The Triat - The Three Aspects

The Thirteen Tribes teach their cubs and cliath the ways of the world, giving them purpose and inspiration. Werewolf cubs are told a distinctly unique legend of why the Earth is dying, a mystical and spiritual account. As is the way of the spirit world, events in the Umbra appear as reflections of the physical world. According to myth, Gaia created the world and all living things in it. When time began, she released three primal forces upon the Earth: the Weaver, the Wyld, and the Wyrm. These elements of creation are known collectively as the Triat. The spirit world is complex, but werewolves can reduce all of its workings to these three primal forces.

The Weaver created all structure in the world, from the highest mountains to the depths of the oceans. She gave birth to a host of spirits to preserve order, and Weaver-spirits have been known for their predictability, ruthlessness, and determination since that primal time. Legions of them weave the fabric of reality with long legs and spinnerets, reinforcing the tapestry of creation. In the modem world, wherever law triumphs over anarchy, whenever technology is present in force, or when anyone rebuilds what has been torn down, werewolves claim that
the spirits of the Weaver are scurrying nearby.

The Wyld was the breath of life in the world, allowing the Weaver’s creations to thrive. Wherever nature is alive, the Wyld is there. The spirits that serve it are capricious and effervescent, unpredictable and indefatigable. Just as the Weaver brings order, the Wyld brings chaos, surging with energy wherever it could not be contained. Rebellion, frustration, and feral instinct all give it strength. Yet nature can also be gentle. Behind every serene glen and tranquil brook, the Wyld returns its energy.

Garou mystics say that Gaia created a third force to maintain the balance between order and chaos, between the Weaver and the Wyld. Like a great serpent wriggling through all creation, the primal Wyrm snipped at the threads of creation that could not otherwise be controlled. Once, say the Garou, the Wyrm was the force of balance in the world, but no longer. The mad Weaver grew too ambitious, trying to tip the balance by trapping the Wyrm within its lifeless web. Confined and denied, the Wyrm went slowly insane, and creation listed out of balance.

For mystics, this story is not mere myth. Each portion of the Triat has spawned a host of lesser spirits, mystic servitors who are still at work in the world. In the shadow of creation —the spirit world of the Umbra — werewolves can see these forces at work. Over the last few centuries, the spirits of the Wyrm have become more powerful than ever before. The most fanatic Garou share a common belief: If there is corruption and misery spreading through the world, the Wyrm is at the heart of it. Beyond all other ideals, the greatest goal of the werewolves is to protect all of creation by destroying the servants of the Wyrm.

The Wyrm’s servants have become a cancerous corruption, and its servitors have become the Garou’s greatest enemies. For millennia, its rage and hatred have grown to the point of insanity. Its pain ceases only when it can pare back creation, destroying the Weaver’s order and polluting the Wyld’s purity. The Wyrm can suborn even human beings, especially when they practice destructive and malicious acts. Wherever the Earth is despoiled and befouled, the Wyrm grows stronger. Wherever order is perverted and law is denied, the Wyrm shudders in glory. When humans fall prey to darker emotions, succumbing to vice and spite, the Wyrm gains more victims. It is beyond reason, and its servants are legion.

The Wyrm’s strength is such that it now overpowers the efforts of the werewolves to contain it. In prophecies, in visions, and in the world around them, the Garou see evidence that this treacherous evil is achieving its goal to destroy all creation and free itself forever. Therefore, the world that remains is cold and bleak. As prophecy has foretold, the werewolves must fight to the last to defeat the Wyrm. Now is the time of the final confrontation: the Apocalypse. Confronted by a dying world, the Garou have contained their rage for far too long. This is the final battle, and so shapechangers are returning from the shadows, bringing heroism, valor, and horror back into the light of day.

Fanatical werewolves believe that their only duty in life is to defeat — or even kill — the Wyrm. It’s a very direct philosophy, but one with which some cubs and cliath just cannot agree. A heretical idea is spreading throughout the Western Concordiat: The Garou’s real enemy isn’t the Wyrm, but the Weaver. After all, it is the Weaver that is responsible for the largest human cities. She was the primal force that first drove the Great Serpent insane, and she brings her own brand of suffering on the world as she continues her mad designs.

