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The Silver Fang remains Crinos-formed until the great Lune has withdrawn to inform My Mother the Moon and returned with permission, blessings, direction that she should accompany the smaller spirit to find and return the shadow to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!"

[1. There is no post order, but please post only once for each post I make unless I indicate otherwise.

2. Post in 15 minutes or less, and declare/roll in 2 minutes or less. "In 15 minutes" means 15 minutes from my post, not the last player to post before you. If you miss your roll it will be skipped. In character this means it automatically fails. And that kinda sucks. :[

3. You are free to multi-task, so long as you can abide by the above strictures. If you repeatedly miss 'deadlines' or are unresponsive in the scene chat, I will ask you to excuse yourself from this scene (or the other) out of respect for my time and the time of our fellow players.

4. This is a very low-risk scene both psychologically and physically.

5. Please PM me now with personal phobias, triggers, or off-limits themes (if none, no need to tell me 'none'). If you're uncomfortable with anything in the scene, IM me once (outside of the chat). If you become uncomfortable/distressed due to content in the scene and need to immediately leave, please IM or email me as soon as you are able to let me know. I don't actually enjoy upsetting my players. Just their characters.

6. Please PM me now with any relevant merits/flaws/traits I should be aware of. If none, no need to tell me 'none'.

7. Keep track of your own health and tempers. Ain't nobody got time for that. Except you. What I mean is: I do not have time for that.

8. Ask questions in the AIM chat. If I don't answer after 2-3 minutes, ping me once in PMs here. In review: AIM chat for chatter and questions, IMs for personal distress, Jove PMs for questions I have not answered within a few minutes.

9. Don't be a dick.

10. Don't forget to be awesome.]

When the sun set today, it blazed through the freshly renewed boughs of the trees, a baleful red circle both drawing and repelling the eye. Everything in sight was cast in a heavy crimson glow, the edges gilded with flaming orange. There seemed to be no break between the edge of the sun and the lines where branches and leaves should be; the world went silent for this sunset, though it flinched with dread.

When the heat grows too searing to bear, you go north. When the itch of summer's heat makes the skin crawl, you go north. You begin heading that way without quite understanding why or how; you find yourself knowing deep into the journey that you will never make it far enough to escape the heat. It seems that a great deal of time has passed, leaving you in autumn now. The leaves here are enormous: veiny orange and brown things the size of the trees they should have come from, standing tall and straight from yellowed grass, fluttering in wind that should be cold but is only hot, dry, and unforgiving.

You have been walking for -- you do not know how long. From where, you do not know, or why. There are people alongside you: three others. You do not know them, or their names. You realize: you do not know your own name. You think, looking upon the forest ahead, that there was a wall before, a low one, maybe around a portico or veranda. You're not sure. It was stone, you think. You're not sure. The sunset was red and unmerciful; you came north, and now the grass is yellow underfoot, there are leaves the size of trees, and you are with strangers and you do not know how long you have been walking with them, or they with you.

You know this: go north. You know this: you are with strangers. You know this: you are a werewolf, and your skin and bones will change shape around you, but you do not know for what purpose. You know this the way that perhaps an ant knows it is an ant, a dog knows it is a dog, a bird knows it is a bird. There is no need to question it, no need for cumbersome mythology. You are a mammal, and this is the type of mammal you are. You know that leaves are not usually that large, even if you do not know if every sunset is always so red, so disquieting, or just the one you remember.

You know that it is night now, the sky darkened, the stars and moon above. You like the moon. You do not know why, but even as thin as it is, the sight of it fills you at once with hopeful joy and maddening anger that itches at the back of your mind. You like the moon very much.

You think: the moon likes me, too.

When the sun set today this one thought he had plenty of reason to stay where he was. Now the heat sinks into his fur and it can't roll off his tongue fast enough to cool the rest of him but he does not stop. If he had stopped he would not be here.

He accepts the strangers as he accepts the heat and the leaves and the yellow grass. This is nothing more than what it is. He knows that dark speckled through with light means the moon is here.

Part of this one wants to run to catch up with the beckoning north. He has been walking with the others this long. He does not hasten to leave them yet.

He sniffs the grass and when he's done he lifts his muzzle to the night air. Maybe it will tell him something.

Oh, she's a rare thing. A rare rare thing, fine and pale as that slivered moon she loves so well, nothing like that the baleful light of that setting sun, those too-large leaves. The wall and the sun and the wall and the trees had an ancient sort of familiarity, see. She can taste them, somehow, on or beneath her tongue. Belongs in places like this, even if she does not know what this place is or where it might be, or that there are other places like this: any of it. Walls though, walls and grounds that are groomed, with sweeping views, well ordered though not - never - tamed.

