Ornature

[Sorrow] "Mouse," says Sorrow. "I will call you Hungry-One, I will call you Remembers-Death. I will tell this story and I will call you Mouse, and you will be remembered, as great and great and many times great grandfather's greatgreat grandfather remembered the red wolf.

"Listen, there is more to your story. The red wolf was named Burns Within, and he harried a great darkness from the winter land, a darkness that would have swallowed everything, even the narrow spaces, even the burrows and warrens where you hide. We remember how he lived - distantly, through a distorted mirror, but then his name fails us, because we do not know how he died. Left behind, his woman mourned him until her hair fell out, so red it seemed like blood on the snow, keened for him until her throat closed and the moon turned away, so as not to hear. Named her children Misery and Grief, and so went the rest of her days.

"I have told you this," all this is quiet, is sinuous but solid as cinderblock, is made of aggregate words, half-remembered languages, the breath of sighs, the meaning of gray. " - now listen, quick. Tell me what you remember. His pointless death, and I will feed you, because it is winter, and your are hungry."

[Waking Dream] The ladder is cold. Not winter-cold, not cold as a pure concept of cold; not cold as it might be, quintessentially. But cold enough to bite. The ladder is metal. The ladder flakes rust under her fingers, staining them. Mouse who will be Hungry-One, Remembers-Death, is liquid-eyed, and its whiskers drip more light at a quicker pace, quickquickquick, mouseheartbeat fast, and it washes its whiskers with one hand, then lifts its head and looks off to one side.

- this is what the Mice in this Land of Lands and Doors and Fields know of the red wolf and his pointless death. He came many times. The first time he came he said what is this place it is waking. He left behind breadcrumbs. They were big crumbs, and tasty. His pockets promised more breadcrumbs but we did not get too close because he (twitch) smelled of (twitch) bad things blood and he showed teeth when he saw the Mice like humans show teeth. He walked through halls and tested doors and wanted to know what they were for. He did not know that doors are for going through and closing. That was what the Mice think he learned.

The third time he came there was something in the house that ate. It ate and it ate and it ate ate ate and it was hungrier than I am very hungry I am hungry and I am old. The Mice remember this time because they were all very hungry. Hungrier than winter. We thought that his pockets might still have crumbs and what might be inside and the Mice ate each other. More than just the weaklings. We made each other weak and ate ate ate and some of us tried to eat the red wolf too. Then the hunger went away although our bellies were still not full. The last time the red wolf came he walked to the door you are going to but it took him many days. When he was asleep a thief took something from him and when he woke up and saw he became a monster and tore up many things.

We the Mice thought that maybe he would snap us up so we did not see. We hid we hide from things like that and there is a falcon. The falcon is a good hunter. The falcon is swift. We do not like its talons, we have thought many times that perhaps we will eat the falcon when it sleeps, but we have not yet. Not yet. And the falcon is watchful. The red wolf's blood was good they say. They say it was everywhere. They say that he did not heal. But only the bad mice say that. I do not know. I cannot smell it.

When he reached the door he could not open it because the key had been left in another door. He wanted to go back but he couldn't. He opened the door by being hurt. We the Mice do not understand it, but we think that maybe, maybemaybemaybe, it is because he was weak, so what was behind came to see, and he said he would give something, and then he just died. We the mice did not see him give anything. He did not have anything because it was all taken. That is his pointless death. He went into the door and then he never came out. But then he was dead and we could smell him. We did not go near the door for manymany years.

- and with that, the Mouse dashes away. Or begins to. A sleek shadow, shape.

[Sorrow] Sorrow listens, does that thing that humans due when they bare their teeth. Which is to say: she smiles, a generous curve of her generous mouth, the gleam of white teeth behind her soft lifts, the promise of the wolf inside, a hungry thing, moon-made and sure. Hungry-One, Remembers-Death, Mouse speaks and the wolf-girl listens, rust from the ladder flaking beneath the pads of her fingers, drifting down through night and night and night and hungry to some quiet landing place, some shadow, raining down through some ceiling door onto the still, stripped floorboards below.

"Thank you," says Sorrow, low-voiced, still as the horizon shrouded by mist on a cold winter's morning. Her fingers are cramping, in truth, and the cold eats its way into her bones, and inside her is another life-to-be, maybe not even a heartbeat yet, just some promise there, just some need. She reaches out, fingers except for the rust, turned up. Sorrow does not have pockets full of breadcrumbs, but she does have her spirit, and she offers a kiss of it to Mouse for the story as promised. " - here."

Offers Gnosis for his hunger.

- and then she moves again, straightens, reaching upward for the next rung, and the rung after that, eyes closed against the rust as it falls like flakes of ash from a fire; like a first, fat snow onto her cheeks, her mouth, into her lungs as she climbs and climbs, imagining a door, and remembering that they are for going through and closing.

- and coming back, and opening, too.

[Sorrow] stamina! (homid!) plus ze athletics!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 4, 4, 7, 8, 10

[Waking Dream] There is a moment where her muscles protest. They've stiffened. They quake. The moment passes. Athletic, limber Kora - determined, well-aquainted with her own physicality. When she reaches the very top of the ladder, which happens now, now that she has walked so long and climbed so far, now that - surely - dawn is beginning to silver Chicago's snowclouds, and pokes her head above, what she sees is another portion of the (another?) attic. A lower portion, perhaps; something at the root, somehow unnoticed before, no door that lead to it, nothing.

The ancient thing with the ancient voice and the mellow, ponderous way of speaking waited for her - it took the shape of a stag, and she saw the room through its hooves, which it pawed the floorboards with. A stag, yes - but so large, so vast, so greatgreatgreatgreat that its shoulders hulked against the ceiling and it had to bow its head, 'lest its mighty rack tear holes in the ceiling, rip right through to the - attic. The other attic. The sky. Whatever. It says -

- and here we are. Remember what you promised -

There are windows here, too, and feathers everywhere, soft and moon-translucent, as if this little room was a place for birds to roost. The windows here are not boarded up. The wood is new, and smells new, still smells of trees - of pine. Go on, Kora; smell it, Sorrow? This is a room made out've a wood which was made out've pine, perhaps; some evergreening thing, some winter-strong, dark and stark thing, and the metal charm hanging from her earring means she can hear the sleepy caught-in-slumber dream-talking of the wood-spirit within the timbers. There is a well-made dresser, pressed against the wall. On it, a copper chocolate pot. A little copper spoon. A little wooden tray, a little oil lamp. And one of the drawers is half-open, and from it comes a spill, a froth, of yellowing old lace, something that looks like it might ash into dust if someone looks too hard at it.

And there is a door, set against the wall. The door is stone. The door does not belong. The door is stone, and the door has a sun carved on it; maybe a glyph - too far for her to see. There is also the whisper of a stain on the floor in front of the door, and it lies there like the shadow of a thought. She will notice, too, after a moment, maybe more - one bone, another, the remnants of yet another; human bones, maybe. Or Garou. Just scraps.

[Sorrow] "Three times three minutes," she says, nodding a slow, solemn nod, the seal on a pact, the - "when you ask. When I can."

This is after she has pulled herself forward, her arms liquid now, her strength spent, her breath harsh even in her charged lungs. Wolves are made for long-running, ranging across the snows, but humans are not made for climbing, and she is more than one human, now - and she feels the exertion, feels the exhaustion - in dead center in her spine, in the palm of her hands, in her burning calves and thighs, the great slabs of muscle flanking her spine.

There is more there, though. More inside, underneath, and so she pulls herself up until she is seated on the floor of the attic, the root-of-attics, breathes in the dust, the desicated lace, the feathers and pine, the sharp scent of raw, new wood, the musk of bird-things that reminds her of the belltower, the low gleam of the bell she tends every week, atop the church.

The bones and the door: her attention is fast upon them, and after several liquid moments on the floor, where she feels every ache in her muscles, every sort, overworked fiber in their attachment to bone - she pushes herself upright, drawing her dangling feet out of the long, dark shaft through which she climbed. Sparing a glance for the moon and the dresser pushed against the wall, Sorrow crosses to the bones and the stone and the door with its etched maybe-glyph. Her dark eyes settle on the door, still, wary, and then she sinks to her haunches, touches the scraps, one and then another, the shattered little shards, the scraps of flesh, cloth, fur - whatever's left there, gathers them up and turns them over and over in her hands.

After several moments quiet contemplation, Sorrow reaches behind her shoulder, and pulls away something that wasn't there. A narrow olive backpack, half-full, appears against her shoulder and falls to the ground, though she catches one of the straps before the contents spill out and shatter. Carefully, she tugs off her black t-shirt, leaving the thermal behind, and carefully, she folds up the bones, with a quiet sort of - reverence, with an unremitting, quiet grief, remembering her losses, all the deaths before. And carefully, she folds up the bones in the t-shirt, slips them into her backpack, and allows the pack to slide back into her spirit.

And then, there is a door.
A stone door.
And Sorrow has the key.

And so, she opens it.

[Sorrow] Strength!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 7, 8

[Waking Dream] And so, she opens it.

And so, the hungry wind comes for her.
And so, the hungry wind drags at her.
And so, the hungry wind seeks to slough the flesh from her bones, cuts through her clothes, drags at her.

And so, she is almost lost in the roar, the unrelenting ferocity, of what lies behind this door. All wind. All fury. All noise, noise, noise, and for a moment she cannot see: the wind whips at her so, understand, it stings her eyes -

But beyond the door, she can see a carpet of stars, of moonsilvered fields, of a moonsilvered lake, of leaves, shaken from the branches. Winter, again - stark, and helpless, and friendless, and cold. The perfect place for a hungry wind to prowl. And in the distance, wolf-song, wolves speaking each to each, hints of tales, of things lost, of names lost, a search in progress, again -

But she knows these are the voices of the dead. And she knows the stars are fires, as well as stars. And she can smell, in that hungry wind, something redolent of spices, of warmth, of resurrection, of woodsmoke.

[Sorrow] Every shred of concentration, every ounce of her strength goes to keep her rooted: here. Sorrow imagines herself a tree with great, twining branches and deep, endless roots. Imagines herself a mountain, imagines herself stone - in staccato moments as she holds fast, plants her hands on the frame, resists, in the end, the hungry wind.

It steals her breath; steals away her warm breath, blisters her with cold. She's still human-skinned, though now this is so only because the moment's inattention required to shift might be her undoing. The animal in her bares its teeth, the rage in her burns hotter to restore the warmth lost in the lashing wind, and she holds fast until she can pull the stone door about, and push it, finally, closed - the voices of the lost dead clear in her eyes, the distant promise of warmth, woodsmoke, clear skies, a burning hearthfire.

The door shut, she rises to her tiptoes and traces the shape of the glyphs etched into the stone.

Hid(Mem)den(ory).

