[Waking Dream] The silence holds, a spell. The silence holds a spell. The silence holds a spell. Waking Dream gazes at she who offers sorrow, and her expression is an ungenerous thing, insofar as it is not very giving right now; no real hints, that she who offers sorrow has reached her audience, that she who offers sorrow is doing well or poorly. Except, of course, the silence has been a listening one, and the intentness of Waking Dream's (inhuman [creature]) gaze hasn't stirred, hasn't been broken by - No. Hold. You are not ready. Come back after you've gained more wisdom. Come back after you've gained more true signs of glory, after you've proved yourself more than an Ahroun. Come back, after you've shown me you know how to fulfill your auspice. She doesn't say any of that. She doesn't even look it.
Of course, she doesn't look as if she's going to say - At last. You're ready. You've been ready all this time. You just needed the deeds to mark under your name, and now, and now. Waking Dream is, in spite of her general demeanor, rather poker-faced when it comes to challenges, especially challenges like this.
Instead, the silence holds. For a spell. And then, this -
"We know that this city, Maelstrom's city - this city claimed and held, oh, barely - held," and see, her voice is a low, simmering thing, all shot-through with brightness, "tooth and claw, prayer and might, held - has a history. We know that the reflection of Hill House is something out of the ordinary, something with an attic full of stories. We know that much of this land's history has fallen into shadow." She is quiet, for a heartbeat.
Then, with a brief smile: "We know there is an attic full of stories. We know where the key hangs. Race me there, she who offers sorrow, if you'd bring some lost thing out of the dark," and the smile stays, an echo, although it's still a creature-thing, not a human-thing; her lovers may pretend she's human, but oh: garou know better. The smile's for this, perhaps: the dark Waking Dream and she who offers sorrow have fought before.
"Show me how strong and quick and determined a skald of Fenris is. Show me that a skald of Fenris can revel through this land we - we, Maelstrom's warriors - claim as ours. Show me - "
- and her shape blurs, dissolves; unmakes itself from woman, lovely and still, to wolf, feral and gray-dappled, sun-pale, moon-eyed. She throws back her head and howls -
- race [glory] wisdom [cunning] swiftness [city walking] show me. Go.
[Sorrow] Dreams in Summer Snow, the young Gaian, the young Philodox, stands witness - a respectful distance outside the challenge circle drawn in blood on the cool reflection of the concrete ground they claim. Underneath is aggregate, slow and mottled, some hybrid thing, human-made, but as with all such strange amalgams, come to life on its own. And deeper still is earth, thin earth, sandy, wet, leached of minerals and nutrients, pale-as-death from all these years hidden underneath the great sprawl of the city but deep dreaming, waiting, dreaming of an end-to-things above it.
The flash of brightness in Waking Dream is like the heart of the flame; which is always deceptive, warm promise that blisters the skin, wild underneath. Sorrow is a different thing; not dour like most of her kind, except that her brightness is whiter, somehow - sun-on-snow, and blood steaming underneath. She has dark blue eyes, Sorrow, to Waking Dream's bright green gaze, and they flash briefly to the young Gaian after Waking Dream has dissolved into her feral skin. She has a generous mouth, Sorrow, and it curves with something like a challenge, just a hint of it - part of the game underneath, substrate - oh you are here or oh will you follow or oh do you dare - and then she's no longer the illusion of human, sinking to all fours. There is a massive blur as her body bulks into the forms Gaia dressed them in for her endless war, until she settles at last as a swift gray wolf, narrow through the shoulders and frame, a hint of bulk beneath the ribs as if she had put on weight for the winter, her coat heavier with the season.
Tail low, straight, alert, moist nose twitching in the sharp cold air, Sorrow takes a spare moment to orient herself, then nips briefly at Waking Dream's flank before streaking off past her - running through the umbral reflection of the bawn toward the boundaries, intent on the city and the tangled reflection of Hill House somewhere within.
[Dreams in Summer Snow] No one asked Harmony to be here. No one requires of him that he come to oversee this challenge. Nevertheless: here it is at the caern, and here he is hearing them speak, listening to Kora's tales of Those Who Come Before (we stand on the shoulders of giants.) She's speaking the names of Garou he does not know, who left before he arrived rather than stay here to die, and he's learning.
And as it turns out, there is a use for his presence after all.
Harmony is a Philodox of the Nation, on the cusp of becoming a Fostern himself soon. To anyone else, he'd be a sophomore in high school. They're important, these stories. Any good member of his Auspice knows the importance of keeping secrets and dredging what's lost out of the deep.
So he stops, the boy folding his arms and tipping his chin to the side to let a fall of brown hair swing away from his eyes, leaving them unveiled to observe the remainder of the challenge. He is silent, and he is watchful, and as they both take on their wolf skins so does he, not yet fully grown, his brown pelt thick and rich.
And he sprints off after them, to witness the winner.
[Sorrow] Dex + Athletics
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9
[Sorrow] Per + Survival
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9
[Sorrow] Wits + Primal-Urge
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10
[Waking Dream] This isn't something that happens everyday. Yes, the garou occasionally challenge one another. They play, they swim, they combat, they challenge. But they don't usually make for the bawn's boundary, as these three do, so intent and so - utterly - wild, moon-called, moon-flung, moon-mad (galliards [after all, and the moon, it waxes]). As they leave, one wolf after another, each quick, each arrowing ahead, the philodox keeping up not only admirably, but perhaps worthy of note at some later point, two of the guardians watch, and hey, hey song, word is passed along. She Who Offers Sorrow is challenging for Fostern, finally, or, Something's going on. Waking Dream and She Who Offers Sorrow just ran ahead with Dreams in Summer Snow. What kind've trouble might be on, that they need a philodox that bad? What's going on? And maybe, They'll tell us later.
This is how it is now -
she who offers sorrow, a streak of gray, as lean and as intent as an arrow, as a hunter who's seen its prey, pulls ahead of her (for now) elder and the philodox who plays witness. The air within the shipyard (within the bawn) has a certain taste to it: sharp, but liminal; spare, but endlessly open, endlessly (although the city outside gives lie to this) clean, endlessly - endlessly - pure and stark. The colours are sharper; the colours are more. The colours are as it should be; there's a vibrancy singing in the umbra around the caern.
This vibrancy does not sing without it. Not often, and not loudly, for fear of -
For fear. For these are the end days, and the city is besmirched, where it isn't calcified, where it hasn't been ordered into an immovable shape, where mutability hasn't been conquered by things gleaming, sterile, and fixed in nature, unable to change. The city's a dark place, and well does she who offers sorrow know it. The spirit street outside the caern is clean enough, Gaian spirits hiding in spirit-snow, behind spectral structures, behind trees-that-don't-exist-in-the-human-vision-of-the-docks, watching as the grey wolf runs.
There are any number of ways to get to Hill House from the docks. Two of those ways are through parts of the city the garou of Maelstrom's sept haven't walked for many, many months, because there are only so many garou, there's only so much time: wild parts of the city, blatantly under the wyrm's sway - it's easy to get to at least one of these; the far end of the lake stretches into a warehouse district that feels wrong, that makes blood shrill, which makes blood ache. One of the ways is through territory undisputedly Weaver, through the highrises, through nests of Pattern-spiders, where even the bodies of newcome garou are cleaned, polished, transformed into some human-made thing, some bastion of order, where numbers rule, and the well-lit paths are more difficult than the dark. This is a scab - and even the ways through familiar territories are apt to have surprises, and how many packs actually claim and maintain territory? Not too many.
