Where We Came From

It is a hundred years and three and fifty since I came out of the egg, but I do not forget what my father told me. Now I am the chief of the great rawens of the Mountain. We are few, but we remember still.. .

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit Where We Came From Secrets, kid. It’s all about secrets. I’m going to spill a few to you today, but the rest are up to you to discover.

That’s not to say you’re not going to find them - there are folks out there waiting to talk to you - but you’d best be prepared to shake a tail feather when it comes time for you to do your research. If there’s one thing Gaia herself hates more than a Corax who expects answers to be handed to him, it’s, well, I’m not sure what it is.

But that’s not important. Lemme give you the basics about where we came from and who we are, and you can pick up the other stuff from your other teachers when you find them. You will find them, you know. Spirits and Kinfolk and other kinds of C o r a - all of them will have other things to tell you. The trick is to realize that there’s value in all of these stories, and to try to piece together a truth out of all of them that works for you. Remember: Treasures hide in strange places.

Geez, kid, you’re not bored already, are you? Better stay awake through this part - I don’t think you’ve quite got the knack of the tighten-claws-when-you-sleep thing down Chapter One: An Oral History yet, and I’d hate to see you do a full-throttle faceplant from up here. It’d probably take the Sanitation Department bozos two weeks to pry your beak out of the concrete anyhow, and I hate to see that sort of wasted effort. (zhe deginning of the Worlb In this joint, everyone’s got a story of how their spiritual great-granddaddy created the world, usually for their exclusive benefit. Now, after hearing the Garou and the vampires and Gaia knows who else expound on how the world got made, I’ve just got one question: How the hell do they know?

I mean, think about it. One of the things that pisses me off most about the vast majority of the creatures crawling around on this rock is that none of them admit it if they don’t know something. They always have to come up with some self-aggrandizing myth about how the whole megillah is here for their benefit.

The thing that makes this a right bitch is that any one of the tales could be right, too. Mokole remember back a long time, although they ain’t too talkative. But so do spirits, and all those Incarna from Luna to Fenris and on Sorry about that rant. Sometimes i this leads us to secret#l, which is How promise because, frankly, he Weaver overheated his sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. Riiiiiiiight. Meanwhile, the Weaver’s got a definite bit of female vibe to her, while the Wyld -well, I wouldn’t let the Wyld date anyone in my family.

But in any case, above and beyond the usual professional rivalry that went on between the Weaver and Wyrm, there was a little bit of, ern, tension. With that tension came all sorts of dominance questions, BS like that. Who got to be on top, cosmologically speaking.

Now, here’s where Raven came in. Raven had, deservedly, a rep as being a good listener. And so when the Wyrm and Weaver had problems, they came to him to talk about it. Now Raven is bright, but at that point he didn’t have a hell of a lot of what you’d call people skills (or primal force while he came into being as a sneaky-ass bastard, he still wasn’t real up on the d that the Weaver down the line have waxed poetic to any shapeshifter that rubbed ‘em the right way. And they’ve all got their own variations on the story, and the tale gets funkier the more people telling it, and so on, and so on... .

You see what I’m getting at? Obviously, the story the Nuwisha tell their cubs isn’t the same as the one that the Ananasi tell their hatchlings. Their story isn’t the same as the one that the humanscientists in their white lab coats tell their undergrads. And each one kinda works, kinda makes sense if you’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Damnit! And because we’ve got SO many stories, we can’t know which one’s accurate. sure, everyone’shappywiththeirownpersonalHau ItAU:CmneToBe,andthatworksforthem-theGarouwho’s sureofhisstorycangooutanddowhathehastodo.TheGarou who isn’t sits on his and meanwhile the Wyrm runs amuck. and hardwired on getting the truth out of every And we don’t even know all the facts about this. at the back: The enough. Should a press we will find out. (In the meant the individual wereraven a bi That’s a valuable lesson right been created as a scout, and accurate info. Misinformati actively dangerous.

That’s why we don’t worry to world got made. It’ll drive ya about it or ask too many peo making assumptions based upon unreliable sources, we run the risk of acting on bad information. Instead, we’re just happy that the damn thing’s here. &ab Wyrm. t2o &ismit Origins Youth is a disease from which we all recover.

Dorothy Fuldheim Right. Here’s another deep dark secret. We were the last of the Changing Breeds created, and we might be what you’d call “second generation.” We’re the patch, the fix on the original software, and that means that occasionally we’ve got some compatibility errors with the older models.

Another thing: Gaia’s not an omnipotent, omniscient God, not in the sense in which you learned the drill in Sunday school. I mean, she created everything, including all forms of life, but it’s almost as if she didn’t recognize, in Of course, one bit of prehistory that I will speculate on is the Wyrm going bad. We’ve got enough testimonials from various trustworthy types - like Raven himself - to have a pretty good idea of what went wrong.

The sad thing is, it’s not the Wyrm’s fault. Not really.

Mind you, that doesn’t excuse item one on the list of bad things that have happened since then, but initially, the Wyrm was more or less a victim.

Now, let’s take a step back and think about some intro psychology here. The Wyrm, at least as it’s depicted, is a long hard muscular thing that likes wrecking stuff. And Cora I I ood and tied up in her nted evil chuckles. Bad t the “Hey, Let Me The c k matters into his own coils and tore nd their merry little war came out in e, the Wyld was off somewhere picking ere was nothing standing between the nd total destruction. e in. We were Gaia’s reinforcepath of the spiritual juggernaut.

