Ornature

The Silver Fang remains Crinos-formed until the great Lune has withdrawn to inform My Mother the Moon and returned with permission, blessings, direction that she should accompany the smaller spirit to find and return the shadow to its chains. Slumber, Charlotte things. Sleep, quiet.

Then she shifts one again, her body melting into the slender, boyish frame to which she was born. A girl, silver-haired, standing dwarfed by the gates of the palace of the moon, with a glowing little hare at her side.

Alice, right?

In something like wonderland.

Charlotte swings her messenger bag across her body and settles it over her thighs, fingers twining with the straps as she Thinks Thinks Thinks.

"I need to know more about the shadow you saw." She is thinking-human-thoughts, suddenly, perhaps nauseatingly aware of how little she does know, but those human thoughts find themselves remade into something comprehensible to the little spirit. "What kind of shadow? Or where did it go? Or who chained it? Or where can we find it?

"Why do you think it will eat us all? All of that. Any of it. So we know where to go, and whom to ask for help."

Having issued the blessings, charge, and dismissal of the Moon, the great Lune steps back. That enormous door swings shut again, that dazzling light shrinking all along its immense edge until it is thin as a handsbreadth, thin as a yardstick, thin as a pencil, thin as a knife's edge,

gone.

Left to themselves on Luna's luminous surface, which in comparison to the light within that palace seems almost dark, the little rabbit-shaped lune straightens from its deep bow and twitches its nose. It seems quite about to berate Charlotte again for being silly, silly, stupid, meat! -- but something stays its tongue this time. It thinks.

"I show you."

It unslings the mortar-and-pestle from its furry back and grips it in its furry little paws and tosses a pawful of something, some bright leaf-thing, from its satchel into the mortar and pounds pounds pounds pounds pounds until the bright leaf-things are bright-dust.

"Here," the little lune says, and throws a handful of dust into Charlotte's eyes. She can feel the particles land, each a tiny zing like soda popping on the tongue. There's no pain, but: at once her vision goes black.

She hears the little lune. Every word, every sentence pulls light out of darkness. Brilliant, simple lines, like prehistoric drawings in the cave of Charlotte's mind, sketching the tale even as the small spirit tells it:

"Meat-wolf can fall into darkness, yes? You know this. Spirit can fall into darkness too. Even big spirits, great spirits, spirits of mighty suns many many many many many far-aways away. When suns fall into darkness they change. They not shine anymore. They become hungry, so hungry. They eat all things, even other suns. So other suns band together. They circle the fallen suns. Keep them locked in. Keep everyone else safe.

"But the fallen suns, like My Mother the Moon, like My Grandfather the Sun, have many many many childrens. These childrens so small, the bright suns not see them. So they not locked in. They get away, go everywhere, make trouble.

"Long long time ago, when I not even me yet, one child-of-fallen-sun came here. It make trouble! It eat everything! So My Mother the Moon sent my mighty elder brothersisters to stop it. They fought for many many turnings, and many many elder brothersisters died, but little by little, by light of Mother, the shadow become small. Small enough to defeat! Small enough to catch. Small enough to put away and lock away and keep away from everyone else.

"Many many many many many many many turnings later, after I become me, shadow escape. I not know where it go. But it still small, and it cunning, and it hungry, and it eat light. It not strong enough to try to eat My Grandfather the Sun. It not strong enough to challenge My Mother the Moon. But it will look for small lights to eat, maybe small childrens of Moon. Maybe small meat-wolves. And if we not find it and lock it away, it become stronger and stronger soon."

Oh,

she breathes in the dust, which fills her every cell with this sensation of light. The brilliance behind her, the soft face of Luna beneath her feet. The moon who comes and the moon who hides and the moon who comes again, and wrapped in a kind of awe that could feel jagged were it not for the softening light of the moon, she watches as the little spirit shows her what only it saw escape its bonds.

After. After after after, she straightens, rubs her thumb and index fingers together as she considers the glimmering moondust and its soft, inherent glow against her skin.

"Okay." Still quiet. "Ask one of your brothersisters to make a moonbridge to take us back to the Caern. Then, show me where the hungry-sun-spirit was bound. We'll start there. I can try to track it with a rite or a gift, and if that doesn't work we'll track it another way. Or ask a No-Moon to come help.

"Meanwhile I'll try to think of something to bind it into so that it won't escape again."

And so that is what they do:

They call upon a stronger Lune, and they open a moonbridge, and they know the exhilaration of utmost speed once more. Earth, that beautiful blue marble: it grows larger and larger, more and more beautiful, aglow and aglitter in the sharp, dustless darkness of space. What bittersweetness to come home to such a home, and to know that it, like all other aspects of the Gaia-Mother, is under such vicious attack.

They land back in the Caern. Hours or days might have gone by, or little time at all. It is nighttime still, or nighttime again. And the little lune, still glowing-hare-shaped, bounds into the deep shadows with long, haunch-driven lopes. On and on and on they run, wolf and rabbit, girl and spirit, until they reach and cross the edge of the bawn, until they're deep in the dry, brittle wilderness of highland Colorado.

All at once, the little lune stops. They are standing at the lip of a wide, shallow indentation, so old and weatherworn that realmside Charlotte would have never identified as a crater from a meteorite strike. That is what it is, though, and here in the Umbra it still smells faintly of not-from-here; it still pulses with the faintest memory of its fiery descent to earth. And lo: there in the center, a fist-sized hunk of oily-shiny, dark, misshapen rock. If Charlotte looks across the Gauntlet, she finds the same hunk of rock in the realm, though the area has long since smoothed out in rain and wind; has long since overgrown with weeds and detritus.

The little lune sits on its haunches and scratches behind a long ear with a hindpaw.

"When elder sisterbrothers dragged the shadow to My Mother the Moon, she bound it into rock and threw it far far away. The Earth caught it and buried it here for many many many turnings."

Charlotte is girl-shaped again and she hunkers down in the center of the crater, examining the hunk of oily-shiny rock, listening with that odd, delicate solemnity to everything the little Lune says. Bows her head after, her pale brows furrowed as she slips her fingers over the piece of rock.

Then picks it up, feels its weight in her hand. She does not have the name of the fallen-sun, but she has its prison and she knows - must know - the way its scent will twist the world, its original nature warped and devoured by a darkness so foul it is hard to conceive or hold.

First, she opens her senses and invokes one of the simplest gifts she knows, to catch the scent of the wyrm in the air. Then, she pulls out from her back a very simple set of implements: an iron needle and a string.

She holds the hunk of meteorite in one hand, the needle dangling from its string in the other, and concentrates, seeking the path of the shadow-that-escaped.

Sense Wyrm!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

wits + rituals for questing stone.

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

That hunk of meteorite: it feels cold, and crawl-y, and a little bit slimy. It also feels dead, though. Emptied out. When she stretches out her senses to catch the smell of the Wyrm, she can scent its stink immediately on that rock. And, as she stretches her senses farther, farther --

the needle whips out. It pulls eagerly forward, north-east-ward, toward the city.

"Meat-wolf has idea?" the little lune wants to know. It has found a bit of grass. It is eating grass, its little buckteeth busily chewing. "Meat-wolf knows how to trap shadow?"

"Meat-wolf," returns girl-Charlotte with this small smile that has a tinge of familiarity, even affection, for the little grass-chewing lune There is a store there, about the moon and the earth somehow, but she is not a storyteller and she knows only that the moon changes, and hides her face, and shrouds herself sometimes even in shadow, and then returns. "knows where the shadow is. The needle shows me.

"I don't exactly how to trap the shadow. But I am going to cleanse the rock in which it was imprisoned. Then I am going to follow the rite and go closer and closer until I am so close it will have to come when I call it.

"I'll stay by the river, if I can. And ask the spirits of the river to be ready to help if I need them.

"Then I'll summon the shadow to me, and try to bind it back into its prison.

"That's what meat-wolf is going to do."

Alert, she half-rises then, pulls out a small flask to start a rite of cleasing on the oily, pulsing foulness of the meteorite.

(Rite of Cleansing - dif ??)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

That thin needle pulls Charlotte onward through the night. At some point, she realizes it's more prudent to run on all fours than to walk. Even then, the journey is long: countless miles passing underfoot as she lopes her tireless wolf's lope toward the city.

It's an overcast night. Realmside, Denver lights up the cloud cover over its heart. It is so bright: the brightest thing for miles. Even in the Umbra it seems made of light, a million glistening strands of spiderweb slung between the shadows of skyscrapers and highrises, each strand aglow from within. No wonder a piece of a fallen star, hungry for light, is drawn to it.

As it runs, the little lune eventually loses its hare's shape. It floats into the air, changes, becomes avian. Small and swift and sure of wing, with a distinctly split tail: a swallow made of silver, shadowing Charlotte's pace.

Eventually, the needle begins to pull harder. And then harder still. And then so hard that Charlotte knows the shadow must be very, very near indeed.

a die!

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( fail )

It is close.

