cubs, ghosts.

[Wyrmbreaker] Caern: past midnight. Weather: still cold. Wyrmbreaker: at the edge of the lake, wind blowing in his face. Eyes: narrowed. Arms: folded.

[Waking Dream] The theurge's moon is in the sky, one eye just opening; not yet open. Dreaming, still. Hushabye. Wyrmbreaker is at the edge of the lake; Wyrmbreaker is joined by (oh, she's so quiet; moon's shadow on the shiftless sea) Waking Dream. Who has a concept of personal space, but not tonight. The galliard bumps Wyrmbreaker's arm with her own. Her hands are in her back pockets. Her hair is up in braids, twisted, looped, a Fenrir's crown (midsummer is far). "You look like a spear."

[Wyrmbreaker] Oftentimes, Lukas seems so human that it's hard to think of him as a Fostern of the Nation. He has an easy courtesy about him; he's familiar with the use of machinery and cars, familiar with knives and forks, familiar with fine dining and living large. It's a mask, though. A disguise of humanity that he wears because it is convenient, and protective. Something that, nonetheless, he has to spend actual effort on.

That's clear when Waking Dream comes up alongside him; greets him with a nudge. He doesn't startle, or shy away. He leans into the contact, a bump for a bump, brief but not light.

Then, a huff of a laugh. "Do I?" he muses, and lets it go. A nod, eastward: "I come from New York City, you know. Flying into Chicago from the east -- now that's a sight worth seeing. A world of midwestern blackness, and the emptiness of the lake: and then suddenly it's there, a gridwork of incandescent orange laid out beneath you. Threads of glittering gold coming in from south, north, west, converging on the heart of the city, which ends with a knife-edge sharpness against the lake.

"Amazing, what humanity is capable of. There's a lot of hate for humans amongst our kind, but I think we easily forget that without human blood in our lineage, we wouldn't have half the determination and ingenuity and drive that we have now."

No indication of what brings this topic; no conclusion to it, either. Lukas lets it go and turns to Lila.

"Anyway. What do you want to talk about first: the cub, or the ghost?"

[Waking Dream] "The cub," she says. "The ghosts will keep a little longer. They have, after all, for years and years."

[Wyrmbreaker] "Eighty," Lukas replies, musingly, "to be exact. God; 2010."

Anyway. Again.

"Grace," he affirms. "I met her at Shedd Aquarium a few weeks ago. She said something about being from Wyoming, and how her Rite of Passage couldn't be performed at her home Sept. She wanted to come to where the war was being fought? Mentioned you and another named Carlotta. She called you her warder; I assumed she meant mentor, though she herself seemed uncertain.

"Bright cub," he adds. "I met her again a few nights later when there was an impromptu fight club over in Hangar Six. I pointed her to Buried Hatchet, the ranking Fianna around these parts. Seeing as how her bloodline is Stag's."

[Waking Dream] "The world was supposed to end eleven years ago." Eleven years ago is (lifetimes) so long ago. Lila considers where she was; where she is now. There is no existential angst. There is no grimace, no mellowing, no moment of sorrow. Her mouth curves, slightly (go on, lover, let me kiss you). "Here we are."

Waking Dream listens to Wyrmbreaker, and when he's done, she huffs out (disturbed). "Fuck." A beat. Then: "Did she say anything about how she arrived in Chicago?"

[Wyrmbreaker] "If she did, I don't remember. I assume she ran. Or maybe hitchhiked; though, she didn't know what waffles were until last week, so I'd say running is more likely than hitchhiking." Pause. "You look troubled. Why?"

[Waking Dream] "Because she shouldn't be alone. The Sept of the Hidden Path is troubled right now." A pause. Oh, storyteller. Lila's looking at the lake now; her glance skids there, measures out contemplation in the black. "There's been a murder," she says, and it's quiet; quiet as banked embers. Breaking Heart. "Not a death." A death is glorious, a murder is not; that's the difference. "The Master of Challenge was found slaughtered, outside of the challenge circle, torn apart, half-eaten, pissed on by -- ah, and that's where it becomes a trick, Lukas. Because they can't track it. And the Mistress of Rites is said to be pleased; is said to, oh, have drunk a lot of water the day that Judgment's Favored Howl was found. All I can speak to are rumors; but I do know this, for certain: Something was going on there, and the Sept's two cubs were being hustled away. Grace, a lupus born Fianna; Carlotta, a homid born Shadow Lord. And their mentor -- Cocks the Hammer, Bitch. Fostern Fianna Ragabash. Where is Carl? Where is Frank -- Cocks the Hammer Bitch? That's why I look troubled, Wyrmbreaker."

