Gifts

Most would say it is impossible to love a Black Spiral Dancer; they are monsters, incapable of love themselves. The closest they come is a farce of emotional control and mental abuse that turns Kinfolk into their pawns. Nevertheless, the monster can be alluring, magnetic, and larger than life to smitten Kinfolk. The Wyrm’s tribe exudes the same sort of animal magnetism as other werewolves. In the early days of romance, a Black Spiral Dancer might even try to cultivate the last undamaged shreds of his soul and feel something for his Kinfolk mate. Nothing pure can truly grow in the Wyrm’s poisoned soil, of course, but sometimes there’s enough to provide false hope.

Over time, and through selective breeding, the Spiral Kinfolk have evolved. They became more exotic, more fantastic, more thrilling. A Spiral Kinfolk was that person who was a touch out of step with society, charming but morbid: a person who seemed like they couldn’t be constrained by the rules that weighed everyone else down. The Kinfolk of the Spirals were people tormented by inner demons, but burned with passionate fervor that magnified them against the backdrop of sheep that call themselves human.

The Spirals decided that they deserved only the best, and so they made their Kinfolk into desirable objects. Being awful and unlovely things themselves, the Spirals conceived of families that would love them, or at least worship them, and so showed their Kinfolk the best of themselves for as long as they could, until there wasn’t anything left to show that wasn’t obviously broken.

The Spirals often use such Kinfolk as objects of weaponized lust, luring the Garou into traps and bargains to their advantage. Only love or the adulation-bordering-on-worship their Kinfolk had for them, allow the Spirals to use them as stalking horses and Judas goats, to give them away knowing that their hearts could never belong to any other. The Spirals don’t see this as abuse or betrayal; it’s why they bred and seduced their Kin, after all.

Loving a Black Spiral Dancer is an invitation to later ruin and horror. A Black Spiral Dancer isn’t just a man with a dark side he holds in check, his soul is a poisonous wreck, and it gets worse with every return to dance the Labyrinth again. But it’s the thrill of terror that makes the love so much more exhilarating in the beginning. Many houses of Kinfolk have been held together for years purely on the powerful romances between Spirals and their Kinfolk spouses, their obsessions with one another burning through the worst of times, the most horrible events, and the Spiral’s own monstrosity. That those flames even ultimately self-consuming, killed or rendered dead inside or worse, is of little concern to the Spiral Dancers.