The girl-wolf bark-whines at the little Lune floating in the air above it. Her head is canted as if she were listening to something no one else can hear, and perhaps she is. But then she shakes her fur out and laps her tongue at the calcified air. Considering. Another half-bite of the fall air, and she can taste the moisture in it. See the silverling gleam of the river's loops curving through the metallic canyons of the city.

We go to the River first. Then find the shadow.

--

And so she does, feeling the tangible, magnetic pull of the needle against her flank, slipping beneath the singing, glowing strands of the weaver's ever-present web to the edge of something older, wilder, stranger, and well-remembered.

The River.

No need to summon the elementals there, though perhaps she must remind them of what and whom and why she is, and so she calls them to come, and listen. Paws in the shallows, great head lowered rather humbly (for a Silver Fang) to the water's gleaming surface, her own lupine face reflected therein.

I am Charlotte Black Sheep, known to you, known by you, known of you. I bring the water from the mountains, clear and clarified, to help you fight the pollution the Wyrm brings to your shores. The spirits of the Platte saved me once, in no-time, or another-time, so I remember them. Remember me now. I go to bind a gaffling or jaggling of the fallen, hungry sun, before it grows and grows and grows to swallow us all. And ask your aid: to cleanse or heal, perhaps even to battle until it is weak enough to be bound back into the prison it escaped during the eclipse.

And offer in return: continued devotion, gnosis, whatever you would ask.

Charisma (3) + Enigmas (3) + Pure Breed (4)

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

I become stronger, the little lune replies, to help.

And so it does: shapechanging again, coming out of the sky and landing on the earth, growing fur, growing fangs, growing claws.

It is a cat now. A small, pretty, sleek-furred wildcat all in white, blinking slit-pupilled eyes at Charlotte. Perhaps Charlotte hasn't the heart to tell it how little help it would be in real, pitched battle.

--

Something you should know about water: ever does it change, and ever does it remain the same. Rivers flow. Lakes fill and drain. Seas rise and fall. Rain pours, rain dries away. And through it all, water: mutable, shifting, returning anew. It remembers.

The River remembers Charlotte from that other-time, that no-time. It is a stone's throw away. It reacts to her voice, stronger and more fluid still in the Umbra. Easily, it floods its banks. Silently, it swells and swells and swells, until the current washes past her ankles.

The little lune hisses. It scrambles onto a rock, wraps its tail daintily around its paws, and begins to groom itself.

And the needle: it pulls.

She hasn't the heart; or perhaps she does. The little lune has become stronger, to help. Whatever its part in the coming fight, it was also the only creature that noticed the shadow's escape.

Without the small spirit's attentiveness, the shadow would be left to grow, and grow, and grow.

Charlotte shifts now: larger, to her heavy-shouldered Crinos form. The messenger bag exists here too: a slim piece of ornately tooled leather slung across her massive frame. The tools of her trade secreted within.

One of them: a slingshot, of all things, which she pulls out along with a handful of obsidian stones, which have been worked, and worked, and worked, written with glyphs and sigils, crafted to be employed against the Wyrm.

A moment's concentration to reawaken the talens - two - and then she follows the needle's pull, along the riverbank, the flood in her wake.

[-1 WP to Activate her Healer's Torque (basically a fetish that confers resist pain. 2 Gnosis rolls to activate her modified bane arrows (stones rather than arrows, flung from slingshot, not fired from a bow), and then she'll activate lambent flame. ]

Talen 1:

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Talen 2:

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )

Closer.

Closer.

Closer.

And then, all of a sudden, she is there. A dip in the landscape, a bend in the river, something: the last barriers to line-of-sight fall away, and she sees The Shadow.

Or really: she doesn't see it. No one can see it. It is notable, visible, by its very absence: a being of pure darkness. In comparison, the blackest night is bright as day. In comparison, the deep blackness of space, even, is bright. This thing is black beyond black, blacker than anything Charlotte has ever seen before, so black that her eyes ache for lack of light.

It has latched onto one of the strands of light emanating from the city, and it is feeding. Up until that point, that strand, that pattern-web, is the orderly, fractionated brilliance of an optical cable. Past that point, that strand is only darkness.

As Charlotte approaches, river at her heels, little lune at her back, The Shadow looks at her. She knows it looks at her, because she can feel its limitless, lightless chill straight down in the core of her being. It dislodges from the pattern web. Slowly, smoothly, with the inevitability of its own terrible gravity, it comes toward Charlotte.

She is, after all,

so very bright.

Charlotte lifts up the slingshot. It is a lovely slingshot, made for hunting, made for handling, made, even, for hands the size of a Crinos Garou, and she loads and throws first one and then another of her little missives, her little stones, right at the the darkness

pewpew

and then she throws down the now-cleansed stone that was its prison for so-many-years, right into its path. Snaps her jaw and snarls a challenge.

Sinks into hispo and surges forward, the rite and the battle begun.

[soakity!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

[soak!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

That first missile glances across The Shadow -- seems to tear through the darkness, carve a flaming trail. The edges of the wound burn scintillatingly, the red-orange of embers.

The second missile is simply swallowed whole. It disappears into darkness, as though falling into a very, very, very deep pit, until the eye can no longer follow its path.

Charlotte-the-Hispo snarls a challenge. She surges forward, so brave that the little lune is right on her heels, puffing up, arching its back, hissing. And The Shadow, that inevitable, terrible thing: it simply keeps coming forward. Onward. Nearer and nearer, dreadfully slow, until all at once

it is not slow at all. It is fast, fast as light, fast as darkness. The little lune is there one second, and then

gone. Devoured.

[+2 rage for NOOOOOOOO]

This is both rite and battle. It is a battle-rite and she can feel the surge of rage in her feral body. The full-moon spike of it - which has a tidal kind of certainty. No wonder the moon follows the ocean. Or is it the ocean that follows the moon?

No matter.

This is not merely a thing-of-darkness. It is also a thing-of-substance, of spirit, of will, of rage.

The Silver Fang surges forward and tears into it. Faster than can be seen.

[1a/b split. BITES. Rage 1 + Rage 2: BITES.]

1a. -2.

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Damage!

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 7 )

[soak!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Soak! Ack!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

1b. BITE.

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Damage!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

There is no satisfying crunch of teeth into flesh and bone. There is no murderously delightful spurt of blood, or even ichor.

Instead, Charlotte's mouth feels numb. Her teeth feel as though they're not there at all. Her strength feels sapped, and sapped further with every bite. She finds herself digging in with her claws to maintain her balance. She feels the devastating pull of The Shadow like a riptide, threatening to drag her in, and away, and down.

[soak!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

SOAK!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

This whine, deep and raw, at the sensation as it pulls at her, away, away and down. The gravity draws another snarl and she shakes her maw and digs in for purchase and -

Rage 1: BITE.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Damage!

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

[soak!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Rage 2:

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Damage!

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 4, 6, 6, 8, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

[OW]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (6, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Is it doing any good? Is she making headway? How does one fight absolute nothingness, anyway?

Charlotte fights like this: with claws. With teeth. With fervor, with valor, with outrage, with fury. She bites and bites and bites at it, tears at it with all her might. She tastes nothing. She feels nothing. She does not know if she is weakening it, though surely she is --

she does know, though, that it is encroaching upon her. That with every bite she tunnels deeper into its nothingness, and now it has oozed around her, it has begun to envelope her.

At her back, the river washes over her numb paws. It reminds her: it is here, it is here. What can it do?

Perception 3 + Primal Urge 3

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

[she is making a difference! she can't really see it, but The Shadow is shrinking.]

Her flanks heave and her numb mouth lolls and she can feel it, devouring her, eating her, consuming her, pulling her into its endless gravity and it is harder to breathe and harder to feel and harder to think the more she charges the nothing, the more the nothing surges over her, as if it were the unmaker itself.

But she still feels: the water lapping at her ankles, the river washing over her paws. That wakes her. She shakes herself again and -

reaches

and senses the devouring darkness, is shrinking.

Heal me if I fall.

This to the river, panted out, more thought or prayer than anything else. The River saved her before; perhaps it will again.

Then she leaps forward again. There is no more time to question. There is just -

darkness, numbness, the cold kernal of rage inside her body.

[1a/b. BITE and BITE. Rage 1: BITE. Rage 2: BITE.]

1a:

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (5, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Damage!

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 8, 8, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

[soak!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

1b.

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Damage!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Rage 1:

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Damage!

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 5 )

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Rage 2:

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

Damage!

Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 8 )

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

soak!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )

Little

by little

by little, she whittles it down. She thins the darkness, makes it flimsy, breakable. Makes it stretched so taut that -- she realizes this suddenly -- even as it envelopes her, even as it covers her ankles, her knees, her waist, her shoulders, her mouth, her ears,

even as it threatens to swallow her entirely: she can see right through it. She can look through it, as though it's not there at all.

One last snap of her teeth. And The Shadow simply ruptures, flailing apart, spinning, tearing, ripping, fluttering. If it could scream, it would. But it can't scream. It is only darkness: collapsing on itself, becoming very very small indeed. Crumpling into a basketball, a tennisball, a golfball, a point of nothingness.

Bindable now. Lock-away-able.

No sign of her little lune, though.

