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the rest of Europe. They felt guilty for what had happened to the Jews ofEastemEurope, and rightly so.They assuaged their guilt by giving Palestine to the Jews without regard for the property or lives of Palestinians.

We are the tribe of the dispossessed? The Israelis are no longer dispossessed. They are the possessors. The Silent Striders need no longer stand up for them and travel alongside them as the orphans of Europe.

Yes, that is correct, my father is Palestinian, as are most of my non-Garou relatives on both sides of the family. Not all of us traveled far from Egypt during the diaspora, and as you know my family’s homes and the homes of the Kinfolk of my sept serve as way stations for traveling Garou of all tribes when they cross Palestine. Without regard to human politics.

I believe that as the cycle of violence continues between Israel and Palestine and innocent lives are lost on both sides, the Wyrm takes root. It festers in the hearts of all who take joy in this conflict and who pervert it for political gain. We must take decisive action-I do not say against Israel’s army or government, but against the influence of the Wyrm. ‘Combat the Wyrm wherever it dwells and wherever it breeds’ is Gaia’s law.

Also overheard at the Wheel of Ptah, April 2002 Jews have been screwed out of property and holdings in Europe and America over and over again through the centuries. Christians fought Muslims to take Jerusalem during the Crusades. Anyone ever ask the Jews? No, not really. No one gave a damn. Hey, after all, they ate babies, right? And they killed Christ!

Oh, Gaia preserve us.

We knew the superstitions were false, we didn’t give a Ratkin’s ass who killed Christ, and we found ourselves traveling the same roads as some Jewish travelers in the years after the Fourth Crusade. Over the years to come our tribe came to regard the Jews just as they did the Rroma and half a dozen other groups: fellow travelers on hard roads, outsiders in every community. We didn’t really interbreed with them so much as we did with some others - some real hndamental theological differences, you know - but the Striders have Kinfolk in a few Jewish communities.

So finally, after some horrible crimes against them, a number of Jewish settlers manage to claim and hold their homeland, fighting off plenty of strong foes and building themselves a secure and prosperous home, So suddenly the committed wanderers of the tribe want to abandon them? What is this, the Garou equivalent of abandoning a punk band because they got too popular?

The Silent Striders have historical ties to the people of Israel. No other tribe has a strong presence there, and the Wyrm is always lurking. The Cult of Sutekh makes its home rather nearby! We have to remain there.

Chcipfer One: The R O G ~ Behind tlr Yes, it is honestly a shame that the Palestinian people have lost so much territory and freedom, and the Striders owe them their support as well, but the insane tactics they have used for the last fifieen years are never going to drive the area toward peace. The violence only serves to feed the Wyrm, in the end. Stability will provide peace; peace will help us win the greater war. 7?& &iZm fbv kyq4f A Garou named Jackson Longwalker, alpha of the Black Stalkers pack of Silent Striders, is a Galliard with an obsession about the long-lost Caern of Long Voyages. He’s done as much research on it as he canwhich isn’t much, because almost all of the Garou who made up its sept were Silent Striders. As Strider ancestor-spirits, they cannot be found. Longwalker learned what he could from various spirits, and then about two years ago he and his pack disappeared.

We didn’t pay his disappearance a lot of mind at first. We’re Silent Striders: we go away sometimes. We usually come back. But strange stories started to crop up. Nature spirits said they’d seen him and his pack, that kind of thing. These stories almost always came from the West Coast of the United States, a lot of them from Seattle. But then a guy I go way back with who calls himself Horus (no, not the Horus from Alabama, or the one from Novgorod - the one from Washington State) swears up and down that he talked to a young Japanese shark-changer who’d seen Longwalker in Kumamoto. The shark-changer, Hayashi Kaokami, said that Longwalker had come in from the sea, but that he was very cagey about precisely where he’d come from or what he’d been up to out there.

You can probably guess what I think he’s been up to, but I believe that I will keep my suspicions to myself, and simply hope that it’s working. 7?& kk?k!!udA W d I amgoingto try andpresentthe followingstory without any commentary. I don’t know what to make of it, but since I’m getting roughly the same story from two independent Garou I have to assume that something’s going on.

I bumped into a young Garou, Sarah Owlschild, about six months ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was a little disturbed. Her pack is multitribal, pretty wide-ranging and fairly modem. They don’t stick physically together as much as more traditional older packs do, they use the Internet with a fair amount of savvy.

