"Yes, this is my cub. Yes, she is metis, but her worst flaw is knowing the Wyrm too little. There are too few of us now, and the time is too near, to reject the gifts Tehuti sends us." - Sekhmet, Galliard Silent Strider
"If the road leads where we do not wish it, why not step off the path?" - Sepdet
It's been a handful of years since those words were spoken, and by blood and fire, I did speak truth. I am djed-Sekhmet Ma'at, outcast of Per Wepwawet the hidden caern. They call me speaker-of-lies, if they remember me at all. You may judge with your own ears.
You seek to know about my Little Star? I cannot tell you how she is now. You know her. Judge with your own eyes. Where she came from: this I know.
In the Red Land, in the desert kingdom beyond the river, there in canyon and hill and waste beneath the setting sun, we lived. There is the Valley of Kings. There too is the hidden caern, Per Wepwawet. All but empty and ruined, it yet holds close to its secrets. So too did we few proud Striders who would not abandon it, though the land has long been held by the enemy. A defeated people, we are born among the tombs of our ancestors, and fight their old battle anew which was lost long ago. So few of us are left, we no longer guard the graves of our homid kinfolk in the Valley; we must leave them to the humans for protection. They do not know of the desert guardians who fight and hunger and thirst and die a few stades distant. They do not dream of the more precious, secret places held by desperate Striders or, more often, by the enemy. This is how it is there.
I tell you, the desert wolves, the jackals, the w'neshu... they run wild and free even still, though their numbers are as small as their lithe fleet bodies in these last days. Few are born black, fewer still have the size of their Garou cousins. I wonder that my dam did not drive me out of den for out-eating my littermates. But she and they remember us, the Striders, and I was proud when my own pack, my Garou pack, were chosen to be their guardians. We were seasoned warriors by then; any who survived two hands of years in that place had such a claim. The recklessness of first-ritehood had been scoured from us by more than the shifting sands.
Oh, it was a short great time, when we ran wild under Nut's sky. Ibis Scans-the-Ground, my second; n'hes-Wsar, taloned warrior; ky Buto, scout....oh, but their names are dust to you. Heru-Ma'i, Ibis' little brother: his name, at least, I will add. We knew we were not winning, but we took pride in the number of foes slain and buried in the unforgiving sands. We took pride for the future, too, for it was said by the seers that the cubs born of our pack would be a hope for our people. We rejoiced amidst hunger, parched canyons, dead places held by our enemies. But all roads end.
Apep--who could have such arrogance, to take the name of the Devouring Wyrm itself? Apep, I say, and his troupe of Dancers, would still have been no match for us, had not that ikthya taken a mage into his scorpion's rotten nest. Kano, the mage's name, and I will bear its scar over my heart til my last battle.
We hunted them so long. Many fires would burn low to embers, were I to tell you all the traps Apep laid, all the wounds we got, all the battles we fought against his incestuous brood. Three of my packmates died choked on sand in the last storm of our battle, when we burrowed our way into their hidden pit. Little Ma'i lost his arm. Had Apep's death-screams not distracted his wretched mage-ally, I might have died too, for all that he was already gasping out accursed words that twisted nhs-Wsar's fangs til they grew straight through his brain. But the mage could not do that and rip open my heart also, so I took his in payment. Would that I could have taken his tongue first!
It was then the curse was laid on me. It was then my road was set. Half my pack was dead and half my world already empty and grey, when I held Kano's heart in my teeth and heard his death-curse through my rage: that I should get no cub by human or by wolf. And it was so. I was barren from that day, a blow to a caern which counts its warriors with two hands and its life-bearers on one.
That blow meant little to me then, for my pack was broken. Ma'i and Ibis only were left. I was on three legs. I went far into the desert to lick my wounds. I would not suffer my brother to tend me. My spirit was towards the dark side of the moon's face, and I was dry and cold. I dwelt alone for many, many moons.
I do not know how Ma'i followed me. I did not welcome him when he found me, and for the message he had taken such pains to bring, I gave him utter hate. He said--and I believe him now, though I did not then--it was my cub that would bring hope to our people. Not just to our dying caern, but to our doomed tribe, and perhaps to others. This was the word he brought me. I thought he mocked me. I told him so.
Do you see it now? Do you know what it cost me--Sekhmet, follower of Ma'at's law, upholder of Litany, once Talesinger and for the hidden caern-- do you know what it meant, to betray everything I hold dear, on a seer's word? I was beyond hope. I was beyond despair. If I told you the words he used to convince me, you would mock my senses. But he was like that, Heru Ma'i. Sepdet's eyes, her earnestness--she carries that from him.
