Places

The Red Talon homeland is a hostile nightmare to homid sensibilities and that’s fine as far as the Talons are concerned. The rare homid Garou who visits must have a respected Red Talon chaperone, or have someone close to Griffin vouch for her, or she will find herself hunted.

The predator is king in the dense, tangled forests that fill the entire Realm. A confusing cacophony of shrieks, hoots, whistles, hisses and roars from almost every kind of beast call out from the shadows.

The jumbled noise only falls briefly silent when the wolves howl. Savage packs roam through the forests, confident in their supremacy. These packs are so successful that their popula­ tions have swollen to unsustainable levels. The wolves have out-competed other predators in the realm and decimated the prey. The Red Talons are only just starting to realize that the prey-emanations are dying out. Worse still, they are finding substantial numbers of dead predators who were obviously felled by wolves. In many cases nothing is left but bone and scraps, where the wolves have eaten their competitors.

The only solution the Red Talons have thought of is to cull the wolf population and this is something they refuse to consider. They blame the Realm’s overpopulation on the dwin­ dling wolf population in the physical world, reasoning that each wolf killed there results in another wolf in the homeland. In this way, the Talons sidestep criticism of their homeland, and have found yet another reason to blame humans for their woes.

The Talons argue that if they had their way, they would expand the wolf population on Earth and cull the humans to return balance to both Realms. Other visitors are not as convinced but know that even raising the issue would lead to violence.

The rise of the wolf population is not the only overgrowth in this realm. The dense forest threatens to turn to an im­ penetrable jungle with the unstoppable plant growth. Trees grow close together with barely enough room for a lupus to squeeze past, and vines and undergrowth tangle and block all but the most-traveled paths. The Talons believe this is another indication of the hated imbalance brought about by humans. They whisper that the Wyld has no other refuge to escape persecution and they must nurture it; the Red Talon homeland has simply taken in too much of its energies.