7z P

7z &P&

I want to leave whatever knowledge and secrets I can behind for this generation. I want to leave whatever help I can to those who must fight the Apocalypse.

I can hear the others starting to howl. It’s time for the Rite of the Winter Wolf. Time to say goodbye to one of our own. When the Rite is over, the other Striders and myself will finish the night as we always do when one of us falls. We will gather, apart from the others, and share whatever knowledge and wisdom we have. That way, when one of us dies, what we know will not die with us.

And tonight, I will write down all that I know and learn in the hope that someone might someday learn from it. % 4%+646Rod..

The ornate funerary rituals of the pharaohs never caught on with us. Our ways are simpler. I helped the Master of the Rite prepare Vik‘s body. We cleaned his body and performed the Rite of Purification. Then we made offerings to Great Scarab. She sent her children to help prepare Vik for his journey to the afterlife. I watched as scarab-spirits stripped the dead flesh from his bones.

When there was nothing left to devour, the spirits departed. We gathered his bones and buried them in the earth. A few small glyphs are the only markers. Some might think it’s not much of a memorial to someone who meant so much to me. They’d be missing the point though. The grave is just a symbol. A reminder. Vik‘s real memorial is in my head and in my heart. In my memories. ..A O ! & *?dq Now we gather. There’s not even a dozen of us here. We’re so spread out that it takes a while to gather a large number of us in one place. We will tell each other stories. Stories about Vik. Stories about where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Stories we’ve heard from others. I won’t record what they say word for word. That would be to miss the point. It’s not a message or a prophecy that must be repeated verbatim.

The point of this is for each of us to take in all of the information, and to interpret it as best we can. The goal is for each of us to develop an understanding of our tribe as a whole. So what I write is my people as I understand them. The world as I see it. 7z &P& To even begin to understand our tribe, you must first understand our curse. Every tribe has something that makes them what they are. Something that sits at the tribe’s heart with everything about the tribe flowing from it. For the Bone Gnawers, it’s their desire to survive. For the Get, it’s their love of strength. For us, it’s our curse. For four thousand years, it has shaped what we do and why we do it. It isthecornerstoneofwhattheSilent Stridersare today.

Khem - Egypt - is our homeland, and we have been driven from it. No Silent Strider may know rest silekf Sfriders within the borders of the Kingdom of Egypt. No sleep.

No peace. Even the love and comfort of Gaia is denied us as long as we dwell in Khem. And so we were forced to flee to the four winds. Alone among the tribes of the Garou, we have been driven from the lands of our birth. The Fianna still have their islands. The Silver Fangs still have their Rodina. Even the Uktena and Wendigo still have their Pure Lands. Gaia charged us to protect the lands of Khem. To watch over the Nile and keep it safe. And we failed. The Cult of Sutekh drove us out with the most blasphemous of Wyrm magic. Our trust has been left in the hands of beggars, merchants and addle-brained kings. Our birthright has become our failure and our shame. But it has also become our heart and our fury. Our pain becomes our Rage. We do not forget our homeland and we do not forgive those who drove us from it. We will have vengeance. We will go home again.

Our ancestors are lost to us. As I said before, when we die, all of our strength and wisdom goes with us. It’s not just the ability to channel the power of our ancestors we’ve lost. We’ve lost everything. We can not summon ancestors to teach us Gaia’s Gifts. Nor can we even reach our Tribal Homeland in the Umbra. All that which other Garou take for granted is denied us. Even the afterlife remains a mystery to us. Every Garou knows that if he’s worthy, his spirit will pass into the Tribal Homelands upon his death, where he will be able to aid his descendants if called upon. Every Garou except us.

We don’t know what happens when we die. Perhaps we pass into the Tribal Homelands only to be forever cut off from the living. Perhaps we reincarnate. Or perhaps we pass into oblivion. No one knows. Death is a mystery to us. Here I am, someone who’s spoken to countless ghosts and gods, who’s been to a dozen heavens and twice as many hells, and when the man who’s been like a father to me these past ten years lies dead, all I know about what’s become of his spirit wouldn’t fill a thimble. I might as well be a damn monkey.

