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] 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!)

[Calamity] (Alright:

Welcome to the Scene folks. My Name's Harv, I'll be your ST for the evening, which is Chinese for 'this is my do not fuck with face'. In all honesty, I'm not envisioning anything thoroughly violent happening tonight but given how a lot of these things are dependent on Character responses and interactions the possibility still exists SO...this scene is marked as a Skull 'n Bones to cover that eventuality.

The following rules will be in place throughout the scene:

1) One Post at a time, following the Room Order. Let's see if we can keep posts to a maximum of fifteen minutes per person, though that isn't a hard set time limit. If, for some IC reason, you feel the need to interject outside of the Posting order (I.E - Asked a pertinent question that needs an immediate answer etc.) than try to keep the response to a sentence so as not to drag on and muddle up the process. I may also be asking for a post or a pause here or there to catch up with folks or drop my own PMs and posts intermittently but that's my dispersion and you will be notified prior to the post.

2) Pay attention to the Chat. That goes for all of us, me as well. Any queries or questions that you wish to ask can be ventured there. If you have a private question or seek some knowledge specifically for your character, feel free to IM me. All of these are valid methods. Try to avoid PM'ing in the chat please, except if I ask you specifically for a roll in PM.

3) This scene is classified as a Moral Question. This means that dice rolls are Not the defining factor nor should they be considered the answer to a question.

4) Express, Expound and Enjoy and hopefully we can finish this out at a decent hour heh.

I'll be posting an Intro to get everyone together momentarily.)

[Calamity] Convergences.

The circumstance under which, parties not normally associated with one another through time, experience or relationship, come together to perform an act or event not otherwise planned, performed or practiced, leading toward a Goal of considerable weight, value and meaning.

The invisible threads connecting previously unconnected persons and places, achieving a fundamental change or alteration.

A subject of Fate and/or Destiny.

Thursdays in the Garou Nation.

* * * * *

There is a humidity in the air, a vague threat of rain in overcast skies that have long held that clutch in Chicago. Dreariness and gunmetal are a fond pair within the skies of the Cityscape and the Garou of Maelstrom's Sept know well the hardships, tensions and stress that comes with being part of this protectorate. One almost has to relinquish and let go of that sense of normalcy and comfort that might interject in the life of a Garou, because here there is no reprieve.

Every moment is a demand for more. Every second, a potential for sacrifice. Thus, grim resolution and stoicism are considered a Pride. Weathering and Endurance, a source of Solace. One does not bellow or scream defiance here, they stare and stand. Stare and Stand.

Each of those gathered today has been brought to the outskirts of Town for varying reasons:

The Metis with Secrets, the Lupus in service to Great Fenris, the Daughter of the Wolf~Lord and the Young Law~bringer of the Peace Tribe can feel him in the distance. An ache that defines the heart, gives formula to the ribs and flushes into the stomach with profound discomfort. The tug and pull draws from several parts of the landscape of Chicago and yet each arrives within minutes of each other, perhaps even seconds. From various parts of the city, they come, rushing on two legs or four.

The Call itself is something of distress. Or...triumph? It isn't entirely clear just what it is, but within it, is housed something further than the Garou lungs are capable of. More and brittle all at once. A Terrifying clarion rich with the stuff Terror dreams of each night. It skates the aether and tugs on the umbral travelers, each caught within the spirit world, and draws them to this:

A Hillside. Spotty grass over hard packed dirt, leading down a gradual and infantile hill into a broad and inky plain, which comes to an end in the glaringly inaccurate stretch of dark woods that...does not belong on Chicago's edge. Not here, according to any map looked up in the physical. Yet there it stands, a half mile distant.

The moonless sky provides little respite, no matter the threat of it's Fullness, yet the open terrain before them houses little cover or promise of threat, still...

The dark, the open and a Baleful Howl in the winds above is enough to still any but the greatest of fools from simply charging out alone to explore.

[Barks Secrets] This Metis had a job these days. A pack,a totem to please. It was an unfamiliar sensation for him. Certainly he'd been a part of a pack more than once before, but these were short lived occurrences without any strong bonds forged, and it had been quite some time sine he'd felt the pressure to please a Totem spirit (beyond Rat, of course). It wasn't that he cared particularly for the Silver Fang or the Black Fury, but they fed the totem, and the totem gave him more strength, more air in his lungs and more sureness to his step. His thoughts were clearer, his eyes were sharper... hell, he was pretty sure that even his skin was less dry and his hair less oily (that, of course, was an illusion).

So he was in the Umbra staking out, keeping an eye on what could easily become a festering Wyrmhole within the city if given a chance, waiting for the chance to give his pack a stab at some Glory, to give themselves a name and to give Momentum a little more of a shove so it rolled faster and happier with them. The night had been dull, drab, and Winston was ready to put his tail over his nose and take a nap when a chill cut through his spine and seeped into his chest. His breath wheezed noisily, he stared at the horizon, and the chill tugged him toward the city's boundaries.

Not one to argue with the Spirit or the Wolf, he went.

Surely enough, others had felt the call as well. Winston stalked on all fours in his birth form, a tall, long, Crinos made of sinew and patchy brown fur, with ridiculously long fingers and toes and ears that tended to flop. Sickly muddy yellow-brown eyes hopped from wolf to wolf, those nearer and those still coming up the horizon. He stopped to squat a couple dozen yards from the foot of the hill, scratched at his lower abdomen with wicked black claws, and spoke in a way that seemed drawling and lazy even in the mostly guttural language of the Garou.

"You all felt it too, huh?"

[Sorrow] Int + Expression
to Calamity

[Bone-Grinder] Simon was here. Dark clothing covered his arms, legs, and feet, and a bandanna was worn around his neck, tied tightly enough to be pulled up to obscure the features of his face. It fit him well, what he might identify as the "Urban Ninja" look others would just identify as the "Burgler" look. His nostrils flared at the air the second he heard the howl...

Garou sometimes missed the importance of their senses, sense of smell in particular, relying all too often on their sight without ever realizing how important a keen sense of smell is to a wolf. It was a tool that led them to their prey and warned them of dangers. You might not always see an individual but their scent lingers in the air long after they are gone like a memory left behind for others to glimpse provided they know how.

He stood fast without making the slightest hint of a motion. His eyes scanned the darkness as he drew in the scents and sounds around him. There was an air of seriousness surrounding the Full Moon as he assessed the situation to the best of his ability. Death was an all too real reality for their kind, so each and every step made must be made cautiously.

"Naw... I was just standing around staring ominously into the darkness. It's a Shadow Lord thing."He finally says as a smile takes shape on his face. His eyes slip towards Winston and then back to the Woods."Not a good place to be... I don't like it. Walking into someone or something else's territory... Without prior knowledge of the area."He says this with a little shrug of his shoulders. He was a Full Moon he rarely cared much for any situation he walked into. However, this one had the air of a trap surrounding it which was an even less welcome feeling.

