8

The barrows look different enough from your last visit that you wonder if Melodie had help making repairs. Help from the dead? Is that within her power? Cement bricks that once formed choking dams are either broken apart or neatly stacked on dry land, while native flora has replaced most of the bizarre plant life that once dominated the wetlands. The faint smell of corruption is unfamiliar—you're a werewolf, but you were raised in the modern world, far from the smell of putrefaction. The smell of decaying flesh is unpleasant, but preferable to the eerie warmth that used to hang over the barrows. It smells natural. The Wyrm performing its intended function, perhaps—not rampaging, insane, or omnicidal.

You try to feel the spirits of the dead, the mighty Garou ancestors that are supposed to guide your actions and bless you with their power, but no spiritual intuition reveals the ghost-world to you. Instead you'll have to look around this still badly damaged landscape. The central barrow seems to be Melodie's dwelling-place now, but in the moonlight you see another white door north of her barrow, a cemetery of more conventional aspect on raised ground and surrounded by what's left of a wrought iron fence, and what appears to be an outdoor temple on a nearby hill.

This place appeared infinite when you first visited it. Now you see that it's only a few acres across, with less than a dozen distinct barrows, most of them abandoned for so long that they're indistinguishable from the hills that rise above the wetlands. Still, ruins and fallen stones are everywhere; healing these barrows won't be easy.

Chiminage Possible:

Glory: 3 nights

Honor: 13 nights

I approach the north barrow. Can I get the white doors open?

I hike up to the cemetery.

What's in the temple?

I return to the north barrow and wipe dirt from the niche of Wings-of-Smoke.

I leave the barrows.

Next