One moment she is being swallowed by darkness. The next she is being devoured by darkness. The next it is collapsing, and she springs back at it begins to fall together, splashing in the ankle deep water, snarl-barking as she does.

There is no triumph. Just a moment where she rears back and begins to rise from her hispo form to her crinos form.

Spirits, she knows, are rarely destroyed. Merely sent to slumber.

So where is her little lune?

--

The water remains.

Cleanse the Blight. Make it give-up the light it stole from My Mother the Moon, who shows her face across your waters every night. Then I will bind it so that it may not escape.

The water remains.

The water washes around her paws; wets her fur; cools her paws. Her sensation begins to return: pins and needles, hot as fire.

The water flows, and it eddies. It speaks in a tongue like smooth stones tumbling in a waterfall:

We will cleanse for you. We remember. For you we will cleanse. But we cannot bring light from darkness. Cannot bring light.

You can. You can enter darkness. Find light. Emerge. We can hold darkness at bay. Prevent its escape. Prevent it from devouring you altogether. But only for a time. Only for a time.

Will you enter?

There's only one answer.

Yes.

- and down the rabbit hole she goes.

Into the darkness she dives, until that darkness grows, until it encompasses the horizon, the sky, the earth, her mind. There is -- if she was afraid of such a thing -- no dreadful pull, no horrific stretching, no freakshow spaghettification. There is simply the unbelievably fast growth of absolute nothingness from a point

to a golfball

to a tennisball, a basketball, a beachball, a globe, a world, a universe.

--

She is no longer herself, then.

She has no weight, no identity, no boundaries.

She is darkness, and the darkness is her.

--

And then, gradually, she realizes she is not in darkness at all. She is not in darkness but in light, bathed in it. Absolute, blinding light, white light from every direction. At the heart of a fallen star gravity bends light, bends space, bends time. Caught in this trap, this cosmic time-out, all the world passes outside, too quickly to be seen as anything but brilliance. She is alone in a vast white silence, suspended, in suspension,

until

she realizes: she is not alone after all. She is curled like a fetus, curled like an egg, and there is a rabbit beside her, curled like a fetus, curled like an egg. Eyes closed, ears laid along the back of its head.

She is curled like a fetus, curled like an egg, curled like a seedling, possibility, promise, consumed and consuming and she can hear her heart beating, Charlotte, against the roof of her mouth. They are moving so very fast now but all she feels is the weight outside herself. The dis/connection between that without and the strange slow-time parabolic descent into (she takes another breath) the burst light at the heart (and another) of the fallen star.

Perhaps this is what slumber feels like, to the spirits, or the ancestors. This buoyed compression, this sense of animate suspension, and removal. Charlotte does not think, precisely, in phrases like perhaps or maybe - she is a theurge, and her mind is both more and less bendy than that - but she does think that this is what beforetime and notime and everywhen are like. Sleep, too, perhaps.

Is she a wolf or a girl? She is a wolf and a girl, see, two yolks in the same egg scrambled together and her self here hardly matters.

And there is a rabbit. A bright moon-bound rabbit whose brilliance is lost in the brilliant inward collapse of the fallen start and the girl reaches for it, egg to egg, pulls it close, strokes its ears, strokes its ears, strokes its ears, as she starts to - well, howl and sing, a greeting to what once-was and is-now collapsed.

The simplest of rites to honor helios, greeting the sun in the fallen-star. Some memory of sunrise as the world without passes beyond. Exuberant though the rite is meant to be, this one has a minor note, a keening sound. This is what you lost, little sun, when you fell.

Then she tucks the rabbit against her body, holds it close - stretches. Is movement possible? Is sound? Where does the greeting go?

(Wits + Rituals: minor rite: Greet the Sun)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

Here's the thing. The dreadful secret about falling, about collapsing so far into oneself that one is removed from the universe, about being lost:

it's not so bad.

She could stay here forever. There is no hunger, no pain, no suffering left. Nothing but white light; all the light of the universe, all the light devoured by the darkness. It's still here, see. It didn't die. It just went somewhere else. And it would be so easy to curl up. Like a fetus. Like an egg. Like the promise of something else, unfulfilled. It would be so easy to just give up.

Wouldn't it?

--

The little rabbit: bright against her heart. Soft fur, cool fur. A real rabbit would be warm, frenetically hot-burning, but this one is not. This one is soft as moonbeams, cool as silver. It moves only a little, a tiny little dream-twitch, and does not open its eyes.

Charlotte begins to howl. She begins to sing. She honors the sun-that-was; not the fallen-star-that is. She honors what it was, and what was without. There is no music here: her voice is mute, her body impossibly heavy, almost impossible to move. But she sings nonetheless, and the song is everywhere and nowhere at once, and all around,

all around a quiver, a shimmying shiver like a quake. An ache and a sigh; remembrance. The blank white ripples and stills.

The greeting is a kind of remembrance, a sort of half-formed contrition. Here is the inverse of that-which-was. Everything consumed back into itself. All that light swallowed, the gravity impossible, time slowed to the shape of a dream-twitching moon-rabbit held quite safely in her arms.

She feels the stir, the sigh, the shifting in the bound and heavy light all around her. Honors whatever is in this thing that would stir and shift and sigh for what was and what was lost, and she does that even as the song changes: another sound, twined with the first - because it was meant foremost to be performed at dawn, as the sun rises and offers its new-light to the world - and here it is always dawn, a dark and endless dawn, without a horizon around which to bend itself except the event horizon.

So: the stir, the sigh.

The song.

Holding on to the moon-rabbit in her right hand, Charlotte (Alice) reaches for her little pack and pulls from it a small vial of clear water from the highest of streams. There are no spirits bound within, just that water that she pours into this endlessly collapsed static as she starts to move and her howl of honor and greeting changes to something else: a challenge, a snarl, a rite meant to cleanse and banish the Wyrm.

Rite!

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

That shiver all around again. That ripple, heavier this time, a shudder. A straining, keening note on the edge of hearing. In her arms the moon-rabbit opens its eyes, gives its head a quick shake. It kicks, spasmodically, as small animals and small gafflings do when caught.

And overhead, in that blank whiteness: the tiniest, most transient of partings. A rift, an opening, a crack through which Charlotte can see a glimpse of the world-that-was.

Large enough for a moon-rabbit.

Large enough for her, perhaps. If she squeezes.

And yet all around her: that intangible sense of loss, of suffering, of ghosts on the very edge of remembrance.

[i am gonna let you, if you want to, reroll cleansing at the same diff. if you get 3 succ in one roll, or ... let's say 7 cumulative! SOMETHING REALLY GOOD WILL HAPPEN. but if she fails or botches a roll, the opening will close again, and Cleansing will not reopen it. she'll have to find another way out.

in interest of fairness: she will not lose renown at all if she chooses to escape right now.]

The beast the creature the priestess is still keening/snarling that challenge, that rite, scattering clean water from the highest of alpine lakes, where the water knows the sun and knows the stars and knows the moon, and remembers all, reflects their light, gleams pure as anything left on earth in its basin. She lifts up the spasmodic little moon-rabbit with her other hand, to that thinning, that opening, that place-where-things part and pushes the little sisterbrother through but does not follow him.

Does not follow him and does not stop her song, her call, her remembers.

There is a challenge inherent in the rite but there is also somehow twined with it now the earlier rite - a paean to greatness, the memory of the sun - see, wake, wake.

Once you rose.

Now you - merely - fall.

(Continuing the rite!)

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

And again.

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (2, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

ONE MORE TIME.

Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Her voice like a beat in a heart, unseen and unheard but felt, felt. Like a hammer against stone, against ceramic, against glass: again, again, again. The shuddering of the world all around her. The splitting of the featureless white sky. The cracks and the rivulets running together, a spiderweb of fractures, spreading and growing and fusing until --

until --

This is what it must be like to stand at the heart of creation. This is what it must have been like to be gaia at the moment she came into being. This sudden, wild out-flinging, this ecstatic shattering, this bursting-forth, this atomization.

Charlotte flies apart. The world flies apart. The white heart of the black star flies apart, flails in every direction, flings to every corner of the universe. There is pain, because of course there is; birth does not happen any other way. Things crack and rupture and split and tear and there is a scream in her mind, it may be her own, she is blind, she is rapturous, all the universe screams with her and then

silences.

--

Darkness, then.

True darkness. The sensation of coolness. Liquid. A river washing past her feet. Grass beneath her cheek. Fur against her arm, pushing, nudging, insistent.

Her dazzled eyes open. The night sky above, restored. An infinity of stars. Perhaps there is one more there that was not before. Who can remember? Who can know for certain? Who can count the stars. Who is like god?

A moon-rabbit huddled beside her, nose twitching, wide-set eyes fixed on her.

And a moon-bridge descending from on high, arcing so slow, so graceful, so silent down toward her.

The pain is so physical that it feels distant somehow. She is intact in the midst of being pulled apart. She is shattered, but that sundering is fractured and physical, it is not bound and framed and formed in her madness, but in her being. Somehow that makes it both right, and righteous.

