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“Did you really think you could hide from me?” Zhyzhak, chosen of the Green Dragon, lives a life devoted to destruction in the Wyrm’s name. An Ahroun of freakish power, a terror in battle and assured of her destiny, Zhyzhak is more cunning than intelligent, letting the members of her pack worry about implementing her will while she seeks out important targets and destroys them. She focuses her attentions on old, powerful caerns, seasoned and storied Garou heroes, and nature spirits of tremendous import. She is a breaker of legends and an ender of tales, and in the final battle, she will crush the last Gaian king beneath her heel. She is the select and honored daughter of the Wyrm.

Zhyzhak’s martial prowess is well known and rightly feared amongst the Garou. She has demonstrated suf­ ficient raw power in Homid form to destroy Crinos Ga­ rou with her bare hands. When she needs it, her fetish

Devilwhip Btk’uthoklnto comes to her hand at her call. In the past, she has used it to tame raging spirits, forcing them to kneel before her, and to flay Banes that have displeased her. Only the strongest and most worthy op­ ponents can force her to shift into Crinos.

Beyond her absurd strength, no one knows much about Zhyzhak. She comes from the Trinity Hive, a Pit beneath the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico, deep in the gut of a horror named Grandmother Thunderwyrm. Recently she has moved into the Nameless Tower, where she has become central to a plot to attack and destroy the Sept of the Green.

Image: Zhyzhak is huge. She is 6’5”, weighs just over 200 pounds, and she dresses scantily, in leather high boots and straps. She often goes bare-breasted into battle with nothing but tribal body paint. Zhyzhak almost never appears in public. When she does, her only goal is to cause as much death and destruction as possible. The practicality of her appearance is never a concern, and she dresses implausibly whether at home or abroad, boldly displaying that she doesn’t give a fuck. A modern ber­ serker, Zhyzhak is also quite physically attractive, though most of her hive would rather try fucking a startled tiger. Zhyzhak’s hair is dark and falls to her shoulder blades. She usually braids several streams of her hair and hangs wicked multi-barbed hooks on the end. When she smiles, it always looks like a snarl, and displays the jagged wolf’s canines that frame her Homid teeth.

Just to put this up-front: We don’t recommend al­ lowing Black Spiral Dancers as playable characters. The Black Spiral Dancers are monsters. Not heroic monsters, not ferocious avenging angels of nature unbound to seek retribution for the rape and plunder of the Earth, not implacable warriors driven by righteous anger, they’re just monsters. That is both their purpose and their self-justification for not trying to be anything more. They torture, maim, and ruin because doing those things is easy and satisfying on a childish, simple level, and they’ve lost or given away whatever part of them once aspired to something more.

The Black Spiral Dancers are intelligent monsters, capable of reason and emotion and self-reflection, and so they drape their atrocities in self-serving phi­ losophy and lies. They claim to be enlightened, even as they send their sons and daughters to have their minds broken upon the wheel that is the Black Spiral Labyrinth. They claim to be free, even as they do the bidding of the Wyrm’s various avatars. They claim to be predator kings ruling over a dead Earth, the victors of an Apocalyptic war that is already done and over, but they still hunt the Garou, and are hunted in turn. In the stillness of their black hearts, they know that

their words are lies and that they are brutes gnawing at the still-beating heart of the world. They believe that their hatred, hunger, and rage are justified, and pretend that their ‘love’ doesn’t ruin and degrade those humans and wolves unfortunate enough to share in their tainted blood. They’re wrong.

The Black Spiral Dancers are broken, twisted things imagining that they stand tall. They’re slaves marvel-ing over the gilding of their chains. They’re the worst excesses and mistakes of the Garou once the urge to do or be something better is taken away.

We don’t recommend playing them. We’ve only gone into as much detail on the Wolves of the Wyrm as we have in this book to give Storytellers a chance to give Garou heroes a good, hard look at the path that leads to damnation, and how easy it is to justify that trip. Perhaps a player wants a character who plans to escape the Tribe and seek atonement and reconciliation with Gaia. If, for whatever reason, a Storyteller finds himself needing to generate a Black Spiral Dancer character on equal footing with a starting Garou the rules to do so can be found on page 425 of W20. Expanded mechanics for Storytellers to represent Black Spiral characters make up the remainder of this chapter.

Do not push for this if everyone at the table isn’t comfortable with it. The Black Spiral Dancers are dark subject matter, even for a dark game like Werewolf. Please be respectful of your fellow gamers’ boundaries, and try to tackle the very real horrors that are part and parcel to the Black Spiral experience responsibly if it’s done at all.

Few Garou spend much time dwelling on the sacred Pact that grants them their Gifts. A Gift is second nature to a werewolf once bestowed. It seems entirely right and natural. As such, only a few Theurges understand that the Pact is a binding contract between all werewolves and all courts and branches of the spirit world. No right-minded Garou would ever seek instruction from the Wyrm’s foul children, but under the conditions of the Pact, they could.

The Black Spiral Dancers are anything but right-minded Garou, and they have discovered a world of spiritual power offered by the Destroyer’s children that their Gaian brethren could hardly imagine.

What follows is a list of Wyrmish Gifts, not merely “Black Spiral Dancer tribal Gifts,” although they’re

here too, but an entire constellation of corrupted spirit-blessings suited for all Breeds and Auspices.

Black Spiral Dancers draw Breed Gifts from many of the same sources as the Garou, save that they undertake communion with deeply corrupt or mercenary spirits, or hunt down Gaian spirits and subject them to corruption in order to make proper teachers of them.