[Waking Dream] ooc: NO. "a wolf-born Fianna; Carlotta, a human-born Shadow Lord." sounds much better.

[Wyrmbreaker] When Cocks the Hammer, Bitch comes out of Lila's mouth, she can clearly read Wyrmbreaker's reaction --

What. A godawful. Name.

-- which, out of politeness, he does not voice. He does listen, though, intently, interestedly, and then, toward the end, troubledly himself. When she's finished he folds his arms a little tighter across his chest, his wool coat pulling taut around his rounded shoulders, and frowns out at the lake for a moment.

Then, "Carlotta's not a Shadow Lord. She hasn't chosen that path yet. Nevertheless, she's born to my tribe, so I have a responsibility to her. If it's your intention to look for your lost septmates, I'll help. I suggest starting with the easy methods, though -- Questing Stones work well. If that fails, my packmate is a Fostern Ragabash who may be able to learn a tracking Gift that should help."

[Waking Dream] His reaction almost makes her (mischief) smile. Almost. These is serious business. "They aren't my lost septmates," Waking Dream says, breathing deeply, then exhaling. "I've wandered a lot, hither and thither, yonder and then further than yonder, Lukas, and I can't remember a time I wasn't being sent on errands of diplomacy, Sept to Sept, caern to caern. Even my Rite of Passage," she says, reaching up, relieving tension that is coiling through her muscles, running her fingers up the back of her neck, into her hair. Waking Dream half shuts her eyes, and then, "Bwuh. I met them again on the road. Cocks the Hammer, Bitch was taking the long way to Chicago. They figured that this Sept was desperate enough to be grateful for new blood, even if it came untried." Waking Dream's gaze slips back to Lukas, and glitters faintly. "But it is my intention to try and find out what happened to the two. Garou shouldn't just disappear." They do sometimes, though. Don't they? "Has Grace not -- did she seem upset? Did she say anything about Carl?" The Child of Gaia sounds truly perplexed.

[Wyrmbreaker] "She said she beat you and Carlotta here. She sounded happy about it; she seemed excited and pleased by her new surroundings. Grace never breathed a word about Cocks the Hammer, Bitch, or what was happening at her old Sept. All she said about that was that it wasn't able to perform a Rite of Passage. I thought it must have been even smaller than Maelstrom's and didn't ask.

"You might want to let the Fianna of this city know, too, since it was one of theirs that was lost. Buried Hatchet-yuf lives next door to me at the Brotherhood. He's their de facto leader."

[Waking Dream] "That much is true. The impression I got was that noone trusted anyone else to guide the cubs through their Rite of Passage." A beat. "They're good kids. I liked seeing them together. Carl was sort of reluctant, but they made a nice pair." Another beat. "I wonder why," Waking Dream begins to say, bewilderment touching her expression, and then she stops herself, rubs one hand down her face. Another sigh, and she slides her hands into her back pockets again.

"I will look in on Buried Hatchet; what manner of garou is he?" Curious. And -- okay; she's a galliard. Guess what? They can be gossips. They're always listening, witnessing, watching, remembering, repeating.

[Waking Dream] "I mean," she repeats, realizing that she's slipping toward archaic [you're unreal, creature] diction. "What the heck is he like?" Of course! She already has Nate's report, but catalogue, catalogue.

[Wyrmbreaker] Wyrmbreaker laughs, wry. "Hatchet is best experienced firsthand. Come on, I'm heading that way anyway. We can talk about the ... uh, ghost on the way."

[Waking Dream] "Okay." Lila bounces (yes, really) a little. Ready, readying for action; then she takes her hands out of her back pockets, and slips them into her front pockets, instead, and they'll walk away from the cold black lake. "Now. The Chicago Times; had you heard of that pack before? Or The Sept of the Giving Tree?"

[Wyrmbreaker] "The Sept, certainly."

Now, Wyrmbreaker isn't a Galliard. He doesn't collect tales. Not to savor meaning from their rhetoric and structure; not to remember the past; not to instruct the future. He is, however, an Ahroun. A good one. One who understands that the End Times means that every werewolf is a warrior, and so the Ahrouns of the race must be more than brutes and beasts. Tactics and strategies become increasingly important. There's wisdom to be learned from old battles, bygone wars.

So: he knows this story, at least. "That was the Caern and Sept," he goes on, "that stood in this city before Maelstrom. Not here, in fact -- somewhere inland. I heard it was actually hidden in a school. A Wyrmhole apparently opened in its heart, spilled corruption into the Caern. Eventually it fell."

They're leaving the lake behind, their footsteps crunching over lakeside gravel, then stones, then broken concrete.

"Cautionary tale," Lukas adds, wry now.