Listen: a pale girl, slender and finely made given weight by the many imperatives and attachments of her blood is among the quartet.

She is wearing her girl-skin and this she does not mind. She can feel her wolf-skin beneath her girl-skin and this she does not mind either.

Somehow she is both aware of this mindlessness and aware of it as a relief right? A letting-go. She remembers so little she has forgotten even her madness,

and glances at the stranges who are human-strangers and wolf-strangers and says,

"Hello." Smiles, see? How strange it is to speak.

She likes it, though not so well as the moon. "I want to follow her," the moon, the girl means, with a lilting glance upwards through the too-large leaves to the slivered moon in the darkling sky. " - I wonder where she sleeps."

She is walking along in two legs, because that is how Keisha normally walks. Her staff at her side, her sandals on her feet and a simple green sarong dress covering her. She doesn't know why she's walking this way or who she's walking with, and perhaps that sudden realization when it hits (whyever it hits) troubles her, because she stops and frowns. Her attention turns to the moon, who she likes and who likes her, and then around to the other strangers. Her hands grip the wood of her staff and then she realizes that she has a staff. She looks at it, examines the carvings that she began on it upon making her new one (which she doesn't remember she had an old one).

She looks to the wolf, the woman and the other, and takes a breath. She nods, smiles a little. "Hello. Do any of us know who we are?"

Because it's a valid question. And as she asks, she's walking again, heading northward where they want to go.

Amongst their number is a boy who walks beside the girl. He is very different from her, broad where she is slender, strong where she is fine, golden and ruddy where she is silver and white. Something about them is nonetheless similar, as though they were two shoots off the same root; hybrid stalks grafted to the same stem.

It does not bother him very much that he does not know who he is or where he is or why he is. He is, and this is enough for him. As they walk the heat of the day begins to fall away, layer by layer. He looks at the moon and smiles, because he likes the moon very much, because the moon likes him too.

The silver girl speaks: he turns to look at her, his smile widening. "Me too," he agrees, and then:

the other girl speaks, the one who is not silver and white but amber and brown. There is one other in their quartet, another boy, another who is dusky and dark. The boy looks around at the four of them and he sees that he is the largest, and he thinks this must mean he is strongest, and he thinks this must mean he is to protect the others. Of course. That makes sense.

He turns to the dark girl; he seems puzzled and a little amused.

"What a strange question. We are us and we follow the moon."

They know things about themselves. Or feel them, like a pulse that one doesn't notice until you touch your wrist, your throat: the willingness to go into the unknown, and permit the unknown, and keep the unknown's secrets with it if necessary. The call of kingship, how easy it is to be the first to say this is what I want to do. The urge to protect. They feel themselves, their own humor and their own passion, but they are like half-buried boxes, and you are not sure what is inside.

A small dark spot from the sky grows larger, growing closer, and then grows wings, and alights on Erich's shoulder. It is a bird. You know it is a bird, and even: a pigeon. You are a werewolf and that is a pigeon. It has eyes as bright as gemstones, as smooth as riverstones. It hops a bit, and coos, and flutters its wings, then pushes off and circles, flying to Charlotte, working its beak in her hair. And this pigeon is known to the two of them, and is as much a friend as the moon is, but it has no name. Perhaps it never has.

Perhaps they never have.

Up ahead, dark-furred creature, there is a gate. Only a gate, standing between two stone posts. The gate is wrought, and rusted. The stone posts are covered in signs. You can read them: KEEP OUT. NO TRESSPASSING. and so on. You know what those words mean. And you know how strange they are, because to either side of the stone posts there is no fence, no wall. The gate is chained shut. You know this, now:

THIS IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. BUT THE GATE DOESN'T WANT YOU TO GO THROUGH.

She frowns at Hector; no, not even frowns. She scowls a little bit. It's a rebuke, even if light-hearted, and this is not the Keisha who is calm and gentle. That Keisha was gained through certain experiences, and she doesn't have those. She has no knowledge that she's "supposed" (in her own estimation) to act older than she is, and so she gives him a harsh look.

"There's no such thing as a strange question, or a normal one. There are only questions. The answers are what are strange or not."

She watches the pigeon as it circles around Charlotte and Erich, and not her or the other. She wonders about it, but only for a second because there's a gate up ahead. And for this Keisha, "Keep Out" and "No Trepassing" may as well be a big neon sign reading COME THIS WAY.

So that's what she does; she cocks her head to the side and starts walking to the gate itself, intending to try to scale it.

"Hello," says the silver girl quietly to the pigeon and her hello sounds a bit like hello and a bit like a responsive cooing. It is smooth in her throat but there is an edge to it that you cannot quiet comprehend unless you know something of the alient beasts from which such animals descended. She does not know such things and yet:

she does. The sharp and alien eye. The darting directness. The delicate savagery.