And Hill House, well. It's in one of the dirtiest cesspools in the city.
[Sorrow] The whispering guardians are left behind without a moment's thought. The animal-mind is not made for such things - speculation, gossip, the sort of dreaming idlewild that comes through enforced active/inactivity. It is made for Here. It is made for Now.
There is a palpable change in the air as they pass over the border of the bawn; this sense of stretching, reaching. The world left behind seems to fade, and then they are inside the narrow warren of the city's streets. Not just the city's streets here, but the memory of them, old alleys with resonance still bleed through here where they have been built over, torn down, destroyed to make way for the great, vast corridors of elevated highways or sweeping block-wide office parks.
The bawn fades behind them, and with it that sense of expansion defined both by the presence of Maelstrom, the promise of near-wholeness at the Caern's heart, and the sense of distance, the great sweep of the plains present - at least in memory - at the water's edge. Above them, the city glows, cool blue from the weaver's electric currents where the dark blot of wyrmtaint has not suffocated that sense of light, entirely. There is a particular corner, and then another, and then Sorrow pauses once, her flanks heaving, her lupine head canted sidelong as if listening to the hum along the wires.
And then she charges forward again, skirting the pristine clockworks at the heart of the weaver's territory downtown, where the faces of skyscrapers are covered with webbing so think they would be calcifed in half a heart-beat, leading them with more - wary - caution than Waking Dream may have remembered above the edges of the Wyrm's territory. Sorrow moves swiftly here, but goes not charge ahead heedlessly. Follow she tells them, sharply when they approach the dark lands. - full of care. Watch me.
There are places where she streaks, and places where she slinks; pathways she avoids after a still, sharp look down the moon-lit street at the things lingering there. Her scent is sharp in the wind, full of caution, alert, dominant, protective. And so it goes.
[Sorrow] Dex + Stealth
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10
[Sorrow] Stamina
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10
[Waking Dream] And so it goes.
Waking Dream disappears, now and again. But She Who Offers Sorrow can scent her - never far away, never far ahead, never far behind. As for Dreams in Summer Snow, he seems to be playing it just as cautious as the galliards - and he makes little more noise than they do. This is how wolves should be, hunting: ghosts; unnoticed, until they want to be unnoticed; capable of running swiftly, silently - of being little more than an apparition.
It's more difficult to hide emotions (instincts) in these shapes, and She Who Offers Sorrow can scent the other female's surprise, mild though it is, when the Get decides to play it safer, to play it cautious, play it wary rather than just going for the glory, for the intense, danger-laden almost-certainly-a-battle road another way to Hill House might have been. Maybe she even gets a whiff of approval. Then again, it's the scab - it's difficult to tell. The whole place smells foul. Indeed, She Who Offers Sorrow feels herself almost completely subsumed by instinct, by intuition:
She knows, for instance, that that street, down there, hides something foul, that there is a reason her shadow shivers, a reason that there are less spirits flitting, which has nothing at all to do with the city itself, with the high rage (we'lltearyoutopieces) of the wolves, and has all to do with danger. She knows when she passes a mound of dirt, scuffed over, claw-marked, old, that there's something unusual there, but not harmful to the garou as they pass. She knows an empty bane's nest is empty when she spies it down an alley, wavering, illusive, and that the banes are feeding off of humans elsewhere, knows where those particular banes thicken, senses a little swarm (easily bested, easily chewed - they're like gnats; like locusts; they block out the moon, they taste foul, they do damage, but not too much - not - too - much - ) just before it hits, falling over the garou, as surprised as they might've been (were?) -
She knows, also, when - two streets away from Hill House - they pick up followers, knows when the loose pack of garou become stalked by something light-footed, something fleet, watchful, something holding back but hungry, something.
[Sorrow] That sense-of-things in the distance, shading, shadowing, the way the hunger feels her, sharpens against her sense of place makes her wary, makes her alert. Sorrow plants her feet there, two blocks away from Hill House, goes still and steady, her ears cocked, her tail low and sweeping with caution, with warning to the other Garou. That there is Something Else close. Something to be wary of.
Her flanks are heavy from the run, her mind fulls of pheremones, endorphins, neurotransmitters running amuck through the folds of her animal mind and the whole world seems sharper here, the details of place resolve themselves into minutaie she'll remember later. The shape of the moon in a still pool of not-water, a dark ooze bubble up from the impression of a storm sewer, the jagged edge that defines a buildings shadow, like the crests of synchronous waves moving darkly toward a broken shore.
Behind - the wolf growls, sharply, [i]following. Holding back. Waiting. We wait here - ambush. You flank, hide in shadows there - " with a lift of her black nose, a curl of her lips against her sharp teeth, she shows: WHERE. "I wait - here. When it comes, we close around like a jaw. See?"
Sorrow will not lead these hunters to the kin-place, to Hill House.
[Sorrow] willpower!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10
[Sorrow] (switching computers!)
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Harmony followed the other two without an inkling of where they were going. He came to the city because he wanted War, not in the way the Get do, not for the Glory, but because he thought that here he could do some good, he could get a sense of how someone like him could help. He could find his place, tread the Maelstrom. That said, he hasn't been to Hill House before, and he hasn't been to a lot of the Wyrm-ridden places in Chicago.
His footfalls are light and silent as he comes after the others, and when he gets a whiff of the foulness about the three of them, something out there that is Feeding, his hackles raise just a little. In alarm, not in hostility.
He's a good follower, is Dreams in Summer Snow. When Kora growls her warning to him, he does as she bids, sidling off to the side to wait so that he may attack on her order when the time comes. He didn't expect to be participating, but it isn't hard for him to understand that this too is part of the challenge and part of what determines a Galliard's worthiness.
It's not enough just to sing of Battle, after all.
[Waking Dream] Waking Dream doesn't make a sound. You'd be a fool if you thought that's the only eloquence galliards had at their command - the eloquence of howls, of vocalizations, eerie, human-chilling, lovely and ragged, dragging the moon out've the sky; you'd be a fool, or you'd be a cub. Look at She Who Offers Sorrow. Her body tells the story of warning, long before she growls, long before she gathers the Gaians up and - without hesitation, without ornamentation - lays out a plan. As she does so, she is aware that the hunters, they who follow, have withdrawn, that they've circled, that the circle is closing, gathering the way dusk gathers into night, see? She's aware, and it prickles under her skin, the way the cloud of banes - little mouths, nibbling ineffectually at fur; little mouths, able to draw doubt out've a living thing the way a mosquito'd draw blood out've a living thing - prickled at her fur, at her senses and thoughts, without getting a firm hold. (Dreams in Summer Snow felt them more keenly, more sharply than did the galliards. Doubt sang in him, and he had to push it down; but he did.)
All to say, Waking Dream doesn't make a sound, but she circles She Who Offers Sorrow (violence [contained]), then separates and blends as well as she can into the shadows, where the other galliard indicated. And the hunters, the things that follow, they wait. Patient. Watchful. The air is alive with watching, alive with studied unconcern -- the air is a lie; so is all that unconcern.
[Sorrow] And they wait.
The street is quiet; the call of feeding banes echo in the distance, ringing out over the rooftops. The garou are quiet, slunk into the shadows, vibrating taut as stretched wire, some internal note ringing through their sense of place. They know communicate by scent here, by movement, the flick of an ear, the sweep of a tail, the swing of a sharp muzzle. The air is still, full of promise that seems - fragile somehow, and eerie peace that is nothing like the genuine thing, which is surcease. Adrenaline shoots through the blood and makes them want to move, and their muscles quiver with it, with the rage that expands with the adrenaline.