[Waking Dream] "I always liked that book when I was a kid," Lila remarks, offhand. "I was going to get the cover art tattooed on my back, but decided not to." A glance, again, at Lukas; the almost smile fades, and she is back into this serious, storytelling mode she has. "But yes, you're right. That's the last story of that Caern; but there were stories before the last one. I know some. I -- " she pauses, wrinkles her brow, trying to remember. (She looks like a fairy queen.) "Well. There are stories and songs of a pack called The Chicago Times. Bonegnawers so brave, so tenacious, so tooth-baringly strong that they earned respect even from those who'd as soon spit on them and steal their territory. They didn't have the streets noone else wanted; they ran proud."

A pause. And then: "There's an entire song devoted to," okay, she looks a little pained, "their No Moons favourite joke. Or maybe it was their Ahroun's." Here, insert an obnoxious, yet nonetheless, catchy rhyming thing about joining the pack which ends with Lila aping an oldtime movie radio announcer's voice: "'So c'mon, boys, marry a Mary for a merry good wife.'"

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas makes a face -- "That book depressed the hell out of me when I was a kid. I read it once, burst into tears, and never read it again." He thinks for a moment. "You know, I think my mate has it now."

No explanation of that little phenomenon; it's back to business. Lukas listens -- even to the song -- and by the end of it they're at the roadside getting into the same car, the same fast, mean-eyed Bimmer M3 with the six gears and the aluminum clutch-brake-gas pedals that gave Mary a ride home to the goddamn cemetery just like a storybook ghost.

"Okay," Lukas says as they're getting in, "so ... they all married Mary's? Only something happened on the Mary-we-met's wedding night that ruined the wedding and ended with her dead?"

[Waking Dream] "Awww, you cried?" She dimples at him. "And you have a mate? How long? Yay!"

"Precisely! And, well. TWO of them married Marys. It is a bad joke. They were five. Streets of Fire. Ahroun. Alpha. Bloodrunner. Ragabash. Beta. Tears of Gaia, the moondancer, Runs the Rails, the judge, and Rides the Wind -- their seer. Two of them married women with that name; one of them had a daughter who was called Mary, and this Mary died. The story doesn't say how; just -- she became an absence. Not forgotten; that part of the story is missing. I don't remember it; maybe I never heard it. But, but, ah ah hah, here's where what the tales say about the kinswomen -- and you know, there are never really very many stories about our kin; it's a shame."

Waking Dream repeats the story, as she remembers it; as she was told. By rote (learn this). Mary died on her wedding night. This must be the ghost. Three years after Mary the daughter died. But why is that in the story? Is it important? What's lost? The other Mary -- "Maybe the second ghost we saw; the one who looked at you while grabbing the cemetery fence. That wasn't the same woman; was it?" -- died only months after.

"And after, The Chicago Times grew harder, more intent, more intense; I suppose they wanted to die. There's a story says they did. I don't know." Ah, comments from the still alive; the dead can't argue, can they now? Lila tells Lukas about their last mission -- about the hearsay of their last mission; how it was to locate and then destroy some Wyrm-eaten thing, some filthy, foul piece of Wyrmery, something so corrupted that it ate the very air -- and all who protected it within a hive. Three things to do, three tasks: Retrieve. Destroy hive. Destroy thing. The first two: yes. The last? Where's the story?

[Waking Dream] And, it might as well be admitted, that when Waking Dream gets back into Lukas' car, the front seat this time, she sinks a little low, looking at the rearview mirror as if it might catch a reflection. And she turns her head very, very quickly when something makes it seem as if there's a white apparition just over her shoulder -- some passing radiance from some neon city sign they drive by, drifting across the glass, reflected.

[Wyrmbreaker] "I was seven," Lukas says, irked, embarrassed: big Fostern Ahroun, dimpled at for crying at a book. Lukas has dimples too. Lila hasn't seen them yet, and she won't if she keeps gushing over small Lukas crying over Giving Tree. "And it was really sad. He chopped the tree down, for god's sake. Selfish bastard."

Lukas is happier to talk about Danicka -- brightening noticeably when the subject moves on. "Not long," he admits. "Since October. Her name's Dani&+269;ka." Lukas pronounces that name differently, too; an aspirated c, the vowels carried low on the tongue. And Lukas pronounces that name differently: with a subtle care, and a certain warmth. "I knew her when we were children."

In New York. That other great city, or perhaps the only Great City that matters; the capitol of the world. Lukas grew up there. Small wonder that he'd have more appreciation for humankind than most Garou.

He adds -- because she's a Galliard, and somehow it seems like he should tell a Galliard things like this, "Her mother was Night Warder-rhya."