Most elders are horrified by this idea. Some refuse to send packs to investigate the mad Weaver’s activities, and some even refuse to award renown for succeeding in such enterprises. Nonetheless, a new generation of cubs has dedicated itself to shredding the Weaver’s webs, regardless of what their mangy, crusty old elders might believe.

The Weaver



The unlimited ambitions of the Wyld must eventually gave way to ordered growth. With a few strands, the Weaver anchored the turbulent vortex of the Wyld’s creation, naturally selecting the most promising creations to endure, thereby saving them from falling back into the maelstrom of the Wyld’s endless creation. Limitless chaos was structured and given form. From these simple lines and strands, patterns took shape, as the Weaver began constructing the fundamental structure of the universe: the Pattern Web. Wherever there was form, there could be growth and progress. Inconstant infinity yielded to enduring eternity.

Then the Wyrm began pruning the Weaver’s forms and structures. The Weaver’s perfect patterns gained imperfections; some say this was necessary, so they could not inhibit the Wyld’s ceaseless acts of creation. The Weaver has given us time and distance, but when it acts without restraint, it also threatens to bring stasis and conformity. In legendary times, the Wyrm attempted to act as a force of balance between the Wyld and the Weaver. For the Garou, they acted as the true cosmological trinity of chaos, creation, and destruction. This stalemate would have lasted forever, but the Weaver found a way to tip that balance.

Despite the Weaver’s own epic ambitious, the Weaver’s webs could not contain everything. Parts of creation were patterned within absolutes of time and distance, but the Weaver’s order could not resonate through all of infinity. Quantifiable matter composed the structure of the physical world, but the ephemera of the spirit world would not fully conform to the Pattern Web. In a compromise, the Weaver erected a calcified barrier between the realms of flesh and spirit. The Wyld’s presence in all living things allowed some randomness in the physical world, along with the presence of magic, but as the worlds of matter and spirit drifted apart, order became ascendant in the physical world. The evolution of the first sentient beings advanced this process: they perceived an orderly world of consistency and pattern. Over time, these sentients became more intelligent and advanced, and humanity’s real world solidified.

Garou endlessly speculate on the Weaver’s role in all of this. Not every explanation is the same. One version holds that when the Weaver responded to the Wyld’s boundless energy by attempting to calcify all creation, and the attempt drove the Weaver insane. By recklessly attempting to bind the Wyrm within the Pattern Web, she never considered the cosmological consequences of her actions.

Another legend claims that the Weaver was far more calculating: When she attempted to define all of reality to conform to laws of causality, predictability, and order, she saw the Wyrm as the only obstacle to her ambitions. Through her machinations, some loremasters claim, she trapped the Wyrm within her Pattern Web, leaving it no recourse but to lash out to avoid constriction and calcification.

Glass Walkers posit a far more sympathetic view. The Wyrm’s destruction and malice was an undeniable threat, they say, and the Weaver had no choice but to confine it as an act of self-defense. She deduced there would be a future in which the Wyrm would try to destroy everything. Preparing for this eventuality was a prudent act of caution.

Most of these Garou can agree that the Weaver held the origins of intelligence. As human civilization and science has advanced, the physical world has become more structured and limited. The power of magic has faded from a raging conflagration to a spark in the darkness. Human technology has advanced more in the last century than in the entirety of human history, and accordingly, the Weaver is now powerful far beyond her station. Whether this drove her mad or is a product of her madness is irrelevant: this is the world the Garou must live and die in. The ancient balance of pattern and chaos has given way to stagnation and decay. Prophecies say the Apocalypse is inevitable, but some believe creation will not ultimately vanish because of the Wyrm’s destruction. If the Mad Weaver ever finishes spinning her cosmic web, all of the Tellurian will be bound in rigid, motionless, changeless strands

As the strands of the Weaver choke the world further and further, many Garou wonder if the grand spider is also a threat on the level of the Wyrm. According to legend, the Weaver ran mad first, and then drove the Wyrm insane as well. Now her favored children, humanity, stand astride the world and grind it to glass under their heels. It takes subtlety to sever threads of the Weaver’s schemes — a kind of campaign that werewolves were not designed to fight so easily.

