Gifts

The curse of the Spirals is the seed of the Wyrm inside every Garou heart. Rage is proof of the Wyrm’s hand in the creation of the Garou, though most deny with empowered vehemence the presence of their dark Father.

Yet the Spirals have persisted and pervaded, taking Garou Kinfolk for their own, and dragging pure Garou down into their Pits, to force them to walk the Black Spiral. In many cases, the Spiral stance: the Apocalypse is over, stop struggling, and give in to Rage, has drawn many Garou willingly into the Pits of their sworn enemies. But this isn’t always required.

The example of Nathan Rocksye, a New England Get, is instructive. Rage and lust were the Wyrm’s way into his heart. His love was forsaken; the object of his desire, also Garou would not love him back. They were the best of friends, and the attraction was mutual, but she followed the Litany, and she disdained the horrors of the metis. When she took a Kinfolk lover, he left the pack and became prey for both the Wyrm and his passions. He lost himself in his war with the Wyrm, and when she finally found him, he was out of his mind with Rage. Driving her down, he attempted to throttle her into submission so that he might partake of her body. But the man inside rallied, he fought back from the precipice, finally flinging her away winded but unharmed, and fled into the wilderness.

With all the urgency of one who sees a disaster loom­ ing, she gathered her pack to give chase, and find him before the Spirals could.

The Garou have a term for those werewolves con­ sumed by lust, or hunger, or other qualities of the Beast, and untamed by higher reason or the sustaining nature of Gaia. They said it of Nathan Rocksye as well: “he

walks the Spiral inside.” The belief is that such Garou are already on the Spiral in their hearts and in their minds. The Wyrm and its agents must soon follow, to take the Garou to a Pit where he might face the monster within and accept it, and become it.

In the case of Nathan Rocksye, his pack arrived just as Rocksye stood at the precipice of a Pit, surrounded by Black Spiral Dancers. But before they could throw him into the Spiral, he surprised them with his sudden berserker rage, slaying three of the Wyrm’s wolves and scattering two others. However, when his pack tried to approach, he drove them off and warned them not to follow — her most of all — and then disappeared. His last known residence was Hither Woods, near Montauk.

Once it was easy to think the Black Spiral Dancers had no weakness, that they held nothing sacred, nor cherished anyone. Once it would have been easy to look at the degenerate children of the Black Spiral Dancers and brand as victims and future monsters, writing them off as products of the psychotic torment they are subject to from the time of their birth.

Times have changed. Though examples abound of the Spirals rutting in degeneracy and tormenting their offspring into greater states of insanity, the more prominent example of Spiral Kinfolk is also much easier to miss. These Kinfolk live in houses and apartments, go to school, hold jobs, and act as a stable buffer between the world and their monstrous relatives, whom they help to conceal behind the Veil of their own, apparently normal lives.

Such children, lovers, and associates lead anything but ordinary lives. They know that their existence is one of requirements, of demand and response. Sometimes they need to run errands, to have the car’s engine running and the doors unlocked at a particular time. Sometimes they are required to answer phones attached to dead lines from numbers that have no origin in the bank of telephone registries. Sometimes they must answer to the Beast, in the most literal of terms. Sometimes they are required to kill. Rarely are they required to love, but they are always required to fuck. In all of these demands and responses, there is one common thread, one issuance that never changes: the Kinfolk are a tool that ensures the survival of the Black Spiral Dancers. Their actions always lead back to that common thread, whether it be by paying rent on a place to hide, to killing someone who knows too much, to giving birth to the next Black Spiral Dancer.