We went back, to find the caern emptier still. Ibis was gone; the Alpha of Per Wepwawet had driven him out in a petty quarrel which still raged on in the hidden halls beneath the dead lands. I was sick. I went back to the jackals, to run with them. Ma'i came with me.
Four short moons I carried her in my belly. She was small, like her father, like the w'neshu, and so eager to come out into this world that would hate and break her! I have never been afraid before those nights. I stayed out in the desert, with the jackals my brothers and sisters, and saw no Garou save Ma'i, who brought me food and news. We knew the cub would be killed by those we had left behind. We knew the road we walked and could ask none to walk it with us, to help us.
I was the strong hand of Sekhmet; he was closer to the jackals, tiny, lithe not powerful, no match for any that might prey on us; at least, not without the aid of his spirit powers. That is why I risked bearing my pup in the Umbra. He could stand watch and guard there, in the True World. The first crescent of Tehuti's moon-knife is a dangerous time to be in the spirits' domain. This is a truth. But why Ma'i did not sense the death waiting for him, I do not know.
So it was. There in the grey dawn our cub came to us, and her father held her up to catch the light of the Hope-Star's newborn rising on that first day of the year. Her birth-cry was a howl of warning. The Dancers came upon us so fast, that I could barely don the war-form before the first talons bit my fur. They were only Dancers; my pack could have slain them easily. But I had no pack. Ma'i then, he worked a magic I did not know he had in him. He pushed me onto a moon-path, and pushed the cub onto my back--I could feel her fists gripping my fur but she made no sound-- and I saw him stand out to bar their way, his moon-knife a white crescent in his hands. He broke the end of the bridge between himself and me. I did not see his death.
I could not go back. Ibis Scans-the-Ground, he held the other end open, and I came through. Ibis was angry. He nearly killed me. He nearly killed the cub. Ma'i was his brother, and I had brought shame on his bloodline. But there had been too many quarrels, and in the end, he was tired, and stayed his hand. Besides, he could not bring himself to slay a cub who had his brother's eyes.
He never betrayed me. I ran with the jackals until Sepdet could run too; then I went back to the caern and took my old place. Ibis would watch her sometimes when I was gone, and sometimes the jackals looked after the strange runt who made no sound and danced on two legs. I still spoke the Litany at moot, but the words, and the knowing gaze of Ibis once my friend, burned me sleepless.
Sepdet learned what it was to be the ronin, in those days, for the w'neshu accepted her only slightly more than Garou would. She ran wild. She grew, small and silent, hungry and all ears for stories. I saw to it that she was old enough to walk her own path, by the time she was found by the other Striders. She spoke those words to the Gatekeeper, when she was taken before him: just as if they were not the first words she had ever spoken to any Garou besides her own mother. She was no more surprised than I when we were punished and driven out: she to the east, I to the west.
I have heard her say little of her two years in the human places. She found her way onto the streets of Cairo, and hid with the humans and the dogs who live without hope and pick food among the rubble. It was there, I think, she first met others of her kind: Bone Gnawers, who taught her the ways of humans and how to hide among them. With a small pack of them she took her greatest journey, across more water than she could imagine, stowed like rats in the belly of a great ship. They came to New Orleans.
There her path and her uncle's crossed again. Ibis saw what she had become: all eyes and ears, silent, a scavenger who watches and waits at the edge of things. She knew the horrors of the scab and of humans, but it had not yet touched her soul; the callousness of people and the barrenness of the city meant no more to her than sandstorms or a dry season. Ibis saw what she might become, if the Wyrm's minions collected her. She had skills that could be bent against us. And so he took her and taught her, first there in this wild city, and then in the dry lands of the west after his feet carried him once more to the road. He brought her to Garou he trusted, teaching her how to move and be with other tribes. She even made friends, a few. (I believe some of you have met them, Hollytoe and Jacksprat.) And finally, in Sepdet's twelfth year, Ibis sent her out with her father's moon knife--I cannot tell you how and where I came by it-- and with these words: Seek a road untouched by Wheels, yet itself a Wheel.
