Garrett) ᑕᕼᗩᔕᗰᗯᗴᗩᐯᗴᖇ__⸙ by GhostArchipelago

The cat meows again, then trots off, greeting another newcomer in a perfectly pressed captain's field uniform: around your height, and rangy, with light-brown skin and close-cropped black hair graying at the temples. Unsmiling, despite the cat and the guests and the convivial atmosphere.

"Ah! Captain Korzha, dear!" calls Kass, looking over from where she's regaling a group of students with a story about last year's cohort. "You must meet Lieutenant .. He's new this year with Catarina Roldan."

I think I've heard of Captain Korzha, though we haven't met.

I'd hoped for a break from military personnel.

It's rather nice to see another officer.

I've never heard of this person.

I'd better be on my best behavior.

This captain had better not be spying on me.

You hit him at maybe forty miles an hour, blast him right out of the saddle and into the trunk of an old maple. That would kill most people, but he keeps fighting, trying to bring the rifle into line. Then you sink your fangs into his chest and he screams as you wrench him back and forth. You've trained for this, and you snap him left right left right, four quick jerks, breaking his neck. You fling the body away and it skids down a slope and across a frozen river, leaving a furrow of pale snow dotted with blood and gore.

You breathe deep, your breath steaming, and glance back at the trail of destruction you've left through the woods. Then you notice the horse is still standing.

"Well done, little wolf," the dead rider's horse says through bloody lips. Then its face splits open as its incisors lengthen, and it hurls itself at you.

So far, everything had gone according to plan, just as you had practiced a hundred times. But now you're forced to think on the fly as you confront the real threat, this mangled horse-thing. You taste blood in your mouth, hear your frightened breath…now it's for real. No mistakes.

I'm quick enough to dodge, weave, and fall back until this Bane makes a mistake.

I rely on stealth and cunning, disappearing into the undergrowth and then striking from the shadows.

I'm hearty enough to shapeshift into my war form before the monster reaches me…and tear it apart.

Garou are not creatures of mindless Rage. The five forms require cunning to use wisely, but also great physical vigor to deploy in the middle of a battle. But you know that not even this monster can stand against a werewolf in crinos form. Letting the Rage flow through you like bloody lightning, you leap, twisting through the air to avoid a scything hoof, then land on all fours and grit your teeth.

Then it's like your teeth turn inside-out, ripping through your jaw, piercing your brain. The pain is incandescent as your bones shatter and re-knit, your spine transforms, and you rise up on two legs, a nine-foot-tall walking wolf with dinner-knife claws and huge, hooked fangs. For a moment, you're both blinded by a shockwave of superheated steam as your accelerated metabolism reacts with the freezing air.

When you can both see again, the horse-thing scoffs—an oddly human sound. It's not impressed, certainly not insanely terrified, the way regular humans fear a werewolf's crinos form. It rushes you, cat-quick, fangs bared.

You twist and drive one hand up under its jaw. Your claws explode out the back of its head, smoking with brains. You both skid backwards and your clawed feet leave a furrow of snow as the monstrous thing keeps trying to move forward, mindless and implacable. But when you both stop, you wrench your hand out of its head and it drops without a sound, already dead.

You don't dare stay in this death-hungry form any longer. You scent the air, seeking other threats. Nothing. The fight is over, you tell the screaming monster you've become.

Keep killing. The town isn't far. The People of the Map are soft and weak. You can—

No.

You sink down onto all fours and return to your titan-wolf hispo form. You've learned to plan ahead, so in your wolf forms, you always wear a pack at your hip stuffed with emergency clothing. The pack survived your transformations, but if you turned back into a regular person, you'd probably freeze to death before you could pull your thermals on and reach the Speedway up the road, the one across from the local Amazon hub. You'll need to stay like this until you're within sight of the convenience store.

Right now, you shake the Wolf out of your thoughts and force yourself to plan and think like a person. The Bane is dead, but where are Clay and the others? You need to make a call, and you can't do that without fingers. You check your hip: the good news is that the gear kit you carry in wolf form is still there. The tightly wrapped clothes within it will let you blend back in with the human population. Of course, if you tried to change now, you'd freeze to death before you reached that Speedway. A conundrum.