No quarter here.

--

That is how she looks at the gate. The gate the gate the gate that bars the way and keeps her from the place where she must go.

The girl does not like the chains and does not like the signs and she walks beside the boy with an unconscious certainty and she smiles at the beast and there is something benevolent about this but also assured and she smiles at the girl and agrees with the golden boy.

Here is a secret: already she knows that she does not miss her name. Feels that secret like something organic in her chest.

She glances at the golden boy, alert see.

She knows he will back her up,

when something comes,

and something always comes,

and the signs do not belong there, and how dare they bar her way.

So, she begins tearing them down. Bare hands.

And the male wolf the only one who left his home on four legs can feel in his bones that he could stand on two if he wanted but why would he want to when the ears he has now catches flapping wings before that dark spot takes on a form. He doesn't. His ears and his eyes and his nose and the moon are all good as they are.

They come to a pause and he stands alongside the other male without knowing why. Scents the airs and sees the gate and chuffs out a low firm noise: there. Not harrying or herding the others.

If he is fast he does not move so fast as to leave them behind. No question in his mind and he voices no question and what voice he has he keeps to himself.

He goes around the gate.

A pigeon comes. And the boy knows the pigeon, even as he knows his own self, his bones, his strength. He is happy to see the pigeon, and the pigeon is happy to see him. It alights on his shoulder. He kisses it on its small, sleek-feathered head. It is a meek, pretty bird, neither ferocious nor even particularly intelligent, but it is adoring and loyal and terribly good with directions.

It goes to play with the silver girl. The boy smiles again to see it go.

He doesn't smile to see the gate, though. It bars their way, even if there is no fence, no wall. The wolf moves to go around it, but the boy hangs back: an eye on the silver girl, ready to defend. An eye on the gate, with its air of forbidding and foreboding both.

"Be careful," he calls to the wolf.

One will climb the gate that says you must stay out, and one will tear down the signs that say you must stay out, and one will go around the gate that you must not go around, and one will hang back, perhaps obeying the gate that says you must obey it.

The pigeon lifts from the pink-haired female's shoulder, rising upward, landing to perch on the stone post.

This is what they get, for their troubles:

The gate should not be hard to climb, and it is not. The gate might be painful to climb, and it is. Her feet get stuck. Her hands sting and cut as she grabs hold of rusted metal. Her feet slip, too. She bangs her chin on the iron. The gate rattles under her weight as though it would collapse, but it does not. It just shakes her loose, shakes her down a few inches.

The paper tears easily, as paper does. The metal signs bend and with enough prying will come loose, but they take chunks of stone with the screws and nails that hold them in place. They do come off. The posts start to stop saying KEEP OUT STAY OUT quite so vehemently, as those messages tatter to the stomped-upon grass.

Around the stone post he finds himself looking from a new direction at the one female climbing, the other female tearing, the other male standing watch. Round and round and round and round, a door that is the same on both sides.

The pigeon looks at the boy hanging back. Cocks its head and flies back, but it does not fly over the gate. It cannot. There are laws here, you see, as efficacious as gravity.

She makes a hissing sound (as you do) as her hands are cut and she slips down off the wall with a frown. Looks at the gate, and the chains that bind it shut to them. She examines the lock, looks at the gate itself, furrows her brow.

"We need to find a key." She looks around at the others, up to the moon. Her friends (because she assumes they are friends, even if she doesn't know them). "Some way to get the lock open and get through, or we won't be able to pass."

When the signs are pulled away, what are left are the chains. The chains that bar it and the doors that they secure that bar the way, properly.

And the pink-haired girl tears away the signs that say GET OUT STAY OUT because how dare they bar her and then she grabs the chains and she looks at the golden boy and she is a BEAST she knows this in her bones and she tells him,

tells them, really:

(and when she tells them she is no longer a pink-haired girl. She is large, larger, she remembers not why or what she is, but that there is a strength in her body that remains untapped.)

tells - perhaps - Keisha most of all:

"You're stronger than you look. Help me tear it down."

The boy is, indeed, hanging back. There is that about him: a sense of shyness, nevermind that he is large and well-muscled and has fists that look as though they might easily bash walls to rubble. He watches the others tackle the gate: climbing it and getting hurt for the trouble (though perhaps the sting to the pride is worse than the sting to the body); ripping the signs down; walking around it

and instantly rounding the other post, as though there is no world to either side of the gate.

The pigeon comes back to him. The boy reaches an absent hand up and scritches it under its small beak. Then he walks up to the gate, behind the silver girl and to one side of her, looking at her handiwork.