What she told me, more or less verbatim, was this: “My younger sister’s Kinfolk but doesn’t really know it, she isn’t part of the culture. Mom and Dad are suburban office worker types. Marie’s fifieen now. She ended up pregnant last year, and couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. I offered to take her to our people, maybe the local sept could help her in some way, but she is still v( suspicious of my ‘freaky commune friends,’ so Ididn’t pu I drove her to the Planned Parenthd clinic in Muskeg( “I don’t honestly know what possessed me to IC at the spirit world in and around that place. It shol have occurred to me that it might not be quite rig It ... wasn’t quite right. I don’t have any ability to SI out the Wyrm, but it didn’t seem exactly Wyl tainted. The Gauntlet was really thick. Beyond th there was a hollowness, a sense of loss, and someth palpably semiconscious all around me. To be hones1 spooked me. After the procedure was over I kl meaning to go back, bring my packmates and eve thing, but I kept finding excuses not to.

“Eventually our Theurge - Johnny Two-Moor thinkyoumethim-came withme tothesite intheuml and really lookedaround. John‘sbeenaround forever, y’kn he’s Adren now. He said he was almost certain that the ec effect in the Umbra was just a reflection of the emotion: pain of the women who’d gone through abortions there. was very confident that the babies - the fetuses - o don’t know what the hell to call them - didn’t have souls of their own yet, that so early in their development they were just sharing Mom’s soul, and so there couldn’t have been a real death-echo there. And that the Gauntlet was so thick because of the repression of emotion in the area, and the mechanicalnature of the procedure itself. I believed him, but thought you would want to hear about it.”

I would have just filed this story away, except I was inNewark, New Jersey about a month later and heard about a late night brawl between two packs of Black Furies outside of a clinic there. I tracked down the Galliard of one of the packs, Helen Axewarden, and asked her what had happened. Again, as well as I can remember here is what she had to say: O?&y The material in this section, ‘The Howl and the Wal1,”covers avery sensitive subject in modem American life; abrtion is a religious, moral, political, and personal issue. Werewolf: the Apocalypse does not have a particular stand regarding abortion in the real world; the material inthissectionshouldn’tbetakenasanendorsementofany particular position on the issue. Werewolf is a game of animistic horror, and in such a setting, an event that is as emotionally, physically, and spiritually charged as abortion will have an impact on the spiritual surroundings.

Storytellers and players should consult one another and the troupe at large before introducing storylines based on this material, and if anyone in the group feels uncomfortable at its addition, drop it and move on. It’s a big World of Darkness; there are other stories you can work with.

P “It started as a disagreement between our packs. My packmates and I are all Furies; so was the other pack. They believe that it is acceptable for human women to destroy the life within their wombs should the coming child be inconvenient for their careers or their men. We disagree.

We had come to this city in part to destroy this symbol of the Namer’s domination over the natural order. The other pack - Hecate’s Grace - stood against us. They claimed to be defenders of women’s’ right to ‘choose.’ “Although my packmates and I were and remain confident that we are in the right here, we did not expect the local spirit world to react as it did when the first blood was drawn. There was a ripple of some kind in the Umbra.

Something reacted to our battle. My pack‘s totem spirit fled; I learned that Hecate’s Grace’s totem also fled. There was a scream. I believe it came through the wall of the Umbra, or possibly even out of the lands of the dead. The scream struck three of my sisters down; half of Hecate’s Grace was similarly affected. The battle ended as my sisters and I tried to pull our tribemates from the area. We had no idea what was going on.

“We did manage to escape. Eventually my packmates recovered, and I am told that the other Garou of Hecate’s Grace also recovered. None of us are certain what happened, but I believe that the reaction we experienced came from desperate child-souls that were trapped in or near the clinic after their bodies’ destruction. I do not know why they would have responded this way to our presence. The Furies of Hecate’s Grace told me that they had spent time near such clinics in the past and, even when things did get violent there was no such response.”

So, thick and spooky Gauntlet? Semiconscious child-ghosts? I have no idea. The only guess I will venture is that things might have changed after the big storms in the Underworld a few years back. Lots of other things about ghosts did change after that; maybe it had an effect on this. & p & P d Every American - and through American domination of world media, just about everyone in the modem world - knows what happened on the eleventh of September of ’01. The crashes and collapses that came afterward had more of an impact on the Silent Striders than you might initially think, and for different reasons.

First, let’s get the basics out of the way. While I am sure that the Wyrm and its minions cackled and gloried when the buildings fell down, the event wasn’t the act of supernatural beings. It was humans, ordinary, boring, mundane, suicidally fanatical mortals, that crashed those planes. The crash wasn’t done to satisfy any magical agenda that I know about, either. It obviously wasn’t the completion of some kind of massive ritual - I say “obviously” because if it had been, surely there would have been some kind of result to the ritual by now, more than a year Chfipfer One: The R O G ~ Behind t(s later. And I don’t know of any Wyrm cults that had it in for the Towers or the Pentagon, though I’m sure there are all kinds of fruitcakes out there waving their Tarot cards around hollering about something or another.