You don't dare stay in this death-hungry form any longer. You scent the air, seeking other threats. Nothing. The fight is over, you tell the screaming monster you've become.

Keep killing. The town isn't far. The People of the Map are soft and weak. You can—

No.

Flies fall dead onto the snowy ground, forming a black halo around the dead horse in the shadow of an abandoned pipeline that stretches east-west across the landscape. You did it. Clay sent you to destroy the Bane, and now both the rider and the horse-thing are dead. You stand beneath Clay's greatest victory—the abandoned oil pipeline—contemplating the future. You won't be a cub anymore, but a true Garou. You'll be able to seek renown and respect, to join one of the remaining tribes of the Garou Nation.

You can join Clay's pack, but is that even what you want? To linger here with your miserable elders? As a true Garou, you could seek out your own pack, or walk the world for a time on your own. Gaia suffers everywhere. As the monster's blood cools on the snow, you consider what you really want.

Glory. To destroy the enemies of Gaia, and—if it's still even possible—to stop humanity's desecration of the earth and halt the Apocalypse.

Honor. To restore the packs and the tribes, to help rebuild the laws and the dignity of the Garou Nation.

Wisdom. To learn what has happened to Gaia, to the spirit world, and to the paths our ancestors used to walk.

The Garou are Gaia's fangs, made to fight the Wyrm—the cosmic enemy, the principle of rot and ruin. The Wyrm spreads through the spirit world with its army of Banes and unclean spirits, and slowly kills the living Earth through pollution and extraction. Before your First Change, Clay's pack slaughtered the Banes and mercenaries that guarded the empty pipeline that rises over the winter woods, but now they're paralyzed by despair, convinced that the Apocalypse has come and gone, that Gaia is dead and the appearance of life is only the quiver of dead nerves. You turn the possibility over in your mind. Is there still a chance to save this ravaged world? If so, what weapons can the Garou wield, if Rage has failed?

As you consider what "Glory" might look like in this fallen age, a strange smell draws your attention. It's the dead horse in the snow. Sometimes, fomori—that's the name you learned for when a Bane possesses a person or animal—sometimes fomori rot quickly after death, consumed by the putrescence of the Wyrm. Other times, Clay's packmate Scarper has to roll the corpse up in a rug and take it to a pig farm his ex-girlfriend owns. That's always a hassle. But though this horse's fanged teeth have disappeared and it now looks like an ordinary dead horse, the flesh smells…sweet and strong. As if it still held some power within it.

The Litany—the laws of your people—tell you not to eat the flesh of humans. This monster was never human, but still you hesitate.

Damn the Litany! It has failed, and now the world is all but lost. But I have won, so now I brush the flies away and eat.

I'm still worried about the horseman. I want to make sure he's all the way dead. Mortals ruined this world, and I don't want one slinking off to cause more trouble.

I won't eat the dead. I offer the proper prayers to whatever spirits still watch over this place, and thank them for my victory.

I don't want meat, I want information. If there are more of these creatures, they might attack the communities nearby. I study the dead rider for clues that will help me protect people.

You conduct a quick search of the horse-thing's tack, but you're no equestrian, and it's hard to find anything useful among the fast-freezing pink gore. So it's time to check the man.

You move carefully among the black trees, and while the dim moonlight makes it hard to see, it's hard to ignore the dead man's evacuated-bowel smell. You soon find the corpse.

Despite the stink, the flies are all dead. You gingerly inspect the rider's equipment. The ruggedized tablet is a sticky nightmare, and it doesn't turn on. You set it aside and inspect the rest of his gear.

Knife: USMC KA-BAR, favored by paramilitary geeks all over the US. The snow goggles look military grade, too, and SNOWHAWK is etched across the top. The balaclava…the throat…someone just slit this man's throat.

You didn't do that.

"Why do I have to do your work?" a voice says behind you.

One of Clay's pack, the galliard: Scarper. He flicks a knife back and forth in front of your face. The two other Garou lurk in the darkness nearby, nothing but wolf-shaped shadows.

