"Daphne Clear wasn't originally one of us," Elton says. "Her husband Linus Harrowman was one of our Silver Fangs, though. Actually, ex-husband—they were split up by then. Doesn't matter now that he's dead, I guess. She runs an environmental news and media company, but mostly she watches the…the thing in the woods, the thing that turned our caern into a nightmare.
"And to a lesser extent she deals with minor problems that a bit of data manipulation can solve: people talking about 'weird dog attacks,' that kind of thing. I don't have many good things to say about Glass Walkers, but they're good researchers. Daphne told me about you maybe ten minutes after you got into town, actually. But it's not like she can do anything against the Answering Tiger."
"The Answering Tiger?" you ask. "What's that? A spirit? A Bane?"
"Of what use are names?" the Shadow Lord says. "That final night—God, it was only three years ago, but it feels like a thousand—we realized too late that we had already lost. The Tiger had let us believe our own propaganda. That's all the Tiger was, all the Tiger is: a lie shaped like what you want to believe. We lied to ourselves and it came to us, and blinded us. We turned on each other: Shadow Lord against Silver Fang, human against Garou, family against family. The Answering Tiger had servants, of course: Banes like the one you battled, fomori, werewolves sworn to the Wyrm. But the weapon it used to strike us down…was us. What more can be said?"
A gust of icy wind rattles the windows.
Your hands are cold. You glance down and see that you've drunk all the tea.
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