Places

To venture deeper into the Umbra, particularly beyond the Near Realms, a werewolf needs a moonlit airt: a Moon Path or a Moon Bridge. Journeys by Moon Bridge usually begin within a caern at an artifact called a Pathstone; the pack’s safety is increased by opening it with the proper rites. Travel by Moon Path might avoid Earthly caerns entirely: they can go just about anywhere. Nothing precludes a pack from stumbling (or flying or falling or ethereally swimming) upon a moonlit airt in the midst of their journeys.

Whether a bridge or path, these routes are safest dur­ ing the time of the full moon, since they’re guarded and patrolled by spirits called Lunes. However, Lunes are a lot like many werewolves during the full moon: they can be fickle or wrathful, and they’re certainly unpredictable. If a traveler dares to step off the path, he does so at his own risk. Lunes may choose to ignore, attack, or even mischievously prank the traveler, according to whim and the phase of the moon.

Though these airts are formed from moonlight, their appearance can vary widely. During the time of the new moon, the path may be nothing more than a single shaft of light; during the full it moon, it might be a fully formed tube that whisks the pack through time and space at high speed, a slippery slope of pearlescent white, a scattering of moon dust that billows like desert sand in the wind, or none of these, having assumed a much stranger form.

In any shape, a moonlit path is formed from ephem­ era, which can of course be rent or torn by the claws or supernatural creatures. Just remember to keep your arms and legs inside the Moon Bridge at all times. No one tells stories of Garou who were foolish enough to tear at the substance of a Moon Bridge, for presumably, anyone dealing such a grievous insult to Luna was last seen in the spirit world and has never been seen again.

As one would expect, the Garou are a little bit biased when they talk about Gaia. They live and die in a never-ending campaign to heal and protect Her, so She’s a bit more than a reference from a mythology textbook to them. Gaia is called a goddess, but that doesn’t describe Her adequately. In fact, many claim that She’s more than a Celestine, although Her most comprehensible aspect takes the form of one. Some Theurges even claim that Earth itself is a Celestine form: a fragment of creation limited by what humans can see, understand, and experience. Theurges and Galliards take this further, since they’re quick to spout poetic and transcendental rhapsodies, claiming that Her true form is so much larger that the Triat that Her form is ultimately unknowable. For most Garou, the point is largely moot. Gaia is all around them, composed from the living essence of creation. Fighting for Gaia in the real world is far more understandable than any cosmological rationalization.

Three forces form the whole of creation. They’re per­ sonified as the mysterious Triat: werewolves know them as the Wyrm, the Weaver, and the Wyld. According to the Garou, this trinity collectively shapes and controls eternity, even as the three cosmic forces act against each other. This view might seem a bit simplistic, but the cosmos works in mysterious ways. Supernatural creatures act of their own free will (restrained by their bestial hungers and sinful desires), but from a spiritual point of view, nearly every monster and paranormal entity in the world can be seen as a minion, agent, or unwitting contributor to one of these three forces.

Spiritualists love to make analogies to the three forces of the Triat; despite this, no one set of referents define them. They are known as the forces of chaos, order, and balance; creation, growth, and destruction, potential, making, and unmaking; stasis, dynamism, and entropy; even the guises of the fertile maiden, wise mother, and decaying crone reflect the Triat. From any of these three words comes a host of philosophies, but for the Garou,

these are more than concepts. Supernatural entities of different philosophies, tribes, Traditions, and cults argue particulars about the Triat, but most attempts to define them in terms of moral philosophy or good and evil in­ evitably go astray. Gaia’s greatest champions, the Garou, fight to survive in a hostile cosmos where they’re perpetu­ ally surrounded by the conflicts of the Triat. Giving them more names to define them is a desperate attempt to cope with that conflict.

Theories hold that the three personifications of the Triat are most likely to assume their “true forms” in the Deep Umbra, but no two accounts of these avatars are ever the same. The prevailing belief is that they’re so primal and transcendent no traveler can behold them; instead, the enlightened and the damned can only behold one aspect of the Wyrm, Weaver, or Wyld at a time. Any such sighting is clearly a manifestation of the whole. If a pack claims to see the Wyrm as a titanic dragon in the stars, even if they could conceivably kill it, that manifestation is only one small fragment of the Wyrm. Kill a head of the hydra, and another appears. Clever creatures rationalize that each third of the Triat is really the collective sum of all spirits that represent it. Since it’s a cosmic, primal force that cannot be eradicated by anything short of the Apocalypse, that practical definition is as good as any.

Although the Triat is the personification of three primal, cosmic forces, they never really manifest as fully actualized entities. You’ll never shake hands with the Wyrm; you’ll only meet one of its insidious local represen­ tatives. Because these primal forces are nearly omnipres­ ent, combining to create the entirety of the Tellurian, no natural or supernatural creature can ever see them in their true forms: instead, werewolves and other shapechangers witness different avatars, fragments, or reflections of them in the spirit world.

In the physical world, their presence is even harder to detect. You may notice patterns to suggest their minions are present, but at best, that’s an educated guess. Garou can only prove they’ve sensed a part of the Triat through spiritual abilities (like the Gift: Sense Wyrm.) Within the Penumbra, the Garou interact with them through a legion of lesser spirits that perform the bidding of the Triat. The farther one travels into the depths of the Umbra, the more powerful those manifestations become.