Somehow - for an endlessly passing moment - her broken mind feels,

well,

whole.

--

And then: night. She is a girl-again, and she is on her hands and knees in the umbral reflection of the city's own expression of madness. She has become more comfortable here, she might even make it through LA without clapping her hands over her ears and decompensating, but it is the river, still wild, that makes any of that calcified city center tolerable. And beneath it: she is spent, so utterly and wholly spent that she just wants to curl up, perhaps with her moonrabbit, and sleep. The wolf-girl does open her arms, exhausted, and pull the moon-rabbit closer, and pet its silver-cool ears, and marvel at the arcing brilliance of the approaching moon-bridge, which seems as if it is half-contained in a dream.

Perhaps she expects a Lune to approach.

Perhaps she expects the one she Called, or the one who guarded the Gates of the Moon.

Perhaps she expects nothing at all. And indeed, nothing -- or at least no one -- is what she gets. The moonbridge touches down. It bathes her in the purest, silverest light she has ever known. And no one comes, and no one goes, and no voice booms approval from the heavens.

Just light. Just the soft touch of the Her Mother the Moon; cool on her brow like a mother's touch, a fevered brow.

The moon-rabbit doesn't leave, either. It snuggles a little closer and closes its eyes.

--

Perhaps she falls asleep. Perhaps time simply passes unremarked; for what is the passage of time, when her mind has so recently touched eternity?

Eventually the light dims and fades.

Eventually the night passes.

Eventually the sun begins to rise, golden through the trees and the brush, and now, softly, footsteps approach her from afar. They are steady and they are patient and they are quiet, and when they are quite close indeed Veiled-Heart crouches lithely before her. Tilts her head, her black hair falling over her shoulder like sand through an hourglass.

"Tell me," she invites, simply.

"Uhm." Is it morning? Has she returned?

No, Veiled-Heart has found her and she is still here, close to the shores of the river she called to follow her into darkness. The ground is still damp, but the water has receded as if it never rose at all. As if this were merely the effect of the spirits of the morning-mist, or perhaps a passing storm.

Charlotte kind of pushes herself upright, both hands planted on the ground, careful with the little lune, yes but still - utterly - spent.

"Well that's the little lune. He wasn't scared away by the eclipse though, see when the eclipse was happening everyone was watching it but he was watching a different shadow bound into a heavy rock it's that one over there - " and indeed it is still close by. She had intended to bind the fallen-star spirit back into its prison once she sent it in to slumber - " - and it escaped when no one was watching.

"It was a shadow too, a little fallen-star, hungry, and that's why she-he said it was gonna eat everything, because it was. So I followed the little brothersister into the Aetherial realm to call herhim back but shehe said no, meat-wolf, you're being stupid I'm not scared of the eclipse and told me all about the shadow, so I went too to the Gates of the Moon to offer to help and we came back down here and found its prison so I used that for a rite to follow it and called up the river after I found it so it could help cleanse or heal and then I threw some bane arrows at it and fought it 'til it went to sleep but while we were fighting it ate the little brothersister so I went in after.

"And it was everything in there, all light, moving so fast and not moving at all, and it made me think of a sleeping star and a star's just another kind of sun so I honored the sun in the star and then I started cleansing in hopes that it would maybe spit me and the little brothersister out but instead it felt like it was remembering what it was so I put the lune out and kept going and going and then I was out here.

"There was a moonbright but I didn't follow it.

"Maybe I should've but I was too tired."

Silently, Charlotte's tribe- and auspice-sister listens, her expression smooth, her eyes as veiled as her heart. She is kneeling in the dirt, kneeling so neatly, her palms over her knees. Now and again her eyes flicker, but never once does she interrupt, or gasp, or move.

When Charlotte is finished, Veiled-Heart's smile is faint, and like so many other expressions of hers, tinged with a faraway sort of sadness.

"Even if you should've, I suspect Luna forgave so small a transgression."

Her eyes rest on the little lune for a moment, and then return to Charlotte. "And what of the little fallen-star?" she asks. "Destroyed? Bound? ... Cleansed?"

"I don't know." Charlotte says, her voice remarkably quiet, her expression still and absolutely accepting her lack-of-knowledge.

There is so little they know, or can know, of all the mysteries that surround them.

"I was trying to cleanse it, and then it shattered and it felt like it shattered me. Like it was destroyed, but maybe also in its destruction it was reborn.

"It wasn't here, though. When I came to."

Veiled-Heart lifts her eyes to the sky. Here in the penumbral, the moon shines by day or by night. The stars sing. The sun, though distant, is impossibly glorious; a sovereign king on his throne.

"One day," says Veiled-Heart, soft but sure, "when you find out the fate of that star you saved, you will come back and tell me. Won't you?"

A beat.

"What would you name yourself, Charlotte Gray, Fostern of the Silver Fangs?"

"I don't know that, either." Charlotte says, with a ghostly sort-of-smile drifting across her mouth. Tired, that expression. "Alice," a glimpse at the moonrabbit, "maybe."

A joke. This quiet little brimming of her mouth that blooms and fades.

"I never thought I'd get another name. But I guess I have, though I'll figure that out later, too.

"Thank you, Veiled-Heart. Shall we take our little sisterbrother home?"

ascendance

"You have earned another." The distinction is small, but important. "It shall be one you are proud to wear."

And then, smiling:

"Yes, Yuf. Let's take your friend home."

--

Their little sisterbrother, it turns out, is in fact a semi-permanent guest of the Caern. Their path back to its home is a short one, taken under the rays of the day's new sun. A little ways into it, the moon-rabbit hops down from Charlotte's arms, recognizing the terrain, leading the way.

As they go, Veiled-Heart converses a little more. She admits that she was never wholly convinced that fear of a simple eclipse was what drove the little lune away. She confesses that she never thought, however, that the danger would run so deep; stretch so far.

She hopes, she says, that the little fallen-star was cleansed and reborn. She believes, she says, that even were it not reborn, it is at peace; severed from the darkness of its patron, given another chance in the great wheel of Gaia's love.

She is proud of Charlotte, her sister of moon and tribe. Charlotte, she hopes, is proud of herself as well.

--

The little lune lives in a little shrine near the heart of the Caern. It has built for itself a shining, diaphanous little home, like a mirror in miniature of the grand palace of Its Mother the Moon. It breaks into an all-out dash at the sight of it, heart-glad, streaking over the earth like light over water.

At the door of its home it turns. One quick glance back at Charlotte, and then

it relinquishes its borrowed form. Becomes a being of pure light and lightness: its true self, returning to roost like a flame within a lantern.

--

There is, of course, the business of the formal declaration before the Caern. There is the Challenge Circle redrawn, the onlookers gathered. There is Charlotte's new rank shouted for all and sundry, so that all wolves, all men, all spirits knew the truth:

that she was worthy,

that she was strong and wise and clever and brave,

that she is Fostern.

When Veiled-Heart breaks the circle and declares the challenge ended, Erich is there, laughing, sweeping her up in a hug. Her friends are there; those who know her and love her. Others are there as well, those who know her not, or not very well: they, too, look upon her with interest, with consideration, with recognition.

Fostern, they call her. Yuf, and sometimes even Rhya. She is congratulated, her hand is shaken, she is hugged, she is nudged and bounded-upon and eventually they manage to escape the well-wishers, Charlotte and her pack-brother; they manage to make it back to the car where they call Melantha, and then of course they will all go out to dinner, they will all celebrate, they will all be happy for her.

--

It is quite late at night when they return to the tinyhouses. Two, now, because Melantha's is so very nearly finished. They bid each other goodnight, they wash for bed, and Charlotte lets herself into her tinyroom in the tinyhouse

where

curled and dreaming upon her pillow

she finds her little friend, the little lune, the moon-rabbit with its little mortar-and-pestle, come to visit, and perhaps to stay.

Onward they drift, then -- caught in the invisible embrace of Luna's gravity. It seems to take an interminably long time, and for quite a while they hardly seem to be moving at all. Perhaps Charlotte asks why the little lune doesn't just moonbridge home. If she does, she is met with a scathing silence followed, at length, with the chagrined admission that the little lune doesn't even know how to open a moonbridge yet, it was so recently dreamed into being.

Eventually, though, it becomes clear they are moving. Luna's face grows larger, and larger, and larger, and with every passing moment the increase seems to accelerate until -- at last -- they are so near that Charlotte realizes they are, and have been, moving quite fast indeed.

She can make out details on the surface below, now. Shifting, immaterial hints of moon-palaces and shimmering silver lakes; perhaps here a mighty warrior of Luna's personal guard, perhaps there a diaphanous moon-maiden. As they get closer still, those half-envisioned dreams coalesce into a single discrete impression. Charlotte sees a great silvery palace stretching horizon to horizon, rising to a black, star-strewn sky. In the naked light of the sun, the walls are mirror-bright, almost too brilliant to look upon.

The little lune, too, has taken a recognizable shape. It is a hare: small, scrawny, twitchy-nosed, long-eared. It carries on its back a tiny mortar-and-pestle, and a small satchel of ... something.

