Thomas and his friends are staying in a small campsite outside a couple of kilometers outside a small town in outback Queensland. He is taking a bucket to the nearby creek when he hears the sound of young children crying. He moves that way, more silent than shadow, and spies two young children sitting on a bench near some playground equipment. He decides to find out what is happening.
He makes a lot of noise and tramples his way onto the path, to make sure the kids see him. They are looking his direction as he moves over and introduces himself. There is a young boy of about 10 who was crying, and a young girl of about 12, who is sporting a rather impressive bruise on the side of her head. The young girl says her name is Rachel, and her brother is Michael. When asked what the hell they are doing 5kms from anywhere, Michael says that they ran away from home because their dad hurts them, and Rachel tries to shush him. Thomas asks if they would like something to eat. Rachel agrees and they go back to the campsite.
The rest of the ferals give Tom a dark look when he turns up with two strays, but set out to make the kids comfortable. Many faces go dark when they see the bruises. Brett (the feral's leader of sorts) talks to Thomas about what he is intending to do. In the end it is suggested that they take the kids to the cops tomorrow. Rachel, who has been eavesdropping, tells Thomas that the only cop in town, Joe, is her dad's friend, and last time they just got in more trouble for telling people. The children drop off to sleep, and the ferals discuss what to do. No outcome is agreed on, and Tom decides to slip away for a little spying.
A couple of hours walk later, and he comes to a small weatherboard house. All the windows are open, and he can hear the sound of a television. He peeks around until he finds an open window or two - yep, looks like a 12 year old girl's bedroom. He can see inside, where a large slob in his shorts and singlet is sitting and watching tv - there are a couple of beer cans around, and he seems to be asleep - there's no sign that he's noticed the kids are gone.
Thomas creeps around to the next window, but stops when his feet sink into the ground - odd, in the hot, dusty summer. He looks around carefully and finds that some of this ground has been recently turned over. He scrapes back the soil, and finds a recently deceased child, buried a couple of inches below the ground. He scouts around and finds a few more. Gak, thinketh Tom, and he heads back to the ferals. He finds Brett and explains what he found, and they both agree that its time to call the cops. First thing in the morning.
Tom heads off at first light, straight back to Rachel's place. He is lurking nearby when he hears Rachel's dad come out of the house, yelling the kids' names. He goes back inside, making dire threats. Tom makes a break for the house and leaps into Rachel's room in glabro form. He can hear the guy talking on the phone to a 'Joe' (presumably the police). Tom starts to formulate a plan. He picks up a drinking glass, and once the guy is off the phone, knocks it around in Rachel's room. Her father responds fairly normally, obviously thinking she was hiding, or something. He is somewhat surprised when a 200kg, 7' tall guy grabs his arm and throws him back into his house, and then more surprised when said guy slaps him in the head, knocking him out. Not as surprised as Tom, perhaps, but there you go. Tom continues to improvise.
Expecting the police at any time, he ties the unconscious guy into a chair. He then rushes out to the garden and uncovers the freshest corpse and lays it on the guys lap. Mmm, smell that juicy goodness. Tom then proceeds to bring the guy around. Rachel's dad appears to express some surprise at the rotting corpse on his lap, and initially seems to think it was Michael. He does, in fact, express considerable surprise at its presence, and is adamant in his statements that he has nothing to do with it. Tom is starting to get a bad feeling. He smacks the guys in the head again and runs off, back to his hiding place. Twenty minutes later a police divvy van pulls up, and a policeman (presumably Joe) saunters out, and into the house. Five seconds later, Joe sprints out the door of the house and to the car, grabbing what is probably a radio. Tom seems to feel that it is time he should leave.
He returns to the campsite, to find... noone. Its a very Marie Celeste situation - the fire is still burning, food sitting open, etc. Tom changes to lupus and sniffs around. It becomes readily apparent that everyone has gone up a walking track. He runs after. The track winds around for a while, but starts heading up to a lookout of sorts, a flat rock platform. Tom can smell blood, and he starts to sprint. As the path reaches the top of the platform, there is a thin trickle of dark liquid running down it. It is blood. Tom sprints out onto the platform... the remains of his friends lie everywhere. None of them are moving. They have all been scratched and bitten, or thrown from the platform. Blood pools in crevices and runs down in a constant stream from almost everyside. Tom is in Crinos and howling utter despair.
There is a laugh from behind him. Floating a good 8 feet above the platform is Michael, although quite dessicated, and with rows of nasty sharp teeth. "Hello Mr Wolfman", sayeth he, before diving at Tom and trying (fairly sucessfully) to bite and scratch him. When Michael bites, Tom feels his gnosis drain away. He manages to grab Michael by the upper leg and smash his head agains the rocks. This doesn't seem to slow Michael down much, so Tom continues to beat his head against the rock until Michael's skull cracks, and he suddenly stops moving.
