Gifts

The Black Spiral Dancers will not stop at victory. As the world lies bleeding, they will reach deep into its agony, making it a part of their own.

Over time, the Black Spiral Dancers have devised a blasphemous ritual to hollow out those nature spirits who have succumbed to their power, so that they can wear their empty shells like a second hide (see p. 124). Not only does this make the Spiral look like an absurdist nightmare, but also it gives the Spiral access to a host of the spirit’s innate powers, including the limited ability to pose as the spirit itself. Many Spirals have used the latter ability to give false guidance to young Garou, leading them into the clutches of the Wyrm. Some Spirals more directly use this power to increase their own horrific appearance.

S’nogg Bone-eater, an Alaskan Spiral, has hollowed out a grizzly bear spirit and fused with it. When she shifts into Crinos, the bear’s body forms against her own, giving her a second, massive set of bear claws that move along the curves of her arms, and the head of a grizzly bear opening over her head as though she were bursting alive from the bear’s throat. The grizzly spirit roars, chokes, and snorts as S’nogg fights, its eyes almost bursting with rage; it knows nothing but a lust for murder.

Another Spiral named Vikkatha was dealt a mortal blow by a Garou more than 600 years ago, but to survive she hollowed out and inverted her own soul, to prevent it from fleeing her body. Doing so engulfed her in black and white ghost flames, and sent her into a permanent state of instability, discorporating, and becoming corporeal every other full moon. In the centuries since even this state has waned, until Vikkatha only appeared one night a year under her own power. Now only those who know both a particular ritual as well as her location may conjure her on a full moon. When unleashed, she seeks to drink the souls of the living to maintain her coherence. In the years after her ‘death’ she continued to pursue whatever agendas she had before her transformation, but the passage of time has erased most of her ideas about the world and replaced them with hunger and ambition to kill. Spirals who release her are typically in need of a weapon against the Garou, or a distraction to draw their attention away from their true aims, or a weapon with which to frighten ghosts and other foes. As it stands, no dying Black Spiral has ever recreated Vikkatha’s transformation.

Another Spiral, a former Wendigo named Dayalond, consumed a servant of the Wendigo spirit. He wears her flesh while hunting members of his former tribe. White Hunter Dayalond bears his name for two reasons: his pure white coat, and the blizzard that moves ahead of him, covering his approach. The White Hunter has stalked from Alaska to Maine, and hunted extensively in the blinding heights of the Yukon.

A Spiral metis guards the junkyard entrance to a Pit, lurking in shadows, growling and snarling through chain links at passersby. Though he is metis, he has enough low cunning to know that he need not show himself to terrify people. All alone in the darkness, just making noises, he sounds like the biggest, meanest, tiger-balled sonofabitch­ ing attack dog there ever was. He prefers it that way. From the top of a heap of junked out old cars, on a night when the wind is right, his howling carries all the way to the Lincoln Park Zoo. If he is lucky, the wolves answer back, telling him he is brother even if no one else will. All that would change if they ever saw him, or caught a whiff of his

scent. But that won’t happen. The junkyard is his world. One does not leave his world. How would one breathe? Rather, the metis sits in the shadows, sometimes lit only by the glow of a television. His favorite show is Scooby Doo, though he often wonders with a mixture of fear, indignity, and sadness, why the Mystery Machine hasn’t come to investigate his yard yet. It certainly is haunted, what with all the mad dog sounds, the howling, and the occasional screams.

His pack calls him Scuzznuts. He is the dog of the yard, and his junkyard is the entrance to the hell humanity has invited into the world. Inside, the Black Spiral Labyrinth awaits. Obliquely, the metis knows this is not the only path to the Spiral, but it is his path, and none may come to it, and none may leave it, but by him. In the eight years he has been guarding the Pit, fourteen have been dragged down into the hole at the center of the junkyard. Only nine crawled back out, and of those, only five were strong enough, fast enough, mean enough, or insane enough to make it past him. The bones of the other four are his chew-toys. In all of Chicagoland, only the metis’s brothers are stronger than he is.

For any Garou dragged down into the Pit, only one choice leads to survival.

Becoming a Black Spiral Dancer At the core of a Black Spiral’s hive lies a totem-hole invested with the spirit of the Pit. In this area of malign power, a Spiral Theurge may complete a ritual to open a path to the Labyrinth of Malfeas. Such a pathway requires immense power, meaning that the Pit in question must be a particularly fearsome locus of the Wyrm’s power. Creating one powerful enough, is difficult, but achievable: through the binding of or an alliance with a powerful spirit or Bane, the corruption of a caern with immense geomantic significance, or through the constancy of horror. The Pit itself is a place of pain, torment, and despair; a place that inspires fear, guarded by a terrifying warden.

In any case, such doorways open so that Garou captives, or Black Spiral young, thrust into the Labyrinth where the Enigmas, Banes, and avatars of the Wyrm test and judge them. These trials lead inevitably in one direction, tak­ ing the traveler into the darkness of his own soul, where he accepts either that he is a product of the Wyrm and embraces his monstrous nature, or he dies. In both cases, the werewolf’s sanity never survives intact. Few mental perspectives emerge from the Labyrinth wholly unchanged, unless the “dancer” was fucked in the head to begin with.

And this is only the first dance. Many more will fol­ low in the years to come, as the Dancer proves himself to his new tribe.

Invariably, the transformation has a profound effect on the werewolf’s mind and emotions. Given a perspec­

tive of righteous hatred, the kind of obliviating force that strips bare his core, washing over him a torrent of Rage allows a Garou to survive the Labyrinth and transcend his original nature in the first place.

The werewolf’s physical appearance can also change, subtly or overtly. These changes may be incredibly ap­ parent in Crinos: anything from bat ears or muzzles that unzip like flower petals, to greenish werewolves covered in needle-fanged, flesh-eating tumors. Or they may be less-overt changes, like the Garou’s coat steadily turning white, or his Homid form developing a perfect, wicked symmetry. Balefire burns away the imperfections, leaving the hollow survivor a vision of decadence and an object of tremendous lust.

Rarely is this transformation subtle. With it comes the dark blessing of the Wyrm, an induction into his twisted mirror of the Pact that binds the Garou to the world of spirits.