I don’t like our chances, either. But remember, Tokyo’s still standing.f .. i to the point, it was going to be a terminal scene if Helios didn’t come back, because even the Gurahl were bitching about how cold it was, and that means we were well our way to ice-age status. Luna was doing her best to heat things up, but she’s A) forgetful, B) easily distracted, and c) not real good at h a t sort of hing.

So Raven decided something had to be done about it. He had a plan, which he passed on to us, and we went off to where ~~l~~~ was sulking. ( B ~ the way, if it been for us, this planet would be frozen solid, ‘cause even if one of the other breeds had doped out a plan, no way could they have gotten the altitude to bring the plan to the Man. Wings are a real plus in this biz.) Oh, and we took one thing with us when we went ho&-h=k-knocking on Helios’ door.

A mirror.

So, anyway, we got there, and Helios’ house was all boarded up with a big“DON0T DISTURB” sign on the front Chapter One: An Oral History a gut kind of way, that everything she’d created would have consequences. I mean, for one thing, a good number of the critters she made were sneakier than she was - look at the way Coyote and Wolf and Spider and the rest of the skinchanging lot kept creeping back in for second helpings of Gaia’s loving. For another, she didn’t have the resources to keep track of what the things she’d created were up to - there was too much going on all of a sudden. If she took a minute to make sure that Coyote and his children were behaving over here, the Gurahl made a mess over there.

Sure, she created Coyote (and his children) to play the part of the Trickster, but she did it too well. Coyote was the perfect Trickster, focused entirely on that, so Gaia (who had umpteen-zillion other things to take care of) couldn’t divine bed, had his kids whiz all over the Umbra to m their property and generally lowered the property where the totems live, Gaia knew that something those critters a on for her, preferably someone an editor and an executive s something vital was going down spend her time, personally, whe interpreter between Gaia and he fast enough to go from Place to Place, to see what Was happening everywhere. She made his eyes sharp enough to see the smallest details, SO that Raven could bring them back to her. She gave him a taste for carrion, as asubtle reminder tothe other critters as to who was the real boss (and that they’d be dead meat if they pissed her off too much). She gave him a quick wit and a ready tongue, probably so she ~ ~ l d n ’ t get bored listening to his recitals. And she made Raven bright enough to understand what he was doing, SO he could explain Gaia’s creations to her and help her understand them.

That might have been her one mistake with Raven, come to think of it. Making him smart, that is. Or maybe it was telling Raven how smart he was that was the big booboo, because once Raven doped out that Gaia needed him, he started extracting concessions. Let’s put it this way: There’s a reason he’s the patron totem of all sports agents, even if they don’t know it. He’s good.

So Raven leveraged a few more goodies out of Gaia, like certain protections for his children, and most importantly, the ability for some ofhis kids to wear man and raven skins. He claimed we needed that to get at all the secrets out there, you see. He didn’t want Gaia to miss anything important just because it happened on the human side.

So Gaia loaded up Raven’s dessert cart, possibly just to make him go away and stop annoying her. She did, however, tag on a little rider that’s a pain in the butt to this very day. It’s this: We can’t shut up. Gaia thought it would be nice if all her creations knew what the other ones were doing, so she charged Raven with spreading the word everywhere, not just back to her. Needless to say, this went over as well as a yak-meat burrito, but even after Gaia saw Raven it would, she I . erything he thought he did, I suspect. fool with Mother black in bird-shape. We es. It was a good look for came to an end. elestine, he has real e f ing out Gifts and presents eeds. So when he atever he was doing, all the Garou nar hora and praising Luna to the ey were giving thanks to Luna, not him. of it. Occasionally you’d see sunbeam leaking out the windows, but on the whole it was pretty damn dark up there, too.

That’s how we knew things were serious. When Helios doesn’t even bother to light up his own place, it’s bad.

We got to work, fast. The mirror got itself stationed right in front of the door, and then, in between shivers, we started yelling and hooting about what a great time we were having now that this new sun had come along.

Helios, poor sap, bought it hook, line and sinker. I mean, the only reason Helios had stomped off in the first place was because he didn’t think anyone liked him, so when he heard us whooping it up about our new bestest solar buddy, he flipped. More to the point, Helios came charging out the front door to take a look, and what do you think he saw?

Damn straight -he saw his own reflection. And, seeing as Helios isn’t real ingenious as celestial bodies go, he went right back inside and started crying. That’s where the clever part came in. We knocked on his door (careful not to stand in front of the mirror) and made him an offer he couldn’t understand.

Basically, we hosed him. We told Helios that we had an “in” with the powers of the universe, and that we could get him his job back - but only if he came back with us right away.

He damn near broke down the door on his way out, he was that eager. We barely beat him back to the friendly neighborhoods in the Umbra, and he was so close on our tailfeathers that he burned us black, every blessed one.

Turns out we’d outsmarted ourselves on that one. Not only did we get roasted up close and personal, but when Helios came back to much acclamation, he decided that he wanted to hug us and squeeze us and call us George - in short, to adopt us, as a personal thank you. Now, we wanted no part of this, but Raven pulled a fast one on us and we got suckered into it. Basically, the bastard convinced Luna that it was better to let us go over to her bro than risk having him run away again -so she and Raven sold us out. In one swell foop, we had our auspices stripped, and that was not pleasant. Helios made us his personal property, and with that we were taken out of the good graces of the ever-changing Moon; we were stuck, as Changing Breeds go. 1 mean, even the MokolC have more tie to Luna than we do - and because they were Helios’ first babies, he shone on them in all kind of ways. That’s why we’re all pretty much the same, when it comes to our purpose among ourselves; no warriors, bards or whatever kinda lines to break ourselves up among.

As far as I know, only the Nuwisha are in the same kind of one-note boat. But they’re still doing okay, and so are we.