The bones are in her pack, and her eyes are bright with unshed tears.

Call it the work of the wind.

--

There is still the attic drenched in moonshine, drifting with bird feathers. There is still the sky beyond, the gleam of stars in the dark fastness. She pauses by the dresser, fingers the copper pot, the oil lamp, shifts the yellowed lace beneath her fingers. She opens the drawers, each of them, one by one by one, touches the marker's mark on the bottom of the copper pot, the grain of the wood in the tray. She picks up feathers from the floor and sets them floating in the air like motes of dust in the moonlight, she climbs to her tip-tip-toes and peers out the windows.

She remembers the stars.

And them, quietly, she writes them into her fur. The moon and stairs, the birdfeathers, the dresser, the howl of the hungry wind from the opened door, turns a memory into a memory, a disc of it that clings to her skin the way bubbles cling to flesh when you're breathing underwater.

This is not quite enough.

It never is.

When she is finished - when she has looked through every drawer, traced every groove in the glyph etched into the stone door - when she is finished Sorrow melts from her human skin into her sleek wolf form. She is slender and gray and brown, with keen brown eyes and a short snout, alert eyes, elegant legs, white teeth, and a voice -

well, here she has a voice, a throat that she opens, a howl of loss, a howl of memory, a howl to the moon and the dead.

And then, only then, does she shift into her humanskin, and begin climbing down.

[Waking Dream] The door doesn't want to close. There is effort. Almost, she loses the key. Almost. Almost, she loses her life, and the other life she is just beginning to kindle into a flame-thing, into brightness. Almost. The door closes, and the glyphs are there to be read. They're faint. They're old. And she looks through the attic room, the beneath-the-attic room, and beneath the lace (which does ash when she touches it; half-disintegrates, sighing against her fingertips as it gives up even a semblance of form, a memory that couldn't quite hold in this other-world, not strong enough), she finds a deerskin pouch, something cracked, stiff with age.

And within, three talens - a painted clod of clay, one to wake the heart; an egg, tiny, blue, one to call for aid; an unmarked glass bottle [old, filmy] of some old brown liquid almost hardened/crusted against the glass, one to summon light out of the dark. And within, a (used, ew) handkerchief, monogrammed J. B., wrapped around something hard. When, and if, she unwraps it, she'll see a ring, and hiding in the ring something that almost tries to float-away, and oh: she knows. A memory, contained in a circle, a record, bound by Gnosis, a song. A thing, important enough to keep, to replay.

Through one window, the meatpackers' Chicago, Wyrm thick on the ground, smoking, flickering on and off like the memories they are, almost antiqued, ugly as a bone caught in the throat. Through another window, a Chicago that is burning. Through the third, final window, a Chicago with onions, growing green by the river, onion spirits playing pranks.

And then she howls. And her howl carries, long, strong, outward, down - enough to reach her True Time. Her Now Time.

And, below, there is a howl of answer, Waking Dream's, strong and sweet, I'll take this, carry this, and then after Waking Dream's, while Sorrow shifts down to Kora-shape again, human-skinned begins her descent (there is always a descent; that is the story of every ascent), Dreams in Summer Snow howls his reply.

And then she is on the stairs, down, and down, and down again, and the spirits avoid her, hide away, whispering stories, gossip, half-insults.

They do not stop her. Waking Dream and Dreams in Summer Snow have ceased howling long before she reaches the bottom. She feels as if she's been climbing, talking, thinking all night long - how many hours has she lived?

[Sorrow] The talens are spirits bound to flesh; and so she takes them. How many years have then remained here, well beyond their bargained use, trapped inside the cage of their maker's making, waiting to call for aid and ready to wake the heart and dreaming of bringing light of out darkness.

And the handkerchief,
and the ring,
and the memory,

- disappear neatly into her olive green backpack, which disappears into her skin, a dark line of curves and bundles against the bunch of her trapezius, the swell of her deltoid muscle.

Sorrow is tired now, she is spent. She has climbed and climbed for a day and a night, and her body is beginning to fail, and her mind is beginning to fog. She is hungry enough to eat a hungry mouse and she knows how his hunger feels, how it flays at his ribs, how is yawns beneath his diaphragm, how it makes him -

- weak, I am old.

And down she goes, still, her treats against her body, the story in her mind, her fingers dark with rust, aching, spent. Night whispers around her and sometimes she bares her teeth at the insults, but the gesture is subdued now.

--

When Sorrow emerges from Hill House, when she returns the key on its knotted rope to itshook, when she opens the front door, an ordinary door, a door without a key, when she half-stumbles down the four steps to the solid ground, her hair is half-loose, gray with dust and cobwebs, with chips of rust, with memory.

When she reaches Waking Dream and Dreams in Summer Snow, Sorrow sinks to her haunches, pulls the pack loose from her shoulder again, shakes the old olive canvas panels out, sighing. The bag has been around the world with her, twice, and is held together by duct tape, by big, inexpert stitches, by roaddust.

Squinting up at Lila as she undoes the laces holding the bag closed. "The Fianna, Burns Within, died in Hill House. He gave himself to a door marked with the glyphs for Hidden Memory, and is no more." She pauses, long-fingered hands pale on the dark cotton of her dedicated t-shirt, wrapped around talens, wrapped around bones, and pulls it out, unrolling it on the ground. "These are his talens."

"These are his bones."

[Waking Dream] "What will you do with them?"

The question is simple. The galliard watches the skald - who looks weary, tired; determined, steady - steadily. Watches as she brings out the bones.

[Sorrow] "Return them to his Sept and his people," says Sorrow, still crouched on her haunches, one foot forward, the other back, the pack at her booted feet, empty, sighing. No: there are things inside, a gourd here, a clay disc there. A volume bound in black and white, and another in the skin of a death thing, flayed from the bones. " - so that they may remember him."

Her smile is a weary thing; simple, half-formed, curving quite across her mouth. "And the talens, I will release the spirit inside, and return the vessels with the bones."


[Waking Dream] Now, understand.

The spirit world is a moonsilvered thing just now. The scab is a stinking, festering wound, but Hill House is unique. There is less taint here. Nowhere near as pure - as worth saving; as worth defending, dying for, sacrificing to - as Maelstrom's Heart. But it is lovely, here; it almost feels right - rage can almost feel itself banked. Waking Dream, wide-eyed, as still as any creature out of myth that hasn't a prayer of being real, unflinching, tilts her chin downward to stare at she who offers sorrow, cliath skald of the Get of Fenris, and then she looses a held breath. Her gaze flickers to the bones, and she, too, crouches, reaches out and takes Kora's hand. The hand which, earlier, had a circle marked on it: scratched out in blood.

There is no wound now. Of course not. They've shifted. They've fought. And Kora has climbed, hand over hand, higher and higher, so any mark there was must be mixed in with the rest. Waking Dream takes out that antler tine, again, (it came from below), licks the tip, and scratches a circle on Kora's palm, then presses her own over it, tightly, clasping, tightly -

"I would howl this," she says, and then - "I will howl this, she who offers sorrow, renders bone-yuf,"

and then she is on her feet, the circle smeared - broken, and then she is four-footed, war-wolf, hispo-wolf, powerful jaws, powerful throat, lean, a thing between skins, unnatural, more-than-natural, and she howls:

" - flee, wyrmlings;" fierce, joyful; glad, undaunted-thing, "shrivel, taint; be uplifted, Gaia, let your heart beat with hope - know She Who Offers Sorrow, Renders Bone, Fostern Skald of the Get of Fenris."

And she'll howl it into the stones and the stars, howl it unwavering: triumph, see?

[Waking Dream] [...finis.]

[Sorrow] (confetti!)

[Waking Dream] They go.

They go, all three: the galliard who wishes to prove herself fostern in the eyes of the Nation (you wouldn't believe, you, people on the winter streets, what a thick skin between worlds keeps from you: these three), the galliard whom she must (is?) prov(ing)e herself to, and the young (they're all young, who die for Gaia) philodox. They go all three to Hill House, the umbral reflection of which is - tonight - a thing of inky shadows, silvered and spectral in the half-wash of moon's milk, unradiant and unstill. Hill House is much smaller on the street. Hill House looks only vaguely like this, in the human world. Hill House must only dream of these rooms, stacked crazily one atop the other, of the attic's peak, high, high above the ground level. The structure is Weaver, isn't it? Is of the Weaver, wouldn't one think? It's too solid. It's too real.

It's night, and there is no sign of the falcon spirit the theurges'll say watches over ([sacrificial daughter] sacred trust) the House. The air tastes clean, and cold; of winter, but of winter as it could be, winter as such as Sorrow is, and Waking Dream, and Dreams in Summer Snow, all might long to run through, feel the cold strip their bones clean, wick off their fur like water, dissolve into, become avatars of. The air tastes clean, and Sorrow, alert, can see the movement of Things (they are not Wyrm [this does not make them Harmless]) in the shadows. Rat spirits, perhaps - or the spirits of mice, cautious of predators - perhaps cautious of Sorrow, the noise of her Rage.

The Child stays back, now, and impresses on her tribesmate to do the same. Bring some lost thing out of the dark, she'd said. We know where the key hangs. We know that much of htis land's history has fallen into shadow. We know. Sorrow knows where the key hangs, a simple thing spun of twilight and smoke. Sorrow knows there are doors that do not open, improbable doors, doors that need a key. Sorrows know that there is an attic where shadows gather, menacing those who'd touch circles (the city's [memory]) drifting in lazy sunlight (or moonlight?). Sorrow know she is no theurge, and Sorrow knows she cannot trust to time passing in the umbra [Garou have fallen through it before - ].

There are many things Sorrow knows.

This is the third test.

[Sorrow] Blood still racing from the race here and the running fight that ensued with dark spirits of a darker winter, starveling wolves hungry for every trace of warmth in their veins, every strip of flesh from their blones, her spirit spikes, bright and sure, the flare of her rage like a flame around her, so hot at the heart that it cannot be touched.

The trio stand in the shadows of the great encumbrance of the house's memory and the house's dreams and the house's impression - all that pain, all that loss, all that spirit that did not dissolve into wrongness, not ever, not in all these long years - looking up, wolfskinned now, the skein of the moon's rays reflecting in eyes that are opaque and dark in this form, brown as good turned earth. Then she changes again, her body misforming, unforming, reforming, rearing back from four paws to two as she grows massive, menacing, before sinking back into the soft, fair form of her human shape.

The umbral wind pulls at her hair, and in a strangely human gesture Kora tucks her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans, arms crooked, her head canted in an animal sweep as she considers the great facade of the building, the crawling things lurking in the shadows, the secret things hidden in the corners of the rooms, behind the sweeping shutters, underneath the stairs.

"Alright," says Sorrow, her mouth a curve of acknowledgment for Lila, as close to a smile as a peck is to a kiss. "I will."

