"These barrows date back centuries," Elton says, following you back up the slope to the white doorway, "maybe millennia. The Silver Fangs and Shadow Lords weren't the first tribes to guard these lands. We took the Broad Brook Caern from older and wiser Garou, killing and stealing like humans."
Black Tarn told you horrible stories of those years. That's how you first learned of the Shadow Lords. You wonder how a Black Englishman relates to his tribe's ancient crimes. Elton's expression reveals nothing as he steps around Jasper Heaney's corpse and enters the barrow.
"This was one of the oldest. This tribe used to be called the Pita-skog, the Children of the Horned Serpent. I think they're extinct now." He glides effortlessly around the broken bones and ceremonial items, his shadow-cloak trailing in the dust. You follow cautiously. "We'll have to put these back, fix David's sacrilege."
Elton regains some of his vigor once he's back in darkness. You and he return some of the bones to their niches. You explore the copper mirror. It doesn't look like any Native American artifact you've ever seen, but then again, what do you know about archaeology? Of greater interest: there's a second entrance behind the mirror, screened by grass and vines. When you push through, you can hear a faint, rhythmic hammering.
You follow the sound and look down upon what David Banicki has been doing. You instinctively cover your mouth.
"Oi, cub! Where did you get off t—"
Elton freezes beside you.
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First, here is the source of the noise: a crude dam of cement and piled stones, supported by a cage of rebar. Water flows through the dam in three sections; the water's flow as it hammers into the cement and turns some kind of plastic turbine produces the racket. It's also why the landscape has flooded in this particular way.
Second: the smell.
"How could anyone do this?" Elton says, momentarily overwhelmed even though, as a Garou, he knows exactly what drives humans to do things like this.
He stumbles back, choking on the caustic reek as you wade through muck, closer to the cages where David Banicki kept the horses. Eight animals are in the broad pool formed by the dam, chest-deep in filthy, muddy water that stinks of rotten meat. Crude plastic binders hold them in place as flies swarm over them. All are blind, their eyes eaten away; blood drools down their mouths into the foul water. Five more horses are dead and half-skeletonized, their bones pink in the pale sunlight. When the wind shifts, the still-living animals sense your presence and start to scream, as if they're being burned alive. Crude shacks served as David Banicki's workrooms for…whatever he was doing to the horses.
Your Rage momentarily blinds you. Or maybe it's not blindness—maybe it's ecstatic clarity. You know what you have to do. You know what Gaia blessed you with Rage and wisdom to do.
An act of mercy: I head into the nearest workroom, find a sledge, and systematically kill all the defiled horses.
"We have to rip this place down, Elton." We have to work together to destroy this affront to the Litany and Gaia's laws.
"I'm going to take notes, and then you're going to destroy things when we're done." I take out the Field Notes and turn my education toward understanding this dreadful operation.
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