The victim of the terrible crime was a very distrustful girl. God knows what experiences had led her to be so reserved even with a community as warm as ours.

If she had a name, it was not public knowledge. She suffered from some kind of mental delay that limited her vocabulary and made her drag some words, but that did not stop her from caring for the children she had taken in as her siblings, orphans —like her— who were abandoned near the mountains of Elker so that some beast could do what their parents did not have the courage to do.

It is believed that she was abandoned along with several others in a remote area where they managed to survive by a miracle until eventually connecting with the community of Elker's outcasts. It was evident that she had some disability that affected her motor skills and limited her speech a bit, but her intelligence did not seem to be compromised. The silence with which she sometimes responded was suspicious, and her gaze was constantly alert to her surroundings.

Many people tried to help her, but her distrust of strangers prevented them from doing anything more than sharing food with her. Who knows what she imagined would happen to her siblings if they were taken into some strange shelter, and I don't blame her if she chose the security of her precarious life over the uncertainty of a better place.

I admire the courage with which she assumed the maternal role for those children, fighting tirelessly to give them a better life. That—without a doubt—was the vestige of a primitive maternal instinct that few women come to feel as she did, the one that torments the individual for the sake of those who will come after. It was that protective instinct that kept her away from Joinich Cosner, who had repeatedly tried to offer her substantial donations disguised as rewards for tasks devoid of any complexity.

"Pocuán" was her favorite word. She used it to say she was going fishing, when she was going to eat, or when she expressed her happiness. For others, it was just the name of the river that flows near Elker, but for her, it seemed to be more special. The word became so repetitive in her speech that the locals soon started shouting it to get her attention. Since then, "Pocuán" became her name. It didn't take long for her to be recognized and appreciated as such among many other people, whom she greeted shyly with a smile. After a few cycles, she seemed to be integrating into the community, but still avoided the mysterious Joinich Cosner at all costs.

No one knew why, whether it was because of a bad memory or a revealing instinct. She managed to avoid him for a long time until a period of drought in the river deprived her of the fish with which she fed her siblings. She tried to survive by accepting charity from others, but eventually had to expand her tolerance towards Joinich in order to have stable income. First, she accepted his simplest tasks, like taking care of objects or being a messenger. Then she began to accept more complex favors that took her to more remote places.

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I learned that Joinich made her that proposal that everyone wanted to hear, the one in which he promised fertile lands and prosperity to whoever dared to work them. Pocuán refused, despite the attractive idea, but Joinich continued to remind her of his proposal on several occasions. I don't know the details of their conversations, but I understand that Pocuán's patience with that man was diminishing until she suddenly cut off contact with him.

This happened shortly before the harvest festival. Pocuán was unaware of this event, but I suppose by then she had heard many things about it. I believe she trusted that the season would bring plenty of work, but times did not smile upon her. On the thirtieth day, five days after the harvest festival ended, it is known that she approached Joinich again to fulfill a favor. People saw her enter the man's office, then they saw her walking towards the West gate of Elker, where she was last seen walking on the road towards Durkmon.

I couldn't find out anything about the fate of the child during the eternal days she was lost. I knew —through Asmodeus's information— that the girl had been a prisoner and at the mercy of who knows what inhuman captors. What the imagination suggests about the dawn of her suffering is insignificant compared to the true experience that poor Pocuán faced, prey to arcane substances of unknown origin whose effects seemed to corrode her very essence. And although I have no doubt that pain was a persistent stalker in the shadows of those days, I believe that the uncertainty of her fate was the cruelest of her companions.

Each beat of her heart became an echo of her torment, and her body —almost unrecognizable— was a testament to the cruelty of those who sought to understand the darkest abysses of human nature. The hope of being saved prolonged her suffering, but the uncertainty of what would happen to her friends after her death must have tormented her. Surrendering was the most pleasant end possible for her, but Pocuán clung to life until her last breath. She seized the opportunity that presented itself best to escape the clutches of her captors, I don't know how, and managed to reach the river, only God knows with what strength.

I think those fleeting moments of freedom were an unfathomable eternity for the girl, although I don't know if she was able to enjoy them or if —on the contrary— they only tormented her more. And to think that the Pocuán River, the same river she loved so much, had embraced her in those last moments, was enough to bring a tear to anyone's eye. It was the same river that had saved her and her siblings from hunger. The death it offered her was peaceful compared to the torment of the poison that was corroding her insides. I now think that maybe it was an atrocity for the lieutenant to want to save her because he ripped her from that immediate death to take her on one last agonizing journey. I know that behind his actions there was pure kindness and that without it, it would not have been possible to uncover the atrocities committed against innocents like Pocuán, but I cannot help but think of the girl's suffering, nor can I stop cursing the god who wanted to use her as bait for human justice to deal with the perpetrators, when it could have been he who pulverized evil with a bolt from the sky.

Such was my investigation into the criminal and the victim.

I was unable to gather solid information about the crimes committed against other innocents, but I was able to glimpse a puzzle with the few testimonies I could collect about the constant disappearances. A vague idea about the location of the misdeeds presented itself to me as a gigantic revelation and was the main reason for contacting Asmodeus.

I presented my brief outline of a map of Elker with the last places where some victims had been seen, and without opening his mouth, Asmodeus's intense eyes understood the pattern that I had also perceived in an instant. His eyes traced delicate lines on the map until they reached a calculation that led them to a blank point. I wanted to ask what he had seen in that location, but I didn't dare to interrupt his intense mental deliberations. The verdict was in.