And then wait. Across the intersection, Waking Dream and Dreams in Summer Snow begin to scent Sorrow's unease. She was watching Behind but is now prickling with Out Front and that awareness - her sense of the balance between prey and predator - raises her hackles to stand in an elegant ruff around her neck.
Abruptly she moves, eases from the shadows like a dream of gray sky on a gray morning, cutting through the stylized shadows of the roof tiles.
They [want to] flank us. Ahead and behind now. Those ahead are not settled. We hit them now, hit them first. Fast. Then behind. Come.
- and so saying, she awaits the barest sign that the others have heard, acknowledged, understood, and then surges forward, her body language sharp, tail sweeping, ready to charge, ready to rage into warform. Ready to fight.
[Waking Dream] [Things In Front. Do we even notice this distressing turn of events?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 2
[Waking Dream] [Things in back: Do we notice?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6
[Sorrow] Charisma plus intimidation!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10
[Dreams in Summer Snow] He scents her unease and the hair about his neck and along his shoulders is beginning to lift, a little, the moment he does. Harmony's head swings about to look behind, his dark green eyes seeking out some enemy he can't see or smell. This is a quiet place, a decaying place, and it is a place in which most Garou are automatically ill at ease.
Her orders receive a soft noise in response, something that is not in any tongue at all but simply meant to indicate acknowledgment, that he heard her and that he is ready.
When Sorrow surges forward Harmony moves after her, summoning what Rage abides in his heart so that he too can prepare himself for war. There is not much anger in him save for that which simmers dangerously, unacknowledged and unrealized, and it is difficult for him to call it forward consciously when he has spent so much time smoothing it away. But for all that, he is still a Garou.
[Waking Dream] The things that are gathering before them are so intent on their watchfulness, on their gathering, that they don't notice any intent when the garou charge forward, she who offers sorrow in the lead. They're taken utterly, decisively by surprise. This is what they were, once upon a time: totemlings, three once-wolf-spirits, gray-furred, steel-furred, eyes the same color of metal, although one has human ears, the other has no tail. The third's chest is gaping, open, and its spine is hunched like a man's - it has a man's hand, rather than a paw, although paying attention to that man's hand causes it to blur, to flicker, until it looks like a (cat's) paw, like it can't quite settle.
They have cracks winding all through, and from the cracks they're dripping black ichor, and where the black ichor actually touches, the shadows become a little more foul, a little denser, more snarled, and the air sort've gets a whine - subliminal; it's difficult not to notice now. Their is absolutely nothing sane in their eyes. Their is absolutely nothing that looks salvageable in their eyes. They look like hunger, and their ribs show through their coats, and once She Who Offers Sorrow, Dreams in Summer Snow and Waking Dream are close enough to snap at them, to claw at them, to do whatever it is they'll do, they can hear this:
winter, raging, raging, angry, twisted, ugly - winter, raging in the wolfish wyrm-spirits' bellies, clawing at their ribs, trying to get out.
They're all very, very large, and very, very skinny, twisted out-of-shape, and being joined by a fourth. They smell like nothing at all. Their shadows are human, but bulking, two-headed - three-headed, and their shadows don't move in an echo of how they move. Their shadows wait, and only copy movement after they've seen what fruit it bears.
They don't notice the garou noticing them. And so -
[Sorrow] The Garou move together now, knotted together, a clot of rage, an organism. A pack is one thing, individuals in motion but one body, moving the way separate cells beneath one skin move - together - and loose as this group of Garou is, they are a pack tonight, in deed if not spirit. Sorrow is quiet - not silent but quiet - because silence is not in here, but here quiet is all that matters. The scent of the black ichor is sharp in her nostrils, reminds her of something strongly enough to make her stomach turn, raw. She wuffs out a breath, shakes - turns her head to growl to the others.
Take the nearest first. Use claws, do not bite. When the first is finished, we take the next. Working like a pack, which is to say: together, tearing the wyrm-wolf-spirits apart one by one, until they are ended. Then she lifts her head, muzzle swinging forward, teeth bare now, in quiet challenge, in silent threat, watching before she clears her nostrils with a whuff of are. [Beware] the winter inside, says Sorrow, at the last.
Dark winter, twisted winter - not simple hunger, but a black rot of need - not simply the absence of spring, but enduring desolation. The wyrm's winter: starved, angry, vicious and viscous, barrenness never ending. Before they charge forward, she gives them talens - because they are alone in the dark, because they are outnumbered. Because she is protecting more than her own hide when she shatters the little clay marble with Fenrir glyphs etched into the rough-worked clay in her jaw.
- a shimmer, a sense of solidity around her, and around them, if they shatter their own marbles and a supple sense of cold, the bedrock beneath the barren northern earth. Then she begins to move again, with purpose and gathering speed. Before she reaches the nearest spirit, she surges into her Crinos form and -
[OOC: soak talen! plus a soak talen for Harmoney and one for Lila. She rarely uses them, but circumstances warrant! 2. Resist Pain. 3. Crinos! charge with claws and stuff.]
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Generally, Harmony's battle tactics are not very complex. They involve pulling on his direwolf skin and charging in to bite things until his Rage fails him or they die, and so it is quite lucky for him that Sorrow has thought to caution him against this very thing, that she is leading in more than just charging ahead at the front. A moment later, when the ichor clogs his nostrils, he understands why this is what she has told him to do.
He's still unwise to the ways of the Wyrm, the little tricks it uses to unweave the world around it. Grateful, he assumes his warform instead, his gangly adolescent limbs looking almost too long for him in Crinos, as though he should still be able to hunch forward and run on all fours comfortably.
It is not a challenge for him to remain silent. The boy is naturally a contained person, even though he is friendly and outgoing.
There is nothing sane and nothing salvageable: this is for the best, as in the past, Dreams in Summer Snow has had second thoughts about felling his enemies. It is difficult for him to charge in and rend things with his claws, to see the ichor that wells up around them when they dig in and tear away, to feel the give as flesh and muscle, even that of a spirit, part and turn to rot in his hands.
He tells himself that it's mercy.
[Sorrow] Dex plus ze brawl! in Crinos.
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10 Re-rolls: 1
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Dex + Brawl]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4
[Sorrow] Dex plus ze brawl!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 10 Re-rolls: 1
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Dex + Brawl!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 9
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Again!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9
[Sorrow] Und again!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 8
[Waking Dream] [DOOM?]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8
[Waking Dream] [DOOM 2?]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
[Waking Dream] [Hallp?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9
[Waking Dream] - and if it isn't mercy, precisely, at least it's merciful the first time. They fall on it, the two galliards and the philodox, and it is dead before it can make a sound. Waking Dream's claws sank into its side, Sorrow's claws tore out its heart. It has no time. The philodox's claws don't quite connect, but he feels as if he's tears snow out've its belly; perhaps he wavered because he wasn't quite so certain that it was unsalvageable, and perhaps that's when he noticed its eyes. Not of Gaia. Not ever going to be of Gaia again. What memory of Gaia there might be is wrecked, twisted, and a perversion. Waking Dream whuffs a warning -
Don't look in their eyes
- when they all fall on the second. The second wolf-thing, winter-howling-in-its-belly, does not go down as swiftly, bites at Sorrow, tears into her - although not enough, not enough to do more than barely scratch, barely tastes blood - and then Sorrow severs its head, and Waking Dream tears a hole in its flank, and Dreams in Summer Snow rips off one of its legs, and it makes a keening sound, and though it nip, nips at Waking Dream, its teeth glances off of her (silver [luna blessed]) hide, and when its compatriot snarls and flings itself on top of Dreams in Summer Snow, sinking its teeth into the scruff of his neck, attempting to drag him downward, pull him away, it hurts Harmony, but the hurts heal, the wounds re-knit, flesh re-formed almost before it's savaged open again. And there was the fourth, remember? The fourth hulks larger, bigger - still larger -
and lifts its muzzle to howl help that much more swiftly to them.
