#loer

"If Almalexia tells you to jump, you jump. If Sotha Sil tells you to jump, you don't jump, because Sotha Sil never tells anyone to do anything. If Vivec tells you to jump, you take a moment to think, because he probably wants you to paint a three-legged horse or something."

“My name is Cyrus Bollai.

“I was born in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

“I’m dead, but I ain’t fuckin’ gone.”

Marching down the hall darkened hall he repeated this over and over as he tossed his baseball bat from hand to hand. Shining, wrapped in barbed wire, waiting to be pumped full of energy-- emotion-- and woken up with crackling electricity.

Like many things in the Shadowlands-- the other side-- his baseball bat used to be someone. He can still hear it faintly moan, maybe weep, but his preternaturally keen ears are tuned in on different noises.

Rushing.

Scraping.

Knocking.

In life, this building is a failing automotive plant. In death, it is a bleak, dilapidated labyrinth of soulforged bricks and rippling pools of pure black. Nihils, he’d heard his new friends, his Circle, call them, portals into some wretched place.

I should be with them, he thought, I shouldn’t be in this fuckin’ fuck-pit.

But you aren’t with them, whispered the voice in the back of his head, you’re here, doing your job.

Shut up, shut up, I heard you the first ten fuckin’ times, you cunt, shut UP.

I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into.

I don’t fuckin’ give a fuck what you want. Now ain’t the goddamn time.

It’s not? murmured the voice as Cyrus rounded a corner, his eyes falling upon a figure at the far end of the crumbling, mold-stained hall. Tall, lean, wearing a stained and ragged jacket and a pair of beat to shit jeans. The man was whistling pleasantly to himself, locking a door that was clearly soulforged, solid to him and, thus, immune to the fancy trick of just ghosting right on through.

Cyrus looked at the man’s feet. There was a nihil. A mix of exasperation and pre-assbeating vigor surged through his... well. He didn’t have veins. Surged through his ectoplasm, a much headier rush than he’d ever known while alive.

“Hey,” he called out, “you oughtta unlock that, I gotta get through.”

The man turned completely to stare at Cyrus, stuffing the relic key in his jacket. A lantern jaw, slicked-back feathery hair, and a pair of piercing, dead green eyes, in the center of which there glinted an evil black light.

More importantly than that, though, was the fact that most of the right side of the nihil-man’s face, save for his eye, was... gone. Like someone had knocked out part of an eggshell, but instead of yolk and eggwhite there was pure blackness and a faint, constant trail of oily black mist that meandered its way down to the nihil at his feet.

He was a spectre. One of those wretched souls that had given in to despair and hate and--

Oh, no, you’re only half-right, chided the voice as the spectre pulled out a  .45, acid-stained and corroded but still cocked and lethal. He is a spectre... but he was always a spectre.

They came to a stop in the middle of a copse. Wyrm-scent was thick in the air. Rotting meat. Sewage. Chemicals.

Djau padded forward on black-furred paws, tentatively, hackles raised and fangs bared. He, and the other eight werewolves behind him, had come for one reason only: wiping out their corrupted, bastardized cousins. Their sacred place, the Caern, could not and would not fall. The Black Spirals would have to slaughter them all to get to it.

Braying howls and the bone-chilling trill of a whippoorwill's cry shot through the air. Djau’s eyes flicked form one shifting shadow to another, and even as he heard-- smelled- the silver-pelted wolf pad up behind him he began slinking back. They wanted a challenge. They wanted their Alpha. They’d get their Alpha.

The Silver Fang took Djau’s place and with a tremble she shifted, growing and expanding until before them stood a ten-foot tall wolfman, thickly muscled and armed with rending claws and shredding teeth. From nowhere she produced her klaive, a short, shimmering dagger of silver, etched in runes.

From the shadows opposite her strode a man. Tall, fit, his eyes glowing a sickly green in the darkness and just barely illuminating a lantern-jawed face covered in hideous scars. He grinned, madly, spreading his bare arms in a challenge.

The Fang rushed forward, howling in rage, but her cry was cut short by a thunderous snap and she fell to hands and knees, for from nowhere, the man had produced a shotgun with a stock of bone, caked in dried viscera, etched with obscene mockeries of the werewolves’ own glyphs. He racked the weapon and took aim at the mortally wounded werewolf before him, with home-made shells of toxic waste and silver, and it was then that the copse exploded with howling and roaring and the sounds of battle as both packs, Garou and Black Spiral, rushed at each other. But the man with the shotgun, he did not yet shift; he just took aim at Djau as the man shifted into the shape of the dire wolf and leapt over his alpha.

“My name is Retson Eighty-Eight, Ragabash of the Wyrm,” barked the man as he blasted Djau aside, tearing apart his right bicep and sending him hard into the dirt. In the span of heartbeats Djau watched as this Retson shifted, his gun vanished, replaced with jagged black claws and oversized, poisoned fangs.