Now, Helios wasn’t what you’d call a bad guy to be adopted by. I mean, Raven still had dibs, and Helios himself kept on dumping all of these Gifts on us. That means, incidentally, that we’ve got a hell of an arsenal because Helios thought that giving us nice stuff was the way to make sure we liked him. It was never necessary, really, but he Cora never got the message, and we’re just as happy to have the toys. But we knew that Helios can get temperamental, and we weren’t sure if hanging around him that closely, like he wanted us to do at that point, was such a good idea. After all, he’d done something stupid once. He might well do something else equally dumb, and drop it on us.

Fortunately, Raven was just as paranoid.

Ravenqolk Scattering Raven may be a cocky bastard, but he’s no fool. As soon as he’d received Helios’ Gifts for his children, he turned around and called all of us together - and I mean all of us. Skinchangers, ravens, and the rare human bright enough to honor Raven properly, we all came together to hex what Raven had to say.

His message was direct and to the point. He handed out the last of the Gifts Helios had bestowed, instructed us in their use, and then told us to get lost - literally.

You see, Raven was less than sanguine that Helios wasn’t going to figure out how Raven had snwkered him. He didn’t want the Sun stumbling onto the truth, then deciding to punish us by taking away our Gifts. So Raven ordered us to travel to every comer of the world as quick as we could. That way, no matter what happened, there would always be some of us hidden from Helios in the night, ones whom the Sun couldn’t touch. That’s why there are Corax from Alaska to Japan, and all over Europe as well. When your head honcho spirit tells you to move, you get your ass in gear and go.

As a further precautionary measure, Raven also told us that whenever one of us ran across another, we should sit down and compare notes to make sure that if anything had been taken away from one, the other could teach it right back to him. This sort of exchange program’s gotten a bit wider over the years; nowadays, we gossip more and shoptalk less. Still, it’s all in the interest of making sure we hang onto what we know, and pass it on when the time is right.

Now don’t get the idea that we don’t like Helios. Hell, we love the guy. He’s great. I mean, his Gifts are killer, he’s a lot more predictable than Luna and let’s face it, the Moon isn’t what you’d call a warm personality. No, we all think the Sun’s one hell of a Celestine, and one of the reasons we usually operate in the daytime is because he’s got the same interest we do in shedding light on things. He’s a bit more literal than we are, but who isn’t?

It’s just that, well, we’re aparanoid kindofbreed. So we like Helios, and we respect him; we just take precautions because, well, you never know. Helios has already flaked on us once; it could get kind of inconvenient if he did it again.

Other Realms I I .

Thefirstman tofenceinapieceofhndsaying ‘Thisismine’ and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Bases of Inequality Among Men e f I i Gaia created Raven to tell her what was going on, and she didn’t impose any jurisdictional boundaries on him. It wasn’t like he was allowed to see what was going on in Europe, but not in Africa - or allowed to see what was happening in the real world, but told that the Umbra was off limits. And seeing as no one had ever told Raven not to go there, he went and we followed.

Now Coyote and his kiddoes had already been to the Umbra by the time we got there, and the place was kind of pungent as a result. The situation had its advantages as well as its disadvantages, though. I mean, sure, the Nuwisha had taken a whole bunch of neat stuff, made the whole place stink to high heaven, and left behind a mess that bore a suspicious resemblance to mass-produced American beer. (It’s called “marking your territory.” Pay careful attention to that fire hydrant down there if you need further explanation.) But there was an upside.

Namely, the place was such a mess that just about no one - and I mean no one - else wanted to visit. Can you imagine a Silver Fang dipping his paws into the mess the Nuwisha left behind? Not bloody likely. So, as we could fly over the nastiest bits, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We took advantage of it, setting up meetpoints and runner routes, supply caches and hidey-holes all over the place. real hard keeping things from the Nuwisha ever since they decided to up and move en m s e into the Umbra. (Kind of like seniors legging it to Florida, only more distracting.

Sometimes they take some things out of your bestest, most secret cache and leave behind something by way of payment. Freaks.) If you’re ever in the Umbra and see some stuff that looks like chickenscratch, that’s the latest Corax news, traffic and weather. Pay close attention to it and you’ll find the fastest and safest routes to where you’re going over there. Ignore it and you’re likely to go face-first into a nest of Pattern Spiders.

Gw Now most of the other skinchangers - the cats and the bears and the wolves and the coyotes -have a certain advantage in reproduction over us werebirds. It’s the fact that both sides of the family tree are mammals for those guys; either way, the whole birds’n’bees process is pretty much identical. For us, it’s a little harder. If a pregnant Corax shifts to bird form, she’s got - what? Eggs? It’s a mess. Hell, we don’t even want to think about it. That’s why the women, once they get preggers, don’t shift. It’s not even law, it’s custom, which is a hell of a lot stronger. No one enforces it, either. There’s no need. Everyone just knows.

Which leads us to where you came from, metaphysically speaking. The stories go that when Raven decided to f Hell, a lot of that’s still there, and we’re constantly upgrading. Most of it’s still secret, too, although it’s been Cora I I I I ~ I take some of humanity and make them his (to go with the birds who’d already come along), he watched what the other totems had done and paid careful attention. Then he went them one better.

You see, Raven figured out that this is all about spirit.

Even Wolf and the rest, they didn’t quite get it when they taught their children how to perpetuate themselves; those guys got it all mixed up with the flesh (and all the problems that come with that). Raven realized all that was excess baggage, that all that was necessary to make a new Corax was spirit and will. Well, spirit, will, access to the Umbra and a few other things, but that’s besides the point.