"Maybe she's right," he says to the silver girl, meaning the earthen girl. "Maybe we need to find a key. I can try, though,"

and so speaking, the golden boy abruptly bursts fur from skin, grows to an enormous and shaggy thing. He grips the gate in both handpaws and pulls as hard as he can; leans backward to leverage his weight, muscles knotted like ropes under that thick fur.

Only once does the wolf circle the gate before he sniffs the air and goes around the gate again and keeps moving north. He takes with him a warning from the upright male and he gives back a whuff of agreement.

Maybe she's right. Maybe they need to find a key.

As the others work to overcome the gate the wolf trots on ahead. He does not think the gate does or does not mean anything. It is a gate and it wore a sign and it has done nothing yet to keep him from moving around it so he keeps moving past it.

There are many signs. The one with pink hair pauses in the tearing, has to pause, to tell the others what she does. When she changes, grows, becomes the strength and awe-inspiring beauty that is in all of her kind, even the ones who have forgotten it.

you are stronger than you look

They begin to use their bodies, power surging up from the earth through them as they change and tear and pull. The pigeon flies away, and into the sky, and vanishes again for a while, forgetting itself. There is no getting around the gate, for one circles. Going past it, one finds oneself passing another stone post on the other side, coming to discover the three others still standing there.

They look, perhaps, in the grass or the stone, pulling at bricks or looking in the lock itself, but there is no key to be found. The gate cannot be broken, which is a sting to the ego: it is so fragile, so rusted, so old, so brittle. They are so strong.

[wits + engimas time]

[[Wits+Enigmas]]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

[hokay, so....]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

[derp]

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

Wits + enigmas

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

The gate is infuriating. The gate stands between her and where she was meant to go. She wants to be on the other side of it. She wants to cross. She wants to tear it down. She wants to tear it open; it looks like it should be easily ripped asunder,

and still it remains standing.

So they hunt; for a key instead of prey. Beneath her skin and in the back of her beast-mind she knows that one is not the other but the instinct remains the same: to hunt, to seek, to range. This is right and proper and the itch of it is a fine thing beneath her skin until again,

there is no key.

They cannot climb it and they cannot tear it down and they cannot circle it and still the gate blocks the way and this is the way they were meant to go and she opens her mouth and she snarls her frustration and her tongue lolls in her muzzle as she looks at the moon in the dark-velvet sky and she lowers her great head and she sinks from her beast-form to her girl form and she considers the gate again, and all the others.

And then the gate, and oh,

well.

The pink-haired girl, she knocks.

Knock-knock-knock, see? Let me in.

Well, it's almost as though they've switched it right around, isn't it? Now the silver girl is knocking meekly and the golden boy is:

well, he is not a golden boy, for one. He is a shaggy wolf-monster, and he is enormous and his paws are enormous and there's all that fur and the heat that radiates off him feels like a sun in miniature. And for another: he is not meekly watching anymore but tearing at the signs himself, as though falling back on this option now that the others have been exhausted.

Or his arms. At least his arms are exhausted. From pulling.

Your blood sings in your own ears. You are pure. You are bright and strong. Things call to you, yestheydoHAHAHAHA and they are cold and angry and bitter and painful things, scary things, but right here there are others, whose blood is not so bright whose voices are not so pure, but they are with her. The large one sometimes listens.

There is no key on the ground or in the lock. She tore down the signs though. The voice yelling KEEP OUT in those bright glaring letters has quieted. She can make it quieter.

She frowns and walks away from the gate, not having shifted form and instead having just pulled with her own strength. Why? Because that's who Keisha is.

Instead, she looks down at the posters and signs and starts shifting through them. No Trespassing. Keep Out. There's a furrowing of her brow as she starts to look for something between the overt messages.

Something Deeper.

"Let me pass."

Not merely the knock, then.

The knock is an imperial knock, a knock of courtesy. The greeting of one shining thing to whatever abides beyond the gate. The knock is the knock is the knock is what it is.

She knocks. She says, again, "Let me pass."

--

And, then, like the boy, she resumes tearing down the signs.

Let them all fall down.

When the male wolf comes back around the gate the final time he does as his bones bid him do and slips out of a skin made for long distances. Running and howling. The grass is different beneath his feet and the clothes he wears and the metal around his fingers hung around his neck punched through his ear don't mean anything to him.

The wolf was lithe and sharp and tan of fur with brown and red and gray run along its spine but the boy who joins the others is near as tall as the other. Thinner and darker. His hair falls down past his shoulders and he wears all black clothing. A hunting knife on one side of his belt and a medicine bag on the other.

He looks like a shaman maybe but he isn't.

He helps the silver girl and the golden boy take down the last of the signs and when the last of the signs is on the ground he glances to the others. At the girl with the staff in particular.

It is not a large gate. He is not the one to test its compliance. He's watching.