I don’t think there were any Striders in the buildings when they collapsed. I expect there were a handful of Kinfolk in the building, but I have not yet heard from any Garou that honestly claims to have lost family there. I would not be surprised if there were Garou in the buildings, but then again I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t. There aren’t a lot of werewolf stockbrokers or investment bankers, after all. I hear rumors, but nothing substantiated. Like I said, definitely no Silent Striders. Not exactly our part of town.

The attacks have affected us in particular in a number ofways. First, alot ofstriders and Strider Kinare of Middle Eastern descent. It’s really not easy for a random swarthy guy to travel around the US anymore.

We have a hard time taking public transportation, and small-town cops like to show off their law and order credentials by pushing around the foreign-looking outsider. We do a lot of travel on foot, hitchhiking when we can, and let me tell you, I’ve gotten precisely one ride in the last year. This isn’t too much of a problem for Striders who aren’t of Middle Eastern descent, I admit, nor is it much of a problem outside of the United States.

Secondly we have the increased political and religious tensions in the Middle East. Whenever governments get nervous about the future, they clamp down on strangers, dissidents, and travel. Silent Striders can’t help but be at least two of those, most of the time, and we’re often all three, as few Garou are practicing Muslims and most of the governments of the Middle East descend from the Caliphate in some way. Many of our Kinfolk are devout Muslims, on the other hand, and in fact several of my tribemates tell me that they had Kinfolk fighting on both sides of the short war in Afghanistan. When things get tense there, as they are currently, we worry about the prospect of full-scale war and the devastation it is sure to bring to the few remaining caems and Garou holy sites in the region.

Lastly, well, there’s the Lower East Side itself. Don’t go there. If you’re hearing these stories, you know about our tribe’s problems with ghosts. We attract them like lint to a balloon. Three thousand or more people died. I have only heard about one Strider who went to Ground Zero, a Ragabash, Carla Walks-Where-She-Likes. Ever pass a magnetthroughapileofironshavings?Fromwhat I heard, Carla survived, but she can’t talk anymore; she doesn’t even see you. She is ... having other conversations these days. I don’t know what the Umbra is like at Ground Zero, and to be honest I don’t want to know. We’ll let a stupid Ahroun from a warrior mbe find out and let us know. k F Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; -Jack Kerouac, O n the Road we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

People ask me why I keep these journals. Why I write everything from my travels down. We’re an oral culture. Our history and customs are passed down by word of mouth. We don’t read; we listen and - Gaia willinglearn something. I’m lucky. I’ve always been good at remembering the stuff I hear. Hell, it’s what got me through high school without ever studying.

Vik Stryker died tonight. For ten years, I’ve had the honor of calling him my mentor, and more importantly, my friend. I’ve never had many friends. Growing up, I was an outsider. Most of us are. It’s a side effect of what we are. And as much traveling as I’ve done since learning what I am, I’ve never really had the time to make close friends. So I tend to treasure those I have.

Vik is - was - the oldest living member of our tribe. Hell, since old Morningkill died, Vik was supposedly the oldest Garou in the world. The son of a bitch was over 100 years old, if you can believe it. As a rule, our people don’t live to a ripe old age. It’s uncommon for us to live past fifty or sixty, and maybe less than half a dozen each century somehow manage to live past ninety. Besides Vik, the only ones I know of in my lifetime have been King Jacob Morningkill, a Glass Walker named Wok Wok Rik, a Black Fury Chapfer Two: The ROW/ Is Life crone named Blood-of-the-Moon, some Bone Gnawer called The Sand Jackal and another Strider named Tommy Ringfinger. All but two of them are dead now, and Vik was the only one to pass the century mark.

Vik lived the last forty years without the Wolf. He never said anything about it, but I could always tell that it was a deep source of shame for him. And I’m glad that in the end, he found the Wolf again, and died the way he always wanted to. Fighting the good fight. As long as I knew him, he kept up the fight against the Wyrm. Even without the Wolf, his mind was sharper than most cubs a quarter his age. He’d forgotten more about our tribe, our history, our allies and our enemies than I’ve learned in my twenty-eight years.

And that’s why I’m writing this down. Our tribe is cursed. Unlike the rest of the Garou, we have no contact with the spiritsofour ancestors. For all the lore we’ve uncovered about the Underworld, what happens to us after death remains as much as mystery to us as it does to humans. When one of us dies, he is gone and all his knowledge and wisdom and strength are gone with him. When Vik Stryker died, he took a century of stories and secrets and strategies to the grave with him. The end times are uponus. If I die tomorrow,