Impatiently, it runs ahead of Charlotte, every so often rising to its hind legs to look back at her. When they come to the base of those mighty walls, Charlotte sees that they stand before a set of great doors.

"You better not knock," the little lune cautions. "It burn you. I knock!"

And so it does. Tap, tap, tap.

Charlotte cannot encompass all that she sees. She cannot contain it. She feels both whole and also somehow as if she were composed of something so essential and so entire that somehow it is being both constantly shed and continously renewed. She glows, too, of course, although the closer they come to Luna's face, the more feeble that illumination (so bright on the dark face of the earth) comes to seem. Dim, retreating, retiring.

Her mouth lolls open, droll, when she suggests a moon bridge and the small spirits admits that it doesn't know how and some part of her that is made of and by and for joy, light, brilliance and not merely madness must be aware of the droll picture they present: the small spirit and the small wolf, approaching the face of a Celestine. Her palace, too bright to look upon, but somehow -

- she thought that Luna's light would be cool. Isn't it Helios who burns his way through the sky? She barks/thinks as much at the little lune who cautions her against knocking, then sinks back on her haunches and rises,

and rises and rises,

into her formal warform. Crinos. It seems the only respectful way to approach a Celestine's gate.

"It not hot," the little lune is exasperated -- but let us admit: also a little smug, a little proud, a little happy to be feeling a little superior right now, which is a feeling that is even harder to come by for this little lune than it was for the somewhat bigger Lune back home. "It made of moonsilver. It burn you, not burn me."

Anyhow: tap tap tap, and tap tap tap again. Then, after what seems like an eternity of silence, and all at once:

the mighty doors

begin

to open.

Light! A mind-shocking amount of light, pure and pale, yes, cold, comes flooding from that tiny crack, which is millimeters wide but miles tall. As the door swings wider, wider, wider, the intensity of that light grows -- and yet never quite blinds. It simply floods, overwhelms, thoroughly suffuses, until Charlotte feels she must be aglow inside and out, that even the pupils of her eyes must be full of light.

Inside, barely glimpsed: impossibly high ceilings, long hallways. Walls of blazing silver hung with tapestries of pure silver thread, where only a difference in texture and direction gives rise to form. Tall, slender beings, beautiful and eldritch and draped in cloths for which we have no name, move amidst those wonders.

Standing in the doorway is a mighty Lune. It has taken the form, more or less, of a man: a man twice as tall as a human, with skin like polished silver, with a face hidden behind a featureless, edgeless, smooth helm. The soft wings of a moth sprout from his shoulders, as pure silver as the rest of him, shedding silvery dust around his feet.

He eyes the odd couple on Luna's doorstep; or one supposes he eyes, because he lowers his chin and faces them. He folds his arms across his chest and awaits explanation.

Oh,

sounds much stranger rumbled through a warformed garou's massive frame, and yet that is the sound she makes when the little lune explains: no, not hot. Silver. Fire.

But beyond, beneath, below that there is no suggestion of chagrin on the creature's face. Expressive as Garou are, there is little place for chagrin in their world. It does not suit them, so instead the lilt of a brow, the curl of the creature's maw, the gleam in her eyes read instead of pride, of purity, the echo of heroes long since dead and gone to ruin.

This SmallOne, rumbling and liquid and strange and nameless, the language of the spirits from the chest of a Crinos. She indicates, of course, the small lune, sent to Earth and Forgotten Questions to saw a shadow that had been chained and bound break free whe the earth shadowed the moon. No other saw the shadow break free. Little brothersister has come to warn her Mother of the escape, and I have come to aid him in returning the shadow to its chains.

Towering over them, the guardian of Luna's palace listens silently, impassively. When Charlotte finishes, he turns without a word.

The door shuts.

The door opens: it is the guardian again, moth-wings draped like a cloak. For all his imposing size and stature, he has a voice as clear as bells:

My Mother the Moon acknowledges your news and grants you the honor of this quest. Go forth with Her blessings, small ones, and discover the truth of this unbound shadow. Uphold the glory of our Lady with all your courage and all your might.

Beside her, the little lune, who was quite dumbstruck in the presence of such a mighty brother, sweeps a startlingly pretty bow, right down to the shining ground. "Thank you, big brother! We not fail! Thank you thank you!"

At the heart of a Caern, the barrier between worlds is no more substantial than the interface of air and water. Charlotte would know how that feels: how it is to dive into still waters, or perhaps into that great churning salt sea that she and Erich spent such happy days beside. If you're not careful you can still smack that transition hard enough to sting, but if you are careful, if you know how to go about it,

you just slip right through.

On the other side, the sky is a limitless blue-black bowl overhead. The moon is enormous, as huge as it was when it was first carved from the earth's ribs, and it is impossibly luminous. Bright as day, but cooler, more distant than the blazing sun. The moon loves Charlotte, and so does the earth: great and dark and breathing, breathing beneath her feet here in the center of this caern dedicated to its remembering and its forgetting.

And see there: there, at the epicenter of that blasted radius, a faint dusting of moon-silver. If Charlotte strains hard, she can just about see -- imagine? -- the trail that extends up into the unbound sky.

Charlotte sometimes feels as if her skin were made of moonlight and her hair threaded with starlight. The moon loves her and she loves the moon, lifts her face up up up to it natural as anything, and howls a strange sort of greeting with her too-human throat. This is rite and ritual, this greeting, and as she offers it she does so in a way that is wholly conscious of the moment in which she finds herself.

Then she closes her eyes, and breathes out, a little bit ragged, a little bit nervous, a little bit proud. Thinks about the first time she met Erich and how walking at his side reminded her of Lauren, reminded her of what it must be like to be the prow of a great sea-going ship, cutting through the ocean.

Then: then, she turns herself to the scene. Takes in both the blast and the faint silvery trail climbing up into the sky in a way she cannot hope to follow.

Not naturally, not natively. Not in this form.

No matter.

She breathes out, unpuffs her boyish chest and unslings her messenger bag and gets to work. Charlotte unearths a small bowl of beaten copper and sets it down in the center of that blast radius and finds as well a small stoppered bottle of cold, clear water from the highest elevations. Pours the water (which sings, supple, with its own small power) and sets free the spirit bound within until the bowl is half-full and the moon has a mirror in which to admire herself.

And so begins the summoning ritual.

(Gnosis to activate clear water talen)

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (2, 5, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

wits + rituals!

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

gnosis! going for a jaggling, spending 2 hours to invoke it. so difficulty 5, -2.

Dice: 6 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

This takes time. It takes time to prepare the materials, and it takes time to perform the rite. To do it properly and respectfully and carefully; to gather power from inside herself, to channel it just so, to work that bright, subtle magic of hers. It takes so long that when the rite is at last complete, the speed with which it takes effect is almost shocking.

One moment Charlotte sits crosslegged before the bowl. The next, the bowl, the girl, the entirety of the caern's heart is suddenly and soundlessly lit with a blazing pale light, so bright that motes of dust in the air candesce, so bright that stones on the ground seem to levitate from their shadows carved black beneath them.

The source of that light hovers over the bowl. Other, more literal-minded Garou see Lunes as personifications: some see moon-maidens, lovely and svelte; some see crescented Men in the Moon; some few even see green cheese. Charlotte, however, is a Theurge, and her mind does not shy from the pure and the true. She sees the Lune as it is, as pure cold light, massless and heatless.

A faint, faint, faint music shimmers at the edges of her mind. The Lune awaits.

Charlotte is smiling and lifting her face (pale eyes closed, pale lashes kissing her porcelain cheek) as soon as she senses the shimmering presence by the changing light visible through her eyelids. Lifts her face as if she were soaking up the warmth of the sun's rays, rather than the cool, perfectly reflective brilliance of the lune.

That music against her mind gives her such a fine, shivering little thrill and she opens her eyes then, and is somehow both beaming and swallowing her smile, not unlike the moon herself, holding it close and allowing the expression to be touched and framed by shadow as much as light.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

she sings right back at the spirit, in a language that admits no human words and few human thoughts and the rarest of human tongues.

Then:

Your sisterbrother was scared by the elicpse and soared up into the sky. Will you open a moonbridge that I might follow to find himher again?

There is a sense of -- mirth, silvery ringing mirth, as well as perhaps just a touch of superiority. This is a Jaggling of the Moon: older, wiser, stronger than whatever poor daft sisterbrother it was that was frightened away. By shadows! Ha, ha, how silly.

A sudden tugging, somewhere between those narrow bird-bone shoulders, within that boyish ribcage. A bit of Charlotte's spirit-magic siphoned away, a price and a raw material both. The Lune spins, it coalesces, it flares impossibly bright and then -- !

A band of light, ten feet wide and as long as the eye can see, stretches into the sky. It approximates, vaguely, the celestial dust-trail left by the fleeing lune.

This Lune, this larger, stronger Lune, settles into a mellow glow. It is very pleased with itself, its strength, its beauty, its not-silliness.

This time Charlotte's gratitude is more quiet. She beams at right back at the mellow-glowing spirit, whose self-satisfaction she can also taste humming in the air the air around it, read in the changing glow that suffuses it.