One pulls at the signs. Stupid little signs! They aren't iron or stone. Just aluminum, just paper, just cardboard. Plastic! One tears at them, til his arms are worn out from it. They are stacked and staggered.

One peers at the signs. Stupid little signs! They are thin and their words are shallow. KEEP OUT. STAY OUT. NO TRESPASSING. Variations on a theme. Some in different languages. They, unlike the gate that is meant to be walked through but is locked, do not obfuscate their intentions.

One tears at the signs. Stupid little signs! Don't they know who she is? Nevermind that she doesn't know who she is. She knows what she is. They all know what they are. She rips. The gate, being a gate, does not answer her any other way.

One takes down the signs. Stupid little signs. Stupid signs, man-made, man-lettered. Gates are symbols like walls are symbols, like giant leaves are symbols. Those might be as native as the leaves, the trees. The signs came from something else, had to have, because they have words. You never read in dreams, they say, that's not the part of your brain that works. Maybe that's a lie, to comfort you, a totem like in that movie, right? Something you can count on to assure you that you are only dreaming. Well nevermind: he knows these things, and he knows that gates are made for walking through, and signs are just spells you attempt to cast on the people who read them. He knows: spells only work on you if you believe in their magic.

--

The stone posts have holes in them, screws and nails. Bits of tape. There is a veritable cloud of signage at their feet by the end. And the gate is not rusted, they must have imagined that, and there is no chain and no lock, because the gate just stands there, the wrought iron clean and dark. It looks like it is made of soot; if you breathed on it, the particles would scatter. But touching it, it feels cold.

Iron often does. Even in summer, late summer, after a baleful sunset.

In the distance, wind moves through the trees, the giant leaves. It sounds like a sigh. A waking sigh, or a relieved sigh. The woods shudder.

The first to put their hand on the gate finds it swinging easily inward, as though it was always meant to swing inward, welcoming and unafraid. It doesn't even creak, and the landscape beyond does not change. The world is no different. Only their perception of the barriers within it.

The signs go away. The rust and tarnish goes away. All that's left in the end is a gate, powder-black and perfect, and looking at the gate the boy suddenly understands that gates are meant to be barriers, yes, but they are meant also to be portals. You can go through such things.

And this gate: it opens, as it is meant to do. Now the way is open. There is a forest; there are giant, giant, giant leaves. Maybe they are small. Maybe they have been made small by the innocence of their own minds. Their names, their lives; wiped clean. What remains is who they are, who they really are outside of those artificial and self-imposed walls, strictures, boundaries.

The boy is still a boy. He is still brave and a little shy, bright-souled, ill-considered, sometimes blundering. He looks at the open way and then he glances at the others, three of them. Then he walks through, the first step cautious, the next easier. Presently, he reduces from his monstrous form: becomes a hulking near-boy, then a boy.

"Oh." The pink-haired girl says, after.

"Oh," listen to the note of surprise in her voice. Listen to the way it enfolds itself into something deeper and more feral, girl-surprise giving way to wolf-noise because the gait is open,

the way is open.

There are dark things everywhere.

It is dark.

There are strange dark things inside her but she is around them too, bright as the moon will be when it is full; bright as that sliver that tastes like a sickle and curves like coy lover's smile.

She is a girl and then she is a wolf because she is girl-and-wolf, she is werewolf and she folds down to four legs and she lolls her tongue and looks at the others and barks.

It sounds like an invitation.

The gate is open. Time to run.

The gate swings open. Gates are meant to keep out so much as they are meant to permit entry and maybe it's starting to come back to him. This reflection of lies in the shadows of a life he didn't take in with him. If it does he stands silent anyway. Accepts it same as he accepted the drawing north and the too-large leaves and the red that was so red it bled into everything else.

Now the silver girl goes to her wolf skin and he does not smile. He does not join her. Long distance covered on four legs already and now he is stood back and watching.

"Alright," he says to the wolf-girl. The first word he's spoken since they regained cognizance.

He steps through the gate.

She looks from the signs up to the gate as the last of them are torn down and the gate is swung open. Well. She seems kind of silly now.

She frowns and stands, and follows them through.

The field is not vast. The golden grass is not endless. They are within a few moments, even less, of the trees, which

get smaller as they get closer, running or walking. The leaves are the right size. The trees are not. Things are coming back to them, like a voice that is and is not familiar:

"-- been gone a long time now.""How long is a long time?"

The golden, blue-eyed one hears himself ask. They all hear him ask it, if they remember.

"Almost two years."

There are other voices, their own voices -- protests, questions. Two years! How!

"It was before River died."

Oh, they remember a little there, at that name which is a thing found in nature and so it can be permitted. They remember someone dying. Death is a bad, sad, maddening thing. Death hurts very much. Some of them were not here when it happened. They know there was death. That's what is behind them, very very very very very very far behind them. Other things, too, but lots of death. And River, whoever River was, River died and maybe, maybe everything bad happened after that. Maybe whatever was lost was forgotten, at least temporarily.

