Everything

When the Garou think of Spiral Kinfolk, they think of slouching, uneducated wretches, held as functional captives in a house of horrors or a radiation-blighted wasteland. They picture the monstrous families from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, or huddled, catatonic victims who spend their lives as the victims of sadistic violence.

Often, they’re right. It happens, frequently. However, the more influential members of the tribe discourage such wasteful practices. Kinfolk are one of the few things which cause the Spirals to exercise any restraint. They’re simply too valuable, useful, and necessary to squander intentionally and the hives that keep their Kinfolk in radioactive breeding camps tend to destroy themselves within a generation or two.

Still, the stereotype, and practice, persists. The Song of the Spiral makes it clear that how a werewolf treats his family is her business and hers alone. him much about himself, and afforded him great intrigue. According to his own words, Scala held communion with the Wyrm for thirteen years, only emerging when he was 26. During that time, he claimed to have met and guided a number of powerful Garou, who had come deep into the Spiral to seek the wisdom of the Wyrm. Many of these were Garou who were now powerful and influential members of the 13 tribes. Certainly, his words inspired wrath and unleashed conflict among the Garou. Still more Black Spiral Dancers emerged to say they recognized his face or his voice, from dreams, or in the fleeting memories they held of the Labyrinth, in which he aided them.

In any case, Scala’s reputation has guaranteed him an audience, and his opinions and writings are widely circulated and hotly debated, both by Spiral hives and by those Garou who believe there is power in studying the works of the enemy. Below are his thoughts on the Garou tribes, thoughts that reflect the identity of the Black Spiral Dancers, and how they view their erstwhile cousins.

Black Furies

We absolutely cannot abide this tribe. They are the Gorgons and the Medusae, the eyes and hands and cunts of Gaia, and more than any other Garou, we must view them all as a threat. These are the embodiments of the Great Mother herself; no other Garou is closer to her will or her essence. Which is why we must conquer them, break them down put them on their hands and knees where they belong. It is only natural, it is only right. If they are the Mother, Gaia, then we are the Father Wyrm. Claiming them would show the Garou Nation the inevitability of what we are. Our line is superior and we will breed them out. Best of all, we’ll be taking what so many Garou men have long wanted but have been so long denied.

The Black Furies are warriors born, unhindered by the poisons of testosterone-fueled minds and masculine social constructs. They are the purity of Gaia, of controlled Rage and the Wyrm suppressed and bent. Think about the power of their thighs and abdomen, taking you in as they writhe beneath you. Be sure to let the next Black Fury you meet know that this end is the ultimate culmination of her lifetime of hard training: to be your bitch. Better yet, drag one of your female Kinfolk from her hovel and throw her out in front of the nearest Fury sept so you can watch them go to pieces over whether to kill her or whether to give her shelter.

Bone Gnawers

There’s a good reason the Garou hate these motherfuckers. For those living so close to the underbelly of the Wyrm, they prove remarkably resistant to walking the Black Spiral. Perpetually shat upon, and living in a constant state of betrayal, these lowlife subhuman scums aren’t intelligent enough to hate the Garou. Rather they persist in the places many Spirals must occupy: slums, sewers, and places of urban blight, where our folk run across them constantly. The fighting is bitter, but perhaps we should salute them, the motliest of all the Garou, for their tenacity. They aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty, and they wallow in a state of blissful don’t-give-ashit and that makes them deadly to us.

Children of Gaia and the Uktena

The Children of Gaia? Sam Haight was the best thing they ever produced. I will say this about them: those shit-stirs and fence sitters might be the smartest of the Garou, manipulating other tribes onto the front lines while they stay safe in their “communion” with the Mother. Don’t think for a second that other Garou don’t notice. In fact, if you ever have the pleasure of dismantling a pack, leave any Children of Gaia alive, but kill the rest. Let the idea that these cowards let the other Garou do their fighting while they skulk and hide become a reality for the Garou Nation. The less organized they are, the better.

As for the Uktena, treat them the same as the Children — don’t kill an Uktena unless you have to. Many Garou already think of them as Spirals-in-Denial, and we want to feed that image to keep them alienated. Just know what you’re dealing with. These guys aren’t easy to seduce, and they aren’t easy to shock or intimidate. Some are as close to the Wyrm as we are, and are yet even more passive and unemotional, gazing into us like they know every corner of our hearts. It feels like being disarmed and dismantled. Nasty shit.

If you kill one, make him disappear. Try to come back wearing his face, walk into a sept, and watch it go to hell.

Fianna

Once upon a time, these were our closest cousins, and in their deepest heart of hearts, they want to live the way we do. Drink, fuck, and fight: that’s the real Litany their hearts sing out. But they sit around, and they tell each other stories until they’re all wound up to go charge off and die for nothing. For pride and glory. Everything they really want, they put on hold. They keep it all in, and it makes them sick.

We know a lot about that, the rot in the arrogant heart of the tribe. Every year, more Fianna metis dance the Spiral in their hearts, and we’re always willing to take them in. The Fianna are too proud to own any of their shame. They don’t acknowledge their lusts, and so hate the children born of them; they don’t acknowledge they left the White Howlers to stand alone, and so they hate us. But we remember, and we’ll never stop making them pay.