[Dreams in Summer Snow] The routine defense of a Sept is a bit different than Harmony had imagined it would be, when he was far out in the suburbs and thought about coming to live in the city. He had imagined constant assaults and skirmishes, with suicidal fomori running headlong into the Sept, and then the brave Garou would be summoned to the defenses. He'd imagined that he'd walk outside the bawn and see corruption. In short, he'd imagined it to be more like the stories the Galliards tell, where they cut out the long periods of waiting and the parts in between where one is just left to be human.

Adamidas is out of town. She was the first person he really connected with in Chicago, and so for the first time since arriving in the city he is on his own. He's all right with that, though. He makes friends easily.

He's in his room at the Brotherhood when it calls him, watching a movie, and young though he is he isn't one to ignore his duties. So he claws his way into the Umbra and he goes, arriving at the hill not long after the Bone Gnawer. Dreams in Summer Snow emerges in Hispo, his fur glossy and thick and brown, and steps over toward the Ragabash and the Ahroun.

"Felt something, yeah."

[Fire-Claws] Four legs good....

His hunting tonight seemed to provide him little this evening. Even with Luna strong, deep into her pregnancy, his rage and howl seem to scare away any thought of a possible kill. The wyrm has feel silent this evening. The wyrm fears that which kills by a full moon, the wyrm hides back in its hives awaiting darker times.

But there are other things besides hunting to enjoy. Duty is strong, but to something is just as important. Protecting one's family, one's pack, one's tribe. To revel in the joy of a great kill, to sing of those who gaurantee a new generation, to feast and drink and live. You fight and die so that you and yours may truly live. It was instinctual, something even the monkeys could understand, some of them anyway.

His hunting pattern changes half way through his night. Hunting for a proper kill to hunting down those instincts that drive him here, outside of the scab. Away from the weaver tech and wyrm taint and their horrific offspring known as modernization, to the inky darkness he has not seen before. But he is still new to this region, this territory held many new places.

And the lupus bounds towards the hillside, following the felling in his gut. His fur a motley assortment, made mostly of grey as any proud Fenrir, mixed with red and black. Brown eyes moving in the darkness, as he gathered with the rest of them. He yips and cuffs in response to those not so naturally inclinded. The monkey born and the sin-born are not so intuned with such communication even if they feel it. They cannot truly feel it.
{ws}
"Garou. Stronger than normal natural howl. Aided by spirits. Seems it wants something away, scaring. Is is renowned more than any of us."

His eyes look around, before finally comin up on his Jarl. His attention focused on her now. Only her.
{ws}
"Seems it hunts. Found prey. Making it fearful as it should be."

[Sorrow] The note finds her umbral, in the hard packed land that is her territory, human-skinned along the banks of the river. There's that fat, full moon riding over the city now, clear and bright in the back of her mind even when she cannot see it. The world feels sharper on nights like this, more pointed, more present. The moonlight is so strong it casts shadows where the city's lights are not so bright as to drown it out. Across the river, electrical impulses gleam and sing along the twisted, knotted webs of the weaver's domain, skeining over huge, faceless skyscrapers, an oppressive tangle of soulless.

She runs through the city, underneath the humming pattern-web, the blue light gleaming in her fine gray fur. In her feral form, Sorrow appears almost adolescent - slender and alert, with soft paws and rich, amber eyes. Her scent is sharply female, though - mature, alive.

--

At the edge of the wood-that-should-not-be, Sorrow gathers with the rest of them, a sharp whuff of greeting as she circles, taking in their scents. Her tail is high as she greets Fire-Claws, before she melts out of her feral form, into her human skin.

Human, she's a young woman, likely older than all of them, but young nonetheless. Her hair is a pale blonde, touched silver, platinum in the light of a full moon, and it falls in errant coils around her head and shoulders, the usual hairbands lost with the change of forms. Her clothes are worn, practical - jeans, a long-sleeved thermal under a black t-shirt, and a pair of black shit-kickers. There are leather bracelets around her wrists, and a thin band of braided leather around her neck.

A glance at Fire-Claws, her eyes - deep blue, the color of twilight - just shadows here, except where they catch the light. "A gift," she confirms, when the lupus is done speaking. "a Galliard gift, Call of the Wyld carried the howl to us. He's using another gift to of some sort to terrify whoever he hunts. I couldn't say for certain, though."

Another look to Fire-Claws. "Can you catch a scent - or track the sound?"

[Calamity] (Skip me this round folks.)

[Barks Secrets] Shame wasn't necessarily the word behind Winston's behavior, he didn't maintain his birth form to remind everyone what he was born as, that he was a crime against the world by existence alone. Shame wasn't present even by a portion in his voice or posture, he seems to forget what he is, what with the certainty and lazy half-confidence that he kept about him. However, despite that, with all the other Garou about, even if he was over all other heads simply by being the only one in Crinos, he kept his own head ducked just a little, his shoulders and back hunched, and his tail low.

He watched blandly as all others arrived, then moved from his squatting sit to stand up fully, moving those deadly scratching claws from his lower belly up to his collarbone. It wouldn't be surprising if he had fleas. With his chest at the height of a few heads, be it the bottom of his ribs or the top, the labored wheezing was more noticeable, scraping and scratching in his chest and rattling in his throat. Ears flicked forward and out, as though he could find trace elements of the soul-sound that had drawn them all here.

"Well, it could be a trap, but don't you think they'd draw us somewhere with fewer routes of escape were that the case?" Mud-colored eyes dropped down to Kora, focused on her face, then jumped back up to the hill crest. "I can scout ahead if you need."

Not like that was his job or anything.

[Bone-Grinder] Simon takes in the information as it is fed to him and listens on his own. Every sight and sound surrounding them had some degree of importance and he did his best to read all that he could. After all... A Black Spiral Dancer was just as capable of summoning them with the call as anyone else. So it did not change his feeling that such a thing could be a trap but there was more to this.

"It's more about getting your enemy somewhere you are familiar with and have had time to prepare. A wolf who knows the woods is just as deadly as a dude trying to run you down in a truck."He says with a shrug of his shoulders. His eyes turning back towards Winston."Well we're not gonna figure anything out standing around here all evening. Scout up ahead and the rest of us will keep up behind you. You see anything you fall back to our position and let us know if something is coming, yip or hollar like you got scared... But don't let them know that you're leading them back to us."He says with a shrug."If there's something out there I'd like to hope we can get the jump on it still even if it more than likely expects us."

With that much said he looks at the others curiously. Sizing each one up before turning to look back towards the woods."That sound like a workable plan?"He asks the others to make certain they were on the same page.

