You are Garou.

You are Garou in a way no others you know are. Your parents were Garou; you know your father's name because it is a shame on the tongue of your People. He was Dark-Shadow-Over-Stream. He could leap rivers. He was a Shadow Lord.

You are Garou.

You remember your Birth-Sept. You remember the ring of trees. You remember your Sept Alpha's eyes on you. Her voice in your ears. Not Wolf. But Garou. You know there was a fight. There must have been; some of them never looked at you the same. Pike-Teeth lured you away, once, when you were young, and held your neck in his jaws. He put you down. He looked at you in agony.

You are past your first change when you learn that Pike-Teeth was your mother's brother. Two litters older.

It falls.

You don't notice. They send you out to run the borders. You're not really at the sept, often, and you don't have a name, then. You're just Biggest Cub, and that's your name. That's what they call you.

It falls.

The Wyrm creeps in slowly.

It falls.

When you run, your paw snags in a trap; your forelimb shatters. It is a human -- always feared, always hated -- that sets you free from the silver that kept you from knitting your wound.

It falls.

It is a Hive, now.

Griffin waits. He knows, one day, you will return. When you do, you will have more than yourself: you will have the Bone Gnawers, and a bloody-toothed Sept, at your side. He is content with your sacrifices of dogs. He is content with your leech-slayings and the way you slaughter humans who smear Gaia before your eyes.

In your dreams, you see it:

the lake, where you learned to swim, corrupted and green-tendril'd. Pike-Teeth's skull, stuck on a jagged rock that juts from the earth at an angle that is wrong.

In your dreams, glittering green eyes behold you.