Get of Fenris

Mother’s fiercest warriors. They never talk about the time we invited them to a fight, and they declined to show. They think we sacrificed ourselves in some noble death-charge, rather than going in alone because the Get were too lazy to help.

Like the Black Furies, the Get are a reflection of us, only twisted in a different way. They have the monstrous strength and tremendous fighting spirit of the White Howlers, and the crazy fuckass wolf-spirits and thralls of Fenris at their backs, painting them a legacy of invincibility borne out through war. They like to think they’re unstoppable, and every year sees another Get dickhead slinging a Spiral pelt over his back, but they aren’t telling the whole story, the story of how they helped make us and set us free. How every year we get bigger, badder, and worse. Now there’s more than a few of us stalking whole packs alone, going Grendel on those motherfuckers. And they ain’t got no Beowulf to save them. Beowulf walked the Spiral a long time ago.

Glass Walkers

Cities are the Wyrm’s scales shed upon the Earth. The Glass Walkers are a problem, because they’ve learned to thrive in the world to come without shedding any of their Gaian delusions. That makes them crazy, but it also makes them good at hiding among the sheep. Lots of times, the hardest thing about dealing with Glass Walkers is figuring out what to hit in the first place. That’s the bad news. The good news is, we have all those same strengths, in greater abundance, and the city is more inviting to us than it is to them.

Red Talons

They are quite possibly our greatest allies, but they do not know it. They do not know they can be tempted. We can give them back the world, the green Earth, the blue planet, free of this plague of humanity, a world in which the towers of the mighty have toppled. The Red Talons need only give into their Rage, and to see how the Garou have held them back and betrayed them, prevented them from getting at man’s neck. It is man, after all, who feeds the Wyrm. Man’s hatred, man’s malice, man’s lies, man’s depredations, man’s greed, man’s fucking hubris. What is so great about man? Only the Wyrm. The Wyrm is man’s sick prize. If man is the universe’s attempt to explain itself, then cancer is an explanation of man. Spiral brothers, tell the wolves: “Kill the man-kind, and your world will be free. The wind will carry your howls across the unsullied plains. Without man, the Wyrm will die.” They will look at you askance and know that the seed of the Wyrm lives on in you, but they’re too stupid and too haughty to be scared. They’ll like what you’re saying because it’s what they want to hear, and they’ll think to themselves: “When the world is quiet, and man is gone, we’ll hunt the Spirals in the night until the last of the Wyrm’s kin dies. And then the world will be ours, and all will be at peace.” That won’t happen of course, by then, that wonderful stock of lupine Kinfolk will be inextricably ours, members of our global pack.

Shadow Lords

It’s easy to pull someone’s strings once you know what they want, and Shadow Lords are the tribe of want. Usually they want to be powerful, respected, in charge, and their own tribe pushes them to grasp any advantage to succeed. We will always find Shadow Lords willing to cut deals with us to get what they want. They will always be planning to do away with us later; they will always assume we’re going to stab them in the back and figure they’re one step ahead for having figured that out.

Honestly, if they could just get over their delusions of noble struggle, they’re a lot like us. They see what they want, and reach for it with both hands. Sometimes you’ll find a Lord who can finish connecting the dots the rest of the way and see the figure they describe is the Spiral. That doesn’t make them our friends, though; if they came over to our side en masse, they’d just want to be in charge of us. So, sure, feed their ambitions whenever they seem likely to cause unrest for the other Garou, then blackmail or ruin them. We keep playing the game because it works out for us even when they think it works out for them.

Silent Striders

The best thing about swift messengers is that they tend to travel alone a lot. The worst thing is that all that stringy muscle makes for poor eating.

Silver Fangs

Glorious kings, leading the charge in an imaginary war! Nothing stirs up the anthill like a dead Silver Fang. Oh no, the noble wolf and/or arrogant bastard is dead, let us weep and tear at our breasts and/or fight over his shit.

Make no mistake; this tribe has the good shit. Silver Fangs are unmistakable thanks to their obsessively pure breeding, so if you ever down one, make time to loot the body. It drives the Garou wild if you show up wielding some mighty hero’s storied klaive. And their Kinfolk! Thanks for keeping the blood strong for us, guys. Sure, the tribe will go apeshit to get their Kin and toys back, but that just means you’re dictat ing their actions, and that means the opportunity for more dead Silver Fangs.

Stargazers

These guys are close to extinction, and can’t get there soon enough. What’s a werewolf with no passion, no desire, and his fury bound up in chains? Nothing, not even a punch line. Just let the modern world finish erasing the Stargazers; unlike the Red Talons, they have nothing to offer us as they pass into history.

Wendigo

Fucking badass warriors like the Black Furies, but most of them without half the testicular fortitude the Furies have. They have the potential to be our worst enemies or our greatest allies. For those of you who know our history, we used to look a lot like these guys once upon a time, but when our lands were poisoned and our people raped we went apeshit and danced the Black Spiral. Guess there weren’t any bars or casinos in old Caledonia? Next time you get a hold of a Wendigo, show him a mirror, and tell him he ought to be angry about the complicity of society in his tribe becoming what it is. He ought to thank you for showing him a way down the Spiral; it’s the only way to salvage what’s left of his pride.