[Fire-Claws] His tail wags slowly as he listens to Kora's queston. But he knows better, that was not a question of his ability, it was a command for his skill. Maybe Sparrow told her of how he hunted that stag with Rainer and Night's Reprieve, maybe it was natural for monkey born to expect if of their lupine brothers. No matter the reason, he was already on it. His nose first to the air, then to the ground, back to the air as his muscles begin to flex and tense. His answer back towards his Jarl first before evening thinking of addressing the... well...whatever Barks~in~Secrets was.
{ws}
"Have his scent. Easy to track. But rain threatens in time.

He is still curious of the other scent, but it meant little to him at this moment. However he does go back to the one that seemed to want to lead. Narrowed eyes set on the other as well, as if he knew better than his Jarl. A growl nearly escaping his lips, nearly.
to Sorrow

[Fire-Claws] His tail wags slowly as he listens to Kora's queston. But he knows better, that was not a question of his ability, it was a command for his skill. Maybe Sparrow told her of how he hunted that stag with Rainer and Night's Reprieve, maybe it was natural for monkey born to expect if of their lupine brothers. No matter the reason, he was already on it. His nose first to the air, then to the ground, back to the air as his muscles begin to flex and tense. His answer back towards his Jarl first before evening thinking of addressing the... well...whatever Barks~in~Secrets was.
{ws}
"Have his scent. Easy to track. But rain threatens in time.

He is still curious of the other scent, but it meant little to him at this moment. However he does go back to the one that seemed to want to lead. Narrowed eyes set on the other as well, as if he knew better than his Jarl. A growl nearly escaping his lips, nearly.

[Sorrow] While they talk, Sorrow pulls back her pale hair, twists it around itself, ties it out of her face, back against the nape of her neck. She's quiet, still, scanning the edge of the wood-that-should-not-be, listening to the whisper of the wind in the air, the lingering echo of the terrifying howl. "Look - " she tells them, gesturing down the hill toward the dark march of trees. " - there aren't any spirits there. Maybe they've been frightened away by the gift. Maybe it's something else - though it's hard to imagine that a Garou's howl could frighten away living spirits of trees.

"I don't want to be too far separated. You're Barks-Secrets, yeah?" This to Winston, whom she remembers only from the moots. " - scout ahead. We'll follow, down to the edge of the woods at least. Don't get too far head of us, and don't do anything especially stupid. Bring back whatever you can, and don't get caught. Go in lupus, I think. Follow the scent that Fire-Claws found into the woods, don't flail around if you lose it. Let's go."

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Harmony is not much of a tracker. He isn't much of a strategian, either: most of what he knows has been picked up on the fly in Chicago. So here, he is more than happy to defer to the Garou who are much older and more experienced with such things. Most of his time as a Garou has been spent acting as a mediator and judge, not on the battlefield.

Still in Hispo, he looks back and forth between the others as they talk about sending Barks Secrets ahead of the rest of them.

"If we end up needing a healer, I can do that," he says. "I'll keep an eye on the rest of you."

[Calamity] The Five that are that. Five and not one as a Pack should be, gather themselves together and decide. Forward...

Maelstrom's Garou are nothing if not cautious. Time, experience and circumstance have made them this way. As easily a trap, painted in their minds as anything else, if not a little easier perhaps. Does the Garou in question present them a foolhardy errand? Or is there genuine trouble afoot? Or something else entirely?

Barks~Secrets is told to move forward and do what his Auspice demands. The Garou remain on the hillside, as the Ragabash vanishes down the grassy and hard packed dirt. Soon enough he is little more than a moving shadow and eventually, the cloud cover above and the darkness of the woods beyond, he is not even that.

[Fire-Claws] He begins to pace now, the smell still lingering in his nose. This was no claith they heard howl. This was something more, something more powerful than any one of them. The rage that surrounding him was pungent, overwhelming even as far from him as they were. His fur bristles with potential. He did not think he would get a chance to hunt tonight, now he has a wonderful opportunity to hunt with his Jarl. It might not have been the best time but some reason he remembered it now and figured he should tell Kora.
{ws}
"Found Tongue-Twister. Returned weapon to her. Had words. She will see to them. Will not touch kin."

Strange things wolves come to think of. No real linear process of thought, just whatever comes to their mind at the time. But there was logic, wolf logic to it afterall. And with that he pads at the hard dirt, stil lingering over the scent that came with the garou. Scuffing up, possibly, more scents of dust and dried blood, death in its true, natural state.

[Bone-Grinder] Simon's form shifts. What was once a man standing in dark clothing is soon replaced by a wall of fur and muscle blacker than the night sky. The sound of muscle and bone popping into place as his body shifts and swells and erupts from within himself is not entirely unfamiliar to the other Garou. Soon enough the beast was standing in it's Hispo form on all fours and sniffing at the floor.

"You see anything... Lead it back to us."He once more reassures Winston. The responsibility of the New Moon was a rough one but at least it could feel safe in knowing that the other Garou would leap upon anything that brought it the tiniest hint of trouble. Simon's ear twitched and it looked about at the others and then back towards the woods. He still didn't like any of this but it was his job not to like it. It was his job to see the potential danger in anything and everything and think up how to best confront it. The life of an Ahroun was not so simple as throw oneself blindly into combat. See it as one might he knew the reality... The Ahroun not only threw himself into combat but he was also the one whose advice would either save or end the lives of his peers. Everything he said had to be carefully weighed and understood... In the end however it came down to a balancing act. Maximizing the damage inflicted against the enemy while minimizing the damage inflicted upon the Garou. A healthy 5,000:1 ratio was about the right number... Sadly it tended to be more like 5:1.

He watches Winston and the area he is about to head into curiously. In the meantime listening to Fire Claws to see if the wolf decides to make any sense. His primary interest, however, lay on his single most important role. Making certain each and every garou present here makes it to whatever they call home tonight.

[Sorrow] Here they are in the skins they were born in - the feral lupus, the human Jarl. She has a certain easily physicality, dark eyes shaded in the stillness. What a strange group is ranged here. Harmony in Hispo, who will be their healer. Kora glances at him; does that thing that humans do with their mouths and smiles. It's not a feral smile, not an intimation of threat, a show of teeth. Easy, " - thank you." she says, her voice throaty and assured.

Then, watching Winston disappear down the hill, she sinks to her haunches, balanced close to the horizon, her forearms braced against her thighs, her feet flexed in the heavy boots balanced forward on the balls of her feet. Thoughtlessly, she pushes the cuffs of her thermal up her forearms, runs the edge of her thumb over the bracelets she wears. The materials are natural, the adornment slight, earthy and eclectic - hemp rope, bits of string and line, suede and leather, braided thinly, twisted around her wrists, part of her now.

"It was the honorable thing to do," Kora says, quiet, speculative. "I need to find her, too. I've seen other of her kin in the city - one I met the first day I met Cigney - who have had no contact from her, no tribemates to turn to, no knowledge that the city is at war."