Sorrow is free, Waking Dream is already moving to help Harmony, and there are who knows how many (more than this) behind them.
[Sorrow] The fourth howls and so does Sorrow. The forth begins to howl - to call aid closer, and she is shaking free of the third dead-thing, its severed head rolling, still avoiding whatever raw secrets crawl behind its dead eyes, whatever barrenness lingers there, the sackcloth and salt-ash winter it promises, the one that never ends. Her howl is fierce, ferocious, a challenge. This one is dead and more will follow. it says. There is a raw hint of victory, the dead opened on the ground before them, and a greater edge of threat, if you come we end you too. spiraling into her voice, twinned with victory. Her howl shears away and rises against the howling-other, meant to drown, bury the call-for-aid. Meant to make it desperate, the last gasp of the dying, the last trap of the dead.
Then the beast turns, sizzling black ichor flying from her claws, and launches herself at the fourth, the last remaining wyrmwolf, the blood of his fellows fouling her claws. She's going for the throat, the mouth, the tongue. She's meaning to turn his howl into a yelp of distress, into a dying cry.
(1. Call of the Wyld to augment threat. 2. RAWR. 3. ATTACK!!!!!!!)
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Don't look in their eyes, says Lila, but it's a little too late, he already did it the once when he was searching for some sign of whether or not it could be helped. It's difficult for him, doing this, even when he knows that these creatures are not of Gaia. It's difficult for him just because they have living forms and they feel like things feel when they can feel pain, and even if he isn't thinking consciously about the suffering his claws are inflicting, there is something in him that just. can't. do it.
Until one grabs him by the scruff of his neck.
And then the part of him that is Wolf remembers. He snarls and twists in its jaws, trying to disengage himself, unbothered now when his claws find flesh and rip away. It's a touch strangled with his skin pulled tight around his vocal cords. He kicks with one of his back legs, trying to shake himself free, tearing away when he can't.
The wounds are not lasting. By the time he has gotten himself free - either by tearing away or by fighting free - he launches himself toward the fourth, and this time there is no hesitation.
[Sorrow] Charisma + Intimidation
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 10
[Sorrow] Brawl!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 8, 9
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Brawl]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 8, 9
[Waking Dream] [Bad Guyz - how many flee?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9
[Sorrow]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 5, 5, 7
[Waking Dream] When Dreams in Summer Snow is free, when the third is dead, when Sorrow's chilling (terrifying [war]) howl is no longer carrying strong, stronger, no longer swallowing the winterwolfthing's own howl for aid, no longer devouring it, riding over it, burning stronger, fiercer, victorious -
Waking Dream has turned to face what's behind them. What's behind them - nine once-wolf things with winter in their belly; it takes Sorrow and Dreams in Summer Snow effort to take the howling wolf-thing down, because he is so large, so furious, almost frenzied. His teeth find purchase on her shoulder and neck, she is just not quite quick enough, and it is cold. And the cold slinks down, sinks through her, before his teeth are dislodged by Dreams in Summer Snow, before the cold disperses into you're alive! warmth. Dreams in Summer Snow finds himself not-overwhelmed. His claws go precisely where he directs them to: and he - too - is lethal. Although it's Sorrow takes the wolf-things throat, mouth, tongue after, crushes the howl into something faint
a wheeze, breath leaving, a rattle.
But - behind. There are nine of the once-wolf things with winter howling, hungry, tainted, Ravenous in their belly, and they're all set to attack. Three are hulking larger, and larger, in the way that these things have, and their ribs are gaping, and between their ribs: a blizzard, and somebody, something, crying lost, some almost-human voice, some voice that sounds like people (garou [kin]) they've known and loved and lost, Kora, Kora, didn't you have a friend down below the city, back when you became more than human, didn't you have someone else, Harmony, Harmony, and also, Lila, Lila, don't just hide there, and then the fourth is crushed,
and Sorrow's howl hangs over them. When Sorrow and Harmony turn, they see their death. And all nine of them flee.
Waking Dream's muscles bunch to follow, but the galliard (barely, just) checks herself, giving the challenging galliard a lambent glance.
[Waking Dream] [And none of y'all sustained wounds that need tending, yo. Y'all are good.]
to Dreams in Summer Snow, Sorrow
[Sorrow] The wounds are healing; the warm dissolves into the heat of her blood and the fourth falls. Each moment is sketched out from the rest, framed in staccato impressions of battle. Rage makes them move faster, rage makes time crawl; they have all the time in the world. This blow and that one, the vicious fight scours the hard packed ground beside, and the ichor steams on the asphalt like acid tears. Somewhere deep underground, the poisoned, quiescent, slumbering earth turns over. This is not a victory, just a holding pattern. Four are dead, more roam, full of winter, the promise of time's end, gray clouds and gray snow and barren earth scattered with skeletons of the starving dead.
The Children of Gaia might imagine the Fenrir Valhalla like that: neverending battle in boundless winter, but it is otherwise, too: golden wheat fat in the fields, golden tables groaning with the harvest, golden voices raucous with laughter, and golden cups raised high in memory of the honored dead.
Sorrow meets Waking Dream's gleaming gaze briefly. In this skin, her eyes are amber, shot through with striations of honey and brown, banked fires visible through wavering antique glass. Then, the moment passes. The Crinos wheels about, melts into her four-legged warform, direwolf, and charges snarling, snearing, howling in wake of the fleeing winter-wolves. It is easy to imagine, in that moment, a Get of Fenris flinging herself into the hunt, charging forward into the fray, damn the odds, the territory, the objective, losing herself in the glory of battle, and that urge is a raw thing inside her, that edged promise of release.
They were made to kill.
Instead she stops short - a half block away, more than - dire warning wordless in her body language, dominant now, the tail high and hackles raised, the snarling mouth open with a enduring threat. I will kill you all. One hesitates, another slows, and she starts after, harrying them apart in the distance, driving them to scatter into the scab, to flee and not to regroup, not to regroup and return, not to follow.
Satisfied, at last, that they are gone, Sorrow comes padding back to the others, quiet now, shaking free that scent of the scab from her fur as if she could rid herself of it when it is all around her.
They are gone now, she tells them. And we are close. We go.
So saying, she turns and melts back into lupus, picking up the pace, circling - at last - toward Hill House,
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Dreams in Summer Snow is not aggressive. Sorrow bounds after the fleeing wyrmwolves, her warform changing shape without shifting mass as her heavy direwolf paws strike the ground, and Harmony stops, tapering down those instincts that tell him to pursue and kill.
There is no challenge from him. He just remains, loose and ready, in case they be required to address some other threat, to charge after and assist Kora. But the Garou have been victorious for now, even though the reinforcements outnumbered them three to one. He waits, proud and assured and ready to defend, but he does not charge after her.
