World of Darkness World of Darkness: Attrition - Tales of the Ajo Runners [Fin]

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[11 PM, 1 September 2006]

The desert air had a smell to it that night, the first hint of seasons changing. Winds-of-Fire remembered that scent, the crisp feel of it, the night that Juan Dead-Wolf brought a new pup up along the long empty dirt track that lead into the desert wilds of Ajo Runners territory. It was a night of protents, he would recall later, a night of old and new friends... and one of hope.

His howl went out, a call that told far more than it had any right to hold within those long mornful notes that echoed off the bluffs. In the end, five pair of glowing eyes stood behind him, watching the pair as they made their way, that strange scent of not-life preceding them as they came out of the wind.

Finally, the familiar of the two walking dead made the change, stepping forward now on four legs to offer his own howl of greeting. The accent was wrong, and always would be, Winds knew - the First Tongue was foreign to one not at least part spirit - but the meaning was no less clear. "After years, Quiet Night comes again. I bring my pup, who knew the People before her change. We come as friends."

"Then come, friends of the Ajo Runners!" Wind called out in reply, shifting to become the bronzed Navajo that he had seemed at birth. "Share our fire, and tell us stories. These are dark times, but you are welcome here!"

With that, the living and the dead came together to share fire, company and perhaps even hope.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

"Be respectful. Be strong. Be silent. Be the wolf."

The words rattled around in Sarah's dead brain, as they had for over a fortnight now. Ever since Juan had told her that she was finally starting on her long-delayed journey again.

The words were intended, of course, to be a crash-course in how to behave around the strange half-wolf, half-man creatures of spirit called the Uratha. In turns, Sarah resented the instruction and Juan's ability to even say the name of her kin.

Life-long experience had taught her the right kind of subservience to show to the shape-changers of her family, and those on the road had proven no different. True, she was over a year out of practice; ever since her death the previous year, her company had been either the solitary undeath of Juan, or those other vampires - "Kindred" he had called them with sarcasm thick on his tongue - in brief visits to Vegas and Reno and other outposts of life and unlife in the great American desert. But a lifetime of memory doesn't just disappear in a mere year; the ingrained responses don't fade so quickly. Hadn't he been listening as she'd explained her former life to him?

The other matter cut at her as well. Never in her life had Sarah managed to wrap her mouth properly around that word, or any of the others that mystified her every time they erupted from a Lupine mouth or muzzle, turning in the air with magical ressonance that her poor mundane ears could not hope to capture, let alone that her thick and unworthy tongue could repeat. Still... if Juan could do it, there was hope that someday she could as well. Unfortunately, months of effort had shown no more progress on that note than at the claws he claimed were there within her blood, waiting to surface.

So it was with a certain defiance that Sarah approached the Ajo Runners that late summer night, her soul burning to show Juan just what she was made of, that she knew full well how to deal with her kin. Indeed, as they came to the fire and the Alpha came forward to greet Juan and his young charge, Sarah stuck her hand out - respectfully, but boldly - and greeted the old Indian.

"Sarah O'Neally of the Wren clan, a year late but finally here."

Her words hung there in the air like a Gay Pride balloon at a Southern Baptist rally for a full minute before they finally fell to the ground. She almost imagined that they made little cartoon puffs of dust upon impact.

The Alpha - who she would later learn was called Ajo's-Teeth - looked at her hand like a polecat that had snuck in under a tent flap. For one horrible moment, Sarah thought he was going to rip it off and throw it over the edge of the bluff. Instead, the grizzled old man looked Juan in the eye and said, "Tell your dead child not to speak again until it proves itself to the People as something more than a memory of life."

Well, that went well.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

"The dead pup showed spirit," Winds-of-Fire would later tell other Cahalith, sitting around other fires. "And after my Alpha's words, she showed at least the wisdom of silence, speaking only when spoken to."

As the tale went: "This young Sarah-O-Neally sat quiet until she was told to speak her tale, and then she spoke from the heart. She recounted, when asked, how she had come from the far shores of the eastern waters to find her cousin, one who carried strong medicine in her spirit but who had run from her brothers and sisters. In her own way, this dead-girl showed her own medicine, though it was not so obvious as the one she followed, for she stayed true on the trail, seeking her lost family across long and lonely miles.

"Sarah-O-Neally told us how her car fell to the desert sun, and how she fell to it after days of determination to reach the next pack - my pack, the Ajo Runners - because of her mission. And she told us how Juan Dead-Wolf came to her as the sacred wolf to bring her into his world. She told us of seeing Luna's Ithaeur face smiling down on eyes that saw again and feeling Her touch. She told us of the long journey of self that came after, finding her connection again to this world and the thread that touched to Luna, and how she had pleaded with Juan to finally bring her to us.

"She wasn't ready, of course. But sometimes, only the unready can step forward."