[Barks Secrets] [Dexterity + Stealth +1Momentum]

[Barks Secrets] [HAH! *Whisks behind curtain*]

[Dreams in Summer Snow] That howl continues on, and the Philodox tilts his head as the sound carries, as he listens to the music beneath it reverberate and waver. They aren't just a primal thing, the cries the Garou give. Most Galliards make an art out of sculpting sound into something more, something expressive. This one certainly strikes a certain chord in Harmony as he listens, his head tilted.

"It sounds kind of sad," Harmony says to the others. "The howl, I mean. Kind of bittersweet and...nostalgic, I guess," he says, with a look toward the others. "Like they're mourning."

But he doesn't know for sure what that mourning might be for. He just hears it, tells the others, even though he has no idea why they've been summoned or what they're here to do. The mention of the Kin just draws a sad silence from him, but he has nothing to add.

[Calamity] ...And suddenly, only a minute or so after Winston departs from the Hillside, a few seconds after Harmony's revelation, the standing Garou hear the sharp and abrupt end of the Howl, the timor of that Fearing sensation beginning to dissipate with the absence.

[Sorrow] Perception + expression.
to Calamity

[Calamity] Kora hears the wispy trail of something vaguely mournful. Like the distant loss of someone or something, long since laid to bed. Accepted for what it was. It is not grief, something recent, nor sorrow, something pondered, simply a Memory, a distant ache with no real answer or question.

Something that was and is no longer.
to Sorrow

[Fire-Claws] His head turns up to Kora as she speaks about kin and not knowing there is a war in the city. It seemed to him that most did not know a war was brewing and they could be collateral damage in a blink of the eye. He also met another Fianna kin, a strange little kin. A monkey kin not like other monkey kin.

Maybe he should use their given names. Yeah and give the Spider Bitch Queen even more power. Not all too likely.

But with the howl starting to give way, the sound moving to quiet. He becomes unnerved. His body no longer waiting, padding. He can feel it in his skin, they wait far too long. He can feel it, the howl was a call to them. And now they have lost the moment.

[Bone-Grinder] Simon waits until an appropriate distance has been made between them and Winston before moving to follow in the direction of the creature's scent. His keen nose searches for the scent of the wolf when he manages to disappear. He pauses to look once back at the others. Nothing needed to be said, he was following behind the New Moon as was promised.

He perked his ears when Harmony chimes up and he files the information away. This might very well be a funeral... In which case they might not be invited, and yet they were invited. If these were, in fact, Garou letting out such a howl then they knew full well what they were doing by unleashing that howl. They knew others would hear and they knew others would come. Inversely if they were the enemy they would still know exactly the same. There was little difference in the overall knowledge what differed was how the situation would need to be handled.

Right now Winston was his largest concern. The slightest hint of a peep from the wolf and Simon would be off. It was the deal they made. You scout ahead and we get your back. That and keeping his ears peeled for any unusual sounds. So for the most part the wolf appeared silent and focused and tensed.

Silence was good. It allowed the Full Moon the opportunity to not only breathe in the scents in the air but to draw in the sounds.

[Sorrow] "Not like they're mourning, not precisely." This is why she lingers in her human skin. The promise of complex thought, the shifting association of words, language, a skin around her framed thoughts. "Just remembering, something lost, long past, the ache that lingers after grief has gone, the hollow underneath the skin."

The woman's gaze is fixed on the horizon, the dark trees still against the shadows.

She looks sidelong at Fire Claws, then Harmony. "Let's go."

- and then she is leaning forward as if she intended to roll down the hill. Instead, the Skald changes, her body rippling outward and then inward, all the way down to her fleet lupus form. Soft footed on the wiry grass of the slope, she pads down toward the border of the trees, in the wake of the ragabash and shadow lord. Tail is straight, her ears are returned forward. Under the moon, her fur shines with good health, her now amber-eyes are bright with it.

[Dreams in Summer Snow] When the howl dies away Harmony straightens, shattered out of whatever reverie he might have been entering, and his shaggy Hispo head nods once to Kora once she gives voice to what she heard in the song. She put it better than he could have - then again, she's a Galliard, and expressing such sentiments is part of the role of her Auspice.

As Sorrow's form ripples and rolls down into something four-footed and lupine, Harmony pads after her and Fire-claws. He has some of the same readiness about him that Simon does, though it isn't because he's preparing to leap into combat at the first sign of dismay from Barks-Secrets; he's prepared to go after him with healing hands if need be. Harmony has never drawn much of a differentiation between his pack mates, those close to him, and other Garou who just happened to be around in need of help.

He keeps his eyes on the horizon, and he keeps watch on the others to make sure they're all together.

[Calamity] The Four Garou come trailing in Winston's wake, drawing across the landscape even as the cloud's above seem to...thicken. The darkness is not as oppressive as it could be. Should, probably be. The Garou find little effort in tracking Winston's trail, both his scent and the vague impressions of clawed toes digging the dirt, barely recognizable unless you knew who and what you were looking for.

The four are moving for no more than two dozen yards, a quarter of the way to the Treeline, when something begins to bulge and finally emerge from the Treeline itself:

He is massive. Glabro is the sprout of hair along bare forearms and bestial flush of features is any indication (jutting jaw, sloped brow, bushy brows) and a thick mane of brown hair, tangled up in thick dreaded curtains that fall around face and over shoulders and back. The vest at his shoulders and chest is barely large enough to contain the impressive girth that stretches him well broad, both to the side and out front in the form of a considerable belly.

His gait is slow and easy, lumbering almost yet the strength with each step...in the way he carries the massive double-headed Axe, who's head is as large as a Crinos' torso, as well as the slung over Hispo shape of the Ragabash, dangling at his shoulder by the nape of Winston's scruffy neck...tells stories of cracking mountains, damming rivers.

He marches through the woodland, pushing trees aside like saplings; they crumble in his wake, inviting a hollow into the darkness of the treeline itself, ignored for the most part by the broad monstrosity that marches forward to meet the Four Garou. It's only as they draw to within twenty yards of one another, that he Stops and, Winston still dangling, hoists the Ragabash forward to hang in the air and shake about rather unceremoniously.

"This Shit~Seed belong to you lot then?"

And whump! Winston is dropped from his grasp to land on his feet or ass, whichever the Ragabash seemed more capable with.

[Sorrow] Int + Rituals!
to Calamity

[Barks Secrets] Winston may as well be a slain boar for all intents and purposes in setting this scene.

He rides into view on the shoulder of this gigantic Glabro of a man (and that says something, that the Glabro is carrying the Hispo like a sack of potatoes), limp with zero fight in him, but the sound of his labored wheezing is the next loudest thing to this mountain man's approach itself. It's been bothering the giant's ear, but rest assured that was the only thing to. The instant he had been picked up, he went limp, his tail curled between his legs, and he was silent.