Raven took the smartest of his children and walked ‘em into the Umbra. He showed them how to take part of themselves and shape a spirit egg out of it, and how to bind it to a baby (or a chick) with a bond made from a hair (or feather). And Raven told them that a Corax soul is too much to handle right off, so it has to incubate for a few years while the body gets ready for it. You see, he’d tried creating a Corax right off the bat first, and it was a miserable failure.

The raven spirit was so strong in the human kid that it tried to fly off the table and ended up breaking its neck, while the human spirit in the raven chick caused it to crawl right out of the nest (which wouldn’t have been so bad if the nest hadn’t been 40 feet off the ground). So Raven thought about it, and thought some more, and figured that a wait period was in order. After all, a Corax soul is a hell of a lot more dangerous than a gun, and they make you wait for that. That’s why he created the spirit egg - it’s really a time-release system so that a new Corax gets little doses of her new soul over a long enough time that it doesn’t fry her synapses. Then, when critical mass gets reached, the egg “cracks” and the rest of the stored spirit energy gets injected in one big shot. That’s the First Change, kiddo, explained all technical-like. But we’re getting away from the story here.

With the world being the way it was, and is, Raven felt that keeping the egg in the real world was too dangerous.

You know what they say about making omelets, but these things are too valuable to break. If the spirit egg were to get broken, you see, all of that stored soul would come pouring out and things would go to hell real fast. That’s why Raven decided to make the egg 100% spiritual and keep it in the Umbra, tied on with that feather or hair. In the Umbra, you see, it’s almost unbreakable. Raven explained all this to his kids on both sides, and they got sort of jumpy. Each wanted to know whether eggs should be given to raven babies or human babies, and how many, and all of those other pertinent details.

Raven saw this, and he knew pretty quick that unless he did something, there was going to be competition between his feathered children and his human ones. He’d seen it with the Garou after all. He pondered a little bit, and then he gave the human and the raven the big decision: They were both free to make as many kids of the other type Chapter One: An Oral History as they wantedthough with the approval of the potential Corax’ real parents, who would have to be part of the whole ceremony.

As you might expect, this shut everyone up real quick.

So that’s the reason we’re made as we are, and why there aren’t so many of us. Neither the homids nor the corvids want the line to die out, but we don’t want there to be too many of the other kind out there, either. In the meantime, we’re balanced, as balanced as we can be, considering.

Chought anb Memory Just as Raven was created to serve as a sort of spiritual NSA for Gaia, individual Corax have performed similar functions for some of the more powerful spirits over the centuries. These Corax, who have “forgotten the Sun,” just wander off into the shinier bits of the Umbra. A lot of them just keep going andgoing-rumor has it that they fade into pure spirit and never actually die. A few, however, end up working directly for big spirits they run into out there, and these guys often end up coming back to Earth, sort of, kind of, on the job.

Let me give you an example. You might have heard of a guy named Odin? Tall, bearded, one eye, spoke Swedish?

He had two ravens named Huginn and Munin (Thought and Memory, that is). Now supposedly, Odin would sit on his throne all day while Huginn and Munin flew all over the world, collecting info that this guy could use. They were literally his thought and memory -while they were gone Odin was without either thought or memory, and basically just sat there staring at the wall and wondering what the hell had happened to his depth perception. Then at the end of the day, H&M would come flapping back in their own sweet time, sit down on Odin’s shoulders, and fill him in on the day’s events.

Now this story does apretty good job of illustrating the role we play in things. We’re the eyes and ears of the spirit world, even more so than the kitties, because we’ve got perspective, the view from the hill, whatever you want to call it. We get overviews that they don’t, which is good for our role. The Bastet stash secrets away for safe keeping; we drag ‘em out into the sunlight and shout, “Hey, look at this!” for the benefit of the less nosy Changing Breeds.

This is why we have always been linked to powerful spirits, and some of those connections have been made public.

There was an Odin, though he’s long gone, and he did have two of our oldest and wisest as his advisors, Huginn and Munin, a mated pair. Word is that Odin granted them immortality as a reward for long and faithfbl service, and that they’re still flying around the Umbra, sun-lost. I heard from Skirts-theCorona, who got it in a message from Johnny, who claims to have heard it from Old Roarkh, who swears up and down to have seen Huginn and Munin in the feather. Word is they’re still watching, waiting for Odin to come back some day so they can share everything they’ve seen.

Che fmper ium an8 Che War o 9 qage guard. We moved our nests higher, hid our Kinfolk, moved our treasures and valuables into hidden places in the Umbra.

We could see trouble coming.

This loudmouth Silver Fang wouldn’t let up. He pestered the Ananasi, who ignored him, and the Rokea, who just turned around and left, and so on down the list, until he got to the big bears. Now, the Gurahl have yet to figure out one important thing: You cannot argue with a fanatic, not now, not ever, and certainly not back then. So the Garou kept on pestering them for the really big healing Gifts, and the Gurahl (who were smart, but not terribly good at judging consequences) kept on saying, “When you grow up.”

Well, you know what happens when you say, “No” to a spoiled child?The kid throws a tantrum. Only in this case, the kid was one of the high-muckety-mucks of one of the most effective races of predators this planet’s ever seen. So he flipped out, and all of the rest of the Garou flipped out along with him, determined to force the secrets of life and death out of the Gurahl by force. And some of the less brilliant strategic thinkers among the Garou decided to isolate the Gurahl, who were pretty kick-ass fighters, from any potential allies. Translation: They mounted pre-emptive strikes on the Mokole, the Bastet, the Ratkin, the weremegatheriums and everyone else they could find. We spread warnings, but no one listened.

