Into the Heart of Entropy

Diane nodded to Niko.  She was ready to join the pack, to understand why
they called themselves Ronin (which means, outcast and lone, unfamilied and
dishonored) and their caern Entropy (which means, the end of all things,
downward into the cold darkness).  To learn to put new wine into old bottles
and celebrate the spiral (shades of the Wyrm's bastard garou children)
rather than fearing it.  Why did they use such triggering words for
everything here?  Things that brought chill into the heart of any true
Garou?  There must be a reason.  She would seek it.  She knew that despite
their words, their hearts were strong and their acts were to protect and
serve as Garou should.

Niko told her to follow him.  Oh, she would have a guide on the path.  For
some reason she felt attuned to Niko, her heart took him as her leader from
the first moment.  She was not sure why; perhaps because he was so much what
she was, yet so different.  Giving her the chance to see that what she was
did not define who she was.  Not at all.

She stepped onto the caern's hearpath, following Niko as the indigo mists
rose.  Oh, this was beautiful!  She felt transported.  The mists clouded her
vision fully and when her sight cleared, she was floating disembodied,
experiencing, sight disconnected from kinesthesia totally,  she could yet
feel her body walking, so, this must be something else... a granted vision
perhaps.  "below" her to her sight, roughly a dozen figures gathered,
enacting a complex and exhausting ritual.  One after another of them fell,
then the mists covered them and then parted to show several figures lying,
exhausted and lifeless, on the newly consecrated ground.  She felt an
overwhelming sorrow and knew, these were the Garou who had died to give life
to this land.

Though the bodies did not move, one of them approached her.  A spirit, as
the ancestor spirits she had once or twice seen in the Umbra.  She had only
met spirits before when they were called to teach her gifts; she was unsure
if this spirit were present or if it were a vision of him.  He nevertheless
spoke to her; he seemed not to hear her or perhaps she had no voice in this
place.  She thought she addressed him but he continued as though she had
not.  Yet he was talking to her, he knew who he addressed, and his words
burned through her.

He told her his story, and it was a harsh one.  An Ahroun, of course, and
one who throve on challenges and victory, and on the defeat and utter
domination of his urstwhile foes.  He had violated them, to show his
prowess, he told her.  And in more than one case he had sown seed that grew
into twisted flesh... the forbidden coupling of Garou and Garou.  That
defilement, he now understood, had caused far worse consequences than he
felt able to sustain.  Regret, once a total stranger, had its claws in him
now that he was part of Entropy.  He had been changed, by this, as had they
all; it is far different to live than to live on after death, in the twilit
half-life of a caern spirit guardian.  He apologized to Diane, as proxy for
all his metis children.  Like at the Passover Seder, where Jews celebrate
their own freeing from enslavement, surpassing empathy, and truly being; he
let Diane stand in for those he had wronged, and in essential he gave her
what she needed and had not known: an existential apologia for her very
existence, and its origin in corruption.  For the original sin of her
conception.

As he spoke, another Garou approached behind him.. the Ahroun faded back to
the illusion of his corpse, and Diane looked into a ruined face, flesh
melted and charred, though the eyes were wise and lucent.  He opened his
mouth and sang to her, at first wordlessly, and she marveled at the purity
of the sound.  Indigo mists gathered at his feet, spiraling up his legs like
vines and flowers growing, forming leaves and blossoms and stems as they
coiled and embraced him.  He kept his eyes on Diane and sang to her.  Tears
that had sprung to her eyes as she listened to the Ahroun, fell freely as
she let the song of the Galliard creep into her, filling the space that
anger had seeped out of, after so long, filling it with joy and hope and a
cathartic sorrow.

The song was of the summer lands, the semimythical place where all Garou are
one, there are no tribes or battles, all live in harmony and fellowship and
allegiance and fearless, limitless loyalty to one another and their central
tenets.  We are all one, he sang, the differences are the illusion, the
truth is that the oneness permeates us all, things are out of balance but
balance restored is only a matter of clearing away the surface debris and
seeing through to the deeper truths inside.  As he let the echoes of his
song die, his lovely voice murmured inside Diane's head, 'This is one of the
things that must be believed, it cannot be known.  Belief makes it so.'

Diane nodded and stumbled as she was once more looking out of her own eyes,
stepping the final step into the center of the caern to join Niko.