"Keep these talismans,"

says someone else entirely, not the deep timbre of the first voice, not one of their own. They don't know what the talismans are. Or what they're for. They don't know what they have on them is familiar and what isn't. Is the staff a talisman? Is the bead, the metal piercing, the pigeon? But someone told them to keep them. Whatever they were.

--

The trees are very small, and the leaves are the right size.

They come upon a clearing, which to them is the size of a boot-heel. Something is in the middle. Something small and shining and curled up and sleeping and thumping its tail in its sleep and with red-gold fur and twitching ears. Very very small, and smelling of autumn, smelling of barley in the wind and smelling -- for here such things have a scent -- of music. Something dreaming.

A little wolf. Tiny enough to fit in the palm of even the pink-haired one's hand.

The moon likes him, too.

Does she have pink-hair here, too? In this form. She runs and they run through the gate and things change and the horizon comes closer and recedes. The trees are too large and then very small and the leaves are the right size and that is enough. There are scents in the air and they are vibrant as a anything, they are a chord that strikes some note of familiarity in the fibers of the muscle of her heart.

The trees open up and here is a clearing and there is a very, very, very,

very,

small wolf.

It could fit in her hand but she does not have hands.

She has paws.

She lopes closer, closer.

The moon likes him. Her nose is warm. She wuffs and nuzzles the dreaming little wolf. Smells his music.

They all hear and they all remember and they all know death to be a thing that doesn't go away. It's there waiting for all of them just as wakefulness waits at the end of a dream but all dreams end eventually.

This one's hands are heavy with all the jewelry he wears. He walks light on his feet. Even as the echoes come back at him and them he walks through the field and he listens to the voices. Glances over at the other male once. Says nothing.

Talismans?

And here the clearing. Here something small enough to trot upon if attention doesn't come before the step. He sees and he scents the air though he stands on two legs and he stands idle frowning but not confused.

He crouches at the edge of the clearing and does not mean to disturb the sleeping wolf but how is he to know his presence won't be a disturbance.

She doesn't understand what's going on. Memories, some that she may recall, are coming back to her and she is confused. So she goes with the others and she looks at the small wolf. She drops into a crouch, reaches out gently to touch her lightly.

With a wet nose coming close, the tiny wolf's ears flicker. She is enormous, compared to him; her tiny nuzzle rocks his entire body. It makes him open one eye, peering at her drowsily, but without fear. A shadow swoops overhead; the pigeon is the size of an eagle. Maybe they are small. Maybe the light plays tricks, maybe the bird is closer than it seems.

No matter. They remember:

shadows tearing at them in some other wood, a darker wood far from here, more to the south. God, how far have they come? Ripping at their clothes, raking claws into their skins, wounding their souls more than their bodies. How did they survive such an attack? Flashes of light, bursts of water over their flesh from shattered something-somethings. They tore -- they tore something away from all of them, and they wandered on, less hurt and less bloodied but

something was happening to them, as they walked. So gradually they didn't even notice.

It's easy to forget the most important things. You just have to keep going.

--

The wolf thumps his tail as he is woken. He snorts and stretches and rolls up onto his feet, spry. He wags his tail to see them, barks. And they understand:

"HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK."

The silver girl becomes a silver wolf, and the silver wolf runs ahead. See her go, like a bolt of silk let loose. That swift, that smooth. The boy follows, at first walking, then breaking into a trot, then running outright himself. On two legs instead of four he is not as fast as a wolf, but he is fast: fast and strong and athletic, blessed in raw and physical ways by the moon who likes him.

The trees grow small and small and smaller still. This does not quite seem to make sense to the boy, but then: nothing really makes sense. Things are beginning to come back to him, an existence before this one nudging at the corners of his consciousness. In a way it lifts the simple contentment of ignorance; it makes him, for the first time, begin to wonder

who am i?

where am i?

why am i?

But then they are at the clearing, which is tiny as a palmprint. They gather around and look down and there is a wolf there, a tiny wolf, curled up and dreaming. The silver wolf nuzzles the little wolf; the dark girl touches it. The dark boy does not touch it, and neither does the golden boy.

--

The little wolf wakes. Another piece of the past comes back to them. The boy blinks suddenly, and his brow creases with a frown that looks and feels odd, new, out of place. He rubs his face for a moment. He looks down and the little wolf is wagging his tail up at them now, telling them all that

THEY WILL BE A PACK

and the boy understands this to be a good thing, a happy thing, though he does not quite understand. "Okay?" he says, uncertainty making the word a question. He thinks for a moment. "You're very small. Do you want to ride on my shoulder like my pigeon?"

