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case ten thousand barrels of oil burned per day, or poured out into the sand and down into the aquifer or out into the PersianGulf. Eachwellsentacolumnoffire aquartermile into the air and blackened the sun for miles around.

Things got worse from there, too. It took months to get all of the wells extinguished, and between that thing and Mount Pinatubo blowing up, the weather that year was a real mess.

Due to the dark magics flowing around many of the well fires, there were Garou or Kinfolk involved in fully a third of the well cappings. There were Wyrm spirits dancing and cavorting at nearly all of the well fires. To this day, if you happen to encounter an oil-industry engineer who’s turned to the Wyrm within the last decade, expect that he was inKuwait. We had Garou or Kinfolk involved atsomestageofnearlyallofthecappings, andIunderstand that hundreds of them felt the touch of the Wyrm.

Something else was going on, too. Now, I was only in my eighties while this was happening, so I did occasionally go out with a young pack of Garou to keep my bones limber. This must have been around October or so of ’91. We toured a few of the fires, if you know what I mean, and I noticed that there was a lot of Gnosis -black, polluted, filthy shit - flowing along lines between some of the sites. I didn’t really have time to make a map or anything, but I have heard that other older Garou noticed the same thing.

I have to wonder if the lines of flow made a message of some kind. Maybe something visible from high above, in the Umbra. A signal beacon or a message. And it wasn’t too many years later by my reckoning that Garou first started to notice Anthelios. It would sure be interesting to figure out whoplotted the locations of those oil wells, and who was responsible for which detonations as the Iraqis retreated. I bet they know more than we do.

But I’m just a crotchety old retired truck driver, what the hell do I know?

There are still a lot of Wyrm spawn lurking out in the deserts of Kuwait. We are talking about an oil spill a hundred times bigger than the Valdez. The Wyrm’s bubble bath. In the last year or two we’ve gotten some attention from Konietzko’s Shadow Lords in the Balkans. Seems he’s stretching out his fingers. He wants to “help us” with the problem. We’re tentatively “letting” him help us.

Overheard at the Wheel of Ptah “By my figurin’, any active pack of Garou has to awaken the spirit of a car, bus, motor home, motorcycle, tractor-trailer, whatever, every few months. Say, four times a year. Say there are two hundred packs of active, adventuring, crazy werewolves in the world. Maybe that’s not conservative enough, but let’s not have that argument right now. Two hundred packs, awakening a vehicle’s spirit four times a year each. Eight hundred spirits a year. Ten thousand spirits since the Gulf War.

“Gets you thinkin’. Car’s been around since, what, 1910? That’s got to be fifty thousand car spirits out there. Talkin’ to a Bone Gnawer the other night, lives in a junkyard. He says there’s lots more cars out there dead than alive, so to speak, and the spirits of the dead cars got nowhere to go, nothin’ to do.

“That’s a lot of Gnosis floating around shaped into the idea of a car. And Car - in America, I mean, not so much in other parts of the world - isn’t really a Weaver spirit. Car’s always been a thing of freedom. Lets you go where you want. People who really love cars tinker with ’em, fuck with ’em all the time, too. I’m not sayin’ we’re going to be seeing a pack of Garou that follows Car, but I bet it won’t be long before you can summon car spirits up without a car on hand. Ever tried?’ rn&CrQ?f*P In 1999 a new star appeared in the Umbral skies.

We call it Anthelios, the Eye of the Wyrm. It is part of the Prophecy of the Phoenix, and its arrival has brought terrible change to the world already.

J%%m hH& UdMUM Overheard at the Wheel of Ptah, January 2003 Itwasagod. I’mserious.No, I wasn’t there, I was inIsrael when it started, but I came here right after, ah, a little bird told me something was going on. Strange how it felt safer in Tel Aviv. This place was a beehive, Garou shuttling in and out. I think Morningkill came through at one point. Yeah, Sarah, I’m sure that we’re still owed back chiminage for it.