That said, you might expect this to be a source of great angst for us. Lots of “woe is us” and “Gaia, why hast thou forsaken us?” accompanied by gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. A few of us do this, but before too long, another Strider will come along, smack you upside the head and tell you to get your act together. No, we do not angst over our lost ancestors. Our loss has become our quest. I said that death is a mystery to us, but that’s only half true. Our deaths are a mystery to us, yes.

But death itself is not. No other tribe knows more about the Dark Umbra and its secrets than we do. Tirelessly, we walk the earth and search the Umbrae, looking for the clues that will lead us back to our ancestors and for the tools to break our curse. We will never stop searching. When I die, I will be damned if I go before Owl and Gaia and tell them I gave up the search. That I lost my nerve and decided it was someone else’s job.

The spirits of the restless dead are drawn to us. The dead lead a sorry existence. Endless regret for the mistakes they made and the opportunities they missed out on in life. So when they find someone in the living world that can see them, they’re the most obnoxious lot of whiners and beggars you’ll ever meet. And they’re persistent. Even if you help them with their problems, they keep hanging around wanting more. And word gets out that you helped one, adozen more show up demanding your time as well. The only thing you can do is run.

Ghosts won’t drift too far from the people and places that are important to them, so if you run far enough, they stay behind and find someone else to bother. And now you know why we’re a tribe of drifters and vagabonds. If we were simply cursed to never rest in the lands of Egypt, we’d all be camped out along the borders constantly making raids into Khem. No, instead, the ghosts of the dead hound us from place to place, keeping us constantly on the move. Our lifestyle is our burden.

So there you have it. We’re a people with no homeland, with no connection to our past, and no place to rest. But we’re also a people with a purpose, with a goal, and with a fucking job to do. We have no time to wallow in self-pity. Instead, the curse drives us Chapfer Two: The Road Is J-if e ever forward, focused on the reckoning we will lay at the feet of Sutekh and of the Wyrm.

C&fiB qfiau!#(Ap) Once, wolves lived in Khem. Then the Cult of Sutekh killed them all. One more in a long list of sins we can lay at their feet. And one more failure on our part.

Gaia will judge us for the latter; we will have retribution for the former. But there are still those of us born to wolves. Most of our wolf Kin live in North America and Central Asia. Ethiopia is home to our only remaining wolf Kin in Africa. They hover near extinction, but those of us in Africa guard them with our lives.

The life of a Silent Strider wolf isn’t an easy one.

Our curse may not fully take hold until Owl accepts us into his family, but a dark cloud hangs over us all our lives. Wolves can usually sense that something is off about a Garou even before he goes through the First Change. For us, it’s even worse. Many of our wolf-born tribe mates tell of being regarded with suspicion and fear by their packmates. As if their Kin could see the grim specter of death hanging over them.

The restless dead who haunt wolf-born are sometimes the spirits of wolves and other animals. Wolves hunted down by humans come demanding vengeance. The spirits of deer and other game animals come asking for the proper rites thanking them for their sacrifice so that they may move on and be reborn. Those human ghosts who are drawn to our lupus brethren typically fall into two categories: the desperate and the vengeful. The desperate are often those who died deep in the wilderness and will likely never find another human to aid them. The vengeful are often those who died at the teeth and claws of wolves or Garou - even at those of the Strider himself.