History is littered with wars that everyone knew would J. Enoch Powell Wars are good for business. That being said, there’s nothing else that’s good about them, and the War of Rage was one of the worst. It was a war about nothing, with no possible winner, and we all lost. The Garou had spent too damn much time lording it over the humans, basically because the rest of us (read my lips here) did not care.

However, the wolves mistook indifference for a mandate, and decided that they were in charge. When they confined their little ego trips to the monkeys, it was no problem. The rest of us had our little Kinfolk-kraals, we did the breeding and culture things, and everything worked out just great.

However, something went *snap* in the brain of some Silver Fang somewhere, and he decided that running roughshod over the humans wasn’t good enough any more.

No, he decided they had to have the rest of us Changing Breeds under his non-opposable thumb, too. So he and his pack went picking a fight. They tried something with us, but fortunately we had enough friends among the other Garou so that things fizzled out there. Still, it put us on never happen.

It was bloody. Most of the Changing Breeds were down before they knew what hit them. Some were decimated.

Others got annihilated, as in “extinct.” Once the initial wave of atrocity was over, the rest of the breeds got together as best they could and hit back, but it was too late. The momentum was going one way - irrevocably. For the critters on the losing side, it was just a matter of what they could salvage.

Our own part in the War of Rage wasn’t spectacular, but it was important. After the initial assault, we put our heads together and came to a couple of conclusions. One, the Garou war camps were off their collective rockers. Two, the Garou were going to win. Three, Gaia had put the other breeds down on Earth for a reason, and seeing them all wiped out now meant that we were going to be in a heap of trouble at some indeterminate point in the future.

So we cheated. Look, there wasn’t anyone in Europe, Asia or anywhere that knew the Umbra better than we did. (No, I didn’t mention the Pure Lands. Shut up, kid!) So we started smuggling refugeesKinfolk and wounded, mainly across the Gauntlet to safe places we knew. We didn’t mess with combat effectives - not our business - but we had a feeling that if we didn’t help out the civilians, no one would. Surprisingly enough, some of the saner heads among the werewolves helped us out, misdirecting or slowing attacks so that we had time to set up evacs. The taste for slaughter, thankfully, isn’t universal.

At the same time, we maintained relations that were as friendly as possible with the Garou without actively helping them out. To have helped the Garou in this insanity would have been bad karma, but to have lined up with the opposition, well, that would have gotten us on the enemy list. So we did a little scouting, brought back a little info - nothing terribly damaging, and nothing that gave the Garou anything resembling an unfair advantage -and kept the Garou from trying to climb trees and wreck nests.

Ah, who am I trying to bullshit? We weren’t collaborators, but we were the next best thing. The only excuse I have is this: We had inside info. At the beginning, half of us were hell-bent to hit the werewolves back, but the Big Bird himself came down and stepped on that notion. Raven told us that it wasn’t our time, that we weren’t meant to fight this one. We - and what we saw - would be needed later as witness. By doing what we could but staying out of the line of fire, by walking into the camps of Garou and Gurahl, by getting an unbiased picture of what was going on, we could see all of what went on - and remember it.

And then, when those memories were needed, when another War of Rage threatened, well, we’d be ready to call the Garou on the carpet with every damn detail of every damn atrocity they’d perpetrated the last time. So we could warn everyone again once the memories had faded - because we knew they would.

It wasn’t a great way to get us to sit down and think, but it was good enough. And you haveta consider the source. I Chapter One: An Oral History mean, this was Raven telling us to hold back. So we did, and it probably saved us from extinction.

Oh, as for that assignment? Near as I can tell, we only partially failed.

Oh, one other thing: Most of the other breeds had no idea we were Wallenberging it behind the lines. To them -mainly the cats, who were fighting for their lives and had no interest in finding anything good to say about anyone - we were sleeping with the enemy. Never mind that there might not be too many Bastet around these days if it wasn’t for our help - we’re bad guys because we didn’t stand up to get slaughtered. The Eyes of Gaia were wearing blinders - by moving their kittens and Kinfolk out, we did more for them than they did for themselves.

More Recent Stuff You can’t say civilization don’t advance.. .for in every war they kill you in a new way.

-Will Rogers, The Autobiography of Will Rogers Humans are an interesting lot. They’ve got tons of secrets, very few of which matter on their own, but most of which feed into other secrets that can get very important indeed. When dealing with humans, it’s easy to get caught up in the inconsequentials and lose the cogent details - but there’s so damn much going on that usually you find your way back to something important, eventually.

So after the Impergium fell apart, the humans started putting things together for themselves. Bear with me here; I need to put about five millennia into a nutshell real fast, so the details are going to get kind of skimpy. What it comes down to is this: After the Impergium, Changing Breed society went downhill -fast.

It was all hiding and memories, trying to keep the old ways alive and sometimes just basic survival. Apart from politics, there was nothing going on - nothing except loss. We lost the Howlers and the Croatan, lost forests and the old lands, lost knowledges and lost our reasons for going on.

Meanwhile, the humans were doing new things. Exciting things. They were getting more and more complex, coming up with advances and new ideas almost as fast as we could scout out yesterday’s news.

Is it any wonder we were drawn to them? All over the world, new things were happening. Songs were being composed, swords and sculptures forged, philosophies and cities erected and then brought crashing down. I mean, it was neat.

We ate it up. Weavertech or not, we loved watching the humans try out new stuff. Part of it, to be honest, was politics. The Wyld was still off communing with its own bad self, and the Wyrm was getting more and more of a foothold in the Tellurian. This, we decided, was bad. And if no one else was going to play, then the Weaver was going to be where we put our money -‘cause as stifling as she can get, she’s better than the damn snake. So we were all for the humans making technological advances and building bigger and better things to protect themselves with because, let’s face it, no one else was going to do it.