Crude tactics don’t work. Outright anarchy and wholesale destruction may damage the Weaver’s influence, but strengthen the Wyrm — to say nothing of rending the Veil and inviting retribution. Weaver-oriented monkeywrenchers find more success when they attempt to cut apart the spidery spawn directly in the Umbra, then shut down the Weaver’s favored weapons in the physical world. Of course, the Weaver’s minions are frequently coldly intelligent, well-organized, and technologically well-equipped. They are no easy targets.

At present, some septs recognize the effort of struggling against the Weaver, while many more find it a potential distraction. Packs all too often don’t earn renown awards for fighting the Weaver comparable to those they earn for opposing the Wyrm, even if the danger is very similar. It sometimes takes various secret societies and camps to acknowledge their efforts. Yet sometimes the danger of the Weaver’s minions just cannot be denied. In modern nights, more and more septs howl the glory of those who defended their caern against the encroaching steely webs of the Weaver.

Forms of the Weaver

When Garou tell tales of Weaver-spirits, they speak most often of spiders. After all, the Mad Weaver is known for her webs, but even she is not entirely predictable. After all, she can make shape and substance out of the limitless possibility of the Wyld. Travelers tell tales of bizarre creations: mad caterpillars and silkworms endlessly spinning their silken, sticky threads; tentacled monstrosities carefully coordinating the elaborate terpsichorean ministrations of their myriad limbs; cockroaches and sinister insects chittering Morse messages that force the ephemera around them to pulse in time to insectile commands; a single blinking light repeating mathematical patterns hypnotizing its minions into performing idealized
plans. Even when the Umbra is orderly and patterned, the Weaver is still insane enough to trap travelers with demented creations they’ve never encountered or even dared to dream of before.

The Wyrm



Savage and brutal and bestial though they may be, werewolves are not the greatest monsters in the World of Darkness. That honor belongs to the Wyrm and all its twisted spawn. Wherever the Garou hunt the cruel and oppressive, they often find the traces of the spiritual corruption brought on by the Wyrm.

The Fenrir describe the Wyrm as the Great Serpent of Darkness, spawning monsters that must die at their claws. The Bone Gnawers see its touch among the poor and desperate, forced to live in filth and eat trash to survive — even those who have homes and buy processed food. Black Furies describe a father of spiritual despair, lurking near families devastated by domestic violence and abuse. The hydra has a thousand heads, each one stretching out to sink its barbed fangs into the weak, the helpless, and the easily tempted.

The Garou are certain that the Wyrm has an actual incarnation — a body hidden deep somewhere within the Umbra. No living werewolf has ever seen or interacted with it (save perhaps the elders of the Black Spiral Dancers, if their prophets are to be believed), but they know it coils somewhere in the dark. Its near-omnipresent nature reveals itself through the influence of intangible spiritual corruption, and the actions of warped minions that carry out perversion and ruination. It’s difficult for even the wisest Theurges to determine just how much of the
Wyrm’s own intellect directs the actions of its underlings. Even if its colossal mind has only indirect influence on the armies that march in its name, the Garou speak of it directly. The armies and the cause are the same: The enemy is the Wyrm.

Mystics recognize three major aspects of the Wyrm, each with its own legion of servitors. The Beast-of-War gluts itself on violence, destruction, and entropy. The Eater-of-Souls seeks to devour all of creation, feasting on matter, energy, and spirit with equal relish. The Defiler Wyrm is the most insidious aspect, a force of corruption and violation.

Banes

If it’s difficult to determine just how much any mortal soldier is influenced by the Wyrm, it’s much easier to tell how strong its hold is on its legions of twisted spiritual servitors. Banes are those spirits born of the Wyrm, or so fully polluted that their very essences are now corrupted. Like all spirits, they must follow their nature, and their nature is defiled. Some are near-mindless, others are cunning and highly intelligent. All are loyal to their Dark Father.