Ckfifl fM4fl (N”kyta3 Most of us are human-born these days. Every tribe in the Garou Nation is much the same, save the Red Talons. If we’re lucky, both our parents are Kinfolk or we get adopted by Kinfolk in the know. Otherwise we have one Garou for an absentee parent. Just by being Garou, we become the proverbial problem child. Moody. Sullen. Withdrawn. And angry. If you’re a homid and you’re reading this then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The indescribable rage that simmers just under the surface. The urge to lash out at everything that bothers you. The burning need to fight. To kill. I pushed my parents to the breaking point. Others push beyond that, and end up either running away or getting thrown out. I think the only reason my parents never kicked me out was because they were diehard Deadheads who were convinced that trying to discipline me would “cage the brilliant butterfly that is my soul” or some such bullshit. I wonder what they’d think if they knew I killed a dozen people in a bar when I went through my First Change. Some butterfly.

We’re adiverse bunch. It’s anaturalside effect ofhow much we get around. Of course, we’re originally from Egypt and we still have Kin there, so some of us actually are still from the motherland. Those born in Khem have to get out though. Most move to the surrounding countries and journey back into Egypt as often as possible.

Others travel all over the world, becoming devoted seekers of the answer to breaking the curse. After being driven out of Egypt, a lot of our ancestors sowed their oats around the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Arab Striders tend to stay in the region, drifting from one comer to the other as necessary. There’s always a few though who decide they’re going to be the next Ibn Batuta and travel the world. Regardless, Striders from the Middle East tend to be among the most pure bred of the tribe, and some of them let it go to their heads.

Africa and India were the two other regions the ancient Striders tried to settle once the curse was laid.

India was, from all I’ve ever heard, a mixed success. The tribes who were already there tend to be acliquishlot, and follow some sort of complex caste system similar to that of their human Kin. We’ve never been really welcome into that system, so we exist on the fringes. No wonder so many of the Indian Striders decided to leave with the f S ilenf Sfriders Rroma when they got driven out. Africa was a slightly better deal. Make no mistake, it’s a dangerous place, but if you walk softly and carry a big stick, so to speak, you can get along okay. Most of our African Kin outside of North Africa live along the Nile River, in Eastern Africa.

As it became clear that the curse made it impossible for us to settle down in a single place, we started taking nomadic peoples as our Kin, and Striders are still born among them even if they’ve long since settled down.

The oldest lines are found among the Bedouins of Arabia and the Tuaregs of Northern Africa. Dozens of our bloodlines are scattered throughout the horseclans of Central Asia. Our blood runs still runs strong in many Rroma families, even though many of them have given up their wandering ways. One still finds Striders being born on the lands of the Sioux and others from the nations of the Great Planes, from bloodlines going back to when we tried to live along side the native Garou.

Not all nomads are born into the culture. There’s always been some of us who favor the open sea over the open road, and you know how sailors are when they get into port. The Wild West gave us vaqueros and cowboys. The 1950s gave us bikers and beatniks. The Sixties and Seventies, Gaia help us, gave us hippies and Deadheads. Regardless of my personal biases, each of these subcultures still exists in one form or another, and each continues to produce Kin and Garou. Although to my knowledge I’m the only Strider I’ve met to claim Deadheads for parents. Or maybe Vik was right and I’m just the only one dumb enough to admit it.

Speaking of bands, it’s not just groupies that produce us. There’s a long tradition of Strider Kin living among traveling circuses and carnivals. There’re stories of medieval troubadours. The past few decades have produced more than a few packs that travel as bands, scraping together a living from town to town, gig to gig. I even met one Strider who works the indie circuit as a professional wrestler. What’s scary is that’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve seen in my life.

But no matter where we come from or whom we attempt to live among when we can, all of us are still cursed. Human ghosts tend to favor us, looking for revenge, to make amends or any of a hundred other things.

Almost without fail, the first ghost one of us picks up is one of the people we kill during our First Change. It’s the rare homid who can change without going berserk among a group of humans. Some of them might have deserved to die. Some of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Almost all of them had families, friends, responsibilities. You know, lives. Many of us avoid the place where we First Changed, hoping to avoid the ghosts we created. I know I haven’t been back to Nashville in ten years. Someday, maybe, I’ll go back. Someday. Maybe.. ..