And maybe as far.

--

And so she goes, opens the gate and slips inside, finds herself in the shadow of the massive spires, the endless gables, the eight-sided towers, all the follies anyone ever dreamed of adding to the already strage façade. So she goes, slipping her hands from her pockets when she climbs up the steps to the porch.

Sorrow hums a tune in the back of her throat, nearly noiseless, soft, a gift to those spirits shearing away from the light of her rage, like a torch around her, a passing gift, remember me, it says, and also remember me? as she searches out the key, smoke memory hanging from a peg by the door, opens up the rope on which it hangs, and drops it nearly around her neck, feeling the swinging weight of it between her breasts.

Inside, she pauses, glances at the doors - the easy ones, foyer, hall, kitchen - and the closed ones, darker than the others, who knows how long unopened, then begins up the stairs.

- which she will climb, and climb, and climb, and climb, past all the doors, closed and open, all the half-solid windows, all the remembered reflections of the past, or dreamed-up future, until she gains the attic she remembers, where she knows memory floats in the air like motes of dust in the sunlight, and there - well - there, she uses the key.

She opens the door.

[Sorrow] Perception with ze alertness!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10 Re-rolls: 1

[Sorrow] Stamina - in homid!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 7

[Waking Dream] [?]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9

[Waking Dream] [?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 7

[Waking Dream] Ascent, then.

Different than digging a grave for winter, different than digging down into the dark to see what'll come up. Different than digging at the hard earth until your nails are unhinged and bloody. Different, not as close. There are improbable rooms. The logic of Hill House is not human logic. Kora passes through a room with a doorframe as blue as a robin's egg, and a door set in the wall cobwebbed over of the same sharp color. When she passes close, out of the corner of her eye she can almost - only almost mind, mind - see some shape in the wood, some hint of unbirthed things behind. Kora passes through a hall that looks as if it's been riot-torn, riot-wrecked, where dirt and dust cake the floor, sift soft in the fall of light from thin wind-shivering windowpanes, except where the dust and dirt and crust of too many days uncared for solidify and moisten into fungus, into rot blooming underneath wallpaper, pushing out've tears in the wall, dark gouges. There's another door, unlocked, unfamiliar, shouldn't be, found there - this one looks like it belongs on a barn, is set two feet above the ruined hall's floor. Going up stairs, she sees yet another door, this one as red as a spanking, as red as Victorian lady's blush, and it is set with a little step in brickface, has a little window, the windows have little curtains. Another door, metal, thick, cold as winter, as Silence's eyes, steelmetal, stormmetal, dull and dead and lifeless, nothing near it. At some point, passing these doors, some of them unusual, some of them looking (and this is almost stranger, truly) as if they belong in this rambling mansion-that-isn't-wasn't-will-be-is, Sorrow feels the knowledge that there are eyes upon her

not Waking Dream's, not Dreams in Summer Snow's

as she makes the final approach to the attic. There is a window, and through the window she can see heat-haze, water-wet air, thick enough to drink, stir some sugar in it, pick out the mosquitos - a summer molotov. Through the window, she can see no such thing as a city. There is no city here: just onion-fields, just water, stillness of a lake where a giant slept (or perhaps a wolf, or perhaps), people moving in the weeds, in the spring-green that shivers at the touch of attention like grease on the surface of water. If she opened the window, who knows what'd really be out there. That's when she gets her watcher, though - her watchers, eyes upon her.

But nothing attacks. There is the key, and there is the door to the attic, unlocked, and when she opens that door, it is not as she remembers it.

The wood floor is the same, and the window seats, and the windows, and the support beams, and the emptiness, the air as if something was waiting, as if something was holding its breath and this was the moment between holding and releasing, but the windows are blocked off. There are wooden slats, nailed haphazzardly over, and a few gleaming filaments of spiderweb. There is a heap of snow at the far side of the attic, and that is where what illumination there is comes through: ruddy, late afternoon - watery, early spring or late winter half-light, and it's in this half-light that a few bubbles drift (starlight [starbright]). Some are large, and some are small, and some are barely there at all: all colors, any colors, prismatic. They drift, and disappear as soon as they leave the light.

[Sorrow] Here is spring and there is winter, beyond the quiet door, in the cobwebbed attic. Oh there are other doors, lower - doors that stared at her with her elder's eyes, doors that promised something salacious, crimson like the flush of blood beneath the palest skin, enough that she can heart the capillaries dilation, the red blood cells rushing beneath the surface - doors in doors, doors in ceilings, doors under her feet, and she passed them all, counting the memory, pushing herself upward to the attic and the anchor and the breathing space of living memories -

- to find spring, onion-green, with quiet shadows dark and damp with life and reeds murmuring in the wind, tall grasses damp against the thighs, swaying in the breeze like dancers, like a thousand sighing dancers swaying in asynchronous motion to the bear of a dream of a waltz no one remembers any longer. And then: winter, in moonlight, the great piled drift of it beyond.

So here is spring and here is winter and here is she: a wolf made for both, a daughter of a winter god, a winter wolf, the great northern snows, all that dark and all that cold, the fastness of the tundra, of storm-tossed arctic seas, and one who - now, carries the promise of spring, of summer, of heat and light, and new-things new-made in her body.

Sorrow reaches up, wraps her fine fingers around the finely toothed key around her neck and considers her choices. Before she enters the attic, she walks over the to summer's window and closes her eyes, leans close, puts her cheek against glass and feels the seductive warmth radiating from beyond the glass, so delicious she shivers with the decadent promise of it.

But she does not linger. She does not wait. She does not throw open summer's window. Instead, she looks up, straightens, smooths her hands over her thighs, looks around at the shadows seeking out her watcher(s) in the rafters, in the eves, in the gables of the place, in all that great keen dark.

"I'm she who offers sorrow," she tells the watches, as she walks now, as if this were a conversation, as if she were making acquaintance with a stranger she could see while she walked toward the snow drifting in the back of the attic. " - Skald and daughter of Fenris. I've come to find a secret - some piece of history here - to share your story with my elder and my kin."

She speaks slowly, carefully, and with a certain - consideration - repeats herself after enchanting the metal charm hanging from the iron ring in her ear. Repeats herself in the spirits' language, her voice quiet, assured.

By the time she has finished the second speech, the translation, she has reached the pile of snow, the dreams drifting in the light shed from above, the promise of early spring, late winter - falling, failing light. Sorrow sinks to her haunches in that light, reaches out for a handful of snow she will allow to drift down from her cupped hands while she looks up and out into that light.

And then, if the window frame is close enough, she lifts herself up in preparation for climbing, after - and simply, looks up.

[Sorrow] Athletics + Dexterousness! (in homid!)
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 4, 8, 8

[Waking Dream] The metal charm hanging from the iron ring - activated - does not give her understanding of a reply from her watchers. That is because they stay silent. Perhaps they're guardian spirits of this house. Mistrustful. How many wolves come here, after all? How many has Sorrow heard mentioned in conjunction with Hill House as it is? How many wolves in Chicago seek mystery, as well as blood? Not very many. Even the theurges who're drawn to this city, moths to a flame (and oh, baby, they'll burn, their bodies'll smoulder once they're hit just that damned hard), are more concerned with the physicality of war, of bodies mending, bodies made impervious, bodies made stronger in order to rip, and red, and tear bloody swaths through destruction's kin. Which is to say, perhaps she is being watched by guardian spirits (or feral spirits [they're all feral]), or perhaps she is being watched by something that has strayed down a beam of light, out of some sleeping hero's memory. They do not reply.

But there are other things she hears, now. Understands. There is a weak spirit in the snow she cups in her hands and it says I am cold hello I am cold where it is cold it is still and silent and in the cold there is motionlessness and the cold will dance and cold dreams and cold is winter winter is bloody heap here heap here build higher and higher get inside the air will be cold I will bring cold. When she touches the snow, it says, Ah! warm. Ah! There are half-heard whispers in the corners, Look, they say, and, Did you hear, they say, and far, far-flung off, I remember when the red wolf came, and even further, as if in answer, Ah, I remember what I took, I remember how hard-bargained it was, I remember, and also, grumblings, twice-born, wolves, angry, rip-us, don'ttrust, don'ttrust, and still more murmurings, the spirit of the stairs, muttering to itself about the halls it won't go to, the doors it won't touch, the creak of footsteps that can't actually be, not NOW, Kora would hear, but the stairs seem so sure. It's easy to see (hear?) why theurges, especially just-Changed, just-lost theurges, are said to be mad. This is what they hear.

She looks up. The window frame isn't easy to reach, but she may be able to just touch the bottom of it with her fingertips if she stretches herself as lean and long as she can go and uses the moulding to leverage herself upward. The light - and now that she is allowing herself to be shadowed by it, now that she is standing under the stream of it, it seems thicker; less watery, although perhaps she'll note the air is thin, when she breathes it, mountain air, alpine air, air so taut it'll snap in the lungs and leave one gasping - comes not just from the window, which is ajar, the only window in all of Hill House that is - great, round, Victorian thing - but also from a tear in the roof above it. There is a snowflake, caught there. Or maybe it's another [memory circle (remember me)] ring of light.

If she wishes to climb, she will manage. But only just. The skin of her teeth: her teeth are skinned; cold days.

The window shan't be easy to climb to, but it is possible. Will require agility, if she wishes to avoid the lazy fall of the colored circles, but is possible. There is nothing to stand on, but the walls have nooks, crooks, crannies. There are beams to cling to, to swing oneself up. There is moulding, the window seat: if she wants to go up, if she wants to reach that window, open and slanting from the roof, to see where the snow comes from - why, she can try.

[Waking Dream] The metal charm hanging from the iron ring - activated - does not give her understanding of a reply from her watchers. That is because they stay silent. Perhaps they're guardian spirits of this house. Mistrustful. How many wolves come here, after all? How many has Sorrow heard mentioned in conjunction with Hill House as it is? How many wolves in Chicago seek mystery, as well as blood? Not very many. Even the theurges who're drawn to this city, moths to a flame (and oh, baby, they'll burn, their bodies'll smoulder once they're hit just that damned hard), are more concerned with the physicality of war, of bodies mending, bodies made impervious, bodies made stronger in order to rip, and red, and tear bloody swaths through destruction's kin. Which is to say, perhaps she is being watched by guardian spirits (or feral spirits [they're all feral]), or perhaps she is being watched by something that has strayed down a beam of light, out of some sleeping hero's memory. They do not reply.