Banes are strongest in the Umbra. There, they use spiritual powers called Charms to seduce, corrupt, or assault their enemies. Powerful Banes possess humans or animals in the physical world, using them as vessels. Typically, these possessed creatures are “spiritually weak,” already overcome by sin or dark emotions such as lust, greed, envy, or wrath. In some rare cases, they may even override their victim’s free will. More often, however, they attempt to influence their prey into acting on preexisting desires. Once a victim has been possessed, the whisperings of the Wyrm urge him to commit further horrible acts. Banes can also manifest physically, creating as loathsome a form as possible to unnerve those who oppose them.

The diversity of Banes is nearly endless. Because almost any spirit can be corrupted into becoming a Bane, they range from warped and twisted spirits of animals and elements to philosophical abstractions of sin, horror, and insanity. Some defy taxonomy, seeming to have been spawned with no obvious purpose. Common theory holds that Banes serve masters tied to the great themes of evil: Hatred, Pollution, Seduction, and so forth. But the efforts to catalogue Banes are almost futile — and arguably a waste of time. They are legion and numberless. Who has time to study them carefully? They must be fought.

Wyrm Caerns
The Garou’s sacred sites devoted to Gaia are reflected by tainted caerns created by the minions of the Wyrm. Some are former Gaian caerns, captured and desecrated; others are newly christened loci of foulness crafted anew on sites of great pollution.

The first Wyrm caerns were created deep underground, marked by the green, cold light of their toxic balefires. Horrors writhed there, deep below the surface of the earth, but the surface remained free of their cancers. The Garou were stronger then, and if any beast pulled its way free to the surface, its murderous activities would be silenced before long. Human memories of these nightmarish raids have gradually evolved into human myths. Beowulf and Grendel, St. George and the Dragon, Marduk and Tiamat —each story masks a more horrible truth.

Near the end of the 20th century, human activity brought these pollutants to the surface. Disastrous mistakes heralded the dawn of the End Times. Nuclear warfare, biological havoc, and ecological devastation on an unprecedented scale overwhelmed the werewolves’ efforts, summoning the Wyrm into the world in forms never witnessed before. As below, now so above. Throughout the last century, the Wyrm established and befouled more caerns on the surface, rejoicing in landfills, toxic waste, ecological devastation, atomic tests sites, and urban hell-holes surrounded by crime and human suffering.

The Wyrm caern, whether on the surface or still below it, does not advertise itself openly. Its guardians do not mark their territory. Instead, the signs are read on the faces and bodies of the humans who live there. Children are born wrong; the land goes sour. The horrors are hidden by these sullen, xenophobic communities who have no idea how wretched their fate truly is.

That is, of course, save for those caerns that once were dedicated to Gaia. The forces of the Wyrm delight in claiming the sacred places of their enemy for the Dark Father. The Garou keep the memory of each caern that is taken and desecrated, for no insult or wound is harder to bear.

Wyrm Corruption
The Wyrm’s minions claim many victims, yet the most prized are the Garou themselves. No target is more desirable than the defender of Gaia. Nothing brings darker delight than the fall of a once-noble wolf. Though the Garou revile the works of the Wyrm, they have proven fallible time and again. Far too many werewolves have given into Rage or darker lusts, and found the Dark Father waiting to embrace them. Heroes, packs, even septs have fallen to the Wyrm — and once, an entire tribe.

How does one tempt one of Gaia’s Chosen? It’s a subtle game, particularly if the tempter doesn’t want to end his days bleeding out from a mortal wound. The first step is identifying a possible target, one that’s been weakened somehow. Perhaps his faith in his elders is faltering. Perhaps he has done things he regrets. Perhaps he feels he hasn’t done enough. The tempter takes some innocuous form, flesh or spirit, and begins to prey upon the target’s emotions. Many werewolves feel terribly isolated by their Rage, and a tempter may offer camaraderie or a place to truly belong. Others crave power, and the Wyrm has that to spare. Perhaps the bait is a prized birthright, a fetish, forgotten lore, or the chance at revenge. In return, the tempter asks a little favor: information, an act of violence, or perhaps an item that “no one will miss.” If the target isn’t discovered, then perhaps the tempter can play up fears
of discovery and offer further aid with the secrecy. If he is discovered, then he may need a new place to turn.