Greece J When people think about Greece, we come in a distant second or so in the Important Bird Name Recognition Contest. Owl’s got it, hands down, for hanging with Athena and getting his face in all the pictures. That doesn’t mean we weren’t there, though. You want proof? Look at ESOP’s fables. There are two, count ‘em, two that star ravens, even though one of them isn’t terribly flattering.

The one that is, though, is instructive.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The one about the raven who finds the pitcher with a little water down at the bottom, so he drops pebbles into the thing until the water rises high enough for him to get a good drink out of it. Now that, kiddo, is lateral thinking, something we were championing way back when in the glory days of Athens and Corinth. Taking things from a different angle.

Encouraging people to question and to reassess. Sound like the basis of any school of Western philosophy you know?

Naaah, can’t be, right? Well, you decide for yourself. The point being, the Corax’ idea of looking at things from every possible angle was alive and well in at least some parts of Classical Greece.

Speaking of which, there are a few things you need to know about Classical Greece. Contrary to popular belief, the place was not full of white-bearded guys standing in front of white-columned temples in white togas declaiming the wisdom of the ages. Uh-uh. Even Athens, the cradle of democracy, didn’t let women or foreigners vote. Read some Aristophanes some time; it’s instructive.

But the main point I’m trying to make here is that in the good old days, Greece was full of mountains, goats and guys in hoplite armor trying to skewer their neighbors - and that’s it. Communication from city to city was damn near impossible at the best of times, deadly at the worst, and still the news had to get through somehow.

Three guesses how. Yep, it was us. A lot of your famous communiquCs in Greek history - the run from Marathon, the news of the walls of the Piraeus - have our featherlight touch all over them. Mind you, we didn’t necessarily make the runs for those guys, but we helped. You know, scouting out safe routes and directing traffic, whacking bandits along the way, things like that.

Why? Well, basically because in those days we played favorites. The Persians and Spartans were information control freaks while the Athenians allowed the occasional discussion, at least. Of course, we later wised up and threw our lot in with Alexander - an empire is a great way of establishing reliable and safe communications networks; you dig? Too bad it couldn’t last.

I I I I I I I head that he was, prophesied that England would be safe as long as his head was undisturbed.

Beginning to see how the stories fit together? Good kid. We’ll make something of you yet. questions, lots of them. Questions like the secrets of the other breeds, the rules to magic, and all sorts of other goodies. And just as Bran’s band of followers came back with their construction equipment, one of us asked him about the Apocalypse.

Bran opened his mouth to answer- -And one of his idiot henchmen threw a shovelful of dirt into it. Before we got our answer, those guys had buried Bran, built some piss-ant fortification on top of him, and performed a few interesting rites to inform the local gods that it was a done deal.

Which left us waiting for our answer. And we’re still waiting, damnit! That’s why there are always ravens at the Tower; we never know when Bran’s going to spit the sod out from between his incisors and answer the damn question.

Mind you, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon, but we want to be there 24/7, just in case it does. lust in case.

Che Beasts of Wattle Despite the War of Rage, we’ve managed to maintain fairly good working relationships with the Garou most of the time. It’s just when they get their dudgeon up that they’re a pain in the collective ass. Most of the time, though, we work well together - even our animal Kin cooperate. Weird, huh?

The best example of this is in, believe it or not, poems, Old English ones like “The Battle of Maldon.” The skalds saw us working together and immortalized it in poetry. After each battle, the eagles would seek carrion, the wolves would prowl the field looking for Wyrm-foes to dispatch or trophies to take, re’s one story about ravens that eve ow what I’m talking about here? ven skinny kids from t W No, not the friggin’ poem! Christ, if aU&we said was “Never-frackin’-m No, I’m talking about the Tower of Lon name, every kid knew how the Tower had its o q f l ravens ever left the Tower, the whole country would one that even to this day the bastards clip our Kinfo stories are true, but who wants to be the prime minis* flock of us and our Kinfol The second takes a little more explaining. Once upon a time, dirt. It says something about these guys that they preferred the company of a dead he Chapter One: An Oral History and we’d drink memories out of men’s eyes. The poets saw that we came to every battle for news and tales, and they made us part of their ritual. “The fighting was now imminent, ghy was at hand; the time was come when doomed men were to perish there. A din was upraised there; ravens wheeled about, and the eagle greedy for carrion.” That’s beauty; that’s poetry. The skalds knew we’d come to record the battle, the names and visions of the fallen, and they immortalized it. By the time the Normans came across thechannel, it was impossible to conceive ofbattle without us.

We were that much apart of the fabric of their culture. A battle without our presence lacked benediction. of pointless fights simply by not showing.

Pity those days are gone. We could probably stop a 1( make sure the food is damn good. They Owain Glen O w r Glendower, that’s what they call him in the English histories. The prince of Wales; the man who stood off Bolinbroke and ruled undisputed from Harlech for five long years. Some called him a wizard, because the English never caught him. There are even a few overheated nationalists out there who claim that Glendower’s sleeping under a rock somewhere, waiting for the moment when Wales needs him again. It’s a cute notion, but I don’t buy it. What is one outdated Celt with a rusty sword going to be able to do against tactical airstrikes and smartbombs? Not much, I think.

But back in the days when Glendower was a going concern, we ran with him. The English Marcher lords were corrupt as all hell; Glendower seemed at least vaguely concerned about the well-being of the peasants under him, and there was all sorts of interesting magic running around Wales that we wanted to uncover the wherefores of. So we hooked up with Owain, him all unknowing, and became his scouts (not to be confused with his Scots) and his runners.

