Hoshor Plains allotment

maybe it had not been joy between nukilik and any of the men, but there must have been joy in nukilik knowing she would have what she wanted at long last - to stand as head of her conclave, to have her children. sulukinak chose to see the joy there. for as long as she could remember, her mother had been loving in her way; it was only when her children grew too large to feed that things changed.

sulukinak considered all of this, and what dutch said. if she was given any choice it would be to see the love in her mother rather than the mania which gripped her in the end; and so too, she would revoke the same choice from nukilik. it was too painful to think of her mother making the conscious choice to drown her daughter. that was a rite, a necessity predicated by the gods of the everdark.

the girl thought, and she wallowed in the warmth and presence of dutch, and thought of all they had spoken of and all that was to come; eventually, her silence became a measured breath. a slumbering.