The Garou fear traitors almost more than any other enemy. A corrupted werewolf is as strong and cunning as his former brethren, and has inside knowledge of many secrets. He may know about caern defenses, the weaknesses of elders, attack plans or long-term goals. In their fear to stamp out corruption, septs too often grow tyrannical and xenophobic — throwing up more barriers and alienating their own in the process. Thus a new generation becomes open to temptation.

Black Spiral Dancers

Few things are more painful to admit than the fact that the largest werewolf tribe of all is the Black Spiral Dancers — the loyal soldiers of the Wyrm. Once they were a Gaian tribe, the White Howlers. Subtle corruption suborned them over generations, until the minions of the Wyrm conquered the last White Howler caern and captured its greatest heroes, dragging them into the depths of the underworld. The survivors emerged, named after the corruptive Black Spiral that transformed them.

For almost two millennia, the Black Spirals spawned in tunnels beneath the earth, waiting for the time when they would be numerous enough to decimate their Garou rivals. That time has arrived. They are ready for the Apocalypse to erupt in earnest, now that they easily outnumber the combined strength of the two largest tribes of Garou. But even as they whip their maddened foot soldiers into a frenzy, the great minds of the Black Spiral Dancers also continue their millennia-old game of corrupting the Gaian Garou. The Dancers didn’t survive and flourish by breeding alone. They have always been recruiting.

While it’s easy for the Gaian tribes to assume that all Black Spirals are utterly and completely insane, the truth is that insanity does not necessarily dictate functionality. Black Spiral cubs and Garou initiates are dragged to a realm of the Underworld known as Malfeas, where they are forced to walk a spiral labyrinth containing unimaginable horrors. Those that survive and return to the surface world are forever changed. But while many become little more than frothing berserkers, others are still very functional in their madness. The cracks in their psyche don’t keep them from formulating intelligent plots; the flaws in their logic don’t render them unable to infiltrate and seduce other Garou to their side. Black Spiral Dancers
still possess a measure of free will, and many can operate intelligently on that free will — even if their perspective may be warped beyond repair.

Madness and insight combined breed great power. Centuries of exposure to balefire and radiation have twisted the Black Spiral Dancer bloodline. Many display bizarre deformities, especially in their Crinos form. Sharklike teeth or serpentine fangs, leonine or batlike ears, sickly gray green fur and wrinkled scabrous hides are typical genetic changes. The Black Spirals hold no qualm against spawning legions of metis shock troops. They always have more subtle agents, particularly those who were turned rather than born under the Wyrm’s talon.

Black Spiral Dancers breed in Hives, vast underground lairs as connected to spiritual corruption as a Garou caern is to the energy of Gaia. Rumors speak of vast networks of underground labyrinths that extend into the spirit world, connecting one hive to another. Here the wan light of balefire illuminates blasphemous rites and demented moots, with weird and forgotten creatures from the bowels of the Earth moving among the polluted Garou. Heaven help the humans dragged down from above to feature as entertainment, spiritual offering, or food for the gathering — or all three.

The tribal totem of the Black Spirals is Whippoorwill, a strange corrupted avian spirit that has taken on aspects of doom and nihilism. A Whippoorwill pack on the hunt mimics its haunting cry, calling out their desire for the souls of their victims. But with the legion of Banes at the Wyrm’s beck and call, the Black Spiral Dancers are spoiled for choice where pack totems are concerned. Their Bane totems offer hideous spiritual gifts of pollution and degradation, coloring the packs in insidious ways. A pack that follows a totem of corrupted water may command polluted rivers or lurk in a rusted-out water treatment plant, while a pack devoted to a spirit of fear haunts and terrifies its prey long before they deliver the final strike.

Pentex and its Subsidiaries

The most mortal of the Wyrm’s pawns is also one of its most diverse and dangerous. Pentex is one of the largest corporations in the world. As with many institutions, it hides vast conspiracies behind layers and layers of corporate security. Originally investing in oil and mining, Pentex has since become a holding company, diversifying its resources into hundreds of subsidiaries. Organizations like Magadon Pharmaceuticals, Endron Oil, Sunburst Technologies, and even the Black Dog Game Factory consume the resources of the earth and spit them back out as consumer goods tainted with the corruption of the Wyrm. While many Garou know of its various subsidiaries, fewer are as aware of the connections between them, for Pentex does not show much of a public face. Working through its corporate pawns, Pentex holds monopolies in many areas of the world, acts as a leader in the global economy,
provides jobs for countless employees, and continuously spawns corruption and despair.