You know, he was thinking,[/i] paper trees aren't so bad. You could re-use the leaves. And if I could breathe, this ride wouldn't be so bad either. I don't have to walk.[/i]

Then there was the rumble of a voice in his side, and he was thrown down onto the ground. His feet may normally find ground first, but he was still playing himself as the cowering, submissive Shit-Seed that he was, so rather he hit on his side, which was, as a matter of fact, a terrible idea.

There's a yowlp of pain, the oversized wolf beast squirms, then rolls up into a sit. His sides shiver and quake, his tongue lolls out and his jaws stretch wide, and there's a hanging couple of seconds where he's simply not breathing. Then, punctuating the silence and shifting it to obnoxious staccato bursts of sound, he hacked and coughed and wheezed as though he may literally dislodge a lung.

He must make his pack proud.

[Bone-Grinder] Simon couldn't help but growl at the creature as it drops Winston on the floor. It was the one who brought them all the way out here... if it didn't wish to be bothered it shouldn't have made use of a gift it knew would carry for miles. It asked folks to join it and since Winston was lying in a heap on the floor at the moment it implied to him that the beast was here for a fight and he would be more than happy to oblige.

He could see the creature was talented and capable perhaps even a full moon in his own right but it honestly didn't matter if the beast was an elder. Garou's strength came in numbers... He stood alone therefore it mattered little how talented or skilled he might be he was at the disadvantage. The thing was more than happy to fight... Which was funny because this full moon was as well.

[ws]"Stand down... Or step up..."The Full moon gave that simple warning. If you're here to fight then let's fucking get to it. But he wasn't going to negotiate this was either a Parlay or it was a battle and by his stance the Full Moon showed that he was fully ready to back up his words. The intruder had already harmed one of their own and Simon wasn't about to let the thing so much as move without having to pay dearly for every step he gets past that point unless of course... He can show he is not their enemy.

[Sorrow]
to Calamity

[Calamity] ...Something begins to nudge at the back of Kora's mind as this walking mountain stirs itself into place before the assembled Garou. A nagging sensation that is at once familiar and alarmingly out of place. A voice creeps into her immediate mental state, housing itself amongst her thoughts like some errant intruder.
to Sorrow

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Harmony's first reaction is concern for Winston: fear that this massive, primitive looking creature hurt him somehow before bringing him back. The moment he drops the Bone Gnawer to the ground, though, Harmony's fears are laid aside even if he feels a sharp spike of indignation on the Ragabash's behalf when the stranger insults him.

That's when he notices the glyphs inked across the man's skin. The dark hazel eyes of his Hispo form squint, the way a human's might, as he tries to make out the symbols and suss out what they're for. But all he can make out are a few words, and those few words in conjunction alarm him a little. Not enough to convince him that the man is some sort of enemy, but enough that he is immediately a touch wary.

They're the marks of an old ritual, something hazy that he wasn't sure was used any longer. He has no way to communicate this to the others without the man overhearing, but he tries to catch Kora's eyes and direct them to the symbols scrawled across the stranger's chest.

[Fire-Claws] He moves in line with Sorrow, his pelt already starting to take on the winter coat as the northern frost was rolling in on Chicago. He was ready for the cold and it was starting to show. And his pelt was not as beautiful as Kora's with the impurities in color, but still quite heathy nonetheless.

As he moved with grace and agility that one could only expect from the nature born.

He moves into file with the others, his Jarl being his lead, not the shadow lord he seemed to think himself a worthwhile warrior on par with a Fenrir Jarl. He watches in response to the monster of a garou who seems to handle the no moon with little ease, even as Winston is in his hispo form. Watching him cower and act like a dog more than a wolf.

He moves besides his Jarl once more now as the Glabro creature seems to stand before them, brown eyes take in the creature and through the hair along his arms and neck he can see something. Something he tries quite hard to understand, to remember. Something he should know, but doesn't.

He growls at Bone-Grinder as he barks commands to this one. He didn't kill Winston and for all they know, they were intruding on a special rite. Or a solemn one. But he does not stop there, his body nudging up against his Jarl, taking the risk of her possible reprisial. A cuff to the Glabro form, and the Glyphs along the bare skin of the monster. Maybe she might recognize them. He does not speak however. He leaves communication to the Skald of the group.

[Sorrow] Sorrow snaps at the air as Simon starts to growl, just once, a subtle suggestion that he hold back, that he stay his rage. Both Harmony and Fire-Claws work to draw her attention to the glyphs on the warrior's chest, and she huffs ou a faint breath, a hint of negation there. The Skald does not see what they do not, not even on a second look.

Still for another half-secnd, she watches the stranger, dwarfed by the pair in their hispo forms. Then, she changes form again, matching him Glabro for Glabro, her lean frame bulked with layers of muscle, her brow sloped, her jaw squared, the protoclaws tipping the fingers of her now blunt, strong hands. Her clothing remains, stretched and strained, bound together with spirit to fit, but her hair is uncoiled, loose again.

A glance down at Simon, then Winston. Briefly, her brow furrows - she tilts her head as if hearing a different note, a still-older sng, then glance up at the other Glabro, affirming, "He's ours. And you are on the edge of our lands, stranger. Who are you, and why have you come hunting here?"

[Calamity] "Oh Aye, then?"

Loud. Thunderous, even, the mountain in Glabro turns toward Simon with the glaringly enthused offer of challenge. The massive Axe, thuds into the ground beside him, without a backward glance from the Mountain of muscle and power who spreads his legs wide and assumes a bowed wrestler's stance. He faces off in Simon's direction, a broad grin lighting his features, thick brown mane of matted hair falling over part of his face.

"I ain't one to go movin' off a Fight, Boy." A pause, shifting slightly, grunting with the exertion of the position. It isn't until Sorrow pipes in, that the fellow's bushy brow rises and a brief moment of consideration, almost forgetful really, for duty creeps into his features. He clears his throat, frowning obviously before righting himself again.

"Your lands than, girl?" He turns to look past their shoulders, frown all but banishing his eyes beneath those bushy eyebrows, a negligent hand waving at the distant landscape behind him. "Ain't see nothing but open realm, s'far as I can tell. Gaias bounty 'yond your mention."

And oddities continuing, the large fellow is correct, as the Garou might glance back the way they had come and see behind them nothing of Chicago's skyscrapers or horizon. Not even the glare of Weaver blessed illumination. Simply the roiling thickness of overcast skies and pungent clouds. What was there when they were upon that hill is now no longer. As if they'd stepped from the familiar tread of one world and found themselves in another.

"...But that don't excuse an introduction missing does it?" He chortles deeply and slaps a hand against his chest, body seeming to take that cue to shrink down into Homid, his height diminishing to just under seven feet, thick ropy muscles and thinned hair given him an aging look. Not quite grandfatherly, but certainly middle-aged in the crow's feet and haggard sag of cheeks and belly.