Tom is left starting at the carnage. From beyond the edge of the rock platform drifts up Rachel, also dessciated. She is smiling. Tom leaps and tries to grab her as she floats towards him, but he misses, landing just at the edge of the rock... and then Rachel hits him in the back. Tom falls over the edge and manages to twist, catching one hand on the rock, spins... and plows all 500kg of his weight onto the nasty, sharp, pointy volcanic rock just below the edge. He slips...
Tom comes to being squashed my a well meaning paramedic, who is trying to get all the water out of his lungs. Once they are convinced he is alive, they hoik him into an ambulance (of sorts) and rush him to a nearby surgery. He is looked at briefly by a doctor, who decides he really needs to go to a hospital. Tom makes pathetic noises, and the doctor goes out to make the call. Tom gets up, opens the window and then steps into the Umbra. He changes to crinos and heals all but the aggravated wounds. He peeks back, and there seems to be some consternation as to his whereabouts. Figuring that a brief disappearance is better than a total one, he steps back into the toilet, and is found. His wounds are re-examined... and the doctor swears off gin for four weeks. Obviously, if he can walk, er.. it must have been someone else's blood. And broken bones. What a quick healer you are.
Tom is kept in comfort while he recovers... and gives as much information to the Police as he can. No, officer, I don't remember what happened when all my friends were butchered and that little kid was killed and someone broke into a house nearby and belted a guy up and left a dead corpse in his lounge....
Tom gets to know the local police quite well. He actually gets to be good friends with the younger constable, Shane Berriman, who is quite empathic, and realises that Tom is fairly distressed. Eventually, he is healed, and well... there's nothing to charge him with, and the general feeling is it was some sort of weird animal attack, and Tom must have been knocked down into the river. He is free to go.
Tom drifts a little, before ending up at the Sept of the Web of Dreaming Hands, a nearby Stargazer sept. Coincidentally, the Sept tries to help those Garou who are either in Harano, or just stressed out, as they only recently recovered from a sept-wide case of Harano. Tom spends time there, trying to get his shit together. The Sept and bawn are very peaceful - the bawn and grounds of the caern are in the Carnarvon Gorge.
Amongst other people, he meets Alex Urosevic, who has come from Melbourne after a packmate was killed. Alex is quite depressed, and also very bitter at the people he holds responsible for the death of Marion Perry - a Dominique Lalor and Mathias Rourke. He also meets Monash End-to-the-Darkness, who is the Jindabyne Council member for the Stargazer, although only just older than Thomas himself, and the Sept Leader, Indira Songs-Of-Sorrow. Tom's Mentor XXXX also shows up, and is suitably sympathetic to the unfortunate events recently.
Thomas eventually recovers enough to take an interest in his surrounds again. After a while, Indira offers access to the power of the caern to Thomas - the caern is dedicated to Visions, although they are unsure about the nature of the caern spirit itself. She offers him the chance to undertake a vision - for many Garou, what they see gives them a purpose in life, and a focus for their recovery.
When Tom accepts, he is led through a ceremony of purification for a day, and then that night is led to a side-gully somewhere along the gorge. Monash and Indira lead him up to the edge of the gully and explain that the in the gully is a large tree that looks like cupped hands. If you sleep in it overnight, then the caern spirit may grant you a true vision. The gully itself is full of fog and quite hard to see down. Monash adds that the thousands of little spiders in the gully are sacred to the caern, so do not hurt them.
It takes a while to get comfortable, even in the wide 'palms' of the caern tree, but eventually Thomas drifts off to sleep.....
....
You are flying, moving faster than you have ever moved before. You are flying on your own, but accompanying you is an immense dragon-like creature. Instinctively you know you are heading south. You look down and you can see that you are racing lunes through the moonlight. Their light hits open water, and with every flash you see an image in your mind - some stick, but many more are gone in a flash of colour. You see a storm raging across the outback; a vast reptillian eye opening in the darkness; a small, flat stone with aboriginal markings laying on the sand, and then the ground opens up and swallows it...
The images stop as you skim lower, towards a vast sprawl appears in front of you. You somehow are sensing the Realm and the Umbra at the same time, and where your eyes can see the city and its inhabitants, your spirit can see the massive node of Weaver energies slowly and erratically expanding across the Umbra and calcifying further within its existing bounds. In places, it is shredded by wyld energies, and in still others, wyrm taint spreads along the huge web-cables.
You pass beyond the leading edge of the weaver structures, and you can suddenly see a single point of light. In the Realm it is a cemetary, and in the Umbra, obviously a caern. Surrounding it is a thick Umbral darkness, oozing into the purity of the caerns heart. In the realm, the buildings are on fire, and the tombstones are all torn up, gunfire rattles faintly across the clearings.