But there are other things she hears, now. Understands. There is a weak spirit in the snow she cups in her hands and it says I am cold hello I am cold where it is cold it is still and silent and in the cold there is motionlessness and the cold will dance and cold dreams and cold is winter winter is bloody heap here heap here build higher and higher get inside the air will be cold I will bring cold. When she touches the snow, it says, Ah! warm. Ah! There are half-heard whispers in the corners, Look, they say, and, Did you hear, they say, and far, far-flung off, I remember when the red wolf came, and even further, as if in answer, Ah, I remember what I took, I remember how hard-bargained it was, I remember, and also grumblings, twice-born, wolves, angry, ripus, don'ttrust, don'ttrust, and still more murmurings, the spirit of the stairs, muttering to itself about the halls it won't go to, the doors it won't touch, the creak of footsteps that can't actually be, not NOW, Kora would hear, but the stairs seem so sure. It's easy to see (hear?) why theurges, especially just-Changed, just-lost theurges, are said to be mad. This is what they hear.

She looks up. The window frame isn't easy to reach, but she may be able to just touch the bottom of it with her fingertips if she stretches herself as lean and long as she can go and uses the moulding to leverage herself upward. The light - and now that she is allowing herself to be shadowed by it, now that she is standing under the stream of it, it seems thicker; less watery, although perhaps she'll note the air is thin, when she breathes it, mountain air, alpine air, air so taut it'll snap in the lungs and leave one gasping - comes not just from the window, which is ajar, the only window in all of Hill House that is - great, round, Victorian thing - but also from a tear in the roof above it. There is a snowflake, caught there. Or maybe it's another [memory circle (remember me)] ring of light.

If she wishes to climb, she will manage. But only just. The skin of her teeth: her teeth are skinned; cold days.

[Sorrow] There's no reply; and Sorrow is neither pleased nor disappointed. Nothing worthwhile comes so easily. It would not be a secret if they shared it with the first wolf to speak their language; it would be a whisper, a rumor, a thread to be pulled, a ravel to be undone, a game of telephone, mouth to ear and ear to mouth.

Still crouched by the pile of snow, she cups her hands and pushes her long fingers through the drift, feeling it loose around her bare hands, and blisteringly cold. Still human, she curves her mouth, a passing smile as the spirit exclaims against her warmth, and shakes her hand free of the snow, letting the flakes drift back down and settle over the pile.

All the other stories filter in. She looks up, her keen gaze sweeping the shrouded corners of the dusty attic as she listens to the stray thoughts that drift back to her. And when the low, rumbling dreams of the never-moving stairs break through, she turns her head, looks back down the long, still shadows of the attic, and watches the bannister, the railing, the top of the stairs, her expression keen and even and still.

Before she moves - she hums a winter's song for the spirit of cold embodied in the snow, and it sounds like long dark nights and chill gray mornings, like smoke against a cloud-cast sky, like the crack of ice against the rocks - an apology for the warm, for the shadow she casts over the snow-pile as she pushes herself upward, reaching until she has her fingertips on the lip of the ledge, pulling herself, scrabbling for purchase, climbing until her fingertips are raw and bloody, and she has gained the ledge and hangs, balanced there, looking out over winter, ready to drop down - but careful here, alert, aware of the potential perils - that she might fall through, and not come out again.

[Sorrow] Perception + Linguistics!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10

[Waking Dream] Kora looks out over winter. Ah, Kora. You weren't named for winter's daughter. You weren't named for a life unflowered. Kora looks out over winter, not any Chicago she knows. And she sees: the barest of cities -- more of a town; smoke from chimneys off to the north and the east; smoke from factories (?), from the new (?) stockyards. And when she is inside the attic of Hill House, this image wavers; it re-translates itself as she breathes. Breathing is a struggle. It moves under her eyes like a silent film: jerking forward, bubbles growing, blackening the picture, disappearing without rhyme and without reason. And she sees: storm clouds, boiling over the horizon, pressing down on the fledgling almost-city. And she sees: black woods, and snow, and snow, and ah! so much snow, and there is no winter'slight here. There is gloom: deep, oppressive - deepening, gathering over the not-city, brooding over the land as if it'd sucked in a lungful of smoke and was readying asphyxiation for all below.

And she hears, not quite connected to the winter landscape she sees below: wolf-song, distant, thin as a whine - thin as a thread being torn apart (thin as a memory, diminished), more: Garou-song, People-song, wolf-to-wolf, hears, We stood here strong, we stood here tall, we tore the heart out've the beast, we gnashed it between our teeth, one've us was poisoned, the poison went into the blood, but hah hah, a Fianna's blood is already poison I (he) came from the Old Country, my ancestors pissed poison on the wyrm and made the wyrm beat its own mother, and answering wolf-song, Did any escape, did any escape, and another answering song, wolfish, Humans heard, entrails unreadable, tore them out, they flee, they flee and we can't hunt them. We're being watched -

And the wind eddies up, batters at the window Kora is spying from, makes it snap at her leg, drags ice and snow in through the window, blotching her clothing. She looks out of the window, and vertigo: she is looking out of a tall house, sure - but it isn't Hill House (couldn't be Hill House). Compared to Hill House, it's little more than a shack.

[Sorrow] Per + alertness!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9

[Sorrow] There is a keen and feral part of her that wants to drop straight down, ride the angles of the old clapboard house down to the ground, hit the ground with four paws and charge into the gloom toward whatever might be at the heart of that oppressive cloud. She is not merely that animal, though, that blood-hound, that hungry ghost ready to rend, to scatter blood and guts over the pristine crust of compacted snow. And so:

Sorrow cants her head sidelong, listening, her eyes closed, her heart so still that the way it beats inside her chest cavity feels painful, loud - and turns, slides back into the attic, folds and unfolds her body and drops down from the rafters, all opening-and-compacting as her knee bend to absorb the impact as she hits the wooden floor.

Quietly she retraces her steps, watches the dust motes dance up in her wake, listens to their dry, sad little memories of neglect, absence, of stillness, then pries a wooden slat away from a boarded-over window, one large enough to be wedged into her window to keep it open, and small enough that the window remains mostly-boarded over.

And quietly she drops the wooden rail underneath her winter's winter, and quietly she sinks into a crouch by the snow, listening again when the echo of the rail has fallen away. Sorrow digs into the front pocket of her jeans and pulls out a small disc etched with a glyph, which means: solid and then pulls out a coin, a dime, another glyph etched over the president's face, just so.

"Tell me the red wolf's name," she says, " - and I will give you this clay disc. It has my spirit in it, and will make you stronger when you have need of it. Tell me where he went, and I will give you this dime, which has my spirit in it, and a charm to make you whole again. Tell me what you bargained for, and I will tell you a story told to me by Maelstrom's twice-born, of a sand-filled book found in the corner of an attic."

[Sorrow] Ancestors!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 7, 8, 10

[Sorrow] Perception +2 dice!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 3, 8, 9, 10, 10

[Sorrow] Intelligence + 2 dice!
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 5, 8

[Sorrow] Enigmas + Perception!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7

[Waking Dream] The slat is - initially - precarious; a tenuous block, opening this (now [today]) hour into (then [tomorrow?]) yesterday's. This winter into that winter. Her winter into their winter. Kora can still hear - but very distantly indeed; almost too distantly - the sound of wolves, singing; she can recognize in the ruddy, brassy reverbation of the howl a call (demand [compulsion]) for aid. It reacts against her blood weakly, that call; it's too distant a thing - but she can still hear how strong a call it is; how it would blaze up the dark; how it might have chased away a hundred wolf-things, winter howling in their belly, clawing at their ribs. Might have; the howl cuts away - is that a yelp? It's distant, is what it is: only coming to her filtered through today's air, yesterday's not-light today, because of that slat, holding the window open, touching then and now. See?

And Kora is crouched beside the snow and she can hear the spirit hiding in the drift say you've touched it you've touched it your skin is cold but why this ugly warmth why keep it wick and wake when you could be cold don't you want to be cold I like the cold I'm cold, cold, cold, burying deep, burying deep and silent no songs in silence. But even that whisper, that constant murmur, that faint - disgruntled? - protest diminishes when Kora addresses the snow-spirit, or anything else in the House that is still listening - the watchers, maybe.

Tell me the red wolf's name and I will give you this clay disc.
Tell me where he went and I will give you this dime.
Tell me what you bargained for and I will tell you a story told to me by.

There is no reply. Not at first. There is just the silence - the unyielding, space-between-breaths silence - noise, suspended in space - and then. Then the texture of the light changes: shutters on and off - and observant Kora will notice the bat-thing, bat-winged, mouse-bodied, face like a fox, black as the last keen of a dirge, which has settled hanging above her, near the rent in the attic's ceiling, and IT answers her like so - I will tell you what I bargained for. I did not bargain with the red wolf. Would you like to know? I am a clever mouse. How do I know you will not just snap me up, snapsnapsnap?

And then - a pale voice, from without the attic - something moongleaming, something bright and shy, retiring - I will tell you the red wolf's name if you give me the clay disc. His name is Burns Within. His name is dead and gone. His name curdles milk. This spirit is apparently open - giving; without guile. Or impatient? And the part of Kora that dreams ancestor-dreams, dreams things that do not belong to her, dreams things that belong more to her than anyone, dreams that make her a relic, a repository, a book, knows that name, half-knows a story of one of stag's children, bitter-battled, strong-songed, called Burns Within, half-knows - half-knows his story; how he wandered; how they said he was as red as the moon dipped in blood; how they said what he didn't know hadn't happened yet; how they said he disappeared in winter - when was this? Last century; maybe? What's time mean, anyway?

And then - another voice, a snarl-thing, from under the floorboards, the vicinity of her feet - or - no? The walls. No, I will tell you what I bargained for. I will tell you what I bargained for, and where I put it, for the clay disc, for the dime, for the story, but only if they're mine, mine, mine, and you take it back from -

There is a ripple of discontent. Kora can feel it in the ground.

And then another voice - something mellow, old - something that feels like structure - I will tell you where he went. I will take you there, but I want more than a dime. I want to eat your rage for three by three days. I want to take you where he went.

The stairs groan - something disgruntled about attics.
About attics within attics within attics.
About losing things in attics.
It doesn't signify.

[Sorrow] "It's the red wolf I'm here for - " says Sorrow to the batspirit, " - and no other. We have no bargain if you cannot tell me what I've asked: of a bargaining with Burns Within. Another time, though - another night, I will come back, and I will bring you a disc of your own, and bargain with you for what you know."

Her voice is quiet; it ripples liquid in the air, like watered silk crumpled underneath her feet, strange and irridescent from the movement of light over and light beneath.

Then something else tells her the name without the bargain, names the bargain without withholding the goods, and swiftly she turns and swiftly she follows the movement of the voice in the chill air, seeks it out, moongleaming, moonbright, stands and offers the clay disc, open-palmed.

"Yours." - she says, without considering going back on her bargain, without a thought for trickery such as a Rotagar might have attempted.

"I take it back from no one." - she snarls, back to the floarboards, showing teeth, her feet planted wide and firm on the floorboards.