"Roaring~Calamity, Adren-..." A pause, a frown almost of...confusion...scratching through his thick tangled hair. "...Aye, Fostern" That frown deepens seem, a shadow cast over his eyes "...Fostern Fianna Ahroun to Gaia. Mighty be Klah'thil, Black~Clover-" He hefts the Axe at his side once more, a broad grin flashing his features once again, crushing the brief moment of confusion and sadness "=borne since my firsting and shatterer of the Wrack Laughing..."

He pauses and then nods firmly, turning eyes on Kora, that grin no less feral and fierce. Pleased even.

[Sorrow] "This moment bares a striking similarity to Wreathes~Frost~in~Red, a Lupus of our tribe bent to Ragnarok and back in clapping his jaws at any perceived threat or challenge to come. Nary a word, not a phrase could stay his snapping teeth from finding throats...easily understood when his end came spitted on some Fang's klaive for such impertinence."
to Sorrow

[Barks Secrets] The hacking is spoken over, ignored for the most part. He's a Metis, this is his burden for it, perhaps they've been around to see and hear it before, perhaps they know that he'll recover. Perhaps they just don't give a damn. It doesn't matter, because with a final disgusting chrrrrruck! a healthy wad of blood hits the ground and he pushes himself up into a more proper sit, hunched down so his head hangs between his massive shoulders.

His tongue hangs from his mouth, stained red with blood, and his breath whistles in a way that suggests he could really use an inhaler right about now.

Shit-Seed learned his place.
He keeps his damn trap shut.

[Bone-Grinder] You see this is where Simon did not feel the same as his peers. The Burden of proof lay in the hands of the intruder. They are in a time of war... If this man who just attacked Winston was not an enemy then he was already doing much to imply to them otherwise. Tonight was the full moon and Simon was a Full moon... This meant that he honestly didn't give a flying fuck who this asshole was or how good he was if it got pushed he and Simon would find out who, in fact, was the superior Warrior. So when the others growl Simon growls back...

He wasn't going to pussy foot around nor was he going to kiss ass. This man has attacked a member of their sept and is already walking on thin ice. The honest fact was that he had already been shown an incredible amount of lenience by the fact he wasn't attacked on sight for what he's done to Winston.

[ws]"Winston get away." Simon says to Winston after an introduction is finally offered. His own focus, however, remains on the other man. The one claiming to be a Fianna. Fine he would let the man talk to the others, but he would not take his eyes off the stranger till he was certain it was safe.

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Roaring Calamity makes to introduce himself, and his bulk seems to shrink and draw into itself a bit as he assumes his Homid form. Harmony is, perhaps, a touch reassured: though things have the potential to sour here, they haven't yet. It would hardly be courteous (and probably a little threatening) should he remain in a dire wolf's shape here, so he too takes a moment, his fur and muzzle receding, his legs lengthening, as he takes his Homid form as well.

Few here have actually seen him in his Homid form, even though it's the form of his birth; when he's met most of these Garou it's been for some battle or other and he's come wearing a war form. When he's been at moots, he's been wearing a war form. When they see him it's clear why: he looks very young. No older than fifteen, just beginning to go through his last growth spurt, just beginning to fill out his frame. His hair, a light brown, is styled into the swirled bowl cut that is popular with teenage boys at the moment, and he's dressed in jeans and a polo in spite of the cold.

He smiles at Roaring-Calamity, even though he can make out the glyphs a bit more clearly now. Even though he's a touch alarmed by them (or perhaps by the idea of what the other Garou must have done in order to have lost rank this way.) Is he a Charach? Is he a coward? Harmony isn't sure. Until his eyes light on the glyph under his chin, and his brows furrow, and he can't help the look of compassion that comes into his eyes.

This Garou was a proud warrior, once. That look might be distinctly unwelcome, but Harmony can't help it.

"Hello," he says, once the Fianna has given his greeting. "Dreams in Summer Snow, Cliath Child of Gaia." He glances once more toward Kora, wanting to whisper and tell her what he's seen, but it would be decidedly rude. Harmony is looking toward the old Garou with respect, now.

[Fire-Claws] He turns behind him and sees the rolling hills of nothingness. The serene beauty of the natural world without the tant of the weaver anywhere to be found. But the spirit world was a strange place, it could leave you anywhere it wanted. Direction meant little when the normal laws of the mundane meant just as little.

They could be in the homeland of the Fianna right now, of in some isolated pocket of the umbra. They could have fallen into some old realm of war. He tries to get a feeling of where they are. The smell of the land, the feel of the Sept they knew. But nothing. The scab and its stench was minimal at best, and only because it clung to them. This was not their territory anymore. This was not their land. He growls to Bone-Grinder again.
{ws}
"He's right. Not at Sept no longer. His words ring true."
He continues to look at the Glyphs. Wondering. But he was no fallen one. He spoke true. Looking to his Jarl first before speaking. He speaks his own introduction.
{ws}
"Known as Fire-Claws, forseti cliath. Born of Stone-Skin, Adren Modi of the Sept of Hidden Smoke. Pledged to the Sept of Maelstrom. Are these your lands?"

[Sorrow] Our hunting ground," Kora begins to affirm with a wry look made feral by her choice of skins. "Chicago - the city - " Then she glances over her shoulder and finds the city gone, the weaver-wrapped skyscrapers disappeared against the horizon. Arms crossed over her torso, she turns back to him, her head aslant, the usual sharpness to her attention somewhat diminished, distracted by some internal music, subtle enough that these Garou - none of whom know her well - are unlikely to notice.

The stranger returns to his homid form, and in this, too, Kora matches him. In a tribe of giants, she has learned the trick of looking up without seeming to be diminished, and she does that now, her chin high, her dark eyes level, her arms still crossed over her torso. Blonde hair loose, curling down over her shoulders, shining in the moonlight, gleaming with the promise of health.

" - we heard your howl from our lands, though we knew your wood did not belong in our city. I am she who offers sorrow, cliath Skald and daughter of great Fenris, fostered at the Sept of Wind and Rain in Hjaltland, pledged to the Sept of Maelstrom, the spirit reborn in Chicago seven winters past, Alpha of my pack and Jarl of my tribe in the Chicago protectorate."

"That," a glance at Simon, " - is Bone-Grinder, full-moon born like you. Your Shit-Seed is our Barks-Secrets. I heard your howl from my pack's territory in the city, followed it to the edge of this wood-that-should-not-be.
"And here we are."

[Calamity] "Hahaha, knew me a Hippy once-" The grin broadens again, the axe settling back into the groove it had created a moment ago, while the broad Fianna turns to regard Harmony to the exclusion of all others. His hands lift and gesture in the air, with all the tender grace and effortlessly a stonemason might possess for the newborn he holds.