And when she returns to them, his hands touch the ground and his shape falls back into something smaller, with no lingering traces of the boy.
He follows her back toward Hill House.
[Sorrow] Ath Plus Dex (in hispo!)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10
[Waking Dream] [pause!]
[Sorrow] (eeee, thank you!)
Of course, she doesn't look as if she's going to say - At last. You're ready. You've been ready all this time. You just needed the deeds to mark under your name, and now, and now. Waking Dream is, in spite of her general demeanor, rather poker-faced when it comes to challenges, especially challenges like this.
Instead, the silence holds. For a spell. And then, this -
"We know that this city, Maelstrom's city - this city claimed and held, oh, barely - held," and see, her voice is a low, simmering thing, all shot-through with brightness, "tooth and claw, prayer and might, held - has a history. We know that the reflection of Hill House is something out of the ordinary, something with an attic full of stories. We know that much of this land's history has fallen into shadow." She is quiet, for a heartbeat.
Then, with a brief smile: "We know there is an attic full of stories. We know where the key hangs. Race me there, she who offers sorrow, if you'd bring some lost thing out of the dark," and the smile stays, an echo, although it's still a creature-thing, not a human-thing; her lovers may pretend she's human, but oh: garou know better. The smile's for this, perhaps: the dark Waking Dream and she who offers sorrow have fought before.
"Show me how strong and quick and determined a skald of Fenris is. Show me that a skald of Fenris can revel through this land we - we, Maelstrom's warriors - claim as ours. Show me - "
- and her shape blurs, dissolves; unmakes itself from woman, lovely and still, to wolf, feral and gray-dappled, sun-pale, moon-eyed. She throws back her head and howls -
- race [glory] wisdom [cunning] swiftness [city walking] show me. Go.
[Sorrow] Dreams in Summer Snow, the young Gaian, the young Philodox, stands witness - a respectful distance outside the challenge circle drawn in blood on the cool reflection of the concrete ground they claim. Underneath is aggregate, slow and mottled, some hybrid thing, human-made, but as with all such strange amalgams, come to life on its own. And deeper still is earth, thin earth, sandy, wet, leached of minerals and nutrients, pale-as-death from all these years hidden underneath the great sprawl of the city but deep dreaming, waiting, dreaming of an end-to-things above it.
The flash of brightness in Waking Dream is like the heart of the flame; which is always deceptive, warm promise that blisters the skin, wild underneath. Sorrow is a different thing; not dour like most of her kind, except that her brightness is whiter, somehow - sun-on-snow, and blood steaming underneath. She has dark blue eyes, Sorrow, to Waking Dream's bright green gaze, and they flash briefly to the young Gaian after Waking Dream has dissolved into her feral skin. She has a generous mouth, Sorrow, and it curves with something like a challenge, just a hint of it - part of the game underneath, substrate - oh you are here or oh will you follow or oh do you dare - and then she's no longer the illusion of human, sinking to all fours. There is a massive blur as her body bulks into the forms Gaia dressed them in for her endless war, until she settles at last as a swift gray wolf, narrow through the shoulders and frame, a hint of bulk beneath the ribs as if she had put on weight for the winter, her coat heavier with the season.
Tail low, straight, alert, moist nose twitching in the sharp cold air, Sorrow takes a spare moment to orient herself, then nips briefly at Waking Dream's flank before streaking off past her - running through the umbral reflection of the bawn toward the boundaries, intent on the city and the tangled reflection of Hill House somewhere within.
[Dreams in Summer Snow] No one asked Harmony to be here. No one requires of him that he come to oversee this challenge. Nevertheless: here it is at the caern, and here he is hearing them speak, listening to Kora's tales of Those Who Come Before (we stand on the shoulders of giants.) She's speaking the names of Garou he does not know, who left before he arrived rather than stay here to die, and he's learning.
And as it turns out, there is a use for his presence after all.
Harmony is a Philodox of the Nation, on the cusp of becoming a Fostern himself soon. To anyone else, he'd be a sophomore in high school. They're important, these stories. Any good member of his Auspice knows the importance of keeping secrets and dredging what's lost out of the deep.
So he stops, the boy folding his arms and tipping his chin to the side to let a fall of brown hair swing away from his eyes, leaving them unveiled to observe the remainder of the challenge. He is silent, and he is watchful, and as they both take on their wolf skins so does he, not yet fully grown, his brown pelt thick and rich.
And he sprints off after them, to witness the winner.
[Sorrow] Dex + Athletics
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9
[Sorrow] Per + Survival
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9
[Sorrow] Wits + Primal-Urge
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10
[Waking Dream] This isn't something that happens everyday. Yes, the garou occasionally challenge one another. They play, they swim, they combat, they challenge. But they don't usually make for the bawn's boundary, as these three do, so intent and so - utterly - wild, moon-called, moon-flung, moon-mad (galliards [after all, and the moon, it waxes]). As they leave, one wolf after another, each quick, each arrowing ahead, the philodox keeping up not only admirably, but perhaps worthy of note at some later point, two of the guardians watch, and hey, hey song, word is passed along. She Who Offers Sorrow is challenging for Fostern, finally, or, Something's going on. Waking Dream and She Who Offers Sorrow just ran ahead with Dreams in Summer Snow. What kind've trouble might be on, that they need a philodox that bad? What's going on? And maybe, They'll tell us later.
This is how it is now -
she who offers sorrow, a streak of gray, as lean and as intent as an arrow, as a hunter who's seen its prey, pulls ahead of her (for now) elder and the philodox who plays witness. The air within the shipyard (within the bawn) has a certain taste to it: sharp, but liminal; spare, but endlessly open, endlessly (although the city outside gives lie to this) clean, endlessly - endlessly - pure and stark. The colours are sharper; the colours are more. The colours are as it should be; there's a vibrancy singing in the umbra around the caern.
This vibrancy does not sing without it. Not often, and not loudly, for fear of -
For fear. For these are the end days, and the city is besmirched, where it isn't calcified, where it hasn't been ordered into an immovable shape, where mutability hasn't been conquered by things gleaming, sterile, and fixed in nature, unable to change. The city's a dark place, and well does she who offers sorrow know it. The spirit street outside the caern is clean enough, Gaian spirits hiding in spirit-snow, behind spectral structures, behind trees-that-don't-exist-in-the-human-vision-of-the-docks, watching as the grey wolf runs.
There are any number of ways to get to Hill House from the docks. Two of those ways are through parts of the city the garou of Maelstrom's sept haven't walked for many, many months, because there are only so many garou, there's only so much time: wild parts of the city, blatantly under the wyrm's sway - it's easy to get to at least one of these; the far end of the lake stretches into a warehouse district that feels wrong, that makes blood shrill, which makes blood ache. One of the ways is through territory undisputedly Weaver, through the highrises, through nests of Pattern-spiders, where even the bodies of newcome garou are cleaned, polished, transformed into some human-made thing, some bastion of order, where numbers rule, and the well-lit paths are more difficult than the dark. This is a scab - and even the ways through familiar territories are apt to have surprises, and how many packs actually claim and maintain territory? Not too many.
And Hill House, well. It's in one of the dirtiest cesspools in the city.
[Sorrow] The whispering guardians are left behind without a moment's thought. The animal-mind is not made for such things - speculation, gossip, the sort of dreaming idlewild that comes through enforced active/inactivity. It is made for Here. It is made for Now.