"You ask too much," she says at last, following the shape of the old, mellow voice. "Gaia gave me my rage, that I might fight for her. I used it tonight to drive away winter wolves who would tear a place like this down to the foundations, and eat every scrap of magic here. If it's my rage you would, I'll give it to your for three times three minutes.

"And listen: you want to take me where he went. But will you bring me back again? That is part of the bargain, too."

[Sorrow] WP!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 8, 10

[Sorrow] wits!
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 6, 8, 8

[Waking Dream] Listen. Bat-song is eerie. Bat-song can scratch a glyph on the bone of a living animal if a batspirit sings it - hits the proper note - just so, like that? Batsong can cut. The batspirit makes a sound, bending echoes in the air just as a blacksmith might've bent metal in a forge - there is even an impression of heat; illusory, because it's just a sound. There is no burning on (in) Kora's bones. Just a bat - diving straight for her face. Scary things, bats. Scarier, when they open their mouths, reveal sharp teeth. Scarier, when they open their blind eyes, and quick-as-a-blink, as two-blinks, another moment of time suspended, strung out from now all the way until then, Kora can see the reflection of a war-formed garou falling in battle: is that the glyph for thought? Isn't that necklace familiar? Kora can see -

- and it dives at her face again, veering off to clip her hair, then swooping (up, down; wavering, eerie) back to the ceiling, but higher, the highest, darkest patch of attic that there is. And it hisses, lowly, another time, as if it doesn't believe.

She offers the clay disc to the moongleaming thing - retiring, withdrawing, staying to the peripheral - open-palmed, and nothing happens. Nothing happens, until she turns her attention downward, snarls at the floorboards - then she can feel the kiss of some Thing on her palm, some Thing that feels like a breeze, it doesn't want to touch her, it doesn't want to be contaminated, it doesn't want her to turn on it, to snarl, to - to -

- and the clay disc is gone, along with the hint of fading brilliance: a fleeting dream spun out've light - its shape indistinct, too swift - disappearing out the door, clay disc with it. Her palm tingles.

The thing under the floorboards is silent. Utterly. As the grave. Then - sulkily: mine. Want. Want most of all.

And then the mellow, ancient voice replies - Three times three minutes when I demand it. Not now. Then. A long, ponderous stretch of silence. And then it says, I cannot go where he went, so I will not bring you back.

This would be too much for some people: the spirits don't answer one after the other; some of their answers sail over the others. They touch. They mingle. They hold to no order. It's not too much for Sorrow - she has no problem plucking strand from other strand, untangling the knot of their discourse, their voices that aren't quite voices, because a voice hints at physicality, and only the batspirit seems to have bothered with such things (unless - under the floorboards - scritch, scratch

the sound of little claws).

[Sorrow] "Three times three minutes," says Kora, and her voice is quiet now. She has her death in her mind's eye, the promise of it thrown back to her in reflection; the end of through, the nadir of memory. It knots itself into the back of her throat and makes her breath, makes her ache, makes her - briefly, unconsciously - touch the curve of her stomach, makes her remember not the glory of the death-in-battle, but the sorrow of those left behind.

She swallows it like ashes, and flares a look up at the rafters where the batspirit hisses, hungry, angry, disbelieving. There are scratches on her skin, shadowed around her eyes, and a certain stillness to her frame there in the attic, in the dark. " - when you demand it. When I can give it, and you will have a deal." There's a certain quiet pause, after.

Then she is standing, stretching toward the open window, the breath of winter coming in from outside. " - show me."

[Waking Dream] The floorboards creak. Not because of whatever lies beneath (and wants more). But because - behind her - something heavy has just put its weight down. When she turns from the window, if she turns from the window, she will see plain young man of around her age, maybe a touch older. His eyes are mellow, animal brown, and he moves slowly, with great care, with great grace, as if each step mattered. He moves heavily, as though he bore more weight than he seems to. His hair is auburn, ruddy, although a close glance - and Kora is observant - will tell her that there is black in his hair, too; also grey. He is deer-dappled, see? With a sinewy, but bulked-up, sort of build - not a lean whippet of a man; something powerful. Also, naked, except for an arm-band of keys: dull, metal. The skin of his left side is much-scarred. He holds out a hand, and says, That is not where Burns Within went when he came across this place. That is something Else. That is something you are not asking for tonight.

[Sorrow] And Sorrow, she turns away from the window, away from winter and the cold, away from the smoke and away from the city, away from the pall settled across it, and the echo of wolfsong both within and without, the call for succor, the howl of warning, the frayed, fraying challenge of a living animal against the howling darkness, mourning the loss of the sun and stars.

--

It isn't sudden, but she's still inside as she moves, alive, alert - her dark eyes tracking, seeking, watchful - up and down the man's frame, the weight on the shoulders and the age in his eyes, the dappled pattern over his hand, like the pelt of an animal running through a shadowed forest, where the sun peeks through the canopy, here and here and there and there.

When she holds out his hand, she palms the dime and turns it over, runs her thumb over the grooved edges, feels the weight of the dime and the touch of her spirit inside, the promise of wholeness inside.

And she drops it into his hand.

Like he, the talen is heavier than it appears.

"Isn't that his call?" she asks, her dark eyes quick on him, aware. " - isn't that part of his story?"

[Waking Dream] The young man (no) closes his fingers over the coin. His eyes squint like half-moons. This, though: he never blinks. Not ever. Kora will notice that. The unblinking steadiness of his glance, although that steadiness is rarely directly touching her. Possibly, he says, features inhuman in their lack of readable expression, after another long moment of consideration. Or possibly not. He does not seem to be quick, this thing. Whatever he really is. But if it is, that is where he was. Not where he went when he came here. That is there. Follow me. I show you. You will see. I will not go and bring you back. You will go.

He turns, and just like that - his humanshape blurs; instead, a stag - no, still human - no, a stag, no, no, no - human? Something bigger, something impossibly big? - he is running. Out of the attic. Through the door. He leaps down the last flight of stairs, and he opens a door, and he passes through it. It doesn't look like one of the doors she'd need the key of smoke and twilight, of gloaming and shadow and breath, to open - but he went through it so fast. Perhaps she thinks she's in danger of losing him?

[Sorrow] He goes and so goes she; unsure now, unsettled now, something deep and swallowed underneath her breastbone, doubting this bargain as much as she has doubted anything. But fear must be lived through, must be swallowed, and there is no time when he turns, quicksilver, moving like a stag, she can imagine his rack, the velvet anters damp in the moonlight, the way he dissolves into the attic -

- and she dissolves after him, not stag but wolf, gray-as-smoke, claws clattering on the wood as she charges after him, down the sighing stairs dreaming of attics within attics and the things beyond them.

The key of twilight, the key of smoke, the key swings around her neck as she runs, gleams like a dream of iron in her fur as she charges after, forward, runs breathless now, runs heedless now, his scent in his nose.

He disappears through the door; and she, she does not stop to think now. She surges, after.

[Sorrow] Dex + ath (in lupus!)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 8, 10

[Waking Dream] - through the door, and she is splashing through water, and it is fall-water, autumn-water, not yet as cold as death. Through the door, and there is an icy puddle spreading across a dip in the floor, then a sudden hole in the ground, yawning to swallow her as it is swallowing that black, cold water - a hole she must leap - she does, although just barely; her claws scrabble for purchase - and the spirit, old and unshaped, now? A figment of imagination, blurring into a red, running wolf? - he doesn't halt, he doesn't stop -

- so through the door, into the hall, follow, follow, and then he is (not a wolf) dragging a chair from a closet, something delicate, something wrought of metal which might be placed outside an art deco cafe, the cushion all mouse-nested, dusty, dusky blue fading to brown -

standing on the chair, unlatching a door in the ceiling, and it hangs open like a jaw - wagging, gossiping - and he stretches up (but - impossibly; he is TALL; he is not a person) and drags a ladder down, climbs up -

Follow, huh?

[Sorrow] Follow, huh?

And so she does: follow, up the ladder into through the door, into the hall, her tail low, swishing back and forth behind her, signifying her caution, her alertness, her wariness, and then the chair is like the forgotten chair in a failing charcuterie in some Paris backstreet, wrought iron and mouth-eaten, moth-eaten.

He changes his shadowskins thoughtlessly. Now he has hands and now a mouth, now he has -

now he has -

- but she does not. She has to thing, to push her body to change, to reach into herself and outside herself to find her new mass and when she changes she changes, like now - wolf to human, to girl, to woman, pregnant, wolf-woman, who cannot see the moon in here except in his half-closed eyes. She reaches up, takes the lowest rung in her hand, and then the next, and so doing, hand over hand - climbs.

[Sorrow] Stamina! homid!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 6, 8, 10

[Sorrow] Dex + ath homid!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 3, 6, 9, 9, 10

[Waking Dream] They were in the attic. The highest point. Then they went down a flight of stairs. They went through a door. The rules changed. They went through a door in the ceiling. Now, the ladder is longer than Kora may've thought it would be - if, of course, she had any expectations at all. Now, it is as if she is climbing the service ladder of an elevator shaft, all bloomed over with mushrooms, spongey, livid orange and uncertain reds, blues that cluster tightly to one another - mushrooms that reach delicately off've the soot-stained (smoke-stained) walls and wires to be lovely, to seek more darkness. And, ah yes: it is dark. The light winks out for a few periods of time - at random, it seems, and then she cannot see the ladder, but must feel it; she cannot see the spirit, but must trust to its honor, that it is bound to show her what it said it would. Of course, perhaps Burns Within went here, and now that she is here, it will disappear.

But then. But then. It said it could not go where the red wolf went. Remember him? She can hear, as she climbs, half-asleep, half-waking voices in the walls, little spirits of night, mentioning things, rats, rats, rats, no these aren't rats, what are You doing here, why don't you close your eyes, ah, hah hah, I'll bargain with you, I'll bargain away your firstborn's heartbeat, ooooh it is dark isn't it betterin the dark. Are you looking for lost things? The red wolf came this way, remember what he dropped, remember how it tasted, remember when we tried to eat him, remember when,

but the dark comes and goes. Comes and goes. And once, she feels something grab at her ankle. Another time, something skitters over her shoulders, something heavy touches her head, and she is staring into the eyes of a mouse-spirit, bold, looking down at her, and it says,

Wouldn't you rather do something else. You're young. You have many young to eat. We fight, too, we do we do we fight, fight, fight, why should you care about the red wolf and his long gone name his pointless death

why do you care where he went
you look hungry
i am hungry

you can eat me if you want

I am old

[Sorrow] Sorrow climbs through the elevator shaft, through the blooming rot, through the soot-stained walls, through the chimney, through the shaft, through the air vent, through the mushrooms and the dreaming dark, and she is a stoic creature, contained, self-contained, away of her body in space, alone here, alone now, without the voice of her packmate in her head since Sparrow left - just that link, that brief sense of presents, that knowledge she has that he's out there, somewhere, that they are joined.

