Everything

Pits represent a constellation of different locations and profiles, patterns and natures. There are four major ways to produce a Pit, so consistently blended are the methods that the four ways might as well be the two ways or even the one way. In this case, it is only important to understand that each method depicted can result in a distinct Pit.

All Pits share a defining feature: somewhere within a Pit lies a locus of emotion and corruption powerful enough to contain an immense spirit to serve as the hive’s totem. This spirit may be a Bane, or it may be a natural spirit that now trapped, tormented, and tortured into being the totem of the Pit. Whether it is a Bane or a nature spirit, the totem plays a significant role in determining the nature and the traits of the Pit.

The first kind of Pit is truest to its name: it is a tun­ nel dug into the Earth, or a network of natural caves, where the Spirals have congregated. Due to a variety of factors, including heat, air pressure, lack of oxygen, noxious gases, and lack of light, such Pits have all the resonance of Hell. It is easy to see how suffering, torment, despair, and horror could breed in such places. Typically,

the Spirals fill such Pits with the screams of victims dragged down into the darkness to be their playthings and eventually their food.

Though many modern hives protect and even elevate their Kinfolk, in the beginning, the Kinfolk of the Black Spiral Dancers saw themselves as White Howler stock, wanting nothing to do with their Spiral claimants. The first Pits’ consecrations were often the screams of those defiant Kinfolk, who were forced to live, breed and give birth in those alien depths. In those places, terrible ritu­ als brought forth creatures never meant for sunlight. The Kinfolk of the Black Spirals suffered; forced to live amongst these, to nurture and nourish them as their own, and to partake in whatever dread rituals were prepared for the unrelated homids stolen down into the depths. Such Pits become spiritual echo chambers of horror and misery, to which a Bane easily ties itself. Some even be­ come hideous enough to birth their own totemic Bane. For such a spirit to be powerful enough to be a hive’s totem the Pit must be the epitome of awful, a savage wound within the world. If the Spirals of such a Pit are fail to bind a Bane into their service, they may go to the surface to drag down one of the spirits of Gaia, to chain in service, reaping power from its terror and despair and potentially birthing a Bane from its defiled body.

A Pit need not be a tunnel in the Earth. On the sur­ face, a Pit represents a coring-out of the Umbra, a place where the spirit world, gouged and stabbed, its scar tissue connecting the real world to the otherworldly sanctum of the Black Spiral Dancer. The second method of forming a Pit requires the capture of a caern. There the Spirals hold hideous celebrations to defile the captured caern, incorporating captured Garou and Kinfolk if possible. Once the revels end, the Spirals keep the Kinfolk, and make them take part in whatever ends befall their Garou kin. If the Spirals are able to, they capture the sept’s totem and corrupt it, forcing it to be their hive-totem. When the totem is too mighty to corrupt, the Spirals instead destroy it, often feeding the weakened spirit to a Bane ripped from the anguish of the fallen Garou and their captive Kinfolk. As these places of power are sacred to Gaia and vital to the struggle against the Wyrm, Spirals have a much easier time attracting a powerful Bane to the totem-hole of a newly desecrated caern. This often involves a ritual that mirrors the opening of the first Pit and the despoiling of the White Howler Kinfolk by fomori, as well as the sac­ ramental devouring of Cororuc. Most Spirals are unaware of the significance of this rite to their past, or how they subtly mock their own origins by performing it.

The third way by which the Spirals make their Pits is perhaps the most tragic. Some Spirals still have enough of Gaia’s love within them to find undiscovered holy sites to corrupt and defile. In ancient times, they would have

feared the intervention of Garou, but in the present day, their numbers have increased while the Garou’s numbers have thinned. With well-placed contributions to local law enforcement, politicians, or even Pentex, the Black Spi­ rals can enlist the aid of humans to keep the Garou from attacking them en masse. One example is the Redheart gated community in north Florida where, in the ‘50s, a Spiral named Adam Dutch found a natural wellspring feeding a small mid-lake island of rare flora and fauna. He purchased the land and leased the surrounding area for a housing development. Houses and paved streets ringed the location, which Dutch gated and made off-limits. To the naïve residents, it looked like a picturesque piece of wild Florida at the center of their concrete and brick world, but Dutch kept congress in the depths of that warren, which over time became a bog, inhospitable and dangerous. For transients who wandered into the community, before it earned its gates, the bog at its heart was their final destina­ tion — though not by choice.

