All around you, gray-brown marshlands or venomously iridescent jungle, and straight ahead, an open double-door of white stone in a low hill like a barrow, covered in reddish grass. The air is warm and heavy. Flies drone as they head into or out of the doorway like bees around a hive.
You follow the flies, trying to control your eagerness, sure that answers wait past the doorway. The hot air reeks of carrion, piss, and chemical preservatives. Garou glyphs mark the walls at irregular intervals—you recognize "death," "peace," and the design for "friendship," which always looked like a falling bomb to you—among more complex ideograms, those defaced beyond legibility. The corridor is less than ten feet long, and then you emerge into a central, circular tomb. Black Tarn told you about these places. You've never seen a tomb like this one, but you know this place has been worse than abandoned—it's been defiled.
Bones crunch underfoot as you fully enter the tomb. When you step to one side, the midday light streams past you and reflects off a beaten copper mirror on the far side of the room. Niches in the wall hint at generations of interment, and you see tools or weapons scattered among the bones. Between you and the mirror rises an oval catafalque of chipped stone. A corpse in stained linen lies on the catafalque, and just behind it is the creature that ambushed you. More than twice your size and wearing only a belt hung with jangling steel tools, it's curled lovingly around the corpse. Steel-tipped fingers caress the linen-draped chest; leathery lips touch the corpse's skull, hot breath faintly stirring scraps of gray hair.
"I didn't think there were any of you left," the leathery creature says, its voice a bellows-wheeze. Flies blow out of the asymmetric black mouth.
"Always with this piety," the man says. "Always so righteous. You call yourselves people of the spirit world, but you do nothing but talk and talk and give things names. Endless talk about the Wyrm and the Enemy and the defiled and the impure, endless labels to apply to the people you hate and hurt."
You and this man probably aren't going to settle things with a philosophical debate about the virtues of the Litany, because you think you know what this man is: a living man whose malice and cruelty has opened him up to Bane possession—a fomor.
The fomor rises. He's tall enough to scrape the domed ceiling. His hand lingers on the dead man's skeletal fingers. His hands—his arms, his chest, parts of his face—are covered in blades, hooks, and other tools. Some resemble the awl that you recovered after he ambushed you. These are leatherworking tools. Is this the man himself?
"Do you know what they said—what your people said?" the fomor wheezes. Spittle drools from his slash-mouth down to his chest. Old stains mark him from jaws down to crotch, the damp slash sticky with flies. "They said I collaborated with the Wyrm, that I made weapons for the Enemy. I was a weapon maker! I sold guns! But they didn't care. They didn't care that I was from the oldest of the Three Families, that we had served this land before them, and when they came, we served them. Good little servants."
He leans down again, touches the corpse's face. Scraps of beard still remain on the dead man's gaunt cheeks.
"It was Jasper who deceived them, who claimed that he'd sold the weapons. So they killed him. They tortured him and killed him, because he loved me so much that he was willing to die for me."
A weapon maker. This is David Banicki. Or what's left of him.