Thread: The trip to Kansas City (ATTN: Tala and Sam)

"A lot of stories make up her journey to Roadkill Range but if I share them all now, you'll never sit at my circle during moots." She smiles. "Rule numbero uno on a Galliard's list of things to do - keeping 'em wanting more." Chuckling softly Tala pushes a stray strand of hair off her face.

"Still, if you haven't heard much about my travels I suppose I could tell you the story about my rite of passage ...being that was what you left me to after all. Or, are we short on time? Tales can always wait if we're running behind."

Sam drops another bundle of planks onto the truck. "A story would make the time pass easier. And I've never heard of a Galliard that couldn't talk easier than breathing.'

Sam winks and goes to pick up another bundle.

"Very well," she said thoughtfully. "... a tale of fallen heroes, though this is not the tale in which they fall but rather the story from which they rise."

"Cold Moon Howl, later known as Fangs of Glory, was just a newly changed lupis of the Get of Fenris... Emecee of the Wendigo, Galen of the Fianna and Karl... a hairless boy metis from the Uktena tribe - were all packed into the back end of a semi-truck when you left me that day and I, drugged and half out of my mind, joined them for a long and unexplained trip to the great white northern reaches of the Canadian wilderness." Tala dry washed her hands of any stray dust and dirt as she spoke.

"It's fair to say that everyone except for Karl and Emecee were nervous as hell. Karl knew, in a fashion, what we were in for and was the most knowledgable of us in the ways of Garou... while Emecee at least understood that he was on a sacred rite of passage. For all the rest of us knew, we were victims of a child kidnapping ... or wolf kidnapping, ring." Tala chuckled. "Funny now but scarey as hell at the time."

"In truth the rite itself was quite basic, surviving in the wilderness that would have killed us if we didn't work together using our wits to keep warm and fight the natural enviroment. No one, and I mean no one, expected that we'd end up wandering off in the storm so far that we came upon a remote village that had been unknowingly claimed by Femori."

Tala's tone gets a bit darker as she continues, carrying an air of the danger that the young pups felt at the time, "Not even Karl had ever seen such creatures as these humans with twisted features which mocked Gaia herself. Karl explained what he knew of how wrong these things were, but all of us felt it in our bones... most of all Cold Moon whose Arhoun blood wanted us to charge in head long." Tala shook her head to the negative. "But I would not allow it and by this point the pups who would one day become a pack, listened."

"Now, you may be saying to yourself... where were the spirits the wendigo sent to watch us? Why did the wendigo not rush in and take care of what pups would never be expected to stand against? Well, that was something we were left to wonder as we found ourselves harried back into the wilderness by the wendigo tribe of the local sept who had sponsered our rite of passage. That evening a spirit of the winter wind spoke to us through our only theurge, Karl, in the coldest darkest part of the night. The spirit told us the lamentable tale of three wendigo pups who were killed in New York... the city which we had all left from."

"Apparently, in an attempt to make a more working relationship between the New York sept of Northwoods and the Wendigo Icefang sept - we pups were sent to them and in turn three pups were sent to Northwoods to administer our rites. The wendigo, who were grieved to no end at the loss of their pups, decided that we should make our own way back to New York and if we survived the hundreds of miles run that we deserved our rank... and if we did not, then justice was somehow served."

Tala let the grave words sink in. No one these days let pups just die but that was what the wendigo had done to her and her pack. It was a grave accusation and one that the spirits took honor from the wendigo of that sept for. "Fear is a dangerous thing, it takes former friends and sane men ... and makes them do foolish things. For the garou that almost always ends in blood and so it was we pups fell upon one another, snapping and growling and fighting for life's blood."

"One by one they each sumbitted to me but not the arhoun Get, not at first. We fought and it was a bloody thing. I had never fought so hard and had no real training ... most certainly not in fighting wild animals such as a wolf. I was an heiress and track star, not a warrior. So it was that Cold Moon found his fangs around my neck and was prepared to throat me if I did not honorably surrender."

"I remember watching thick snowflakes falling down from the sky, remembered the first night and how I'd carried hairless Karl on my back in glabro so he would not die where he fell... I remembered stopping Cold Moon from rushing into the femori filled town and how he would have died without my wisdom... I remember how the others had looked to me and something in me knew that my place wasn't beneath my fellow garou's teeth. I growled, my fear burned away by the power of my blood and heritiage, 'release me.'"

"Of course the Get bit down harder at first but we were not so much garou then as we were each still a bit of who we once had been... and for cold moon, that was a wolf."

"As you know, a wolf runs with his pack... and when his fellow 'packmates' pulled him off of me, he took this to mean they would run him off before ever accepting him as their leader; instead of seeing their very human concern for a fellow girl in the jaws of a beast."

"Not right by our rules of what makes a challenge honorable but, we were pups just trying to survive and so laws and rules we did not yet know anything about really didn't matter. So it was that cold moon howl showed his neck to me and became my Beta - and our pack was formed around the small flame we'd made that winter night. To be sure we would not forget that night we chose the name Winter's Flame... a symbol of our love for one another, for standing against the impossible bright and strong, and of that small campfire that kept us alive on a night that killed more than a few animals more accustomed to the cold than us."

"Angry about how our elders had turned their backs on us we returned to the village we'd found and decided we could not abandon the humans there nor leave Gaia to suffer the ravages of those THINGS. We knew we were not many, nor were we gifted and strong like our betters, and so we used our wits to pick off one by one the femori who lived in the town until there was only a small cabal of them left and they held up together in a hut in the center of town."

"Our charge that day was as glorious a battle as ever I've fought in, though looking back I know the femori were relatively weak. We pups took such great pride, and rightly so, in our achievement that day that our run to New York seemed short and pleasant. From that moment on, until the deaths of each of my packmates over the course of our journies... we stayed together. However, those are tales that will have to wait for another day." Tala closed her trunk as the last of the gear was stowed securely for the trip.

"I think that about does it."

Black Sam smiles widely as he secures the last bundle of wood onto the truck.

"A hell of a tale, your renown is well earned."

He jumps down from the bed of the truck and leans against the car.

"I hope those Wendi's made right by you. Kin shouldn't treat Kin like that. Had I known that's what they had in mind, I wouldn't have left you cubs there by your lonesome, even as fresh as I was then."

"Yes... and no. Yes in that we eventually could be in the same room with them, we did visit them some years later. No in that they will probably never be 100% okay with any European descended Garou." She walks over to the driver's side door of her car.

"I suppose we can chat more when we get back to the range." She smiles. "I'll see you guys there."

Black Sam smiles widely, as though hearing something beautiful. He nods and climbs into the truck.

"Very well earned"