It warped the landscape for dozens of miles in every direction. Whole packs went in and never came out again. I heard the vampires even threw some of theirs at it, which means that it must have been bad for business. Or at least the blood supply, yeah, Sarah.

And whatever it was, it wasn’t all here in the land of the living. It was half in the Underworld. It set a storm going there that’s still raging in some places.

Huge storm. Winds so fierce that they yanked ghosts out of their homes and threw them back into their bodies. Yeah, I know that sounds like a fairy tale, but one of the ghosts that follows me around vanished for a few weeks and showed up in his body. No, his actual body. His corpse. Yes, Sarah, he was half rotted away.

Thankfully I convinced him to leave me alone.

Not all the ghosts have gone home yet. Seems like more of them are closer to the living world than they ever were before, too.

What, the god? No, I don’t know which god it was.

With all the storms, and its location, I wonder if it was Indra himself. I know that sounds idiotic to say - he was the leader of the Indian gods, Sarah. Thunder and storms, too. Anyway, I know it sounds idiotic to say, but it fits the profile. I really hope there aren’t a few hundred other gods waiting to wake up in other parts of the world.

Plenty of werewolves came to the Wheel to recover afterwards. It’s easy to reach. They said that the rite the other Garou used to destroy the thing was so powerful that it reminded them of the old footage of nukes going off. No, no, the ones who performed the rite all died. They won, though. Might have been one of our greatest battles. & W y f d Overheard at the Wheel of Ptah, July 2002 Oh, yeah, I’ve seen ’em. Immortals. Always figured they were a joke or a legend - there was a Ragabash I knew who called ’em mummies. They were... well, if you believe the stories, and I don’t see a reason not to, they were created to fight Sutekh’s cult in old Egypt. An old king, his court, his wife, his warriors, all of them. They were made immortal by some concoction or ritual, so that they could keep Sutekh’s monsters from destroying the world, and fight as long as it took.

Now, I’m not talkin’ about immortal like a vampire is immortal. Those fuckers aren’t immortal on the end of your klaive, know what I’m sayin’? But these guys, you can cut their heads off and set their bodies on fire, and then piss in the ashes, and after enough centuries they will. Come. Back.

Anyway. Seems like there are more of them lately.

Don’t know what that means. I’m tryin’ not to blame it on the goddamned Eye of the Wyrm, because that’s getting old, you know? And they seem to have more power now - immune to the Delirium and calling down holy hellfire and all kinds of other shit - but they seem a lot more clueless, too. They don’t know what or who we are. I don’t know, maybe the guys we’re seeing aren’t immortals. They look like ordinary humans, though. No scent of the Wyrm on them. Not that necessarily means anything.. .

G&0&J C&&B Overheard at the Wheel of Ptah, a lesson to cubs, September 2001 Bennu was the first. She was born in 1981, and went through her Rite of Passage somewhat late, in 1998. At the culmination of her Rite, Bennu manifested the personality and voice of an ancient Silent Strider warrior, Shu-Horus, whose name had previously only been spoken in half-remembered ballads.

The skills of Shu-Horus allowed the neophyte Bennu to destroy several old vampires of the Cult of Sutekh.

This news stunned the elders of the tribe. The Curse of Sutekh long ago exiled our ancestor-spirits. We had little evidence that it had not actually destroyed our ancestor-spirits. For one year, Bennu was the only one who heard the ancestor-spirits. The tribe’s elders surrounded her with warriors, all ofwhom swore to die rather thanlet the Wyrmor thecult ofSutekh touchher. When she did rest, Theurges from hundreds of miles in all directions came to her, praying for insight. Precious little insight came - at least, none of the Theurges ever reported anything beyond the obvious. Then the Eye of the Wyrm opened. Now Bennu is not alone. Others - cubs, and very few of them, but no older Garou that we know of - have begun to hear from the ancestors.