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

Sarah was well and truly pissed.

Not a fucking word. After three hours of sitting here on this fucking rock, trying to keep this funky Beast-thing from going apeshit around their fire, they ask me my story, I tell it from start to end, and they don't say one fucking word to me.

Whatever the werewolves were saying afterward, it was in the First Tongue... which meant that Sarah didn't understand a bit of it. Every once in a while, Juan would look over at her, though, and his face showed what she'd learned to translate as concern when he did. She gathered that it wasn't going well.

Finally, about an hour before dawn, things became heated between Juan and the Alpha. It wasn't as though they were yelling, but the words somehow seemed larger than before. After five minutes of it, the elder vampire looked to his childe and asked one question: "Would you prove yourself, even if it meant you will probably die forever?"

What the hell?!? For a moment, Sarah hesistated... but every eye in the pack was on her, burning into her flesh like the sun. If I don't, then I'll probably keep going... but keep going where? Doing what? I've told myself my whole life - both of them - that if I ever had the chance, I'd take it. I might die doing this, but that's better than an eternity of regret.

"I will prove myself," she spoke with a firm voice, and Juan looked sad as he nodded to old Ajo's-Teeth. And then, for the first time, the Alpha deigned speak to her.

"Then tomorrow night, we go to war."

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[just after sunset, 2 September 2006]

"She could not know what would come," Winds-of-Fire would tell in his recountings later. "She could not know this war, the history of it or the rage behind it. She could not know the valor. Or the cost. But that next night, just after sunset, Juan Dead-Wolf and Sarah-O-Neally emerged from where they had slept the day away in Gaia's heart, and set off for war.

"We had long known of this nest of the hated Azlu. Indeed, we had once fought to destroy it, and thought we had won. When they returned though, it was stronger, as is the way of the Spider Hosts. To truly destroy them is a miracle, one we had not done. Now, they were back, and our scouts learned that they were taking Herd from the city of Ajo, eating them from the inside and walking with their skins. Our numbers were few, but war was needed before they grew so many that we could not hope to fight them. This is why the arrival of the two walking dead brought us hope; fierce fighters despite their limits, they may help us turn the battle. So it was that my Alpha gave Sarah-O-Neally this challenge, and so it was that we went as seven instead of five to war."

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

Spider Hosts. Please let me never see another of those.

She hadn't realize that the Alpha's test would be quite so... suicidal. But when they marched off, five living wolves, one dead, and Sarah keeping up as best she could on two legs, she knew from the silence that everyone was deadly serious. It wasn't until they hit the caves that she knew what was going on. Or rather, until what was in the caves hit them.

Spiders should never, ever be eight feet tall. Or have scorpion tails, complete with stingers. Or spin webs as tough as steel cable. But the Spider Hosts did and do. Growing up, Sarah had heard stories about them, all spoken in hushed tones. Rarely did the werewolves manage to inflict any kind of final death on these arachnid-spirits that thrived on closing off the spirit world from this one. And rarely did the battle see all of the Forsaken coming home again. So seeing one of them for the first time in the flesh was anything but welcome.

The Lupines didn't wait; they dove in, frenzied tornadoes of claws and teeth and fur, tearing everything in their way to bits. And when more came, they did it again, with old Juan adding his deadly claws to the mix. But the best Sarah could manage was to keep from being eaten, throwing punches and kicks for all she was worth.

Until she saw Juan die.

The unholy thing that cut him in two looked like the worst features of spider and lobster thrown together in some mad scientist's lab, then run through the Enlarge-o-tron. It had to have massed in at least half a ton. And it reached out with one awful pincer and took Juan apart at the shoulders.

Her heart screamed in pain, the blood of her sire calling to her as he fell before her, his rugged Mexican face lost to ashes before it could even hit the stony ground. For a moment, Sarah thought she would succumb to the deadly Frenzy, as her own blood rang in sympathetic agony in her ears and burned throughout her body. But instead, something in her changed. For the first time, she could truly feel the secret blessing of Luna upon her blood.

Before, she had been told of her legacy. Now, Sarah knew it.

Out of more instinct than anything else, she poured vitae into her fingertips, and for the first time in response, black claws erupted forth with an impossible mixture of pain and ecstasy. With significantly more cunning than a Frenzy would have allowed, Sarah launched herself not at the hideous thing's head, but at the flanking legs... and leapt up them onto it's armored back.

The Azlu thrashed, hoping to shake her, but Sarah had a whole new tool and wasn't the least bit shy about using it; she thrust the claws that were also erupting from the tips of her boots into the armor, both as a literal toe-hold and cutting into the meat of the hideous thing. In a sort of cleated run, she was at the base of the head in seconds; a series of swift and vicious sweeps later, and the abomination's head fell free. There was no time for it to try the trick of a thousand spiders; death had come from claws far more deadly than it was used to, and it died once and for all.