An Elder. A Shadow Lord. An Ahroun. And dead.

Listening again, then. Mary and Mary. A bad joke. A third Mary; dead; an absence, which Lukas files away, because sometimes absences are simply unimportant. Other times, they're a deliberate hole someone made to conceal something else.

She goes on -- Mary died on her wedding night. He interrupts: "Was it known how? She seemed so distraught, and all that talk about them poisoning her mate against her -- "

And then more: "No, that was definitely not the same woman. Not a child, either."

Harder, Lila says of the pack after their deaths, more intent, more intense. Lukas is quiet then, but there's a thrumming to that silence, words unspoken. He knows a little about that; the intensity, the hardness, that follows too many deaths.

Nothing spoken, though. She finishes, and he's quiet as well.

"But that's all later," then. "There must be a reason the ghosts are from so long before the pack's ultimate end. Something must have happened right around then; something important. The kin must factor into it somehow.

"Maybe we should follow them into the cemetery." Lukas thinks of the woman at the gates. Suppresses a shudder. "Maybe they want to show us something."

[Waking Dream] Aww. Lukas is irked and embarrassed: Lila doesn't tease him any more than she already did; she even listens to the way he pronounces Danicka's name, carefully, as if she were trying to remember it, to note it. Either way, she's happy for him; happy for the what's underneath his voice; for what's in his eyes. Lila's always been so good at knowing what other people were feeling, and among their People, this was sometimes more of a curse than a blessing, so -- well.

But! There is serious business. Lila is shaking her head. "I don't think that they died that long after their kin died; the connection seems close as lover's breath when you hear it. They women died, and the men went furious in the streets, and then they went on to their final reckoning with the Wyrm." The blonde looks out the window, watches Chicago pass by. Her reflection is lovely, surrealist art. A moment's silence, heavy thought. And then: "Maybe they want to show us where the missing relic is. Maybe it was hidden in their graves; I imagine they're all buried near each other. And that's why their ghosts are restless. And possibly not entirely to be trusted."

And now it's Lila's turn to sound embarrassed, for whatever reason. "And no, the stories didn't say how Mary died. But, well. Uhm. I went back to the library and looked it up. Old newspapers. They were called The Chicago Times, after all -- I mean; clearly, there'd be clues, right? She was hit by a car. I made a photocopy of the article."

[Waking Dream] ooc: meh, article --> clipping. obituary. whatever it was. (grin)

[Waking Dream] ooc: make 'relic' into 'wyrm relic of possible doom', please!

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas pulls over by the side of the road. "Can I see it?"

[Waking Dream] "Sure," Lila says, patting herself down. Crinkle, crackle. And lo, she brought it with her. They'd made a date to talk about things, after all.

[Wyrmbreaker] The engine is still idling. Heat is seeping from the vents. Lukas thumbs on the map light and unfolds the paper, his pale eyes scanning the page. He's a quick reader; no meatheaded Ahroun, this.

His eyes linger longer on the grainy, black and white snapshot. Mary Miskowski. Polish girl. Funny thing; Danicka's a quarter Polish. He folds the paper over again, hands it back to Lila.

"Mary talking about them -- or rather, refusing to talk much about them -- still makes me think her death wasn't entirely an accident. I don't think Garou would run mad on the Wyrm over the death of their mates, either, unless they were convinced the Wyrm had something to do with it. Maybe it didn't drive the car, but it might've spread the rumor that caused the fight, sent her running through the streets.

"I'd like to figure out the connection between them and the Marys and the pack and this relic of theirs. I'll probably round up my pack sooner or later and take a look in the cemetery. Should I call you?"

[Waking Dream] And back into her pocket it goes. Should I call you? "Yes!" And, then, a moment's thought: "You don't have the Gift to Sense Wyrm, do you? Because I do not; I didn't really get the vibe off of Mary, but ..." A shrug. Lila may be (unicorn's daughter: which means precisely what, in Chicago? Doomed, cursed, dead sooner than later? This city chews them up) a Child of Gaia, but she isn't exactly (always) blindly trusting. "I was going to tell the Bonegnawers about this too. I mean, these women were their kin; that pack was one of theirs, and renowned. They should know."

[Wyrmbreaker] "Theron might have it," Lukas replies, and then by way of explanation, "my packmate; a Theurge." And, "Certainly, let them know. I'm not in contact with any of them anymore. Their numbers took a hit recently."

And, lo and behold, the Brotherhood. Lukas parks where he usually does -- in the alleyway under his bedroom window -- and kills the engine.

"Come on," he says. "I'll introduce you to Hatchet. This ghost business might have to take precedence over looking for Carlotta and Frank, but we can at least let him know."