The Official Camarilla
Red Talon Web Site
Bypass
the annoying l’il story
Keen-Whisker loped steadily over the dirty, ash covered snow.
Garou of other tribes wheezed and ran heavily to either side of
her, their breath streaming out behind them in wispy plumes. Keen-Whisker took no notice. If they were so far from the wolf
within that they could not run down prey, then they would fall by the
wayside. It would not be the first
time that homid garou had failed to keep up with a Red Talon on the hunt. The caribou of home were quick, and
hardy, and Keen-Whisker had chased them often enough to know the value of
endurance. Her lips drew back from
her teeth as she remembered that the caribou of home no longer crossed the
tundra in great, heaving rivers of bone and muscle. They were gone, victims of the strange human greed for the
black liquid they stole from the ground.
A sharp snarl from the local Sept alpha brought Keen-Whisker
from the depths of her thoughts.
The big ahroun was a heavily muscled Get of Fenris, covered with the
scars of battle, and although he tried not to show it, Keen-Whisker could see
that he was badly winded. As was
the way with his kind, he cared more for the fight at the end of the hunt than
for the hunt itself. He glared at
Keen-Whisker with his one good eye to cover for his weakness, and Keen-Whisker
impassively returned his stare for a brief moment before dropping her gaze. The Get was stronger, so she would
submit. He led her into a small
copse of sickly trees and together they waited in the moonlight for the others
to catch up.
As they straggled in, Keen-Whisker stared out from beneath
the snowy pine boughs at the valley beyond. Many hulking, yellow-metal beasts of man’s creation burrowed
into the hillside there like predators thrusting their heads into the steaming
entrails of a kill. They took no
obvious sustenance from their efforts, and not for the first time Keen-Whisker
wondered at the strange ways of their two-legged prey. They were so far from
the ways of Gaia. She set her
confusion aside when the alpha began explaining to the rest of the Garou why
the two-legs of this place needed to be stopped, but she soon lost interest in
his words. She didn’t care about
his reasoning. They were human,
and they deserved to die for no other reason than that.
She was one of the first to spring from the trees when the
alpha finally stopped talking and signaled the attack, and her Rage sang
through her as she threw herself down the slope. The death of her pack less than a moon’s cycle past was
already growing dim in her lupine memory, but she still recalled enough about
them to feel loss at their absence.
They had all been of her Tribe, and she knew they would have found
pleasure in this night’s hunt. Her
animalistic grief fed her Rage, as did the gibbous moon overhead, and she
brought forth a piercing, primal howl as she leapt the first wooden barrier
that men had built to guard the great pit.
Her howl deepened as she saw more closely the wound that had
been inflicted upon Gaia, and as it often did at such times her mind visited
other places. She saw the times
long past, when man had first taken up the tools of the Weaver and struck down
her lupine Kin. She howled for
their pain, and her Rage grew. She
saw the times when man first came to hunt more than he needed, and in doing so
sent many, many species into extinction, gone forever. She howled for their loss, and her Rage
grew. She saw the days when man
began cutting down the forests and filling in the wetlands and covering the
game-trails with stone and wood and other, stranger things. She howled for the dying of the lands,
and her Rage grew. She saw man dig
deeply into the flesh of Gaia, lusting for the rarest parts of her body and
robbing them from her whenever they found them. She howled for Gaia’s rape as only a Red Talon could, and
yet again her Rage grew.
Only the Red Talons were uncorrupted by man’s ways. Only they could still hear the
heartbeat of Gaia. Only they could
still feel her pulse. The other
Garou were lost in their squabbles, hiding behind their Litany while Gaia died
around them. They were blind to
her suffering. Keen-Whisker knew
this to be true, and she howled for the fall of her race, knowing on some
instinctual level that it spelled doom for all creation. Once more, her Rage grew.
Keen-Whisker let her voice be carried away by the wind as the
first of the fast moving metal pellets that men used as weapons whistled
by. There was no time now for the
past. The prey was before her,
and it must be killed. She knocked aside a grey-metal stick of
the sort that men used to throw their stinging pellets and tore the throat from
the two-legs who carried it. As
his blood ran over her teeth she paused.
The deep, overwhelming sorrow was still there, the sadness that came
from the knowledge that the war for Gaia was very nearly over, and that the
Garou had lost. Still, there was
the hunt, and the kill. For now,
that was enough. Let the other
Tribes meddle in the affairs of men, use their tools, learn their ways and in
doing so risk falling to the Wyrm.
It would do them little good in the end. Better to live, fight, and die as Gaia had intended, and as
Keen-Whisker herself would do. She
knew no other way.
She was a Red Talon.
Tips on
Applying for a Red Talon
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