Wolftomb

The Longest of them all, seriously, I got a little to carried away here. Talking Crazy goes to Wolftomb. Land of the Ghostwolves. And now for the story behind the glyphs They aren't just pretty to look at!

Wolftomb: The Law of Final Rest

In the ninth week of my quest I traveled to Wolftomb, land of wolf ghosts.
A spirit realm in the shadow of Wolfhome, Wolftomb collects the spirits of wolves killed by human hands.

As you can imagine it is very crowded.

When you are not hiding from packs of dead wolves, you find an ashen land of hills and plains and forests, marred by roads and rundown human settlements.
There are no humans, no birds, even no prey to hunt – except for you.
The ghost wolves can smell that you are meat.

Gifts are hard to use there; so I roamed and hid, keeping my distance, watching.
After some time, I happened across a lone she-wolf with a steel-jawed trap closed around her bloody hind leg.
She tried to bite me, but the trap made her clumsy.
Behind her I saw a shallow den of bony pups.

Rage rose in me unbidden.
These wolves had been murdered by men, and their reward was to hunger forever in this bleak realm?
Was there no way to set these ghosts to rest?

I tried many things.

I overpowered the mother wolf and pulled the trap from her leg.
But the trap reappeared after I had thrown it away.

I went to the pups and brought up my last meal for them to eat.
They were still hungry.
They chewed on me.

I tried rituals, as best as I could in wolf shape: the gathering for the departed, the rite of contrition, the prayer for the prey. All failed.

But then a pale pack of dead wolves happened by.
I could have outrun them, but they might have attacked the mother and her cubs.
Instead, I held my ground and fought them, venting my Rage.
But being dead already, the wolves would not die again: they wore me down, attacking again and again.
So I fought only until the mother wolf and her cubs were able to escape, and when they were gone, I ran too.

I lay in hiding, nursing my wounds and considering how I could lay these ghosts to rest.
Ghost stories suggest that unresolved issues bind such spirits to the world.
And what issue could that be, if not the murder of these wolves at the hands of men?

I tracked down the mother wolf again, and she growled at me, but I promised her: I will avenge you.
And the moment I promised, as if it had always been there, I noticed a new scent.
A human’s scent – the only such scent I had smelled in all Wolftomb.

I followed that scent all the way back to the physical world.

I sidestepped into a graveyard.
The spirit-scent ended at the grave of a man named Sullivan.
The murderer of the wolf family was already dead: he had been dead for over a hundred years.

Was vengeance impossible?
Could I do nothing to bring peace to these ghosts?
The mother wolf with her blood-soaked leg, victim of a trapper’s greed; the skin-and-bone pups, starving to death when their mother never came home; their endless suffering in the lands of the dead – should I give up, simply because the murderer was dead?

No – I honored my promise.

The graveyard was in a country town.
The townsfolk spoke proudly of their ancestry, of the families who had lived and worked and died there for generations.
I found a Sullivan who was also a hunter.
I told him about his great-great-grandfather and about the wolf family he had killed with his trap.
He didn’t understand; now he never will.

I returned to Wolftomb with the man’s blood on my claws.
The scent of the mother wolf and her cubs led me to a hidden gully, where their scent disappeared: but lying there in the mud was a bloody iron trap.
The ghosts were gone.

A hundred other ghosts howled in the distance, catching me on the wind.

The law of Wolftomb is that the spirits trapped in that world can be freed by avenging them in our own.
But avenging every ghost would be the work of many lifetimes.
If there is a way to free them all, it will come in the Apocalypse, and that will be a bad night to be human.

For a better translation of these glyphs be directed to
[link]
Talking Crazy, this story and creative elements there within are copyrighted to Adam his player. Glyphs and elements of Werewolf the Apocalypse are copyrighted to White Wolf.