"Fond and lovely girl, by the name a Gwen. Given over to all sorts'a mad dashin' 'n dancin' 'bout. Skirts always half an inch shy of showin' yah just what'cha want'd to see. Had the boys 'round the fires trippin' over their own tongues most nights while she played some sort a-" A gruff furrow of the brow, scratching chin, followed by the bright smile of remembrance "-A viola. Aye, was a Viola. Would dance 'n skip with her viola twiddlin' 'n fiddling and..."

He strings an imaginary viola by his chin, eyes closing and body swaying slightly with some imaginary tune that falls from his lips, an approximation both rough and roughshod at best. It lasts for a few long seconds, before his features fall away in a memory's smile, eyes falling to the ground briefly, hands falling away.

"...Fuckin' bastards came into tha' camp one night. Gwen went to her grave spittin' three of the fuckers under her breath 'n claws." He's nodding, eyes flicking back and forth, solemnity climbing his face.

"Was a Good Lass, she was, she was..."

His head lifts back to the moment. The present. Turning then to regard Kora and the rest, perhaps for the first time. He snorts and chuffs loudly, shaking his head with the flap of thick cheeks.

"Aye, aye. Fine names, all." He nods again, brow furrowing once more even as the mighty Klah'thil is tipped into his fingers with little more then a brief flicker of those digits on it's haft. He breathes in deeply and nods once, firmly down at the Cliaths.

"Younglings, the lot of you...." The grin flashes again. Broad and as excited as ever.

"Come then to join me in the Hunt? Aye, knew they wouldn't let me down. Well, don't any of you worry none-" He wags a telling finger at the lot of them "-We've found us a quarry alright. Full 'n wrymsome and deadly to boot, Aye! it'll be a fight that piss-sopping son of a hydra knew, it will!"

And he turns with the heft of a mighty limb, beckoning them on in his wake, marching off toward the East, following a parallel course to the Treeline he'd emerged with Winston, from.

[Barks Secrets] His airway would relax as far as it ever would after some time, the whistling and wheezing quieted while the collective of Cliaths listened to this man marked with runes's story. He suggested they help him in his hunt, spun about, and went to lead them back into the forest of cardboard and paper trees.

The Ragabash wheezed, coughed, and growled quietly as he stood up.
Note, though, that he stands, but does not move to follow after.

"I want a Theurge."
This is said like a guilty man saying that he wants a lawyer.

[Sorrow] As the Fianna begins to turn off toward the east, Kora calls out in his wake, " - you knew who wouldn't let you down?"

[Calamity] A bright laugh erupts as the Mountainous Calamirty continues marching.

"The Sept, Girl! The Sept!"

[Dreams in Summer Snow] It's as he turns that Harmony leans in to whisper to Kora. "He's under the Rite of the Winter Wolf," he says to her.

[Bone-Grinder] Simon simply watched though he did not his head in acknowledgement when he is introduced to the man. He keeps himself quiet and silent as he watches and listens. It isn't until Harmony speaks up that is attention is pulled towards him and then back towards the man. Under the rite of the Winter Wolf? Where is his pack then? SHould they not be tending to him?

[Bone-Grinder] [ws]"Where is your pack? Why are they not with you?"This was a solemn and an important ritual indeed it was important to see it through... If it was this mans time to die and no one was around to see it through then it was their responsibility to see it through.

[Calamity] "...Lot of 'em Died, Lad! Now hurry up! Wyrm to be Killin' 'n yer all Lollygaggin' about like a bunch of flower fuckin' fairies!"

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Harmony looks after the old Garou, and it's clear that he wants to follow him. It's also clear to him that the aid that he'd hoped for from his Sept has not come; they left him to go and hunt alone. To die because they believe him to be useless now. Maybe it will come. Harmony hopes, but it isn't for Calamity's sake that he does. He just doesn't want to believe that the Sept, any Sept, would abandon this once-Athro no matter his faded glory.

"We should go with him," he says quietly to the others. "This kind of judgment...it's wrong, and it's short-sighted of those that passed it."

[Fire-Claws] He almost begins to pad off at the potential hutn offered to them. He could feel the rage start to boil in him, already overtaking his willpower as the beast rides to the surface. The full face of Luna now beating down on him more than it did before.

But hearing the confession that Dreams offers up. He turns to the Child of Gaia wth a quizzical look. As if he was unsure of it, his instinct telling him to go and kill and enjoy the glory that is too come. But there is the fact that this one, once lost his glory, his rank. His honor and name. To be apart of such a rite, it is indeed noble. He sits down and snaps at Harmony. Growling.
{ws}
"NO. Do not rob him of his proper glory. His name. His last rite."

He would have sat down, but not now. He is growling at the Child of Gaia. What do they know of a good death. Of a proper honor, of great glory.

[Sorrow] "It's not a sentence of death," Sorrow corrects Harmony quietly, with the confidence of a true believer - already moving in the stranger's wake. "It's a rite he performed himself, a death he chose for himself, when he felt it proper."

With a brief, winging glance at Harmony, Sorrow taks off in the Fianna's wake, following in his footsteps. "My Septmate tells me you have performed the Rite of the Winter Wolf. We will be honored to hunt with you, stand with you, and sing your deeds when the Rite is completed. Tell me your stories as we hunt - "

[Calamity] (Uh oh. Rage roll.)

[Calamity] The Monster of a creature is humming something, uplifting and bright as he marches forward...

...and as the others pull forward into his wake, a small ways behind him they watch the landscape seem to shift and alter to the whims...no, not the whims but the necessity of this moment. The paper forest, a two dimensional nothing, spiritless and unfettered, seems to warp and flow into the darkness that exists between until it is an inky haze behind them and slowly swallowing the forestry itself. This odd transformation seems to eat up the ground behind them, not swiftly but steadily, pulling in the wake of the mountainous Fianna.

As he marches forward, the landscape seems to alter and shift, almost imperceptibly, until it looks as if he is marching across rocky turf and terrain, slowing his gait to make sure his steps are more certain and sure. Then, almost at once, unbelievably even, the Garou find themselves scrambling around on rock, the landscape to their left and right a mountain range diorama that looks more like some movie backdrop than a true sight to behold.

Roaring~Calamity, huffs and puffs, Black~Clover bouncing about in his hands as he climbs his way towards the dip in the wall of rock ahead, where stands a plateau waiting to overlook...something...

...Then-

My septmate tells me you have performed the Rite of the Winter Wolf-

"What?!" He wheels, the flush of anger like a gavel hammering the mountain rock, chips and slate peeling down the walk to bounce among their legs and teeth, as the Rage plumes and follows. He stares with feral eyes, restrained fury, the axe hefting to point down at them.