Pentex’s prime agenda is weakening human society and the ecological immune systems of the world, so that the Wyrm can claim precedence. Conveniently, many of the tactics that industries use to turn maximum profit serve this agenda. A company that saves money by opting out of environmental regulations manages to devastate the local ecology, weakening the spiritual allies of the Garou. Pentex takes this one step further. Its subsidiaries work to produce toxins, mutagens, and carcinogens as various “byproducts” of their manufacturing, then release them into the world to pollute the area around caerns and Wyld lands. Similarly, the sort of chemical additives and distracting technologies that make humans fat and
sluggish and complacent produce the double bonus of turning excellent profits and weakening the human ability to resist corruption.

Like many real-world corporations, Pentex incorporates numerous strategies and tactics to cover up its violations. They have an army of slippery lawyers, underworld contacts and government shills who will do whatever it takes to keep suckling at the Pentex teat. Worse, the money they have is able to bankroll supernatural threats. Black Spiral Dancer packs get “care packages” of resources; Banes breed and swarm around corrupt manufacturing facilities. Pentex even has elite shadow teams of mercenaries, hired soldiers possessed by Banes, ready to be dispatched to rain silver bullets down on the Garou.

How does one fight a megacorporation, though? Not all of Pentex’s activities have spiritual resonance, and it hires far too many people for all of them to have some form of Wyrm taint. Most of its employees are perfectly normal people, not much worse off than wage slaves at similar corporations. It takes a very cunning werewolf to successfully find the trail of spiritual pollution in a Pentex facility, sorting out the genuinely corrupt from those who are simply sacrificing their hopes a little bit in order to make the next paycheck. Such tactics will have to be mastered, though, and soon. If not, the Garou will be stuck playing a purely defensive war — one they cannot hope to win.

Fomori

Every army needs foot soldiers. In the spirit world, the Wyrm marshals its legions of Banes. In the material world, however, it needs pawns of flesh and blood. Through strange mutagens, eldritch radiations and balefires, or chemicals ridden with Wyrm-taint, a person or animal can be rendered more susceptible to spiritual possession. Once fully possessed by a Bane, a mortal form may warp and twist into something unnatural, a grotesque beast called a fomor.

The Fianna were the first to name the fomori. Human myth reflects the term by speaking of a race of monster-men that bred in vast undersea kingdoms off the shores of the British Isles. Other myths of ogres, chimeras, dragons, undersea monsters and worse hint at other encounters with beasts that had been twisted by the touch of the Wyrm. To this day, the Wyrm continues to twist mortal frames into fomori, though animals are no longer as prominent a target; humans are far preferable. A human that becomes a fomor can be as bestial and monstrous as any corrupted animal, but has the added benefit of malevolent intellect.

A fomor’s mutative gifts are designed for pain and bloodshed. A single fomor is an easy kill to a werewolf, true, but it’s rare that a single fomor goes hunting for Garou. They run in packs, driven so strongly by their demented urges that it matters little to them if three-quarters of their number die, as long as they make their kill. The Banes that possess them grant an arsenal of unholy powers, from supernatural strength, warped additional limbs, or toxic glands to mental mutations that grant maddening psychic powers. The victim’s soul becomes as warped and twisted as his body. The farther gone a fomor, the more likely it is to become a stalking horror, an urban legend, or a backwoods horror drawn to feed on what victims it
can catch alone. That said, those that retain the greater portion of their will are even more dangerous. The fomor that is able to pass for human, whose mutations hide beneath the skin, can work its schemes from within human society, furthering the urges of its Bane rider.