Any Garou that would have wanted to come take the caern from Dutch would have to run the risk of exposing themselves to the people living all around it. When that was not enough of a deterrent, the Garou found that the police were in Dutch’s pocket; they patrolled the streets around Redheart Pit, and some of them were even thrall to fell spirits and packing silver bullets.

The Garou did eventually manage to roust Dutch and his hive from their Pit, but they were never able to reclaim the location or figure out exactly what he was doing there. The city has kept the gates around the site locked, and since the fall of Dutch, only a few workers with the local Electric Authority have been inside, and each of them has come back with a terrible feeling about the place. Some have even claimed to hear the sounds of grunting and snarling coming from the deepest parts of the bog, while others have been horrified to see children from the surrounding neighborhood playing in the streams that run through the bottoms. Still others have sometimes reported hearing a sound like a low drum, or a ragged heartbeat.

The last way in which the Spirals appropriate a hive is by finding a place that others have already defiled by their own actions. Such areas may include sites of atrocity or genocide, or they may be less obvious: places of pain, loss, or abuse. They might also be areas where Gaia has suffered at the hands of humans: the site of the Chernobyl disaster has courted more than one pack of Black Spirals, and wearing the hides of irradiated spirits and tatter-flesh children, these Spirals are particularly woeful to behold.

This last method is worrisome above all others. The Umbra grows new Hellholes every year, and any of them might serve as fertile grounds for the Spirals’ blasphe­ mous version of the Rite of Caern Building. By contrast,

Gaia’s sacred places shrink and vanish under the Wyrm’s onslaught. New caerns are raised only rarely and at high cost, and more than that number vanish each year.

Invested with the palpable corrupting force of the Wyrm, the dominions of the Black Spiral Dancers writhe with secret life and seethe with dark intentions. Like their inhabitants, the Pits of the Black Spiral Danc­ ers are monsters, a monstrosity defined by individual circumstances.

By binding a spirit of the Earth into their Pit, the Spirals may bond the land itself to their dominion, infusing and infecting the world around them with the devouring essence of the Wyrm and turning the land monstrous. Alternately, by seizing a place of terror and pain, they might bore a hole in the Umbra, which acts as a resonating beacon and an echo chamber for horrific and ancient forces, a kind of void cloud, a hotspot for the poisons that flood the universe. By concentrating such forces in one location, the Spirals can create a source for drawing upon the Wyrm’s might, while concealing themselves behind a manufactured façade.

What follows are just a few examples of Pits around the United States.

A haunted mansion deep in the Atchafalaya Basin, La Bête Noire was the binding place of a resonant horror so profaned by its years in the darkness that it had gone nameless and bled away its past. Still, even in chains, its soundless shrieking called to a pack of Black Spiral Dancers, who migrated to Bayou Chantilly in search of the place.

In order to seize the power lying dormant on the grounds, the Lazeth family purchased the property and set their Kinfolk to renovating the house. For years, the bayou had been encroaching on the property, and the locals were very happy to see the Black Beast sinking further into the swamp. Now the town has grown inexorably closer to La Bête Noire, which rises from the swamp, the bayou spreading around it like a pair of dragon’s wings. A major street runs past the house, and certain of its residents have become fixtures in the local township of Cushing.

Nobody realizes that the family living in the Black Beast harbors werewolves. There have even been times when certain family members didn’t know. What the Lazeth Kinfolk have always known is that there are certain wings of the house: certain rooms, hallways, and always the attic, forbidden from their entry. From

these places, they have heard all manner of sounds, from clawing at the walls, to heavy, fleshy thuds, to snorting like the rooting of great boars, to weeping, sighing, and screams. The Kinfolk of the house sometimes use hallways that intersect these forbidden places, but they take it as a matter of safety not to walk these corridors by night.

While the Spirals’ reasons for living in La Bête Noire, and indeed their reasons for buying the house, remain unclear, three generations of Kinfolk have known the palpable evil that resonates through the house and sometimes wanders the halls. Try as they might to live normal lives, they know they are a front for monsters. On their end, the werewolves manage to contain the blights and keep them from spreading into the common areas of the house. Externally, and through most of the mansion, La Bête Noire is a lively, modernized home. However, in its wings and its rafters lurk its true masters, terrible and reclusive, who hold the demons of the house at bay, keeping sway over dark forces from which they draw their terrible insights.