There is a palpable change in the air as they pass over the border of the bawn; this sense of stretching, reaching. The world left behind seems to fade, and then they are inside the narrow warren of the city's streets. Not just the city's streets here, but the memory of them, old alleys with resonance still bleed through here where they have been built over, torn down, destroyed to make way for the great, vast corridors of elevated highways or sweeping block-wide office parks.
The bawn fades behind them, and with it that sense of expansion defined both by the presence of Maelstrom, the promise of near-wholeness at the Caern's heart, and the sense of distance, the great sweep of the plains present - at least in memory - at the water's edge. Above them, the city glows, cool blue from the weaver's electric currents where the dark blot of wyrmtaint has not suffocated that sense of light, entirely. There is a particular corner, and then another, and then Sorrow pauses once, her flanks heaving, her lupine head canted sidelong as if listening to the hum along the wires.
And then she charges forward again, skirting the pristine clockworks at the heart of the weaver's territory downtown, where the faces of skyscrapers are covered with webbing so think they would be calcifed in half a heart-beat, leading them with more - wary - caution than Waking Dream may have remembered above the edges of the Wyrm's territory. Sorrow moves swiftly here, but goes not charge ahead heedlessly. Follow she tells them, sharply when they approach the dark lands. - full of care. Watch me.
There are places where she streaks, and places where she slinks; pathways she avoids after a still, sharp look down the moon-lit street at the things lingering there. Her scent is sharp in the wind, full of caution, alert, dominant, protective. And so it goes.
[Sorrow] Dex + Stealth
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10
[Sorrow] Stamina
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10
[Waking Dream] And so it goes.
Waking Dream disappears, now and again. But She Who Offers Sorrow can scent her - never far away, never far ahead, never far behind. As for Dreams in Summer Snow, he seems to be playing it just as cautious as the galliards - and he makes little more noise than they do. This is how wolves should be, hunting: ghosts; unnoticed, until they want to be unnoticed; capable of running swiftly, silently - of being little more than an apparition.
It's more difficult to hide emotions (instincts) in these shapes, and She Who Offers Sorrow can scent the other female's surprise, mild though it is, when the Get decides to play it safer, to play it cautious, play it wary rather than just going for the glory, for the intense, danger-laden almost-certainly-a-battle road another way to Hill House might have been. Maybe she even gets a whiff of approval. Then again, it's the scab - it's difficult to tell. The whole place smells foul. Indeed, She Who Offers Sorrow feels herself almost completely subsumed by instinct, by intuition:
She knows, for instance, that that street, down there, hides something foul, that there is a reason her shadow shivers, a reason that there are less spirits flitting, which has nothing at all to do with the city itself, with the high rage (we'lltearyoutopieces) of the wolves, and has all to do with danger. She knows when she passes a mound of dirt, scuffed over, claw-marked, old, that there's something unusual there, but not harmful to the garou as they pass. She knows an empty bane's nest is empty when she spies it down an alley, wavering, illusive, and that the banes are feeding off of humans elsewhere, knows where those particular banes thicken, senses a little swarm (easily bested, easily chewed - they're like gnats; like locusts; they block out the moon, they taste foul, they do damage, but not too much - not - too - much - ) just before it hits, falling over the garou, as surprised as they might've been (were?) -
She knows, also, when - two streets away from Hill House - they pick up followers, knows when the loose pack of garou become stalked by something light-footed, something fleet, watchful, something holding back but hungry, something.
[Sorrow] That sense-of-things in the distance, shading, shadowing, the way the hunger feels her, sharpens against her sense of place makes her wary, makes her alert. Sorrow plants her feet there, two blocks away from Hill House, goes still and steady, her ears cocked, her tail low and sweeping with caution, with warning to the other Garou. That there is Something Else close. Something to be wary of.
Her flanks are heavy from the run, her mind fulls of pheremones, endorphins, neurotransmitters running amuck through the folds of her animal mind and the whole world seems sharper here, the details of place resolve themselves into minutaie she'll remember later. The shape of the moon in a still pool of not-water, a dark ooze bubble up from the impression of a storm sewer, the jagged edge that defines a buildings shadow, like the crests of synchronous waves moving darkly toward a broken shore.
Behind - the wolf growls, sharply, [i]following. Holding back. Waiting. We wait here - ambush. You flank, hide in shadows there - " with a lift of her black nose, a curl of her lips against her sharp teeth, she shows: WHERE. "I wait - here. When it comes, we close around like a jaw. See?"
Sorrow will not lead these hunters to the kin-place, to Hill House.
[Sorrow] willpower!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10
[Sorrow] (switching computers!)
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Harmony followed the other two without an inkling of where they were going. He came to the city because he wanted War, not in the way the Get do, not for the Glory, but because he thought that here he could do some good, he could get a sense of how someone like him could help. He could find his place, tread the Maelstrom. That said, he hasn't been to Hill House before, and he hasn't been to a lot of the Wyrm-ridden places in Chicago.
His footfalls are light and silent as he comes after the others, and when he gets a whiff of the foulness about the three of them, something out there that is Feeding, his hackles raise just a little. In alarm, not in hostility.
He's a good follower, is Dreams in Summer Snow. When Kora growls her warning to him, he does as she bids, sidling off to the side to wait so that he may attack on her order when the time comes. He didn't expect to be participating, but it isn't hard for him to understand that this too is part of the challenge and part of what determines a Galliard's worthiness.
It's not enough just to sing of Battle, after all.
[Waking Dream] Waking Dream doesn't make a sound. You'd be a fool if you thought that's the only eloquence galliards had at their command - the eloquence of howls, of vocalizations, eerie, human-chilling, lovely and ragged, dragging the moon out've the sky; you'd be a fool, or you'd be a cub. Look at She Who Offers Sorrow. Her body tells the story of warning, long before she growls, long before she gathers the Gaians up and - without hesitation, without ornamentation - lays out a plan. As she does so, she is aware that the hunters, they who follow, have withdrawn, that they've circled, that the circle is closing, gathering the way dusk gathers into night, see? She's aware, and it prickles under her skin, the way the cloud of banes - little mouths, nibbling ineffectually at fur; little mouths, able to draw doubt out've a living thing the way a mosquito'd draw blood out've a living thing - prickled at her fur, at her senses and thoughts, without getting a firm hold. (Dreams in Summer Snow felt them more keenly, more sharply than did the galliards. Doubt sang in him, and he had to push it down; but he did.)
All to say, Waking Dream doesn't make a sound, but she circles She Who Offers Sorrow (violence [contained]), then separates and blends as well as she can into the shadows, where the other galliard indicated. And the hunters, the things that follow, they wait. Patient. Watchful. The air is alive with watching, alive with studied unconcern -- the air is a lie; so is all that unconcern.
[Sorrow] And they wait.
The street is quiet; the call of feeding banes echo in the distance, ringing out over the rooftops. The garou are quiet, slunk into the shadows, vibrating taut as stretched wire, some internal note ringing through their sense of place. They know communicate by scent here, by movement, the flick of an ear, the sweep of a tail, the swing of a sharp muzzle. The air is still, full of promise that seems - fragile somehow, and eerie peace that is nothing like the genuine thing, which is surcease. Adrenaline shoots through the blood and makes them want to move, and their muscles quiver with it, with the rage that expands with the adrenaline.