Charlotte waves, why not? a little threefingered wave as she gathers up her messenger back and folds herself from human girl to running-wolf, sleek and shimmering and pale-as-moonlight, and pads onto the moonbridge, and starts to run.

She waves. The Lune glows brightly back.

Her forepaws touch the moonbridge, and -- speed, speed like you can hardly conceive of. Nothing goes faster in the universe than light, after all, and Charlotte is allowed to share some of that dizzying velocity. She runs, but she hardly needs to: the world around her streaks by whether or not she runs, pushed past her vision by the incredible speed of the moonbridge. The earth dropping away beneath her, the moon growing larger and larger and larger and larger, the atmosphere thinning and then she is amongst the stars, whose names she knows, whose faces she may one day see.

From this height she can see so far. The curvature of the breathing earth beneath; that aspect, that piece of the universe closest to Gaia herself. Its surface joined by a thousand silver arcs, some steady and strong, some winking on and off even as Charlotte watches. Other moonbridges, other travelers, other quests for glory or honor or salvation.

She must turn her eyes from them. She's looking for a single, lost lune, and it is so small, and it would be so easy to miss at this speed, this height. Perhaps she doesn't even dare blink.

[roll a percep+alert to see the lune! if successful, roll wits + athletics to get off the moonbridge!]

Perception + Alertness!

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Wits + Athletics!

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

The earth, the stars, the distant sun, the enormous moon. Somewhere in this grand tapestry, huger and more brilliant than she could have imagined -- a tiny, tiny, tiny pinpoint of light that is neither star nor sun nor moon nor earth. Is it her quarry? Can she be sure? She can't be -- but there's no time to wonder. She leaps from the moonbridge,

which unlike all the others below does not arc from point to terrestrial point, but extends straight toward Luna's divine face,

and finds herself weightless; drifting gently on gravity's currents. She is closer to Luna now than she is to solid ground. The Aetherial Realm, they call this, but that's just a fancy word for space. If she were to cross over now, she would suffocate. Die a terrible, frozen death. Here, in Luna's shadow, in Her embrace, Charlotte is safe, surrounded by limitless distance and endless silence.

Not so far away now, that glimmer, that gleam. It is, indeed, a lune: smaller than her Lune, and still running. Fleeing toward mother moon, in whose gravity Charlotte herself is caught.

So she runs. Moonlight dappled in her fur, moonlight stretched out light taffy beneath her paws, this rising wonder all around. The winking stars and the steady moon and the arcs lifting strangers through the vast demi-darkness that frames the fragile fastness of their world.

And she hardly needs to run, but she runs because she was made to run, because of the way it makes her heart pound and her tongue loll and her flanks heave, because of the way it makes her feel whole and entire and (not mad) alive.

There is so little time to everything in and around and above and below her in: because within all of this she must search and search and search, and how to connect this moondust trail, this passing spark with that which was below - ?

There is no time for that, either. The wolf leaps and tumbles in the fleeing spirit's wake.

And then: the wolf, too, begins to glow.

Tumbles nearly weightless, following in the little lune's wake, and calls out, in the spirit's tongue:

Wait, little brothersister, why do you run? The earth has given the moon back to us, there's no need to flee.

[-1 WP. Lambent flame so you know, she'll be awesome like a lune and less scary and not-illuminated.]

Ahead of her, that little light, that small fleeing bright-thing -- it halts, it hesitates, it quivers in place

and then it keeps running. Homeward.

[Charlotte can attempt to overtake it with a resisted wits + athletics roll!]

Wits + Athletics!

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

[resist! run!!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

It flees! It zips ahead, skipping and winking and blinking, fast as it can. Charlotte gives chase, and in truth it is all a little silly, all very slow-motion in the immensity of space, where even if they were moving fast it would be impossible to tell simply for lack of a relative still-point. Relative to each other, though, Charlotte is gaining, little by little by little, until she is close enough to reach out and grab the little lune --

Charisma (3) + Subterfuge (er....0). (Persuasion)

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

-- which is not precisely what she does. She does not grab the fleeing, fear-filled little spirit who has been running (and running or perhaps: soaring) for hours, or days, or centuries even perhaps because light moves at it's on impossible speed but even so, time passes, in the strangest of ways the farther one gets from the Tellurian.

Instead she tries to vault it or circle it and cut off its path, feints perhaps when he tries to swing around her, above or below, shakes herself off then, all glowing and lolls her tongue, lapping at her muzzle.

Little sisterbrother, why do you run!

They play a slow-motion

(lightfast)

game of very serious tag: she cuts it off, it zips around, she feints, it flashes, she is there, there before it for just an instant, face-to-glow. Why does it run?

Its light is erratic, panicked. A burst of music between Charlotte's ears: The shadow will eat us all! And then it swerves around Charlotte. Flees, even faster, toward Luna's face.

This time she tackles the little ball-of-light. Tackles and holds and hums and glows and spins the spirit around though she can hardly tell which side is which is which: the lune is simply a small patch of immanent light to hopefully face the impossible, impassible vision of the earth-below, rimmed right round with all its closest loves.

No Look back, look down. Look with me. The shadow is already gone. Who do you think is stronger? The earth just knelt in front of Luna to confess his love, then turned around again. Look down. Has the shadw eaten anyone? Anything?"

[ITALICS AMOK. resist!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )

How does one tackle light? How is it even accomplished, except in the mind, in the consciousness? Luckily for Charlotte, mind and spirit is all they are here. These are not bodies, see; they are just projections of psyche, of ego, of self, lit from within by that spark of triatic magic that makes them what they are. A spirit, in the case of the little lune. Half-spirit, more-than-half, in the case of Charlotte.

Regardless: she tackles the lune. And she connects, she feels the impact, she feels its form. Her mind interprets it as light. Everything is light, the whole world is light when she holds that small shard of the moon in her paws. She is blinded, she can't tell which way is forward on the spirit and she can't tell which way is earthward, but she makes her best approximation and points one to the other and

and the lune bursts out angrily:

What? No! Not EARTH'S shadow, stupid! Silly meat-thing! Stupid barking loud no-glow meat-wolf! Why I be afraid of earth-shadow! I not stupid silly barking loud! LET GO.

Oh.

Oh.

This startled, startling pause from the chasing-wolf and her grip does not go slack but were the Lune a corporeal thing made of meat and blood and skin and it would feel how the news takes her by such surprise that she does not even seem to hear the invocations of herself as stupid silly barking loud!

(Though later, Charlotte will remember: how the moon's children sense the world.)

[i]Wait. What shadow do you mean? What shadow. Tell me and we will stop it, little sisterbrother, and keep you safe. [/i]

The SHADOW, exclaims the little lune, quite impatient and exasperated and my if the wolfthings weren't terribly inelegant and noisy and clanky and slow. The shadow the shadow the shadow the shadow! How many times I say!

It twists itself adamantly from Charlotte's grasp. It spins, quite fast, whizzing around and around and around like a miniature moon gone mad, until every last strand of fur has been whirled away from its light. Then it settles -- somewhat -- into glowing, glowering indignation.

The BAD SHADOW, it repeats, very slowly now, that My Mother The Moon defeated and made-small and sent away many many many many turnings ago.

Except it bad, it not stay away, it comes back when her back is turned. We Lunes learned! We not slow-dumb like meat-wolves. We fast-smart. We learned be keep watch keep vigil keep careful when Mother's back is turned. We keep shadow where it belong.

But this time! Her back not turned. It just, stupid fat Earth put Mother in his shadow and Mother was all oh hello there and not looking and we not looking either. And the Shadow got out! And no one else saw! Just me. But it will get big big big again if I not stop it, so I have to stop it, so I have to tell My Mother The Moon that the Shadow got out, and then I have to stop it.

A taut silence, fairly vibrating with outrage. Then a very loud jangle of notes in Charlotte's brain:

SO GET OUT OF WAY, SILLY MEAT-WOLF.

There is again and oh, and an oh, and an oh, echoing in her half-feral half-human, more than half-made mind and Charlotte-wolf cannot help but communicate that back to the spirit whom she has tackled in the gravity-less vastness of space.

Oh.

says she.

And, Well.

I'm going to let you go, but I'm coming with you then. We'll stop it together. Deal?

She does not need to wait for his assent, precisely. She can match his speed in this space that welcomes them, in the shadow of the impossible moon. She can match his speed -

- but Deal? you understand, is a pact, a negotiation, a pledge. She will release the Lune and let it go unimpeded. In exchange: it will allow her - facilitate, even - her following.

And they will stop the Shadow, together.

It is the evening after the eclipse; the moon waning from its dizzying peak. In this old, old Caern, tempers ride lower. Restive spirits calm. The earth abides.

The days feel short now, and shorten with every successive turn. Though only a little past the dinner hour, it is quite dark already in the heart of the caern, which is where Charlotte has come to meet her tribesmate, her auspicemate, the wolf she will challenge for her rank.

Veiled-Heart is already present when Charlotte arrives. Tall and slender, with hair black as coal worn loose down her back, the Fostern is a handful of years older than Charlotte at most. Her limbs are long and her fingers bony. Waiting, she crouches on her haunches in the dry dirt, her eyes pale and bright.

