Gifts

Through their connection with Gaia, the Spirals have discovered a breed of spirits that precede the natural world, superseded by the course of nature. These spirits are rare, vast, and immensely powerful; they dwell in dark­

ness, lying dormant deep within the Earth, paralyzed and lobotomized by the course of natural history. Remnants of the cataclysm and the cosmic screaming that was the birth of the planet, these are the Ancients, who existed at different phases of evolution and fell out of currency with the violent shifting and changing of the world as it grew toward a planet not entirely hostile to life. The Ancients, then, represent features of Earth’s evolution that were once necessary but the spirits catalepsied, and their concepts phased out. Rather than moving on to the Deep Umbra where auld and retired spirits go to be remembered and venerated, these spirits were doomed to die, acting as binding elements to hold together a planet in which they no longer served any other purpose.

The Spirals know that most of the Ancients disap­ peared long ago, melding with the life force of the planet. However, they also know there are some that though dissolving for billions of years, will still be around for millions more. Therefore, the Black Spirals search for the Ancients, to draw them up and give them new life, meaning, and purpose in a world that cannot withstand their presence.

The Spirals awakened one such Ancient at the bot­ tom of the Pit known as the Swallowing Caves. Through rituals and sacrifice, the Spirals bound this Ancient to their Pit and infused the surrounding landscape with its essence, turning the area monstrous.

Another Ancient lurks within the Atchafalaya Basin, in Bayou Chantilly. The mystics brought to search for the lady of La Bête Noire tapped this remnant, called the Mother Bog. It reached out to them in turn, with a yawning breath that was as the caress of a mother who drowns her children. The Mother Bog is an Ancient driven mad by the rise of humanity and the tread of time. It has forgotten peace. It has forgotten dreams. It cradles coal and the bones of dinosaurs in its ribcage, and holds the souls of the Atkapa in its stomach. Birds do not fly into the swamp where the Mother Bog sleeps, and the instruments fail on airplanes that fly overhead. It is the Black Spirals’ hope to hone the dread recollections of the Mother Bog, to gain insights on the ancient world and develop new and unforeseen Gifts from her wisdom. Eventually, they would set her loose so that she might once again travel the Atchafalaya River, flooding, drown­ ing, and swallowing to add to her nature.

Living entombed in a planet whose life they hold sacred, the Ancients represent the spiritual collenia of untold epochs. They are the mad and single-minded gods of Ordovician extinction and the last witnesses of the birth of the universe. They are the nameless watchers, the dreaming remnants that defied the pull of science to sink beneath a billion years of time and geological stratum, vanishing into the thoughtless dissolution of

nature. These are things of Gaia, but they are not allies of the Garou, nor of that which Gaia is now. They must never be awakened or restored into the fabric of the world’s cycles, but that is exactly what the Black Spiral Dancers intend to do.