And then wait. Across the intersection, Waking Dream and Dreams in Summer Snow begin to scent Sorrow's unease. She was watching Behind but is now prickling with Out Front and that awareness - her sense of the balance between prey and predator - raises her hackles to stand in an elegant ruff around her neck.
Abruptly she moves, eases from the shadows like a dream of gray sky on a gray morning, cutting through the stylized shadows of the roof tiles.
They [want to] flank us. Ahead and behind now. Those ahead are not settled. We hit them now, hit them first. Fast. Then behind. Come.
- and so saying, she awaits the barest sign that the others have heard, acknowledged, understood, and then surges forward, her body language sharp, tail sweeping, ready to charge, ready to rage into warform. Ready to fight.
[Waking Dream] [Things In Front. Do we even notice this distressing turn of events?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 2
[Waking Dream] [Things in back: Do we notice?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6
[Sorrow] Charisma plus intimidation!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10
[Dreams in Summer Snow] He scents her unease and the hair about his neck and along his shoulders is beginning to lift, a little, the moment he does. Harmony's head swings about to look behind, his dark green eyes seeking out some enemy he can't see or smell. This is a quiet place, a decaying place, and it is a place in which most Garou are automatically ill at ease.
Her orders receive a soft noise in response, something that is not in any tongue at all but simply meant to indicate acknowledgment, that he heard her and that he is ready.
When Sorrow surges forward Harmony moves after her, summoning what Rage abides in his heart so that he too can prepare himself for war. There is not much anger in him save for that which simmers dangerously, unacknowledged and unrealized, and it is difficult for him to call it forward consciously when he has spent so much time smoothing it away. But for all that, he is still a Garou.
[Waking Dream] The things that are gathering before them are so intent on their watchfulness, on their gathering, that they don't notice any intent when the garou charge forward, she who offers sorrow in the lead. They're taken utterly, decisively by surprise. This is what they were, once upon a time: totemlings, three once-wolf-spirits, gray-furred, steel-furred, eyes the same color of metal, although one has human ears, the other has no tail. The third's chest is gaping, open, and its spine is hunched like a man's - it has a man's hand, rather than a paw, although paying attention to that man's hand causes it to blur, to flicker, until it looks like a (cat's) paw, like it can't quite settle.
They have cracks winding all through, and from the cracks they're dripping black ichor, and where the black ichor actually touches, the shadows become a little more foul, a little denser, more snarled, and the air sort've gets a whine - subliminal; it's difficult not to notice now. Their is absolutely nothing sane in their eyes. Their is absolutely nothing that looks salvageable in their eyes. They look like hunger, and their ribs show through their coats, and once She Who Offers Sorrow, Dreams in Summer Snow and Waking Dream are close enough to snap at them, to claw at them, to do whatever it is they'll do, they can hear this:
winter, raging, raging, angry, twisted, ugly - winter, raging in the wolfish wyrm-spirits' bellies, clawing at their ribs, trying to get out.
They're all very, very large, and very, very skinny, twisted out-of-shape, and being joined by a fourth. They smell like nothing at all. Their shadows are human, but bulking, two-headed - three-headed, and their shadows don't move in an echo of how they move. Their shadows wait, and only copy movement after they've seen what fruit it bears.
They don't notice the garou noticing them. And so -
[Sorrow] The Garou move together now, knotted together, a clot of rage, an organism. A pack is one thing, individuals in motion but one body, moving the way separate cells beneath one skin move - together - and loose as this group of Garou is, they are a pack tonight, in deed if not spirit. Sorrow is quiet - not silent but quiet - because silence is not in here, but here quiet is all that matters. The scent of the black ichor is sharp in her nostrils, reminds her of something strongly enough to make her stomach turn, raw. She wuffs out a breath, shakes - turns her head to growl to the others.
Take the nearest first. Use claws, do not bite. When the first is finished, we take the next. Working like a pack, which is to say: together, tearing the wyrm-wolf-spirits apart one by one, until they are ended. Then she lifts her head, muzzle swinging forward, teeth bare now, in quiet challenge, in silent threat, watching before she clears her nostrils with a whuff of are. [Beware] the winter inside, says Sorrow, at the last.
Dark winter, twisted winter - not simple hunger, but a black rot of need - not simply the absence of spring, but enduring desolation. The wyrm's winter: starved, angry, vicious and viscous, barrenness never ending. Before they charge forward, she gives them talens - because they are alone in the dark, because they are outnumbered. Because she is protecting more than her own hide when she shatters the little clay marble with Fenrir glyphs etched into the rough-worked clay in her jaw.
- a shimmer, a sense of solidity around her, and around them, if they shatter their own marbles and a supple sense of cold, the bedrock beneath the barren northern earth. Then she begins to move again, with purpose and gathering speed. Before she reaches the nearest spirit, she surges into her Crinos form and -
[OOC: soak talen! plus a soak talen for Harmoney and one for Lila. She rarely uses them, but circumstances warrant! 2. Resist Pain. 3. Crinos! charge with claws and stuff.]
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Generally, Harmony's battle tactics are not very complex. They involve pulling on his direwolf skin and charging in to bite things until his Rage fails him or they die, and so it is quite lucky for him that Sorrow has thought to caution him against this very thing, that she is leading in more than just charging ahead at the front. A moment later, when the ichor clogs his nostrils, he understands why this is what she has told him to do.
He's still unwise to the ways of the Wyrm, the little tricks it uses to unweave the world around it. Grateful, he assumes his warform instead, his gangly adolescent limbs looking almost too long for him in Crinos, as though he should still be able to hunch forward and run on all fours comfortably.
It is not a challenge for him to remain silent. The boy is naturally a contained person, even though he is friendly and outgoing.
There is nothing sane and nothing salvageable: this is for the best, as in the past, Dreams in Summer Snow has had second thoughts about felling his enemies. It is difficult for him to charge in and rend things with his claws, to see the ichor that wells up around them when they dig in and tear away, to feel the give as flesh and muscle, even that of a spirit, part and turn to rot in his hands.
He tells himself that it's mercy.
[Sorrow] Dex plus ze brawl! in Crinos.
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10 Re-rolls: 1
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Dex + Brawl]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4
[Sorrow] Dex plus ze brawl!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 10 Re-rolls: 1
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Dex + Brawl!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 9
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Again!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9
[Sorrow] Und again!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 8
[Waking Dream] [DOOM?]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8
[Waking Dream] [DOOM 2?]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
[Waking Dream] [Hallp?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9
[Waking Dream] - and if it isn't mercy, precisely, at least it's merciful the first time. They fall on it, the two galliards and the philodox, and it is dead before it can make a sound. Waking Dream's claws sank into its side, Sorrow's claws tore out its heart. It has no time. The philodox's claws don't quite connect, but he feels as if he's tears snow out've its belly; perhaps he wavered because he wasn't quite so certain that it was unsalvageable, and perhaps that's when he noticed its eyes. Not of Gaia. Not ever going to be of Gaia again. What memory of Gaia there might be is wrecked, twisted, and a perversion. Waking Dream whuffs a warning -
Don't look in their eyes
- when they all fall on the second. The second wolf-thing, winter-howling-in-its-belly, does not go down as swiftly, bites at Sorrow, tears into her - although not enough, not enough to do more than barely scratch, barely tastes blood - and then Sorrow severs its head, and Waking Dream tears a hole in its flank, and Dreams in Summer Snow rips off one of its legs, and it makes a keening sound, and though it nip, nips at Waking Dream, its teeth glances off of her (silver [luna blessed]) hide, and when its compatriot snarls and flings itself on top of Dreams in Summer Snow, sinking its teeth into the scruff of his neck, attempting to drag him downward, pull him away, it hurts Harmony, but the hurts heal, the wounds re-knit, flesh re-formed almost before it's savaged open again. And there was the fourth, remember? The fourth hulks larger, bigger - still larger -
and lifts its muzzle to howl help that much more swiftly to them.