It took Charlotte moons to understand that her reputation had grown enough that she could - should, perhaps - challenge for a new rank. The summer came and went and turned itself into fall and the fall -

- well, it is October. Short but still-warm days bracketed by long, chilly nights. Everything turning upon itself, now. Everything going to ground, preparing for the coming winter.

Three moon-cycles to understand and another moon-cycle to work up the courage to find Veiled-Heart and utter the words that bring them here today, near the heart of the caern, where the earth forgets itself so thoroughly that even the experienced theurges can, on certain nights, become disoriented and lose their way. Forget what they meant to remember, remember what they meant to forget.

She comes though. Human-framed, human-formed, human as she was born, live-wire taut but also strangely calm. This challenge is as natural as the turning of the seasons. Some part of Charlotte that is more wolf than girl knows that it is time. That it is long overdue, even.

So, this lovely, awkward, finely-framed girl, such a shining example of purity that her madness seems sometimes tangible to those who love her, finds Veiled-Heart where she crouches. Charlotte has a messenger bag slung across her body, where she keeps her little tricks and bribes, and shifts it - yes a bit awkwardly - over the new Mexican Sprite t-shirt she got (just because) after the first one was ruined many moons ago and gives Veiled-Heart a weird little wave by way of greeting.

"Uhm. Hi. Do I have to - like - say it all again?"

The formal challenge. The laying out of names and ancestors. It took them a solid half-hour the first time around.

Veiled-Heart, seeing Charlotte, stands at once. The motion is a poem: so spare, so pure. They are born of a finer stock than most. A madder stock, too, but at their best they are incomparable, these faithful of Falcon.

"No." A quick shake of her head. Something of that same bird-quick precision in Veiled-Heart. Perhaps that is what drew Charlotte in the first place, more than the tales -- everyone has tales, after all, and most of them so flattering you don't know what's true and what's false -- of honor and dignity and wisdom and accomplishment. Perhaps what drew Charlotte to this Fostern, this Theurge, this Silver Fang in particular was a certain secret sense of shared sisterhood. The same, the same, nearly the same.

"We don't have time for that," Veiled-Heart explains. "It seems your challenge will be a practical quest rather than an exercise in ritual, Charlotte." Like so many others who respect her, Veiled-Heart refuses to use Charlotte's derisive deedname. "You are aware of yesterday's eclipse?"

"Oh." Charlotte's heart is already beating, beating faster, beating brighter, beating like a bird beats its wings as it takes to air: the pumping specificity of muscle, the grasping desire for the sky, which she hardly remembered until she took to wing again. "Oh - "

Sharper, brighter, a practical quest makes her smile, you understand, quick and brief and unguarded.

"That's cool. 'Course I know about the eclipse. We watched it all - howled for her going and danced for her coming. Well, howled actually too but a different kind of howl that was more like dancing, is what I mean.

"What do I need to do?"

Veiled-Heart allows a brief smile for that. "Unfortunately, one of the spirits of the Caern didn't share your joy at the occasion," she says, perhaps just a touch dry. "A small Lune who was terrified by the thought of the earth's shadow swallowing his patron whole -- particularly since he makes his home in this particular caern, dedicated to this particular totem.

"He is a being of negligible power, but he is one of ours. If you can find him, track him, and convince him to return, then perhaps you will earn a better name than that which you now bear, yes?"

Charlotte has tucked her hands around the strap of her messenger bag and is holding on to the strap, worming it about as she considers the task at hand and where she might start. And there is still that odd and lovely wariness to her, which feels both animal and girlish in turn, particularly when Charlotte speaks with a virtual stranger.

Or, no. Not a virtual stranger.

Charlotte stands rather more upright and speaks rather more forthrightly and allows her curling little smiles to come more easily with Veiled-Heart now than ever she might have in the past.

"Okay, uhm. Do I get to ask a question? That's not the question I want, though. I want to ask: where was the last place anyone saw the Lune before he disappeared?"

"Right here."

Veiled-Heart takes a step back. She passes her hand through the air, as though slicing through water. In its wake comes a soft, subtle glow, strengthening beat by beat until it is bright enough to see by.

Like magic. Sometimes it is unthinkable, unfathomable, the eldritch power in the hands of a Theurge. They all have Gifts, prescribed and preformed little bits of primordial power they can draw upon, but the magic of Crescent Moons is different. More malleable. Stranger. In the right hands, far more powerful.

And to think: this is a mere Fostern Charlotte looks upon; one small step -- perhaps not even that, now -- above her.

--

In that new glow, Charlotte can see that the spot Veiled-Heart knelt over is not entirely the same as everything else in the vicinity. There's a subtle silvery sheen to the earth. And if she looks closely, there is a pattern there as well -- dirt blown in radiating lines from the center, as though something detonated here, or perhaps ascended from this spot.

Charlotte gives Veiled-Heart a darting glance. She is - briefly - breathlass as Veiled-Heart cuts through the air itself, light emanent in the wake of her hand, but then Charlotte is following the line-of-light to the place on the ground over which the other theurge was kneeling.

There Charlotte sinks to this neat little crouch on the ground, tracing the the sheen, the radiant pattern in the soil, the small and subtle signs that Something Happened Here: explosion, implosion, ascent.

And Charlotte glances up, a bit more sober, with that odd and bird-like solemnity cut through by a quick and sudden smile.

"Okay." See? The lines gleaming around her eyes. "I can take it from here."

--

She doesn't need a mirror to cross so close to the Caern's heart. Not Charlotte. The barrer between worlds is thinner for her than most as it stands, and here she can slip through it like water through a sieve.

Charlotte crosses over.

So the challenge begins.

Sometimes all the warning you get is no warning at all.

A change in the air. Silence where before you heard birds or traffic. The scrape of metal against concrete. Something once still now moving. A scream.

The three thin-mooned were in the area when they felt the creeping coming of something that did not belong here. Heavy silence hitting an area of the city that teems with life most hours of the day.

And then the scream.

And then the terminal sound of bones.

Sense Wyrm.

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )

[whoops forgot: WP]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Why is Yukito Hayashibara in the area? That's easy, his cousin has a friend who's in a band playing in one of the bars. A bar and a quiet Ragabash on a Saturday night? Not really Yukito's scene. Which is why he was out in the parking lot when he felt more than heard the sudden silence, the scrape of metal.

He's already making to leave the parking lot when the scream pierces the air. The sound of it sends a chill up his spine, but for the time being memories of another time do not threaten to overwhelm him. Keeping his cool as much as he can keep his cool, he creeps forward on quiet, sneakered feet toward the source of the madness.

[dex+stealth]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 8 )

Goldie had started her day like a fucking rockstar. She woke up at 9 a.m. that morning only because she had a work schedule to adhere to, and she had to be there within an hour with no car to drive. She got slapped herself together in ten minutes (hair twisted up into a knot, scarf tied about her hair to keep it in place, bright pink make-up and a white T-shirt and dark jeans tight enough to wonder how much effort they were to put on in the morning), smoked a small bowl of weed, and went to work slinging coffee for the people of Denver city.

It was a miracle that she made it to work within fifteen minutes of the start of her shift (fleet-footed and rude thing that she was on the sidewalk), and further magic that the manager believed her excuses (a gift taught by Spirits, you responsible and gifted thing).

She'd stayed later into the evening for the extra money (some scheme in mind to save up funds for), and so was on her way somewhere as a point B between the point A that was work and the point C that was home. On-foot, with a brown bombadeer jacket to keep her warm in the chill of the autumn night, with an earbud of music in one ear when she heard the scream.

She paused, looked up and pulled an earbud out. The scream sliced through with an extra crick-crack of bone to go along with it. Goldie shoved the headphones into her coat pocket and, with a quick one-two glance in either direction across the street to make sure she didn't get run over, scooted across the road to the source of the violence.

One understands the moon. The night air on one's skin. One understands that the stars are present even when the night is bound-close. One understands the ground beneath one's feet, wrapped in asphalt, yearning. One understands a change in the space-of-things. Vibratory, new -

wrong.

One stops eating tacos, then. Slips out of the weird little outdoor picnic table with its jaunty but rather tattered umbrella, alert and slight and aware.

Slips her hand into the small messenger bag that is always dangling against her left hip.

Follows the sound.

(Gnosis roll: activating fire tooth talen)

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

The scream came from the now-headless body lain in the parking lot of a store that closed hours ago. No cars to speak of and no lights. Maybe lights from a neon sign that never goes out. Some sick wash of red and blue painting the scene a lurid color that shouldn't exist.

That body lies with blood still spurting from the stump where its head was up until a moment ago. Maybe the head is nearby. None of the Garou can see it.

They can see what killed this person though. It's still stood over the body unsteady on its feet because its feet are rotted and mottled and near to disintegrating. So is the rest of its body. From the looks of it the corpse was lain in the earth beneath a manhole cover or a grate something that it had to slide out of its way. Long enough dead that its lower limbs its pelvic girdle its spine are nothing but bone. Internal organs gone to mush long ago. Strips of gray flesh hanging off its upper body and a few sprigs of hair holding onto what's left of its scalp.