"Back off before you look like him, Scarper!" I snap at Scarper with my huge teeth.

"Put that knife away and help me search the body." If we can learn who this rider was, we can learn where he came from.

I keep searching, looking for something that will help me warn people, if there are more of these things.

I grudgingly step back. The Litany has truly failed, if all Scarper wants to do is wave that knife around and threaten me when we still have work.

Ignoring the old galliard, you kneel down and examine the corpse. If the Bane had other servants like this, people in town might be in danger. And though you and Scarper don't exactly get along, he knows more than anyone about how to protect people without letting them know he's there.

He just doesn't like to do it.

"Stop digging around, idiot," Scarper says. "You think you're actually going to learn something useful? I already had to do all the hard work here—you think you're going to impress Clay with this?" Before you can speak, you hear Clay moving through the woods. You spot him as he kneels down in front of the horse-thing and starts to feed.

"Clay tasked me with destroying the Bane. It's down below, dead."

"I'm not interested in your riddles, Scarper. Say what you mean."

"We're not done yet. People might be in danger if there are more Banes in town like this one. We need to investigate."

"I did what you demanded. Now you must acknowledge what I have earned." I am no longer a "pup" or a "cub." In victory, I am Garou.

"I've put up with your shit for almost three years. I did what you demanded, but I won't listen to your insults."

"From what I know of Banes, killing the host body might not be enough. Should we look for signs that it escaped into the spirit world?"

You carefully shape the words of the Primal Tongue—the ancient language of the Garou, which you learned almost instinctively after your First Change—as you cannot speak human language in your wolf forms.

"Is that what you think?" Clay says, his maw dripping with horseflesh as he pauses his feast. "That we…owe you something, pup? You owed us a dead Bane, and you failed. Scarper did what you could not."

To emphasize his packmate's words, Scarper gestures with his knife across his hairy throat.

You sputter. Where to begin? The "Bane" was the horse, not the man. The man was already dead—you're sure you killed him. You finished them both without help, even though the others were supposed to back you up, were supposed to…

What would be the point of arguing? You look from Clay's blood-smeared face to Scarper's gleeful smirk to Black Tarn's hard, mad glare, and know that you will find neither mercy nor fairness here. You could almost choke on your Rage as this pack mocks the Litany right in front of you, turning it from sacred law into a crude bludgeon, used only to torment you. You will win no arguments here, nor find any Glory among these sad old wolves.

"Get back to the van," Scarper tells you. "Get yourself cleaned up. You look like shit. We're going to have to clean up your mess." He flings the keys at you, and they fly away in the darkness. Biting back a curse, you turn and spot the hole they left in the snow. You dig them out of the snow and fish them out with your teeth as Scarper and Black Tarn laugh at your misfortune and Clay returns to feeding on the horse-thing.

Keys held securely in your mouth, you pad through the snow, under the dead winter trees, for maybe ten minutes. In the silence and darkness, you forget about Clay, the Bane, and the old pipeline as you pass through a twilight world of shifting shadows and gusting snow—the world as it was ten thousand years ago. Then you suddenly spill back out into the regular world, as if stepping onto a rectangular map laid out on a table. Trucks rumble down a county road; human silhouettes pass under fluorescent lights. The smell of diesel and fast food. One step takes you from the desolate wilderness into what passes for northern New York's civilization: a loading bay behind an Amazon fulfillment center.

It's past midnight and traffic on the nearby road is infrequent, so you lope easily across the street, careful to avoid cameras, until you spot Clay's rusted-out Chevy Astro. You stop in front of the Speedway's big glass windows, because you don't see yourself like this often: a titanic wolf, your bulk prehistorical and monstrous, with enormous canines and bright, clear eyes—intelligent eyes. In the relative darkness of the parking lot, you can't even see any blood on your fur, which is—

Inky black.

Gray.

Dappled gray-brown.

Silver.

White.

Brown.

Red.

Golden.

Blue-gray.

Garrett) ᑕᕼᗩᔕᗰᗯᗴᗩᐯᗴᖇ__⸙

Volume 1

Chapter 1 - 1