Speaking of which: where is his pigeon?

Charlotte (she does not know that she is Charlotte, but somehow she knows that she has a name now, a name that belongs to her the way the name River belongs to -

belongs to -

names below to things. So, Charlotte thinks that the small wolf does not want to ride the small wolf wants to run wolves were meant to run not ride.

HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK.

the small wolf barks and she barks back, and there is a spiraling sort of brightness to her tone that begins to shade itself into a howl, a paean, a ululating song.

It is worldless. It does not have a name.

After all that darkness, some part of her knows, or believes, that this is a better way to be.

Here. Now.

The memories, they flash and they hurt. They pain her, emotionally and spiritually and she flinches as they come to her. But they are just memories. "Just." Right.

More importantly, the wolf awakes, and it is happy to see them. It says they will be a pack. Does it feel like it shouldn't be? Like she has something that fills that? She isn't sure. Maybe. But for now, because it makes the little wolf so happy, she smiles.

She does not say yes though. Just smiles.

They came here for a reason. They came her to find something lost, lost for almost two years. They came with talismans to protect them against something, but those talismans were torn from their very bodies. They are themselves, and they have purpose, and they are in... the spirit world. They are in a place with its own standards that defy both natural law and the inexorable rules of logic. They find a gate made to open and trying to keep them out, and they think

someone made those signs.

They find something that must be lost, look how small he is, look how delighted he is for the company. Look at him wagging his tail, growing foot-sized from palm-sized, now he is up to their knees. He is very excited, his eyes bright gold, the autumnal light gilding the edges of his fur. What a pretty thing he is, and the tall golden one says okay to the pack idea, and tells him he is small.

"I AM GROWING!" he barks back, not in anger but excitement. "SO WE CAN BE PACK."

They all have names. Not easy to find, it's right on the tip of your tongue, but you can remember ... the W... the War... the Warder. The Warder in a cold place, not summery at all, telling them to go north. No, he said to cross over, to find what was lost. They know this. They all have names, and cannot recall their own, but the name of this lost little one is coming back to them, slowly, slowly.

Maybe it starts with a B. There's an N in there somewhere.

He wags. Cocks his head to the side. "WE ARE A PACK. THIS IS OUR DEN. HELLO."

He is waist-high now.

He is growing. He is growing so-fast and he is growing SO WE CAN BE PACK and she barks-back and remembers the W- W- Warder, the places-that-were and the darkness. Here are names too.

She is beginning to remember names too.

She remembers, you see, that she has a name.

That she does not want a name.

--

Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. This is the rhythm when she returns to the small-wolf. Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. Familiarity, comfort, challenge. Comfort, affection, challenge.

She barks again. He is growing!

And for now they are a pack.

BARK.

But this is not their den.

When he is done growing, she knows, they have to go.

Wefindyou. she tells him. Comefollowus.

She tells him.

Home.

Though she hardly remembers what that means.

He's right, the little wolf. He is growing. Or maybe they are shrinking. The boy is a little worried about this latter possibility, and he looks often at his hands, his palms, to try and determine if there's any subtle shrinkage going on. Probably not. He looks at the wolf again; now he is knee-high. Now he is waist-high. Is he still getting bigger? Wolves aren't supposed to be much bigger; the boy is quite sure of that.

"We can be a pack," he says slowly, "but ... I don't think this is our den. No. Our den is back that way. Where we came from. And ... and across. I mean, across. Across the curtain."

He looks to the silver girl for help. She has a name. The idea is a thunderclap in the boy's mind. Names: what a novel concept. Her name is ... is ... it starts with a soft sibilant sound, sh he thinks. The entirety escapes him, but that is okay: she seems to share his mind.

He is a werewolf and they are in the spirit world and a body that stays in this world too long will shrug off its body and stay here forever. Not as a punishment but because everything here is a reflection. Reflections have no use for substance. They're born of and beyond real things.

This he knows. Not his name and not his home and not what brought them here. Only echoes these but he knows now this is not a dream.

At least he thinks he knows.

As the little wolf grows he rocks back on his heels to give it space. The wolf-girl tells him. Found and follow. He stays crouching until the little wolf who is no longer so little who smells like someone he can and cannot remember has come up past his waist and then he stands.

They have to go across the curtain. He knows this would be an easy journey for him. Like stepping through an unlocked gate. This side calls to him more than the realm does but he knows.

He takes a step back but he doesn't leave without them.

Brandon. Possibly Brian. But he is accommodating to Charlotte's nuzzling and nipping and he is playful, wagging happily at the attention. He bumps his head on hers. He wants a pack so badly. He needs a pack he has been so long without a pack, his pack, he could use a pack.

BARK.

