7

You look around just to make sure there's no one here, but you're all alone. You pull out the notes Elton gave you.

Elton's paper contains a series of gestures, to be executed with a knife or a claw, that will part the barrier between worlds and allow a perceptive Garou to see into the spirit world. It's a rite specifically created for Broad Brook, which won't work elsewhere, and it's not a simple formula: the movements change based on the phase of the moon, your own auspice, and certain abstract spiritual conditions that you have to test with a different set of gestures. Back with your old pack, you found these kinds of rites murky and opaque, full of stumbling blocks that, in retrospect, might have existed only to give the Garou who mastered them a feeling of power and superiority. By contrast, this rite is diamond clear. Under other circumstances, it would be interesting to study how computer science has influenced even those Garou who are not, themselves, proficient with programming: this rite, which has apparently existed in different forms for centuries or even millennia, is now a sequence of if/then instructions. But you don't have time for theory.

You reread the section relevant to a galliard, draw your knife and flick it through the air, testing the conditionals. Faint lateral resistance, what does that mean? Okay, "Arev is riding." Arev is the local name for the sun god, and if he's riding…(flip flip)…you need to make three incisions from upper left to lower right. That's what you do, and then your knife seems able to move freely. And the tip vanishes. Following the next set of instructions, you slice the barrier between worlds open.

And there is the Umbra, the realm of spirit: the stars are down here, or you're up there with them. They shine like paper lanterns, wise and clever spirits swirling around your head, but are also impossibly huge, balls of phosphorescent gas millions of miles across. Both at once and neither, a world of uncompromising truth that does not care what mortals, or werewolves, think; simultaneously, a shadow-reality shaped by your thoughts, needs, and fears.

It's only a window, you remind yourself. You probably won't fall in. And it'll close in a few minutes.

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