away, focusing the floor underfoot with a piercing glare that could've chilled the heart of perhaps the proudest of her family. I felt it, she said with gritted teeth, that that pack's marriage with our own was tainted. I felt it when Kaskae returned from their Cove claiming to be Atka's vessel, while Atka's Oracle lived. It had been the biggest blow for Jinx, who had always been taught to serve Atka and who had, that day, been abandoned by the goddess; and it had been, she had always secretly thought, false, for the sole vessel of the gods was Nutaaq, her grandfather. I felt it in the favour Galateia showed my sister, and the disregard she showed me, and in how the Sea came for me in my youth and how Kerberos had to call me back from it, and in how they prospered while we met with resistance at every turn, that the union was corrupt.

She saw now that it always had been ruinous, and it had been Nanuq who had done it. But what had her mother ever cared for Shearwater Bay? She had left. There was no love lost between mother and daughter, and Jinx was certain if she ever met the woman again, in this life or the next, she would not mince words, especially knowing what she knew now.

For, it seemed, Nanuq's disastrous decision had been the downfall of Jinx's beloved pack, of her sister. It had been why Arktos had been possessed by madness and wandered away in the night, never to return; it had been the catalyst for Vex's decline into insanity, with claims of seeing their father around every corner; it was why Atka had thrown aside Her children, what had unbalanced the pack, and ultimately, why Sos had seen fit to turn His wrath upon it. Perhaps it had been why the gods had not smote their daughter, Siku, when she parted and birthed Tartok; perhaps they had spared her from the curse her sister brought upon them by allowing the sirens to touch them at all. It all made sense, and her anger over it was great.

What she did is unforgivable, she said grimly, her eyes flashing wrathfully as they sought Lecter's. She damned us all. Her chest heaved with the emotion of what he must've felt, when he was forced into the role of consort, and brought to the lowest level a man could inhabit. The Nereides' ways had changed, supposedly, but perhaps that, too, was corrupt. She was not fit for Warchief, Jinx finally concluded, glowering, and her Houngan paid for it with his life. My brothers with their sanity. My sister even now will pay for it with all she has. And us… She paused, then set her lips into a thin line. Why did He spare us, Lecter?