So she came to you. Your own could tell you more of her first days there than I: a cub, she watched our tribe's hero Horus descend into Malfeas, and his passage inspired and chilled her heart. A cub, she defended a caern alone against Dancer and Bane until the Guardians could come to stop them-- in that battle she almost died, and wears the lightning-scars to this day. A cub, she came into a pack whose way I would not have chosen for her. They follow Coyote, and their tracks are dogged by death. But they were her first family, and her adopted father is among them, though most of the old pack are dead now. She tends the graves of her loved ones, just as her ancestors guarded the tombs for millenia. She has died twice, once on the paths of the dead to seek for her father's spirit, and once when she went home to Per Wepwawet to face my old enemies, the Dancers of the desert, who buried her alive and flayed her and broke her. She survived. She knows the Wyrm now, far more than I ever imagined my Little Star should. She follows her own path, chooses her own teachers, mostly among those who are much like her father in spirit: waning moon seers, who follow their feet-cutting path with the surety of knowing what must be done. Eligio Sacateca is one. The Anubis is another, though in truth he is more what she wishes her father were. (Ma'i guided only those who would see through his eyes and his soft words; he was no leader, no Harbinger.) I had hoped she might follow Horus, but his span is all but done, and he walks alone almost more than I.
She is still young. She cares too much for those she calls friends, especially the dead. She walks between many tribes, and she honors many I cannot. She has walked the road of Garou now longer than several of the homid-born elders of her painfully new caern. I know her time will be short, but if she fulfills her father's words, and brings some hope and healing needed there, my heart will be satisfied.
The desert. Waves and rolling waves of yellowish sand, blue under the night sky, flow back from the shadowed gullies and canyons that cut through the low bulwarks of mountain stubs at the desert's rim.
The sky. Its black shield is bisected by the ribbons of the Milky Way, the Nile of the heavens meandering between the banks of the old gods, their insignia brilliant beacons of white light against the utter darkness. Orion is rising over the ridgeline to the east, stretching his limbs from sleep, following his glittering small herald up into the sky. A half moon rests on the opposite horizon.
Wild snarls, barks, and gutteral noises echo and re-echo from a nondescript gully in the midst of this vast landscape. A tiny black figure suddenly rolls out of its shadows into a patch of moonlight, struggling against several even smaller assailants.
Sepdet wrestles against five barely-grown jackals, fox-sized handfuls of fur and teeth and ears and long tails that bite and tug and grapple her wiry limbs. Most of them are dusky coyote-colors bleached to gray and silver by the moon; two are black, bearing the classic Strider coloring. It's hard to tell where the black-furred glabro Strider ends and her fourlegged cousins begin, as she rolls and bites with them, grabbing them with her hands and toes equally and taunting them with playful yips and growls. The whole writhing mass of tumbling black and silver shapes looks like part of a strange, wild dance.
Sepdet finally breaks loose from most of them and rolls up to all fours, balancing on hands and toes and laughing at them with her tongue hanging out. She scrabbles up the ridge in a blink, then bounces up to two legs and breaks into an effortless run across the crumbling edge. Her den-mates bound up to join her with tails whipping wildly. They stream around her bare legs, leaping up to lick her face and shoulders. The impromptu revel is cut short with a sudden, deep bark.
A lone jackal stands at the bottom of the gully, looking up at them impassively. The pups instantly change course and boil back down the bank towards the black shape, fawning the ground. In the dream, the jackal-bitch's meaning is as clear as human speech. Little Star. Come down. Come back to the den. The moon is setting; the enemy will be prowling soon.
Sepdet drops down on her belly against the crumbling sandstone, with her forearms dangling over the lip of the gully, and cocks her head to one side with a soft whine. Just a little longer, Mother? Let me say goodnight to Sister.
The older jackal's sides pulse in a faint sigh. All right, cub. Do not be too long. Then she turns and disappears back into the shadows hidden below, and the five pups accompany her in a dancing throng, still finishing their game of tag as they vanish into the darkness.
Sepdet turns back to the east and sits up in a familiar crouch, a black silhouette against the moon at her back. She cups her hands to her lips and belts out a long shimmering high howl that sends ripples across the canyons, a primal joyful greeting to the star that she loves so much. Then she lowers her hands to the earth and falls silent, simply tasting, feeling, watching the emptiness with glittering eyes and flared nostrils.
Suddenly she is no longer alone. Long-eared crinos and lupus silhouettes rise up like a wall on the lowest ridgeline above the gully, surrounding her, faintly glowing pale eyes cooler than the desert night.
Sepdet's body quivers and goes still. There is no point in shifting.
The voice does not seem to come from any one of them, but rather through the dry cold sand under her feet and fingertips. (In Sepdet's dream, the elusive Garou tongue is clearer than Winter Feather's cry.)
~Behold the Lie of the Speaker of Truth.~