Many fomori are created by incidental corruption, but Pentex and its subsidiaries see no reason to leave things to chance. They spread the toxins and blight that makes humans vulnerable to Bane possession, and then arrange for people to be exposed in various ways. Some work camps and offices have a high “employee turnover,” carefully culling those workers who are showing signs of weakening from the prolonged exposure. Some subsidiaries even work to directly create fomori in laboratory environments. But many play a particularly long and insidious game, simply releasing doses of toxin and taint into the world as consumer goods or byproducts of manufacturing. More and more fomori are spawned every year as a result of these schemes, making it increasingly difficult for the Garou to cut off the corruption at the source.

The Wyld



Creation begins with the Wyld, the prime agent of change in the cosmos. In fact, the Wyld is more than chaos: it’s a perpetual process of transmutation. The Wyld drives evolution and adaptation, as endless variations of the creative process result in the advancement of living things. The Wyld is possibility and random chance incarnate, responsible for everything from hopes and dreams to the fear that everything we possess will be lost by sudden catastrophe. It’s equally liberating and terrifying.

Its spirits’ capricious actions can be attributed to deliberate fate, meaningless coincidence, or just plain dumb luck, but no pattern can ever fully contain it, and no ritual can fully predict it. Every living thing, from amoebas to ants to antelopes to arctic whales, contains a fragment of the Wyld. We invoke its essence every time we proclaim “where there’s life, there’s hope.” The Wyld is the origin of revelations. It’s the impetus for every spark of creativity, yet it also dwells beyond the limitless horizons of madness. Some Garou blindly insist that Gaia Herself came from the Wyld, for she could never exist without it. Nothing could.

The Wyld is complete unto itself, but without the Weaver, it would lose the vast multitude of manifestations it spawns. Most of its creations return to their primal forge at the moment of inception. The Weaver allows them to persist through time (since time, as Douglas Adams says, “prevents everything from happening all at once”). Wrap your mind around this: Being everything at all times is as indefinable and indefinite as being without any form or substance at all. That way lies madness.

Of the three aspects of the Triat, the Wyld is unquestionably the least personified. Mutability precludes any “true form,” for the Wyld is formless madness. Of course, the Wyrm is then essential to the Wyld, since it destroys the weakest and least plausible creations within the Weaver’s web, returning their essential ephemera to the forges of creation. Thus, the creative process comes full circle.

In the Deep Umbra, the Wyld should arguably (though unverifiably) be the most powerful aspect of the Trait: unbounded by Gaia’s laws, he/she/it/everything is almost as powerful as Gaia herself. Fortunately for creation, the Wyld is never powerful enough to overcome the boundary that separates the Near Umbra from the terrifying, alien possibilities of the Deep Umbra. By contrast, the Wyld in the physical world is actually the weakest aspect of the Triat’s trinity.

Fortunately, there are a few scattered sites of pure Wyld energy still left in the physical world. They’re contained within caerns the Garou and their offspring endlessly fight to protect. The Wyld is only truly unassailable within the deepest depths of the Deep Umbra. Far beyond the Membrane surrounding the Near Umbra, any enemy is dissolved into its purest primal protoplasm upon contact with the undiluted Wyld.

The Wyld serves as a symbol of the Garou’s never-ending struggle to forestall an inevitable Apocalypse. Its realms teem with life, and in a world that grows out of the Wyld, anything can happen. The Wyld is the embodiment of hope: the promise of change in a wicked world of malefic matter and entropic annihilation. Although the Garou can never anticipate direct aid from the forces of the Wyld, it’s a powerful ally indeed.

Forms of the Wyld
Wyld-spirits are full of energy and possibility. Since the Wyld is most commonly associated with nature, many of these spirits appear as natural forces, but with a brilliance and vibrancy rarely seen in the natural world. Animate shafts of sunlight, energy that ripples like water, ephemeral essences only detectable as the scent of petrichor after a rainstorm — Wyld-spirits personify life-giving energy. As forces of chaos, they’re likely to appear continually in flux, cycling through impossible geometric forms, the faces of a thousand strangers, or multicolored, pulsing wisps of formless energy. Whether as easily identified as the animal spirit of a deer or as impossible as the scent of the color blue, the spirits of the Wyld become more recognizable the farther one travels from the so-called logic and reason of Earth.