How do you think he was able to be one step ahead of the English all the time? It was because his scouts could fly a hell of a lot faster than the English cavalry could ride, and we didn’t have to worry about those nasty little bogs and whatnot.

So with our help, Glendower kicked the English out of Wales.. .for all of about five years. By 1409, human time, it was all over. Glendower was on the run; his family was captured, and the crown prince had parked his butt in Harlech. Glendower ran for another six or so years, but in the end, he croaked.

And the moral of the story is? Don’t get too arrogant over what you can accomplish, just because you’re a Corax.

The tide of history washes over big rocks as well as small ones, and the humans do what they’re gonna do with or without our help - or hindrance. Without us, the English might never have lost Wales - but hell, it only took them a couple of decades to get it back for themselves.

We can divert the course of human history for a while, but not forever. It’s more effective in the long run to convince the humans to do it for (and to) themselves.

Viva f a Inbustrial flevolucion!

Remember how I told you we’d backed the Weaver in early human social development? Well, right around 1800, we realized that she was getting out of hand. I mean, putting fences up against the Wyrm is one thing, but she was getting out of hand. Soot filled the sky, making it hard to fly - or breathe. Carrion got trampled in the muck or carted off, making it harder to feed on things that weren’t Wyrmtainted. Bodies were, for the most part, carted off out of sight, so we - and the dead -were denied that last rite.

Things were getting too organized, and not in a good way.

Sure, the new cities were rife with stories and places to roost, but too many things that we saw were petty and tawdry. The visions sickened us. Children chained into factories - that’s too damn much order for me.

Meanwhile, the Wyrm had snuck in the back door and subverted the Weaver’s process. Yep, everything was really nicely ordered on the front end - but on the back end, toxic sludge was pouring into the rivers and poisonous fog was creeping out. Wonderful. Hammer and tongs, Scylla and Charybdis. It sucked either way.

Soooooo.. .we punted. We spread the word everywhere we could as to what was going on in the cities, then pulled back to watch and keep an eye out for further incursions. I mean, by that point, it had gotten way too big for us. All we could do was call in the big guns and spot for the heavy artillery. Mind you, a lot of us took to the cities really well - Gaia knows there were secrets to find there, schemes on both sides to topple. One whole heck of a lot of us got into fields like accounting and banking, simply because this was where the new hidden treasures were.

But all in all, it was a bad time for us. The skies weren’t worth flying in. A lot of Corax retreated to the Umbra for good, losing the Sun and saying, “Good riddance” to the mud ball. It looked like the fight was over, and that we’d lost.

Of course, that could mean only one thing: Things would get worse.

The Second War of Rage Yippie-yi-yay. Ki-yay, even.

Now, when the Garou found their way to the Pure Lands, some of us went with them, mainly in the second waves of colonization after the noble, brave and true types (who didn’t want any sneaky scouts along with them) had settled in. Some of us, I say, the rest of us were already there.

The thing is, even those of us who immigrated already knew what was over there. The European Corax went with our Kinfolk, but all of us true Corax had been talking with the ones up in the Northwest for years, decades, centuries, even - in the Umbra. So we knew they were there; they knew us European types were coming, and we hashed out some mutual protection deals. We also tried to warn the Uktena and Wendigo of what was on the horizon, but they didn’t want to hear it. After all, who trusts Trickster’s word, right?

W h y the hell does no one ever listen to us?

So the Europeans moved west. Our Kinfolk came with them in fits and starts -things weren’t great back East for many of them - and it took the railroads and land rush to get them moving in any real numbers. Meanwhile, a lot of the European Garou and their Kinfolk were going nuts.

Chapter One: An Oral History They raided caerns, wiped out Pure One packs, and did all sorts of other nastiness, all in the name of “progress.”

Heh. Weaver seduced ‘em, more or less - conned them into thinking that they were “doing the right thing and protecting what the savages couldn’t.” And thus began the second War of Rage - only this time it was Garou versus Garou. We took our stories from the first go-round, showed them to as many breed-types as we could - and got most of them to sit it out. Only the Garou (big surprise) were hardasses and insisted on fighting.

You know something? That suited us just fine. As well as we get along with individual Garou, we were more than happy to let them practice their atrocities on each other this time. The only thing we made sure of was that there would always be someone, no matter who won, to take care of the caems when the dust cleared. Even if it was just a Nuwisha.

Oh, we also made sure that our people up in the Northwest got away scot free. Emissaries from the villages let both sides know that if anyone laid a paw on those Kinfolk communities, we’d go over to the other side with a vengeance. And our support -or enmity - is worth a lot more than you’d suppose. We’re not great at fighting, though we’re better than we look. But that’s not important.

What is important is information. How well do you think the Wyrmcomers would have held out if we’d reported back all of their locations, all of their secrets, to the Pure Ones?

How ‘bout if we’d given the Pure Ones lifts through the Umbra to strategic strike points, or gone in to steal appropriate shiny things - like guns, ammo, fetishes.. .?

Would have been pretty hairy, wouldn’t it? Probably a good thing we didn’t do it then. Maybe.

I dunno.

Mind you, you’re getting biased info here. My ancestors hitched a boat ride. I’m a carpetbagger, and so are the Corax I learned from. So I can’t know what they saw back then, and when I try to tell it their way, it comes out flat.