It looks at Goldie as she comes upon the scene of its first spate of violence. Makes no noise because it hasn't got the organs necessary to make noise and yet this is not a mindless corpse waiting for her.

It shouldn't be able to walk. It doesn't have the musculature. And yet it starts towards her as if anatomy is no constraint.

The headless body's heart stops beating then.

There is a parking lot outside of a bar that barfs music into the night every time the doors open. There are a number of cars in the parking lot. There is a young man of average height and lean build with light-brown hair, and then?

Then the parking lot is empty, the young man gone, carrying his weight just so, landing on the balls of his sneakered feet so lightly a hound wouldn't hear his footfalls. He slips into the shadows, traveling between lots and shops and lots again. A ghost.

There are footsteps. The purity of Falcon. If he can only put down this threat fast enough these others might never know something is amiss.

This is why, in a burst of what little Rage he carries within his heart, he becomes senpū. Whirlwind. Striking out with his claws to bring the abomination to the ground.

[-1R snapshift to Crinos, claw dat nasty thing: dex (swift)+brawl]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

[dam: +1+3]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

[soak!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Neon red and blue cast a hell of a light on this scene, and Goldie found it absolutely cinematic for a single striking moment. She was wearing sneakers that skidded sharp and short on the parking lot asphalt when she came upon the body, arms windmilling in the air to catch and balance the sudden stop of momentum.

Sure, it was gross, and her stomach dropped to see the body still spurting blood into a growing pool that spanned and started to make small rivers in the pavement. But something had to have done that, and like any wolf that has earned a lick of Glory to their name, she recognized simultaneously that something had to be responsible, and so her head swung up to search.

It was in that moment that the neon struck her as strangely perfect. In that moment that she spied the sewer-slick monstrosity responsible. She made eye contact with it, then registered that it was somehow walking on legs that shouldn't be able to hold it up. That it was walking toward her.

Goldie had rolled her shoulders back and straightened up-- fished a knife out of the knapsack she carried with her all the time. Took a few steps back and smirked and was about to say something witty, you could tell with how those bright pink lips curled away from bucked front teeth with some kind of perfect irony dripping from them when--

--silent and swift, more a sensation of air and a grip in the chest as though a bird of prey had screeched and skimmed the hair atop your head but with literally zero sound to accompany it, a Werewolf whirled through the air claws first into the creature's chest.

"Badass!" Goldie shouted into the parking lot, then bucked her human skin in favor for something to let her join the fray.

Charlotte is light on her feet. Aware. Swift, see, and she still has a mouthful of taco when she comes 'round the corner as Goldie comes 'round the corner as Senpu comes 'round the - well -

Slyph-like creature sliding up behind Goldie sure enough to recognize her just sure enough to reach for something just sure enough to throw it - aiming for the monster's path.

Charlotte is light on her feet. Aware. Swift, see, and she still has a mouthful of taco when she comes 'round the corner as Goldie comes 'round the corner as Senpu comes 'round the - well -

Slyph-like creature sliding up behind Goldie sure enough to recognize her just sure enough to reach for something just sure enough to throw it - aiming for the monster's path.

[Init + Dex 4 + Wits 4]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )

[+7]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )

+8

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )

ROUND 1 - FIGHT!

charlotte: 16

revenant: 15

goldie: 13

[Called Shot! Throat Slice with the knife! Spending WP]

[action: punch goldie!]

[1. Throw Talen. Then reflexive shift to hispo. Rage 1: BIIITE IT. ]

Dex + Ath

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

Damage!

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 7 )

[soak!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

Int + occult?

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

[OW!!

punch goldie!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

[+5]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 7 )

[ :x Soak ]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

[LOL I ROLL ONE TOO MANY HANG ON]

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

[Spending 1 Rage to ignore a dice in damage penalty

Knife to Throat! Dexterity 4 + Melee 2, + 2 diff called shot, -1 dice for damage penalty, spending WP]

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (2, 4, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

[Damage (L): Strength 6 + 1 Suxx + 2 Called Shot]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )

[soak!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Rage 1: BITE.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Damage?

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

[soak!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

ROUND 2 - FIGHT

charlotte: OK!

revenant: 5A

goldie: 4L

[Defensive/Dodge primary action!

Rage: Knife again!]

[action: punch goldie again!]

1a. bite. 1b. Gaia's Breath on Goldie.

BITE. -2.

Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (8, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 6 ) [WP]

hahahahaha. Damage.

Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

[OW!!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )

[swing, battah battah!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

[+2]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

[Dodge!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

[goldie be like "fuck your punch, son"]

[Rage! Knife]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

[Damage (L)]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

[OW!!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 5, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

x_x

The heart stops beating but the limbs take several seconds to stop twitching.

In the seconds that the nerves continue to fire an impulse to run that the body cannot indulge the Ragabash and the Theurge converge upon the reanimated creature. A small tooth flies across the parking lot and explodes like a grenade in the creature's face. The creature throws a punch that does not hit like flesh and bone against flesh and bone. Its fist punches through Goldie's skin as if she were made of paper. A crunching and a squelching and she knows if the punch had landed higher that she would be in the same position as the unfortunate to meet the creature before they had.

Her rage might have saved her. Might have.

It saves her now. It and the spirit-talker's fangs. The wisp of a girl becomes a lean swift dire wolf. Tears an arm off of the creature but does not slow it down or stop it.

It throws a punch with its other hand. Little Uproar dances back as if she could see the blow before it happened. Black Sheep is there to break a healing gourd across her shoulder. The pain and the injury bearing the pain evaporate quicker than the water inside the the gourd will.

A second later the Crinos wolf slashes out with the knife. Like a guillotine falling it takes off the creature's head. It hits the ground with a dull thud and rolls a few feet before the rest of the body crashes down after it.

Somewhere in the distance a car alarm begins to yelp.

The blue and red of neon was accompanied soon by a burst of red-orange fire, but through that came a big slimy fist. Goldie was a wall of golden-furred Werewolf, though, limber of limb but a Warrior of Gaia none the less. She was solid, she was sure she could withstand the rotting fist of a shuffling corpse.

Ah, but to be young and reckless. She underestimated her enemy, and for that she paid with a fist-sized hole into her body. Her muscle and bone had given way, collapsed inward with a burst of blood that had Goldie's arm falling dead at her side. She flashed hot, seared white-hot with pain and Rage and with her good arm, the one that held the knife, she stretched and sliced the blade toward the creature's throat. It would have been a good hit, but the beast was so much stronger than its flesh should logically make it.

But there was Charlotte, Charlotte to sweep in and tear away a deteriorating arm in her teeth (an eye for an eye, an arm for an arm, yes?). Somewhere in the mix the Theurge circled back to smash a healing gourd into Goldie's shoulder. She wasn't quite sure what angle the Silver Fang (ethereal, silver-spirited thing) came in from; Goldie was focused on that fist coming her way again. She wouldn't let it hit her again, she'd learned that lesson once before.

She may have been too slow, but a splash of water and trickle of warmth into the wound brought a surge of energy and strength back into the Ragabash. She ducked away from the fist, twisted off to the side and lashed out with a long arm as she spun away. The knife at the end of it sliced clean through the rotting hulk's neck, and it fell to the same fate as its prey in a sweet twist of poetry.

In the distance, a car alarm yelped.

In this parking lot, Goldie put her fists over her head and punched them into the sky in a silent celebration of victory-- no howling in the city, no no, but the energy of a coldsnap battle had the little Ragabash swooping over to Charlotte like she was going to try to hug her or high-five her or butt heads with her or something.

The Silver Fang seems haloed, right, lambent. Gleaming even in the ugly glare of the city lights and almost curiously untouched in the aftermath, shaking out her heavy coat, which is already thickening in anticipation of winter, cirling and alert, assuring herself that there are no watcher, tail twitching as she also waits a spare handful of beats to see if anything else like this will come.

And nothing does.

Just a car alarm in the distance.

So.

Abruptly girl is where wolf was and Goldie comes her way like she's going to try to hug or hive-five or butt heads with her and Charlotte-the-girl looks, you know. KIND OF SHY. A little bit abashed.

But also: smiling. Unreservedly.

"You okay?"

At first Goldie was still wearing her Crinos skin when she danced her way toward Charlotte, but to see the girl revert to girl-form, Goldie did the same thing. By the time she reached her she'd settled for a high-five over a headbutt, which was far more appropriate for lupine heads than human ones.

"Because of you! Your timing was perfect. I'll bet it looked so cool from the stands." As though there were bleachers here, and this was a sporting event.

There was a headless body, and another headless body to boot. Goldie didn't have anything on her to carry them away with. Unless Charlotte had another tye-dye body bag with her, the Ragabash encouraged her to leave the bodies where they were and amscray instead. Let the humans come up with their stories about serial killers in the night, this wouldn't come back on them.

Sometimes the dead just doesn't stay down. They'd done their part in putting it back in place, and so it was their time to part before anyone else came to investigate the screaming.