Suddenly the ground is broken in many places around the outside of the cemetary, and something starts to force its way through. Just as you realise that the things are the immense talons of a vast hand, the hand clenches and the cemetary shatters as if it was glass, both in the real world and in the Umbra. A deafening shriek of evil triumph echoes throughout the world and the point of light dies, leaving the city in near-pitch blackness.
You can sense the dragon-spirit next to you once again, watching all of this. It turns to you and says in spirit speech. "This is how it will be, but not as how it should."... You wake, suddenly, with the dawn light shining through the trees of Carnarvon Gorge.
Thomas finds, on climbing down from the tree, that he has been marked with a tattoo-like pattern of the dragon-spirit he saw.
Thomas is standing near the shore, judging by the sound of water lapping against the shore. He is looking up into a crystal clear sky, the milky way as bright as bright, as if far from any city. There is something moving through the sky and a pair of fiery green eyes looking for someone. The final image is of John, covered in blood, standing in the midst of a blasted desert as the ground opens up and swallows him.
Message 6: Tue Jun 12 11:22:36 (read) From: eccles [To: zahn] Sometime during the downtime, you get a phone call, from Isis Healing-Hands of the Sept of Reconciliation. Message 4: Tue Jun 12 11:28:50 (read) From: eccles [To: zahn] Isis: "Thomas, do you recall that your pack owes me a debt, for taking care of Alex Muirwood?" she says, without much of a leadin. Message 4: Tue Jun 12 11:30:16 (read) From: zahn [To: eccles] yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesss, yes. lemmie guess, calling it in? Message 3: Tue Jun 12 11:31:32 (read) From: eccles [To: zahn] "Yes, I'm afraid so. Your packmate Chasing-the-Night is becoming involved in something that we would prefer that he left alone. Message 3: Tue Jun 12 11:33:20 (read) From: zahn [To: eccles] "ah, o.k..." *where was he again? do I know?* Message 2: Tue Jun 12 11:33:33 (read) From: eccles [To: zahn] you can hear him moving around the caern somewhere... Message 1: Tue Jun 12 11:34:29 (read) From: zahn [To: eccles] "I spose asking what that is will lead into all sorts of double-negatives?" Message 1: Tue Jun 12 11:35:32 (read) From: eccles [To: zahn] "What he's involved in? He is interfering with our relations with the local Koori associations, and we regard them as being at a delicate stage. I am asking that as repayment for your debt, that he stay away entirely." Message 10: Tue Jun 12 11:38:23 (read) From: zahn [To: eccles] "ah, right... yes... Important things those, woulden't want any rocking of the proverbial boat... It was my understanding he was contacting them as just a guy, who happens to also be from a repressed minority..." ... "but If it's interfering with existing arangements... then I'l have a chat to him today" Message 8: Tue Jun 12 11:39:07 (read) From: eccles [To: zahn] "And I am contacting you, as pack leader, as someone to whom you owe a debt. We would appreciate that. Thank you Thomas."
Thomas heads off from the caern a couple of days after the February Moot, once he is not needed for anything specific. Hitching lifts, working fishing boats and generally moving around in that special wanderlusty way that Striders have, he ends up catching up with his Mentor in Greece. They hang for a bit, and then head back to Australia for the Great Circus in April.
The circus is the yearly gathering of the Australian Striders, and this year they are meeting in the far north, near the Gulf of Carpenteria. The festival runs for a week, from April 15 until April 22. Thomas rings back to Melbourne and lets people know that he won't be back for the April Moot. Ritual and ceremony abound, some of which also include a couple of Garou from other tribes, such as the Fianna Teelia Farrow.
The Great Circus has been running for several days, and tonight is the night of the full moon, and the most important ritual - Feralia. You have been told already of the rite and what it entails, and it is as dangerous as it is important. Only the Silent Striders are part of this rite, and the other Garou are left to guard the campsite.
The Striders head out away from their encampment to a free-standing stone, some distance away. A large, round red boulder lying at the top of a rise has been chosen. Grek, as the leader of the Striders, is the Ritemaster. He stands forward from the crowd and cuts himself with a stone knife. Taking a chewed stick, he soaks up enough blood to paint the symbol of the striders, the wind over the road and then speaks in the Garou tongue.
"In my life I have seen many signs of the approaching Apocalypse. I have seen humans destroy old growth forest to make woodchips to burn in their fires. I have seen culls of animals which grew into a multitude because humanity spewed its wastes into their homes."