The battle was far from over, and it pitched back and forth, favoring one side, then the other. Howls-in-Fury fell to the same scythe-like claws that cut Sarah to the bone, leaving her with a limp that even stolen blood would refuse to heal for nearly a month to come. But in the end, the Ajo Runners carried the day, and four survivors returned home - four, plus Sarah.

Once back at the campfire, they took stock. Of their wounds. Of their losses. And of Sarah. For her part, the vampire was finding herself for the first time alone in her undeath. Juan, her mentor since that fateful night back on the highway, was gone now, and her fate was in the hands of the Ajo Runners.

But she had proven herself, by Luna, and had changed forever in the process. They could sense this in her, as could their totem, Grey Bluff Coyote, who she later found out told them the potential it saw in her to someday join a pack. So when old Ajo's-Teeth came over and clasped her cold hand in his own, she knew that her personal losses and the sacrifice of Juan had not been completely in vain.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[wee hours of 3 September 2006]

A smile would always come to Winds-of-Fire's lips when he reached this part of the tale.

"That night, Sarah-O-Neally would become bound to the People as closely as any of her kind could. Closer even, in some ways, than the Wolf-Blooded, though she could never hope as they do to become Uratha in full. Her blood awoke, bringing the spirit's touch through all the long years from the first of her strange breed through that which changed her the year before to her now. In the fullness of the moment, in realization of this connection, she asked to speak the sacred Oath of the Moon.

"Despite her deeds, Ajo's-Teeth was angered. 'Only the People may speak the Oath!' he raged. It fell on me as the teller of tales to tell him that old Juan Dead-Wolf had sworn the Oath in my grandfather's day, and that the story had come to me. Stunned, and remembering of the long friendship that Juan had shown to us, in recognition of Juan's sacrifice this night, and perhaps in seeing something of Juan in this dead-girl's determined eyes, he relented, and the Oath was sworn.

"She could not say the words, not in the way the spirits would understand. But her heart spoke them in the imperfect human tongue, and I spoke them on her behalf for the spirits.

"The Wolf Must Hunt - Urum Da Takus. Luna had imposed this upon her as a necessity, as her lifesblood needed to be hunted freshly every night. Lest she forget the weight of her Oath, Luna imposed upon her even heavier tolls on the Rahu and Irraka moons; forever would this Dead Wolf both know and feel the first part of the Oath.

"The People Do Not Murder the People - Imru Nu Fir Imru. Though she could not claim the protection of this Oath, as she was not of the People, still she swore it, and added to it, swearing 'I Do Not Murder the People', which I spoke for her as well.

"The Low Honor The High; The High Respect The Low - Sih Sehe Mak; Mak Ne Sih. She swore this, knowing that she would forever be the low honoring the high, as no Lune would ever grant her Renown amongst the People.

"Respect Your Prey - Ni Daha. For her, this would be yet another burden, one not carried by most of her kind; she would have to show great caution on her night hunts, and not tax too heavily the local Herd.

"The Werewolf Shall Cleave To The Human - Uratha Safal Thil Lu'u. You may think this moot, as Sarah-O-Neally's dead womb could bring forth no life; still, as all things have spirit, and as she has felt the touch of Luna, I hold that it does bear; perhaps a union of her with one of the People could indeed create the dreaded unihar. I am gladdened that she spoke the words.

"Do Not Eat The Flesh Of Man Or Wolf - Nu Hu Uzu Eren. I was greatly troubled by this, brothers, and thought perhaps her words were not sincere. How, after all, could it be said that she did not eat of man? But I was reminded by the great Elodoth Mourning Shadow that the blood is truly separate from the flesh. From talks with her, I learned that Sarah-O-Neally could indeed eat no flesh of any sort; it would be forced from her, perhaps as the will of Luna.

"The Herd Shall Not Know - Nu Bath Githul. In this, her kind are as we. Few in number, the Herd outnumber both by many thousands to each one. Her words were devout.

"And to this, Sarah-O-Neally spoke a final Oath, one special to her line: The People Are Not Prey - Imru Nu Daha, as I translated on her behalf to the spirits. Her thirst shall not be quenched by the blood of Uratha, by ancient tradition and now by her Oath.

"These are the words I spoke for Sarah-O-Neally to the spirits. No Lune would grant us mark her with silver brands, and no sign was given by Luna above, but the words were spoken beneath my own Cahalith Moon, and I hold that they were spoken in truth and heard in full.

"Thus ends the tale of trial of Sarah Dead-Wolf, friend to the Ajo Runners. And so begins many other tales, to be told by my grandchild someday. I speak these words as Winds-of-Fire, Cahalith Bone Shadow, now Alpha of the Ajo Runners. Mark them as the truth and my bond."