She does not bargain with the night spirits, though she listens to their constant chatter but does not engage them, does not response, does not tell them whether (if/why) she likes the dark, or why she wants lost things, where that spool of thread has gone, where that slip of paper with the word she wanted to remember, Sanskrit for yellow - does not interact until one offers to bargain away the heartbeat of her first born and then she snarls, swallowing her voice, turning in the dark, struggling to hold back her own anger, that flare of rage deeper now than rage -

- and she climbs, and climbs, until a bold mouse-spirit insinuates itself above her, swings down and -


" - because, mouse, we remember our dead. We remember their names and their deaths; we tell our children so they will know where they've come from. We tell our fathers so they will remember their brothers in arms. We will our spirits so that they will know the deeds and deaths done in their name.

"We remember.

"And that's why I care. And because it is a secret, something un-known, something I want to know. Because he beat back a darkness - not your dark but what your dark would have been without him - changed, made wrong, just devouring, not just black but cursed, rotted from the inside out.

"And if you tell me and the red wolf and his pointless death, I feed your brothers every night for a solid moon, cheese scattered about my territory, whever I see you and yours. And if you tell me, I will feed you know, from my own spirit, to carry you forward.

"And if you tell me, I will remember you. I will tell others and they will remember you, and if you do not have a name, well, spirit, I will give you one so that you can be remembered."

[Waking Dream] The bold little mouse-spirit stares at she who offers sorrow (what sorrow will you offer? What tale is this you're telling?), its whiskers dripping light. Then it says - I would like to be remembered. I would like of all spirits to be respected by those who use their teeth and claws. I would like to be remembered, I think, for I am old old old, and I am hungry. I will tell you of the red wolf and his pointless death for this oh yes yes I will and my name is Mouse -

how proud it is

- I am Mouse. We are Mouse. We are Mice. I am Mouse! But rage-hunger, this is not where the red wolf went. Your guide waits above. I am stopping you from following him. He will wait forever, and I will talk, talk and tell you. He died pointlessly here at the door, you see. And it was pointless because none of your people ever found him so the thing he made was pointless. He might not have ever even done it, although we liked it yes. My greatgreat greatgreatgreat greatgreat great greatgreat greatgreatgreatgreat great greatgreatgreat grandfather's greatgreat grandfather said.

[Waking Dream] The silence holds, a spell. The silence holds a spell. The silence holds a spell. Waking Dream gazes at she who offers sorrow, and her expression is an ungenerous thing, insofar as it is not very giving right now; no real hints, that she who offers sorrow has reached her audience, that she who offers sorrow is doing well or poorly. Except, of course, the silence has been a listening one, and the intentness of Waking Dream's (inhuman [creature]) gaze hasn't stirred, hasn't been broken by - No. Hold. You are not ready. Come back after you've gained more wisdom. Come back after you've gained more true signs of glory, after you've proved yourself more than an Ahroun. Come back, after you've shown me you know how to fulfill your auspice. She doesn't say any of that. She doesn't even look it.

Of course, she doesn't look as if she's going to say - At last. You're ready. You've been ready all this time. You just needed the deeds to mark under your name, and now, and now. Waking Dream is, in spite of her general demeanor, rather poker-faced when it comes to challenges, especially challenges like this.

Instead, the silence holds. For a spell. And then, this -

"We know that this city, Maelstrom's city - this city claimed and held, oh, barely - held," and see, her voice is a low, simmering thing, all shot-through with brightness, "tooth and claw, prayer and might, held - has a history. We know that the reflection of Hill House is something out of the ordinary, something with an attic full of stories. We know that much of this land's history has fallen into shadow." She is quiet, for a heartbeat.

Then, with a brief smile: "We know there is an attic full of stories. We know where the key hangs. Race me there, she who offers sorrow, if you'd bring some lost thing out of the dark," and the smile stays, an echo, although it's still a creature-thing, not a human-thing; her lovers may pretend she's human, but oh: garou know better. The smile's for this, perhaps: the dark Waking Dream and she who offers sorrow have fought before.

"Show me how strong and quick and determined a skald of Fenris is. Show me that a skald of Fenris can revel through this land we - we, Maelstrom's warriors - claim as ours. Show me - "

- and her shape blurs, dissolves; unmakes itself from woman, lovely and still, to wolf, feral and gray-dappled, sun-pale, moon-eyed. She throws back her head and howls -

- race [glory] wisdom [cunning] swiftness [city walking] show me. Go.

[Sorrow] Dreams in Summer Snow, the young Gaian, the young Philodox, stands witness - a respectful distance outside the challenge circle drawn in blood on the cool reflection of the concrete ground they claim. Underneath is aggregate, slow and mottled, some hybrid thing, human-made, but as with all such strange amalgams, come to life on its own. And deeper still is earth, thin earth, sandy, wet, leached of minerals and nutrients, pale-as-death from all these years hidden underneath the great sprawl of the city but deep dreaming, waiting, dreaming of an end-to-things above it.

The flash of brightness in Waking Dream is like the heart of the flame; which is always deceptive, warm promise that blisters the skin, wild underneath. Sorrow is a different thing; not dour like most of her kind, except that her brightness is whiter, somehow - sun-on-snow, and blood steaming underneath. She has dark blue eyes, Sorrow, to Waking Dream's bright green gaze, and they flash briefly to the young Gaian after Waking Dream has dissolved into her feral skin. She has a generous mouth, Sorrow, and it curves with something like a challenge, just a hint of it - part of the game underneath, substrate - oh you are here or oh will you follow or oh do you dare - and then she's no longer the illusion of human, sinking to all fours. There is a massive blur as her body bulks into the forms Gaia dressed them in for her endless war, until she settles at last as a swift gray wolf, narrow through the shoulders and frame, a hint of bulk beneath the ribs as if she had put on weight for the winter, her coat heavier with the season.

Tail low, straight, alert, moist nose twitching in the sharp cold air, Sorrow takes a spare moment to orient herself, then nips briefly at Waking Dream's flank before streaking off past her - running through the umbral reflection of the bawn toward the boundaries, intent on the city and the tangled reflection of Hill House somewhere within.

[Dreams in Summer Snow] No one asked Harmony to be here. No one requires of him that he come to oversee this challenge. Nevertheless: here it is at the caern, and here he is hearing them speak, listening to Kora's tales of Those Who Come Before (we stand on the shoulders of giants.) She's speaking the names of Garou he does not know, who left before he arrived rather than stay here to die, and he's learning.

And as it turns out, there is a use for his presence after all.

Harmony is a Philodox of the Nation, on the cusp of becoming a Fostern himself soon. To anyone else, he'd be a sophomore in high school. They're important, these stories. Any good member of his Auspice knows the importance of keeping secrets and dredging what's lost out of the deep.

So he stops, the boy folding his arms and tipping his chin to the side to let a fall of brown hair swing away from his eyes, leaving them unveiled to observe the remainder of the challenge. He is silent, and he is watchful, and as they both take on their wolf skins so does he, not yet fully grown, his brown pelt thick and rich.

And he sprints off after them, to witness the winner.

[Sorrow] Dex + Athletics
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9

[Sorrow] Per + Survival
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9

[Sorrow] Wits + Primal-Urge
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10

[Waking Dream] This isn't something that happens everyday. Yes, the garou occasionally challenge one another. They play, they swim, they combat, they challenge. But they don't usually make for the bawn's boundary, as these three do, so intent and so - utterly - wild, moon-called, moon-flung, moon-mad (galliards [after all, and the moon, it waxes]). As they leave, one wolf after another, each quick, each arrowing ahead, the philodox keeping up not only admirably, but perhaps worthy of note at some later point, two of the guardians watch, and hey, hey song, word is passed along. She Who Offers Sorrow is challenging for Fostern, finally, or, Something's going on. Waking Dream and She Who Offers Sorrow just ran ahead with Dreams in Summer Snow. What kind've trouble might be on, that they need a philodox that bad? What's going on? And maybe, They'll tell us later.

This is how it is now -

she who offers sorrow, a streak of gray, as lean and as intent as an arrow, as a hunter who's seen its prey, pulls ahead of her (for now) elder and the philodox who plays witness. The air within the shipyard (within the bawn) has a certain taste to it: sharp, but liminal; spare, but endlessly open, endlessly (although the city outside gives lie to this) clean, endlessly - endlessly - pure and stark. The colours are sharper; the colours are more. The colours are as it should be; there's a vibrancy singing in the umbra around the caern.

This vibrancy does not sing without it. Not often, and not loudly, for fear of -

For fear. For these are the end days, and the city is besmirched, where it isn't calcified, where it hasn't been ordered into an immovable shape, where mutability hasn't been conquered by things gleaming, sterile, and fixed in nature, unable to change. The city's a dark place, and well does she who offers sorrow know it. The spirit street outside the caern is clean enough, Gaian spirits hiding in spirit-snow, behind spectral structures, behind trees-that-don't-exist-in-the-human-vision-of-the-docks, watching as the grey wolf runs.

There are any number of ways to get to Hill House from the docks. Two of those ways are through parts of the city the garou of Maelstrom's sept haven't walked for many, many months, because there are only so many garou, there's only so much time: wild parts of the city, blatantly under the wyrm's sway - it's easy to get to at least one of these; the far end of the lake stretches into a warehouse district that feels wrong, that makes blood shrill, which makes blood ache. One of the ways is through territory undisputedly Weaver, through the highrises, through nests of Pattern-spiders, where even the bodies of newcome garou are cleaned, polished, transformed into some human-made thing, some bastion of order, where numbers rule, and the well-lit paths are more difficult than the dark. This is a scab - and even the ways through familiar territories are apt to have surprises, and how many packs actually claim and maintain territory? Not too many.

And Hill House, well. It's in one of the dirtiest cesspools in the city.

[Sorrow] The whispering guardians are left behind without a moment's thought. The animal-mind is not made for such things - speculation, gossip, the sort of dreaming idlewild that comes through enforced active/inactivity. It is made for Here. It is made for Now.

There is a palpable change in the air as they pass over the border of the bawn; this sense of stretching, reaching. The world left behind seems to fade, and then they are inside the narrow warren of the city's streets. Not just the city's streets here, but the memory of them, old alleys with resonance still bleed through here where they have been built over, torn down, destroyed to make way for the great, vast corridors of elevated highways or sweeping block-wide office parks.