Sorrow is free, Waking Dream is already moving to help Harmony, and there are who knows how many (more than this) behind them.
[Sorrow] The fourth howls and so does Sorrow. The forth begins to howl - to call aid closer, and she is shaking free of the third dead-thing, its severed head rolling, still avoiding whatever raw secrets crawl behind its dead eyes, whatever barrenness lingers there, the sackcloth and salt-ash winter it promises, the one that never ends. Her howl is fierce, ferocious, a challenge. This one is dead and more will follow. it says. There is a raw hint of victory, the dead opened on the ground before them, and a greater edge of threat, if you come we end you too. spiraling into her voice, twinned with victory. Her howl shears away and rises against the howling-other, meant to drown, bury the call-for-aid. Meant to make it desperate, the last gasp of the dying, the last trap of the dead.
Then the beast turns, sizzling black ichor flying from her claws, and launches herself at the fourth, the last remaining wyrmwolf, the blood of his fellows fouling her claws. She's going for the throat, the mouth, the tongue. She's meaning to turn his howl into a yelp of distress, into a dying cry.
(1. Call of the Wyld to augment threat. 2. RAWR. 3. ATTACK!!!!!!!)
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Don't look in their eyes, says Lila, but it's a little too late, he already did it the once when he was searching for some sign of whether or not it could be helped. It's difficult for him, doing this, even when he knows that these creatures are not of Gaia. It's difficult for him just because they have living forms and they feel like things feel when they can feel pain, and even if he isn't thinking consciously about the suffering his claws are inflicting, there is something in him that just. can't. do it.
Until one grabs him by the scruff of his neck.
And then the part of him that is Wolf remembers. He snarls and twists in its jaws, trying to disengage himself, unbothered now when his claws find flesh and rip away. It's a touch strangled with his skin pulled tight around his vocal cords. He kicks with one of his back legs, trying to shake himself free, tearing away when he can't.
The wounds are not lasting. By the time he has gotten himself free - either by tearing away or by fighting free - he launches himself toward the fourth, and this time there is no hesitation.
[Sorrow] Charisma + Intimidation
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 10
[Sorrow] Brawl!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 8, 9
[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Brawl]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 8, 9
[Waking Dream] [Bad Guyz - how many flee?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9
[Sorrow]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 5, 5, 7
[Waking Dream] When Dreams in Summer Snow is free, when the third is dead, when Sorrow's chilling (terrifying [war]) howl is no longer carrying strong, stronger, no longer swallowing the winterwolfthing's own howl for aid, no longer devouring it, riding over it, burning stronger, fiercer, victorious -
Waking Dream has turned to face what's behind them. What's behind them - nine once-wolf things with winter in their belly; it takes Sorrow and Dreams in Summer Snow effort to take the howling wolf-thing down, because he is so large, so furious, almost frenzied. His teeth find purchase on her shoulder and neck, she is just not quite quick enough, and it is cold. And the cold slinks down, sinks through her, before his teeth are dislodged by Dreams in Summer Snow, before the cold disperses into you're alive! warmth. Dreams in Summer Snow finds himself not-overwhelmed. His claws go precisely where he directs them to: and he - too - is lethal. Although it's Sorrow takes the wolf-things throat, mouth, tongue after, crushes the howl into something faint
a wheeze, breath leaving, a rattle.
But - behind. There are nine of the once-wolf things with winter howling, hungry, tainted, Ravenous in their belly, and they're all set to attack. Three are hulking larger, and larger, in the way that these things have, and their ribs are gaping, and between their ribs: a blizzard, and somebody, something, crying lost, some almost-human voice, some voice that sounds like people (garou [kin]) they've known and loved and lost, Kora, Kora, didn't you have a friend down below the city, back when you became more than human, didn't you have someone else, Harmony, Harmony, and also, Lila, Lila, don't just hide there, and then the fourth is crushed,
and Sorrow's howl hangs over them. When Sorrow and Harmony turn, they see their death. And all nine of them flee.
Waking Dream's muscles bunch to follow, but the galliard (barely, just) checks herself, giving the challenging galliard a lambent glance.
[Waking Dream] [And none of y'all sustained wounds that need tending, yo. Y'all are good.]
to Dreams in Summer Snow, Sorrow
[Sorrow] The wounds are healing; the warm dissolves into the heat of her blood and the fourth falls. Each moment is sketched out from the rest, framed in staccato impressions of battle. Rage makes them move faster, rage makes time crawl; they have all the time in the world. This blow and that one, the vicious fight scours the hard packed ground beside, and the ichor steams on the asphalt like acid tears. Somewhere deep underground, the poisoned, quiescent, slumbering earth turns over. This is not a victory, just a holding pattern. Four are dead, more roam, full of winter, the promise of time's end, gray clouds and gray snow and barren earth scattered with skeletons of the starving dead.
The Children of Gaia might imagine the Fenrir Valhalla like that: neverending battle in boundless winter, but it is otherwise, too: golden wheat fat in the fields, golden tables groaning with the harvest, golden voices raucous with laughter, and golden cups raised high in memory of the honored dead.
Sorrow meets Waking Dream's gleaming gaze briefly. In this skin, her eyes are amber, shot through with striations of honey and brown, banked fires visible through wavering antique glass. Then, the moment passes. The Crinos wheels about, melts into her four-legged warform, direwolf, and charges snarling, snearing, howling in wake of the fleeing winter-wolves. It is easy to imagine, in that moment, a Get of Fenris flinging herself into the hunt, charging forward into the fray, damn the odds, the territory, the objective, losing herself in the glory of battle, and that urge is a raw thing inside her, that edged promise of release.
They were made to kill.
Instead she stops short - a half block away, more than - dire warning wordless in her body language, dominant now, the tail high and hackles raised, the snarling mouth open with a enduring threat. I will kill you all. One hesitates, another slows, and she starts after, harrying them apart in the distance, driving them to scatter into the scab, to flee and not to regroup, not to regroup and return, not to follow.
Satisfied, at last, that they are gone, Sorrow comes padding back to the others, quiet now, shaking free that scent of the scab from her fur as if she could rid herself of it when it is all around her.
They are gone now, she tells them. And we are close. We go.
So saying, she turns and melts back into lupus, picking up the pace, circling - at last - toward Hill House,
[Dreams in Summer Snow] Dreams in Summer Snow is not aggressive. Sorrow bounds after the fleeing wyrmwolves, her warform changing shape without shifting mass as her heavy direwolf paws strike the ground, and Harmony stops, tapering down those instincts that tell him to pursue and kill.
There is no challenge from him. He just remains, loose and ready, in case they be required to address some other threat, to charge after and assist Kora. But the Garou have been victorious for now, even though the reinforcements outnumbered them three to one. He waits, proud and assured and ready to defend, but he does not charge after her.
And when she returns to them, his hands touch the ground and his shape falls back into something smaller, with no lingering traces of the boy.
He follows her back toward Hill House.
[Sorrow] Ath Plus Dex (in hispo!)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10
[Waking Dream] [pause!]
[Sorrow] (eeee, thank you!)
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