Chereads / Cale Falck X / Chapter 19 - 4

Chapter 19 - 4

The gibbous moon in the night sky seems crooked, off-balance, like a zeppelin about to crash. When it skims the treeline, it looks impossibly huge, as if Earth were a moon of Jupiter. You can barely see the Milky Way as it winds across the sky, from the eastern woods to the hazy red glow of Buffalo, far to the west.

The moon is telling you a story. What does it mean? Do stories have to mean things in order to matter? There's one thing you know, even though you're just a cub: merely destroying this Bane will not be enough. You need the world to know what transpired here. The story is what turns the act into the lesson.

You are gibbous moon—a champion, a tale-teller, a legend in the making, a galliard of the Garou Nation. You will destroy this monster, and then you will sing the song of your victory.

The ice wind shifts and the Bane steps toward the trees, its outline breaking apart as its cloud of flies rises up. You smell the others—Clay and Scarper and Black Tarn—but they're not here yet, and the Bane might still escape into the trackless forest. But you've planned for this moment since your first conversation with the hustlers who served this Bane, and you've already taken on the ideal form…

Homid. I still wear my regular human shape—ideal for luring a monster into the traps I've already laid.

Glabro, the bestial near-human. I carry a bow, and this form's great strength and speed turns the archaic weapon into an instrument of swift death.

Crinos. The ultimate war-form, an incarnation of carnage and slaughter.

Hispo, the titan-wolf. So huge and powerful that I can crash through those woods and run this Bane down with my greater stamina.

Lupus, the wolf. A surprise for any Bane that expects me to use one of my supernatural forms, small enough that I'll have to dodge and weave…and lure this Bane right where I want it.

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