The bawn fades behind them, and with it that sense of expansion defined both by the presence of Maelstrom, the promise of near-wholeness at the Caern's heart, and the sense of distance, the great sweep of the plains present - at least in memory - at the water's edge. Above them, the city glows, cool blue from the weaver's electric currents where the dark blot of wyrmtaint has not suffocated that sense of light, entirely. There is a particular corner, and then another, and then Sorrow pauses once, her flanks heaving, her lupine head canted sidelong as if listening to the hum along the wires.

And then she charges forward again, skirting the pristine clockworks at the heart of the weaver's territory downtown, where the faces of skyscrapers are covered with webbing so think they would be calcifed in half a heart-beat, leading them with more - wary - caution than Waking Dream may have remembered above the edges of the Wyrm's territory. Sorrow moves swiftly here, but goes not charge ahead heedlessly. Follow she tells them, sharply when they approach the dark lands. - full of care. Watch me.

There are places where she streaks, and places where she slinks; pathways she avoids after a still, sharp look down the moon-lit street at the things lingering there. Her scent is sharp in the wind, full of caution, alert, dominant, protective. And so it goes.

[Sorrow] Dex + Stealth
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10

[Sorrow] Stamina
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10

[Waking Dream] And so it goes.

Waking Dream disappears, now and again. But She Who Offers Sorrow can scent her - never far away, never far ahead, never far behind. As for Dreams in Summer Snow, he seems to be playing it just as cautious as the galliards - and he makes little more noise than they do. This is how wolves should be, hunting: ghosts; unnoticed, until they want to be unnoticed; capable of running swiftly, silently - of being little more than an apparition.

It's more difficult to hide emotions (instincts) in these shapes, and She Who Offers Sorrow can scent the other female's surprise, mild though it is, when the Get decides to play it safer, to play it cautious, play it wary rather than just going for the glory, for the intense, danger-laden almost-certainly-a-battle road another way to Hill House might have been. Maybe she even gets a whiff of approval. Then again, it's the scab - it's difficult to tell. The whole place smells foul. Indeed, She Who Offers Sorrow feels herself almost completely subsumed by instinct, by intuition:

She knows, for instance, that that street, down there, hides something foul, that there is a reason her shadow shivers, a reason that there are less spirits flitting, which has nothing at all to do with the city itself, with the high rage (we'lltearyoutopieces) of the wolves, and has all to do with danger. She knows when she passes a mound of dirt, scuffed over, claw-marked, old, that there's something unusual there, but not harmful to the garou as they pass. She knows an empty bane's nest is empty when she spies it down an alley, wavering, illusive, and that the banes are feeding off of humans elsewhere, knows where those particular banes thicken, senses a little swarm (easily bested, easily chewed - they're like gnats; like locusts; they block out the moon, they taste foul, they do damage, but not too much - not - too - much - ) just before it hits, falling over the garou, as surprised as they might've been (were?) -

She knows, also, when - two streets away from Hill House - they pick up followers, knows when the loose pack of garou become stalked by something light-footed, something fleet, watchful, something holding back but hungry, something.

[Sorrow] That sense-of-things in the distance, shading, shadowing, the way the hunger feels her, sharpens against her sense of place makes her wary, makes her alert. Sorrow plants her feet there, two blocks away from Hill House, goes still and steady, her ears cocked, her tail low and sweeping with caution, with warning to the other Garou. That there is Something Else close. Something to be wary of.

Her flanks are heavy from the run, her mind fulls of pheremones, endorphins, neurotransmitters running amuck through the folds of her animal mind and the whole world seems sharper here, the details of place resolve themselves into minutaie she'll remember later. The shape of the moon in a still pool of not-water, a dark ooze bubble up from the impression of a storm sewer, the jagged edge that defines a buildings shadow, like the crests of synchronous waves moving darkly toward a broken shore.

Behind - the wolf growls, sharply, [i]following. Holding back. Waiting. We wait here - ambush. You flank, hide in shadows there - " with a lift of her black nose, a curl of her lips against her sharp teeth, she shows: WHERE. "I wait - here. When it comes, we close around like a jaw. See?"

Sorrow will not lead these hunters to the kin-place, to Hill House.

[Sorrow] willpower!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10

[Sorrow] (switching computers!)

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Harmony followed the other two without an inkling of where they were going. He came to the city because he wanted War, not in the way the Get do, not for the Glory, but because he thought that here he could do some good, he could get a sense of how someone like him could help. He could find his place, tread the Maelstrom. That said, he hasn't been to Hill House before, and he hasn't been to a lot of the Wyrm-ridden places in Chicago.

His footfalls are light and silent as he comes after the others, and when he gets a whiff of the foulness about the three of them, something out there that is Feeding, his hackles raise just a little. In alarm, not in hostility.

He's a good follower, is Dreams in Summer Snow. When Kora growls her warning to him, he does as she bids, sidling off to the side to wait so that he may attack on her order when the time comes. He didn't expect to be participating, but it isn't hard for him to understand that this too is part of the challenge and part of what determines a Galliard's worthiness.

It's not enough just to sing of Battle, after all.

[Waking Dream] Waking Dream doesn't make a sound. You'd be a fool if you thought that's the only eloquence galliards had at their command - the eloquence of howls, of vocalizations, eerie, human-chilling, lovely and ragged, dragging the moon out've the sky; you'd be a fool, or you'd be a cub. Look at She Who Offers Sorrow. Her body tells the story of warning, long before she growls, long before she gathers the Gaians up and - without hesitation, without ornamentation - lays out a plan. As she does so, she is aware that the hunters, they who follow, have withdrawn, that they've circled, that the circle is closing, gathering the way dusk gathers into night, see? She's aware, and it prickles under her skin, the way the cloud of banes - little mouths, nibbling ineffectually at fur; little mouths, able to draw doubt out've a living thing the way a mosquito'd draw blood out've a living thing - prickled at her fur, at her senses and thoughts, without getting a firm hold. (Dreams in Summer Snow felt them more keenly, more sharply than did the galliards. Doubt sang in him, and he had to push it down; but he did.)

All to say, Waking Dream doesn't make a sound, but she circles She Who Offers Sorrow (violence [contained]), then separates and blends as well as she can into the shadows, where the other galliard indicated. And the hunters, the things that follow, they wait. Patient. Watchful. The air is alive with watching, alive with studied unconcern -- the air is a lie; so is all that unconcern.

[Sorrow] And they wait.

The street is quiet; the call of feeding banes echo in the distance, ringing out over the rooftops. The garou are quiet, slunk into the shadows, vibrating taut as stretched wire, some internal note ringing through their sense of place. They know communicate by scent here, by movement, the flick of an ear, the sweep of a tail, the swing of a sharp muzzle. The air is still, full of promise that seems - fragile somehow, and eerie peace that is nothing like the genuine thing, which is surcease. Adrenaline shoots through the blood and makes them want to move, and their muscles quiver with it, with the rage that expands with the adrenaline.

And then wait. Across the intersection, Waking Dream and Dreams in Summer Snow begin to scent Sorrow's unease. She was watching Behind but is now prickling with Out Front and that awareness - her sense of the balance between prey and predator - raises her hackles to stand in an elegant ruff around her neck.

Abruptly she moves, eases from the shadows like a dream of gray sky on a gray morning, cutting through the stylized shadows of the roof tiles.

They [want to] flank us. Ahead and behind now. Those ahead are not settled. We hit them now, hit them first. Fast. Then behind. Come.

- and so saying, she awaits the barest sign that the others have heard, acknowledged, understood, and then surges forward, her body language sharp, tail sweeping, ready to charge, ready to rage into warform. Ready to fight.

[Waking Dream] [Things In Front. Do we even notice this distressing turn of events?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 2

[Waking Dream] [Things in back: Do we notice?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6

[Sorrow] Charisma plus intimidation!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10

[Dreams in Summer Snow] He scents her unease and the hair about his neck and along his shoulders is beginning to lift, a little, the moment he does. Harmony's head swings about to look behind, his dark green eyes seeking out some enemy he can't see or smell. This is a quiet place, a decaying place, and it is a place in which most Garou are automatically ill at ease.

Her orders receive a soft noise in response, something that is not in any tongue at all but simply meant to indicate acknowledgment, that he heard her and that he is ready.

When Sorrow surges forward Harmony moves after her, summoning what Rage abides in his heart so that he too can prepare himself for war. There is not much anger in him save for that which simmers dangerously, unacknowledged and unrealized, and it is difficult for him to call it forward consciously when he has spent so much time smoothing it away. But for all that, he is still a Garou.

[Waking Dream] The things that are gathering before them are so intent on their watchfulness, on their gathering, that they don't notice any intent when the garou charge forward, she who offers sorrow in the lead. They're taken utterly, decisively by surprise. This is what they were, once upon a time: totemlings, three once-wolf-spirits, gray-furred, steel-furred, eyes the same color of metal, although one has human ears, the other has no tail. The third's chest is gaping, open, and its spine is hunched like a man's - it has a man's hand, rather than a paw, although paying attention to that man's hand causes it to blur, to flicker, until it looks like a (cat's) paw, like it can't quite settle.

They have cracks winding all through, and from the cracks they're dripping black ichor, and where the black ichor actually touches, the shadows become a little more foul, a little denser, more snarled, and the air sort've gets a whine - subliminal; it's difficult not to notice now. Their is absolutely nothing sane in their eyes. Their is absolutely nothing that looks salvageable in their eyes. They look like hunger, and their ribs show through their coats, and once She Who Offers Sorrow, Dreams in Summer Snow and Waking Dream are close enough to snap at them, to claw at them, to do whatever it is they'll do, they can hear this:

winter, raging, raging, angry, twisted, ugly - winter, raging in the wolfish wyrm-spirits' bellies, clawing at their ribs, trying to get out.

They're all very, very large, and very, very skinny, twisted out-of-shape, and being joined by a fourth. They smell like nothing at all. Their shadows are human, but bulking, two-headed - three-headed, and their shadows don't move in an echo of how they move. Their shadows wait, and only copy movement after they've seen what fruit it bears.

They don't notice the garou noticing them. And so -

[Sorrow] The Garou move together now, knotted together, a clot of rage, an organism. A pack is one thing, individuals in motion but one body, moving the way separate cells beneath one skin move - together - and loose as this group of Garou is, they are a pack tonight, in deed if not spirit. Sorrow is quiet - not silent but quiet - because silence is not in here, but here quiet is all that matters. The scent of the black ichor is sharp in her nostrils, reminds her of something strongly enough to make her stomach turn, raw. She wuffs out a breath, shakes - turns her head to growl to the others.

Take the nearest first. Use claws, do not bite. When the first is finished, we take the next. Working like a pack, which is to say: together, tearing the wyrm-wolf-spirits apart one by one, until they are ended. Then she lifts her head, muzzle swinging forward, teeth bare now, in quiet challenge, in silent threat, watching before she clears her nostrils with a whuff of are. [Beware] the winter inside, says Sorrow, at the last.