The litany of sins continues. Each Strider steps forward and paints the symbol onto the rock until it is covered in Garou runes, of the Striders, and of the apocalypse to come. Some paint in blood, some in dirt, some change the rock itself for their designs, some claw the images onto the stone. Each Strider names the things that they have seen in the last year that herald the apocalypse. Some events are mundane, others spiritual, some obvious, others obscure.
Thomas carves the Silent Strider symbol with his claws on the rock. "I have seen myself and my people fail due to our own green and lust for blood. Past, Present and Future."
When the last Strider leaves their mark, all move north of the stone except Grek. He passes around it three times widdershins and then leaps from the north to the south, disappearing above the stone. Each Strider follows, diving not into the Umbra, but into the Deadlands.
It is cold and grey, devoid of life and colour. You run as fast as you can, for it is only speed which stops the dead from catching you and holding you fast within the Umbra. The landscape flashes past you, leaving after images that burn in your mind.
The moon turns red and the light recedes like a veil,
revealing something hidden.
Grek leads the Striders towards a sudden light in the darkness. All the Garou move through into the brightness. As you sprint out, you can see the light, for all the brightness, is the moon. Lupus stand around you, and echos of howls wait on the air. The darkness closes in once again and you enter the Deadlands again. Dust puffs up from underfoot as you run through the lands of the Dead, strange places where the land itself has died.
A cowled figure waits patiently for you by the
side of the sea.
Light again, through another circle of Garou, a chance to breath sweet air and to touch the world of light, a Moot being held on the top of a hill, paens to Gaia follow you to the darkness.
.becoming screams as one of the Garou fall, pulled down into an endless night by the ungrateful dead. The Striders are spread out now, you amongst the fastest, followed by spirits and wraiths, some angry, some pleading.
A vast reptillian eye opens in the darkness.
Silent and waiting, the silver furred Garou watch as you emerge into the lush vegetation of their caern, a spring in a gorge. The wind above howls and dust obscures the sky as you enter the darkness again.
A red wolf removes its mask, revealing nothing.
A corridor of swords and axes as you run beneath the honour guard of Get of Fenris warriors, your breath rasping and echoing in the high cathedral roof.
Holistic Approach stand at the caern around a dead
body as darkness spreads beneath their feet
and swallows them.
Splashing through saltswamp, you cannot help but shiver at the memory of ghostly hands clutching at your fur, enhanced by the bobbing reeds gently touching you as you move past. Fianna wait, heads bowed in prayer as you disappear into the darkness again.
A hearbeat, louder than thunder, and an image of
ghostgums, covered in blood.
Emerging into a moonlit eucalypt forest, the smell of the sea still strong in your nose. The others emerge from shadows and run or jog along, obviously exhausted by the journey, but still moving. Grek leads you down a slope to a clearing, where Crinos garou stand, wearing hoods and standing ready. Grek moves to the fore and says "We have come to this place along the roads of the dead. Do you guard our way, or hold us to the darkness?"
One of the crinos replies "We guard the door of the lands of the dead. How shall we know that you are Garou and not ghosts of the underworlds."
Grek replies "We walk the road for Gaia, to see visions of the times to come in the times that have gone. We walk the road of the apocalypse from holy place to holy place that we may see deaths to come. I have seen Demon Kings stretch forth their hands and take caerns from the earth to feed their insatiable hunger."
Another of the Striders, Iah Merenamun, steps forward and describes some of what he saw beneath the world. Not all the Striders come forward - whether they saw nothing, or say nothing, you are unsure.
The masked crinos wait until no more reply and ask "The road is dark and the lands of the dead not for the quick. Have all that trod its path returned to this gate?"
Grek: "Sitkamose, who was cousin of Baktre Touches-the-Clouds, fell and did not rise in the darkness." Sitkamose danced last night of joy and love found in a remote town, where she could feel the soil beneath her feet and her love smiled from the garden.
All the assembled masked crinos howl and scream, a combination of definance and grief howled to the stars. You realise that they are all women, and you stand within a Black Fury caern.
The masked crinos speaks again "We shall remember her. ... We greet you, Silent Striders, and bid you rest one day at the gateway of the dead so that none follow you from Hades unsuspected." She indicates a pathway leading away from the caern centre, where you stand.
The Striders sit about for a day, recovering. Thomas engages some of the young women in his hastily picked up greek, but discovers that as he thought, that particular phrase does not mean "hello". She's nice enough to just laugh.
The Striders moonbridge back to the northern part of Australia and then back to their campsite. Thomas talks to Grek about the Demon Kings thing he mentioned and how it might match his dreams of a giant hand eating the caern. Grek explains a little about the Demon Kings too, and says that his vision was pretty obscure, and that's his best interpretation, but there may be a link.
Thomas heads back to Melbourne a few days later.