Very few ancestor-spirits have spoken, as of yet. The only ones we have seen have been ancient, most having died before the Curse of Sutekh. They do not recognize the modern world; they do not speak any modern human language and their dialect of the High Tongue is hard to understand at times. And they are not.. . chatty. They come to their descendants in time of great need, and the need of the Striders’ elders to understand what the hell’s going on is apparently not great enough for them.

That hasn’t stopped the rumormongering and theorizing as to why this has happened. Most of us believe that the change relates to the storms that passed through the Underworld a few years ago. We have always assumed that our ancestor-spirits’ home was somehow connected to the Realm of Death, and the storms blew ghosts out into the physical world. It would be no surprise if it also sucked ancestor-spirits out of their home. There is adarker suggestion, though.

Garou have been encountering vampire warriors of the Cult of Sutekh less frequently since Bennu began to hear the voices of our ancestors. At the same time, I have heard of shared nightmares of a tiny owl being crushed by a vast and blind serpent. I don’t know what is happening exactly, but we think that Sutekh may have broken the bonds that our ancestors placed on him so many thousands of years ago. If he did, though, we received no warning. The bonds were shattered, perhaps casually. He hasn’t come after anyone - he hasn’t exploded into a hurricane of fury like the godling that awoke in Pakistan a few years ago.

We tend rather arrogantly to think of ourselves as Sutekh’s greatest foe, and as the greatest source of irritation to him. What if we’re wrong? What if he woke up, broke the bonds, and let his exile of our spirit ancestors fade away because we’re irrelevant? If we’re his greatest enemy and he doesn’t think we’re worth bothering with, who could possibly stop him? t Si fenf Sfriders b 4 G a CT!

Around a year before the Red Star’s first appearance, a young Silent Strider calling himself Road Dust heard the Prophecy of Fire Walker for the first time upon completion of his Rite of Passage. For reasons known only to him, the Prophecy struck a special resonance with him.

When the Red Star did appear, he took the omen even more seriously than most of the Garou Nation; he renamed himself Road Walker and began to preach a quiet, awful message to other Garou, one or two at a time.

Walker believes that his namesake’s prophecy had come true: That Gaia is dead. He has assembled only one or two packs to his cause; less than ten Garou, to date, believe what he says. My sources tell me that Road Walker claims to have proof of some kind that Gaia is dead. For the time being, no Garou not of our tribe knows of Fire Walker’s prophecy, much less the modem adherents to it, and surely if the other tribes did know they would consider suchathing to be criminally heretical. I don’t imagine that Walker would live long, spouting such stories.

He and his people have no intention of remaining here in the world and fighting the Wyrm when the cause is lost. I have not spoken to any member of the small cult itself; I do not know the names of any of its members for certain. However, other Striders of my acquaintance have their own stories about the cult’s plans. One story suggests that Walker’s Striders intend to abandon the world, much as the Wagnerian camp of the Uktena plans to do - they will venture into the Deep Umbra and look for a new home. Another tale says that the group intends to venture into the Underworld to find Gaia there and remain with Her, protecting Her from the dark gods of h a t . A third rumor suggests that they wish to return Gaia to life. By what unholy means, I do not know. I suggest that you keep your distance from these Garou if you encounter them. mh* Overheard ut the Wheel of Ptah, April 2002 We have always been the tribe of the dispossessed.

Certainly the Uktena have stood by our sides in this. I would not deny that. The Uktena focus their lives on their Kinfolk in the Americas and sought Kin in other dispossessed cultures around the globe, while many of us focus on our Kinfolk in the Middle East. The Palestinians have rarely had a space that they legally governed.

Most would say that they have never had a state that they legally governed for any reasonable length of time.

Since the British left their mandate in’48 the entire area has been unstable. I will grant that it has been unstable since before that, but I was not around when the Ottoman Empire collapsed or during the Crusades, so trace it back to 1948. I choose to blame the Britishand