I’ve heard the stories of the Second War of Rage from our Northwest cousins, and they’re a bit more acerbic about it than I am, but I don’t want to go putting words into their mouths. I can tell you this, though: The last Corax I talked to from up that way had a story for me, a story about a time when a bunch of Garou outrunners blundered their way into a pre-declared safe zone and started getting uppity.

The Kin who lived there put the word out, and Corax - from both sides - descended.

The bodies got dumped where the message would do the most good, and word of it got spread far and wide by the time Luna had come up.

But remember, that’s still coming from me. Much as I’d like to say we’re always this solid, human Kin nonwithstanding, it wouldn’t be accurate. You’re still not getting the whole story -but remember that it’s always out there, if you look and listen.

During the Great War, flying became an important part of human behavior for the first time. I mean, sure, the Montgolfiers had gotten off the ground way back when, but all humans had done with the damn things was joyride.

Okay, the Franco-Prussian War had some observational spotting done from balloons, but that was it. No one took the gasbags seriously, and so development of their potential rotted.

Then those two bastards down in North Carolina had to go and spoil it all. Airplanes, for chrissakes. Noisy, smelly, stinky, leaky machines that flew. Not real far or real fast at first, but they flew. Still, they were just a curiosity until the War came along. Then everything exploded.

You see, once the War started and everyone settled into their trenches, suddenly the bright boys in the high commands on either side discovered that it might make sense to know where the other guy was keeping his troops.

So they sent up balloons - which were easy targets for planes in which the pilots were armed with pistols - which became targets for planes with mounted machine guns.

Mind you, the early attempts to mount guns on biplanes were hilarious in a fatal sort of way. The wings on things like Sopwith Camels were too damn flimsy to support the weight of the guns, so they had to be mounted right behind the propeller. Until engineers worked out a timing mechanism that allowed the pilot to fire in between the propeller blades automatically, more often than not guys were shooting their own props off.

Hilarious, you say, amusing. What does this have to do with us?

The answer, junior, is lots. Because, for the first time with World War I, we didn’t own the skies any more. We had company, competition. And with the rate of technological advancement from the start of the war to the end, we knew that it was only going to get worse - that the humans were never, ever going to go back to the ground. For thousands of years, they’d been watching us with envy because we could fly - and now they had the keys to doing the same. We knew the skies were going to get crowded, and sad to say, we were right. That was the beginning of the end of our dominance of the skies. From 1916 or so on, we had to be careful when flying. Circumspect - because there ain’t no Gift in the arsenal that’s gonna save your ass if you get sucked into a jet engine or slammed against a plane’s cockpit. i War So for the past century, we’ve been getting increasingly paranoid up there. Yes, we’re still the best there is when it comes to sentient critters in the airbut goddamn, the neighborhood has gone to hell. And World War I is where it all started. coaay (An8 All Chat Good Stuff) Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state.

Cardinal Richelieu So where does that leave us now?

Well, with computers for one thing. The cities are getting bigger, and it’s harder and harder to tell the Wyrm and the Weaver apart. Personally, I think they’re on the track to combining. The Wyld’s still off in the bushes somewhere, doing Gaia knows what and occasionally mut- . tering, “Help meeeee!” like David Hedison in The Fly. I mean, if we thought it was bad back in 1837 or whatever, how should we feel now that there’s tetrofluorocarbons and bioengineered diseases and satellites coming down like acid rain? How should we feel when the other shapeshifters are just barely starting to talk to one another again; there are fomori in the streets and in the skyscrapers, and the Wyrm’s getting fed by everyone from Congress to the kid on the comer in Kowloon?

Well, we feel kind of okay, believe it or not. Computers are wonderful - great new ways to find and spill secrets.

Where before we had to tell stories to a million individuals one at a time, now it’s a post here and web site there, and all of a sudden everyone knows that Pentex is dumping teratogens into Buzzards’ Bay. So that’s something we like a lot. And remote cameras with URLs? Wheeeee!

Plus, the Garou are finally getting off their asses and doing the Darwin Shuffle. Some of them are adapting to the world around them, instead of pining after the good old days of the Impergium. They’re acting instead of reacting, at last. Mind you, it still looks crappy -my money’s still on that huge bastard coiling around the heart of the planet - but you know something? After ten thousand years of doom’n’gloom prophecies of the Apocalypse, it’s damn nice to have a little hope for a change.

And besides, nobody’s proved to me we’re going to lose yet.

Chapter One: An Oral History Digital Web and Malkavian Madness Network bullcrap access having their 15 minutes of fame, all at once. er news that a Pentex subsidiary is the local paper, but odds are the baddies have a thumb on the editorial board of ad revenue, and so that go? Bingo. You get an ompany like Hotmail or rmation through an anonyif you can’t find one, ely related newsgroups 1ocal.sludgy-assriver , ver.dumping.naughty. You get the idea. Anyway, you put up your post with a title like SAVE THE PLANET NOW (all capitals is amust-it draws the Netiquette freaks out of the woodwork) to all these groups and spread the word about what’s going on in as lurid a fashion as possible.

Now, your post isn’t going to do anything by itself.

But what will happen, sure as Gaia made little green amphibians, is that some four and twenty bozos are going to take offense at what you’ve written and write cross-posted responses, which will then get responded to, and so on - with all of the responses quoting your original message. In short, we’ve got lots of people hot and bothered about the bombshell you’ve dropped, and some of them will be so intent on winning the argument that they’ll actually get off their duffs and do some research on the problem.

And suddenly, intelligent people all over the world with a personal stake in the matter have the facts about what’s going on, and that little Pentex subsidiary starts getting hit from all sides. Meanwhile, you don’t have to put your butt on the line, except maybe to post a response or two, and the job’s still getting done.

It’s a thing of beauty.