His eyes fly wide as Charlotte barks that they found him, and so now he should follow. He looks around, and his crest falls, his tail drooping. "not here?" he whines at her, and at Erich, who is also telling him that not-here is their den, he and his new 'pack'. He goes over to the other one, long-haired male one, and bumps up against him. "tell them here, here is good."

It is unlikely that Hector will tell him any such thing. The wolf droops, saddened.

No, Brian is his name-name, only one of his names. There's another N, another R, a gleaming red glow from the horizon, but it is the wrong direction, it is a name that means the very bright and the very cold.

--

A thunderclap: that is what it is in their minds. His name is Northern Sun. He has a name and it is Northern Sun. His name is also Brian, and he has been lost in the spirit world for almost two years. They came to find him, the four of them, to bring him back to his pack, to help him find his way. Theurges go missing often enough; maybe they each, for one reason or another, felt a measure of pity for his packmates left behind

HIS PACKMATES WHO ARE ALIVE AND WAITING FOR HIM, OH GOD.

They have packmates. They all have packmates behind them, waiting for them. Oh. God. And Northern Sun has been without his for almost two years, they without him, barely feeling him alive, not knowing why he had not returned from beyond the veil.

Because he forgot.

Because he didn't have a talisman.

Or because his was torn from him, too.

--

One of them feels his name returning like a whisper, a breath before a poem: Hhh, hhh.

Another feels it encroaching, coming closer, unwanted, fearful.

Their names are returning to them. The world will return to them. Like all gates, this gate is meant to be opened, meant to be walked through. If you can just remember that it is there. If you can just remember that the barriers between are nothing more than an illusion held in place by spells that you only choose to believe in.

Names are spells. Those spells, if believed in, call them back to their lives. And their truths. And their packmates.

Northern Sun.

That is his name. This tiny-wolf, this small-wolf, this medium-wolf, this full-size-wolf who is now their packmate. Only not. He is not their packmate but he is a packmate, his pack is out there, they are waiting for him,

his name is Northern Sun.

The boy looks thunderstruck. He is wide-eyed and stunned and sucking a breath to give the news, which he thinks is good news, it must be good news, but then: what comes out is --

"Charlotte!"

And he rounds on her, his silver sister. He laughs aloud.

"Charlotte. You're Charlotte!"

He gives her a name. He pins her in place. She is whining. It is an animal whine. It is in the back of her throat, this whine, not precisely of protest but of something else that remains nameless as she is for another three -

- two

- none seconds.

--

And she remembers two. Her name and his name and their names and Northern Sun. Erich says,

You're Charlotte, and the wolf becomes a girl again and she is a different sort of girl now that she is laden with a name. She knows the things behind him; the dark things she can fee scritch-scritch-scratching against the recurve of her mouth.

She swallows them.

She is a girl named Charlotte and she is not laughing but she looks at Erich with a familiar affection,

and names him.

"And you're Erich."

With an odd little smile.

Then looks to Northern Sun. And says,

" - and you're Northern Sun. Come back with us. Your pack is waiting."

Before he remembers his own name he knows he has a pack on the other side unassured of his presence. That he has a mate far from here and they will have a baby any day now and if he never came home his mother is there with her. Not their names but their faces and the tethers they offer him. He knows.

And he knows these two before him. Knows they fight together though they are not pack. Stands while they remember and he waits and then he reaches out to shuck aside the velvet curtain. Maybe they can pass through with him. If not they're strong enough to do it on their own.

He does not will not promise not to leave before Northern Sun does but he stands while the wandering wolf decides whether or not to follow.

No one names Hector, but no one needs to. Hector knows things they are not meant to know. Hector knows his name. He knows the name of his mate and the considered names of his child. He knows he has a child coming. He knows the names of his packmates, current and former. He knows Erich and Charlotte, and knows Keisha. It comes back. It starts to come back.

They came to get Northern Sun because no one should be lost for so long. They came, instead of his pack, because of what this place is: memory-stealer, name-stealer. They would remain here, a whole pack of Garou, and stay with their packmate.

That is why they wanted wolves from disparate packs, with at least one of their number staying behind. It's the only way they could make sure they'd hold it together and get home again.

Home again, home again,

something-ity something.

--

Northern Sun wags slowly. They are not his pack. But his pack -- he remembers. He wuffs at them, and looks at Hector, who is drawing apart the laces of the veil to move through it. They cannot be carried on his strength of spirit. They will have to use their own. They will have to use their own, and hope that the prodigal will go with them.

He sniffs, and chuffs, and his tail does not wag. He shakes his furry head.

"My pack."

The veil is parting. On the other side is Northern Colorado, the outskirts of Fort Collins. It'll be a long run back. But their packmates will be waiting for them.

All of them.