Bestiary

Quote

“Prophecy is meaningless. Even Spiral dreams die.”

The Black Spiral named Rhaos proved himself a worthy and tenacious leader when he fought to break the strength of the Garou in the wilderness along the Mexican border. But when his pack of Spirals began to gravitate toward the firebrand leadership and revitalizing vision out of New Mexico’s Trinity Hive, the blooded Ahroun saw his renown slipping.

To save face, he went alone to confront Zhyzhak, whom legend held to be the strongest Garou of all time. Rhaos had never seen Zhyzhak, but she had a storied if short history, filled with the tales of unwary, foolish, and stupid werewolves who had scoffed at reports of her power and had been subsequently humiliated and decimated at her hands.

He hid his intentions well, knowing that ferocity and surprise were his best chance at winning the fight. He was still young, at the height of his strength, but he had the advantage of years of experience fight­ ing a brutal border war in two countries and several states. When it was time to fight Zhyzhak, he cast away honor to achieve victory, approaching her as a supplicant only to strike her with a silver-plated pipe. Then grasping her fetish Devilwhip, Rhaos mounted Zhyzhak and began to strangle her, hoping in his fury to break her neck.

At first, her raging, writhing, unbelievable strength seemed like it would surely break Rhaos’ hold — or his body — before she succumbed. But moment by moment, as she struggled and clawed for breath, her movements began to slow, weaken, and collapse. Then, when it seemed as if the last of her life had bled out, Zhyzhak shifted into Crinos. She leapt, driving Rhaos halfway through the cement and stone ceiling.

Pushing through physical shock and mental disbelief, Rhaos shifted to Crinos and plummeted from the hole like a falling star, claws and fangs ready to finish what hands had started. Zhyzhak caught him midair and with a snap of her hips, suplexed him through the concrete floor of the bunker with all of her force. Before the fight was over, she had also driven him halfway through each of the bunker’s four walls. She ended the fight by driving the pipe through his brain, killing him.

Or so she thought. Rhaos’ packmates dragged his body away, to where one of their Kinfolk could perform surgery to save him. They managed to save his life, but not his mind. Zhyzhak lobotomized Rhaos, and it appeared he would be in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. One of his

packmates was about to finish him with a mercy stroke when the room began to tremble. Specimens in jars writhed, danced, and chanted. The heads of deer and bear and elk mounted in the hall whispered, leered, and twisted into the heads of dragons, their nostrils shooting plumes of smoke into the room. The wind blew through the room then, and it carried a voice, as Rhaos’ might be if it had been aged by a thousand years. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Image: In Homid, Rhaos was a lean, athletic man in his early 30s, though he looked to be in his 20s. He is white, but a Native American ancestor somewhere in his bloodline causes him to look tribal in certain lights. His dark eyes, once handsomely expressive, have developed the dead black glassiness of a shark’s. A headband or a bandana, to cover the damage to his scalp, usually obscures his dark hair. He almost never appears in human form anymore. More typically, he appears as Crinos, hooded and chained into a massive iron wheelchair from the 1950s. He has the power to move this chair without touching the wheels, and among other curious new powers, has gained the ability to reach into people’s dreams, attacking them in the form of a living nightmare.