A O dq

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