"So they told you then? Sent you along behind me to watch? To chastise as well? Sent you with more of those lies! Like I was the one to betray!?!"

Plumes of white mist begin to seep from his nostrils and words, as the chill air of the mountains creeps into the scene, the last marker of their scenic shift. Still he stares, froth gathering at the corners of his mouth.

"It weren't me, ya little Bitch!" He slaps his chest with his free hand. "They died in battle! Died as heroes! Blood and bold and true, each one! Melody! Thomas! Feral! Winch-"

And he freezes, Pauses. Frowns again, ferociously still.

"Winch...and...and..." And that hand comes up to slap his head. Trying to dislodge a memory.

"Winch and...and..." And something begins to crumble under that veneer. Creeps in-

-Something in the valley beyond. A dozen more yards of climbing, a sound erupts from over the wall of rock. A chittering thing. A vicious and ugly thing and Calamity is snapping his head around as if his eyes could find that sound.

"Aye...Aye you're there...You're there..." And the axe hefts, a growl escaping his lips.

"The Wyrm is come! No more words! None of it! It's time, Lads! Time for War! Time for Glory!"

And he continues marching. Up those slopes. Slowly. Almost...desperately.

[Barks Secrets] Winston didn't move to follow after the marching Fianna. Rather, he listened and gathered information it was a pile of precious dollar bills all crumpled up and floating away on the breeze. The Rite of the Winter Wolf, one wants to go help and another snaps, telling them no, to let him have his glory. Winston agreed with the Wolf, and flinched when the Skald, the leader of the Blind Muscle Tribe, rolls forward and offers help on his last quest.

There's a snap of Rage in the air, and Winston's body hunkers down against the shifted scenery of rock (which his claws had struggled to find purchase on, but managed somehow anyways) when the Fianna bears down upon the Get of Fenris, and he wheezes audibly from stress.

The Fianna seems to press through his Rage without tearing the intestines from any bellies, loses his train of thought, then declares that war is on and starts marching again. Winston stares after for a few seconds, then shakes out his pelt in a wolfish translation of the human gesture of clapping dust off your hands.

"Well, he's crazy and that's not in my jurisdiction."

And with that said, the Metis simply turned and started walking(climbing, struggling) in the opposite direction of the old wolf on his last journey.

[Bone-Grinder] He keeps close, he keeps watch. The wolf showed signs... He showed why the rite had been performed and why it even existed. This was the reason for this ritual, and any warrior could understand and relate to it. it mattered not how able bodies a Full Moon was... Or anyone for that matter. Thangs happen to a Garou, mind or body, that cannot be undone. Sometimes a person reaches a breaking point from which there is no recovery and the only thing left is to alieviate ones peers of their suffering.

Do not suffer thy people, tend to thy sickness

He was Garou. He had fought, he had slain an untold number of their enemies. He stood there with strength, determination and honor and Simon found himself respecting that much. The full moon kept up with the Full Moon. This was an Honor, this was his Honor! This was his night to stand and to shine. This was his night to let loose his fury and in a final surge of unmitigated fury teach the minions of the wyrm a lesson they would not soon forget and they... They would be a part of his final moments. The final breaths of a hero as he falls this night in battle. They would bear witness and they would take part(If doing so were not a suicidal act).

The wolf wins every fight but his last and then... He dies.

This was this warriors final battle and Simon stood ready to see him earn his final little scrap of honor. For all he had sacrificed at the very least they would come to the next mood with their heads held high and deliver to the sept the story of the final moments of this brave warrior.

Simon had been the most apprehensive but Simon was also a Full Moon and he understood the importance of this ritual. The man wished to die while he was still himself, while he could still stand on his own two feet. They would see it through... Either the Wyrm would kill him this night. Or they would emerge triumphant and then in those final moments Simon would personally see the ritual through to completion. Whatever the case this warrior would have his final battle and he would kill anyone who would dare stand in the way of that!

[Dreams in Summer Snow] Even Harmony almost quails from the force of the Ahroun's Rage when he spins to face all of them and howls about his dead packmates. The grimace that had been threatening to form when Kora mentioned the rite actualizes, and he looks between the Jarl and the once-Athro, trying to come up with what words he can to placate, to quell.

Whatever happened, Calamity clearly can't remember much of it. He's older: perhaps something has driven that memory out of him, perhaps it's just an effect of age. Maybe he did kill his packmates. Still, watching him, hearing that note of desperation in his voice, makes Harmony's heart ache and he can't shake the feeling that it's wrong to let him wander off to die alone.

Calamity marches off. Harmony looks once toward she who offers sorrow and then starts after him. At the very least, he wants to be there.

[Fire-Claws] He listens intently to what the monsterous fianna has to say. The monkey jibber-jabber spews forth in verbla diarrhea. These monkeys could talk for hours and never seem to say one thing worth while. Half of his words a mixture of confusion and others lies. He can feel it in his bone, his muzzle.

He watches as the Fianna begins to storm off to war, to kill the creature before him. He sits nearly sits down and watches. The wolf was strange, confused. Maybe the loss of his pack had ruined his mind. Maybe he was just that far gone, disgraced. This would be his final battle. His good death.

He sits first. Watching. Waiting. He would pounce in if anyone tried to stop him from his good death. But he would not. He would wait until it was done. Until the Fianna engaged in battle. And then....

He would howl. A howl that one who goes to face a good death deserves. A howl of lost and glory and honor and righteousness. A howl of pain from a lost warrior and joy that he found the courage to face his final battle with honor and pride. A howl all too similar to the one that brought them there.

[Sorrow] Sorrow stands her ground against the snap of the Fianna's rage, the hot spike of it that seems to warp the air around the Fianna - something about her body language, though, suggests that she's readying herself to dive out of the swinging arc of that great axe should it ever come down to it. Her attention remains on his face as he begins to protest his innocence, the deeds of the dead, their names,

- Melody, Thomas. Feral - Winch.

"Gwen?" she supplies, as they are moving again, prodding him to remember even as he marches to forget.

They are climbing, though - heading toward a final fight, and she has left her softest human skin behind as they go, scrambling up the now rocky slopes in the wake of the adren, her tail high and her eyes - bright, but sometimes distant, distrated by memory that drifts in and out of focus as the Fianna's does. In the sharp morning air she follows to the final fight.

This is not a spectator sport for her. When he fights, she fights alongside him, tearing into the wyrm as if they were pack, fighting in his wake, letting him remember not just the glory of his deeds, the bright burst of rage moving through his veins, but the feeling of fighting with a pack, like the pack-animal he is. Feinting to avoid blows as much as she deals them, swift, light-footed, until the death blow comes to him, as it must.

And she fights so that she will remember this; each blow, his great, hefted swing of his massive axe, the whine of the blade through the sharp air, its shuddering impact on the carapace of his enemy -

- and when it is over, if it so ends, then she will howl.