Dark winter, twisted winter - not simple hunger, but a black rot of need - not simply the absence of spring, but enduring desolation. The wyrm's winter: starved, angry, vicious and viscous, barrenness never ending. Before they charge forward, she gives them talens - because they are alone in the dark, because they are outnumbered. Because she is protecting more than her own hide when she shatters the little clay marble with Fenrir glyphs etched into the rough-worked clay in her jaw.

- a shimmer, a sense of solidity around her, and around them, if they shatter their own marbles and a supple sense of cold, the bedrock beneath the barren northern earth. Then she begins to move again, with purpose and gathering speed. Before she reaches the nearest spirit, she surges into her Crinos form and -

[OOC: soak talen! plus a soak talen for Harmoney and one for Lila. She rarely uses them, but circumstances warrant! 2. Resist Pain. 3. Crinos! charge with claws and stuff.]

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Generally, Harmony's battle tactics are not very complex. They involve pulling on his direwolf skin and charging in to bite things until his Rage fails him or they die, and so it is quite lucky for him that Sorrow has thought to caution him against this very thing, that she is leading in more than just charging ahead at the front. A moment later, when the ichor clogs his nostrils, he understands why this is what she has told him to do.

He's still unwise to the ways of the Wyrm, the little tricks it uses to unweave the world around it. Grateful, he assumes his warform instead, his gangly adolescent limbs looking almost too long for him in Crinos, as though he should still be able to hunch forward and run on all fours comfortably.

It is not a challenge for him to remain silent. The boy is naturally a contained person, even though he is friendly and outgoing.

There is nothing sane and nothing salvageable: this is for the best, as in the past, Dreams in Summer Snow has had second thoughts about felling his enemies. It is difficult for him to charge in and rend things with his claws, to see the ichor that wells up around them when they dig in and tear away, to feel the give as flesh and muscle, even that of a spirit, part and turn to rot in his hands.

He tells himself that it's mercy.

[Sorrow] Dex plus ze brawl! in Crinos.
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10 Re-rolls: 1

[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Dex + Brawl]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4

[Sorrow] Dex plus ze brawl!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 10 Re-rolls: 1

[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Dex + Brawl!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 9

[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Again!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9

[Sorrow] Und again!
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 8

[Waking Dream] [DOOM?]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8

[Waking Dream] [DOOM 2?]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

[Waking Dream] [Hallp?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9

[Waking Dream] - and if it isn't mercy, precisely, at least it's merciful the first time. They fall on it, the two galliards and the philodox, and it is dead before it can make a sound. Waking Dream's claws sank into its side, Sorrow's claws tore out its heart. It has no time. The philodox's claws don't quite connect, but he feels as if he's tears snow out've its belly; perhaps he wavered because he wasn't quite so certain that it was unsalvageable, and perhaps that's when he noticed its eyes. Not of Gaia. Not ever going to be of Gaia again. What memory of Gaia there might be is wrecked, twisted, and a perversion. Waking Dream whuffs a warning -

Don't look in their eyes

- when they all fall on the second. The second wolf-thing, winter-howling-in-its-belly, does not go down as swiftly, bites at Sorrow, tears into her - although not enough, not enough to do more than barely scratch, barely tastes blood - and then Sorrow severs its head, and Waking Dream tears a hole in its flank, and Dreams in Summer Snow rips off one of its legs, and it makes a keening sound, and though it nip, nips at Waking Dream, its teeth glances off of her (silver [luna blessed]) hide, and when its compatriot snarls and flings itself on top of Dreams in Summer Snow, sinking its teeth into the scruff of his neck, attempting to drag him downward, pull him away, it hurts Harmony, but the hurts heal, the wounds re-knit, flesh re-formed almost before it's savaged open again. And there was the fourth, remember? The fourth hulks larger, bigger - still larger -

and lifts its muzzle to howl help that much more swiftly to them.

Sorrow is free, Waking Dream is already moving to help Harmony, and there are who knows how many (more than this) behind them.

[Sorrow] The fourth howls and so does Sorrow. The forth begins to howl - to call aid closer, and she is shaking free of the third dead-thing, its severed head rolling, still avoiding whatever raw secrets crawl behind its dead eyes, whatever barrenness lingers there, the sackcloth and salt-ash winter it promises, the one that never ends. Her howl is fierce, ferocious, a challenge. This one is dead and more will follow. it says. There is a raw hint of victory, the dead opened on the ground before them, and a greater edge of threat, if you come we end you too. spiraling into her voice, twinned with victory. Her howl shears away and rises against the howling-other, meant to drown, bury the call-for-aid. Meant to make it desperate, the last gasp of the dying, the last trap of the dead.

Then the beast turns, sizzling black ichor flying from her claws, and launches herself at the fourth, the last remaining wyrmwolf, the blood of his fellows fouling her claws. She's going for the throat, the mouth, the tongue. She's meaning to turn his howl into a yelp of distress, into a dying cry.

(1. Call of the Wyld to augment threat. 2. RAWR. 3. ATTACK!!!!!!!)

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Don't look in their eyes, says Lila, but it's a little too late, he already did it the once when he was searching for some sign of whether or not it could be helped. It's difficult for him, doing this, even when he knows that these creatures are not of Gaia. It's difficult for him just because they have living forms and they feel like things feel when they can feel pain, and even if he isn't thinking consciously about the suffering his claws are inflicting, there is something in him that just. can't. do it.

Until one grabs him by the scruff of his neck.

And then the part of him that is Wolf remembers. He snarls and twists in its jaws, trying to disengage himself, unbothered now when his claws find flesh and rip away. It's a touch strangled with his skin pulled tight around his vocal cords. He kicks with one of his back legs, trying to shake himself free, tearing away when he can't.

The wounds are not lasting. By the time he has gotten himself free - either by tearing away or by fighting free - he launches himself toward the fourth, and this time there is no hesitation.

[Sorrow] Charisma + Intimidation
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 10

[Sorrow] Brawl!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 8, 9

[Dreams in Summer Snow] [Brawl]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 8, 9

[Waking Dream] [Bad Guyz - how many flee?]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9

[Sorrow]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 5, 5, 7

[Waking Dream] When Dreams in Summer Snow is free, when the third is dead, when Sorrow's chilling (terrifying [war]) howl is no longer carrying strong, stronger, no longer swallowing the winterwolfthing's own howl for aid, no longer devouring it, riding over it, burning stronger, fiercer, victorious -

Waking Dream has turned to face what's behind them. What's behind them - nine once-wolf things with winter in their belly; it takes Sorrow and Dreams in Summer Snow effort to take the howling wolf-thing down, because he is so large, so furious, almost frenzied. His teeth find purchase on her shoulder and neck, she is just not quite quick enough, and it is cold. And the cold slinks down, sinks through her, before his teeth are dislodged by Dreams in Summer Snow, before the cold disperses into you're alive! warmth. Dreams in Summer Snow finds himself not-overwhelmed. His claws go precisely where he directs them to: and he - too - is lethal. Although it's Sorrow takes the wolf-things throat, mouth, tongue after, crushes the howl into something faint

a wheeze, breath leaving, a rattle.

But - behind. There are nine of the once-wolf things with winter howling, hungry, tainted, Ravenous in their belly, and they're all set to attack. Three are hulking larger, and larger, in the way that these things have, and their ribs are gaping, and between their ribs: a blizzard, and somebody, something, crying lost, some almost-human voice, some voice that sounds like people (garou [kin]) they've known and loved and lost, Kora, Kora, didn't you have a friend down below the city, back when you became more than human, didn't you have someone else, Harmony, Harmony, and also, Lila, Lila, don't just hide there, and then the fourth is crushed,

and Sorrow's howl hangs over them. When Sorrow and Harmony turn, they see their death. And all nine of them flee.

Waking Dream's muscles bunch to follow, but the galliard (barely, just) checks herself, giving the challenging galliard a lambent glance.

[Waking Dream] [And none of y'all sustained wounds that need tending, yo. Y'all are good.]
to Dreams in Summer Snow, Sorrow

[Sorrow] The wounds are healing; the warm dissolves into the heat of her blood and the fourth falls. Each moment is sketched out from the rest, framed in staccato impressions of battle. Rage makes them move faster, rage makes time crawl; they have all the time in the world. This blow and that one, the vicious fight scours the hard packed ground beside, and the ichor steams on the asphalt like acid tears. Somewhere deep underground, the poisoned, quiescent, slumbering earth turns over. This is not a victory, just a holding pattern. Four are dead, more roam, full of winter, the promise of time's end, gray clouds and gray snow and barren earth scattered with skeletons of the starving dead.

The Children of Gaia might imagine the Fenrir Valhalla like that: neverending battle in boundless winter, but it is otherwise, too: golden wheat fat in the fields, golden tables groaning with the harvest, golden voices raucous with laughter, and golden cups raised high in memory of the honored dead.

Sorrow meets Waking Dream's gleaming gaze briefly. In this skin, her eyes are amber, shot through with striations of honey and brown, banked fires visible through wavering antique glass. Then, the moment passes. The Crinos wheels about, melts into her four-legged warform, direwolf, and charges snarling, snearing, howling in wake of the fleeing winter-wolves. It is easy to imagine, in that moment, a Get of Fenris flinging herself into the hunt, charging forward into the fray, damn the odds, the territory, the objective, losing herself in the glory of battle, and that urge is a raw thing inside her, that edged promise of release.

They were made to kill.

Instead she stops short - a half block away, more than - dire warning wordless in her body language, dominant now, the tail high and hackles raised, the snarling mouth open with a enduring threat. I will kill you all. One hesitates, another slows, and she starts after, harrying them apart in the distance, driving them to scatter into the scab, to flee and not to regroup, not to regroup and return, not to follow.

Satisfied, at last, that they are gone, Sorrow comes padding back to the others, quiet now, shaking free that scent of the scab from her fur as if she could rid herself of it when it is all around her.

They are gone now, she tells them. And we are close. We go.

So saying, she turns and melts back into lupus, picking up the pace, circling - at last - toward Hill House,

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Dreams in Summer Snow is not aggressive. Sorrow bounds after the fleeing wyrmwolves, her warform changing shape without shifting mass as her heavy direwolf paws strike the ground, and Harmony stops, tapering down those instincts that tell him to pursue and kill.

There is no challenge from him. He just remains, loose and ready, in case they be required to address some other threat, to charge after and assist Kora. But the Garou have been victorious for now, even though the reinforcements outnumbered them three to one. He waits, proud and assured and ready to defend, but he does not charge after her.

And when she returns to them, his hands touch the ground and his shape falls back into something smaller, with no lingering traces of the boy.

He follows her back toward Hill House.

[Sorrow] Ath Plus Dex (in hispo!)
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10

[Waking Dream] [pause!]

[Sorrow] (eeee, thank you!)