Prophecy of the Phoenix

And at last, the Tribe novels wind down with Black Spiral Dancers by Eric Griffin and Wendigo by Bill Bridges, the last double Werewolf feature in the series.

For The Spirals, we focus on Arkady, the long disgraced Silver Fang long rumored to have become a traitor to the Gaians.  We spend much of the first part retracing his steps on the Silver Spiral as he tries to confront the Wyrm in the heart of its realm. This has a few odd consequences, such as his decent into Malfeas and eventually redeeming the White Howler's totem.

By far the biggest part of this is Arkady's eventual redemption by Falcon, and the gift or a duplicate Silver Crown. In the end, Arkady rallies the ghosts of long dead Silver Fangs at the lair of Jo'Cllath'Mattric and leads them into battle.

Then comes Wendigo, as John North Wind's Son meets his daddy before the North American moot to figure out what to do about the Lore Banes.

Essentially, King Alberecht leads the Silver River Pack and a large number of North American werewolves into the Umbra to the lair of the memory eating dragon. While several folks die, none of the major names do, and we're left with the lore at the heart of the dragon, one that states that the Apocalypse is nigh, and the Gaians will die in short amounts of time.

The Tribe Novels thankfully have been much less disjointed than the Clan Novels, but they've still had their issues here and there. on the bright side, props for the downer ending.

20 years on, and it's still a mess

So, I hit one of the volumes in the Clan Novels I remember being problematic, and unlike some of the other ones, Eric Griffin's Tremere remains a train wreck from start to finish. This is not to say that Aisling Strurbridge, Regent of the Chantry of Five Boroughs in New York is a boring character or that her arc is is silly, it's more that the plotting that ensnares her makes no sense and is never particularly explained. Also, more than a few passages appear to be lifted directly from prior volumes, and the entire thing ends before the time frames previous volumes did. Which means it really doesn't progress the timeline at all. Indeed, it's almost as if it should have been an earlier release.

Aisling runs the under siege Chantry of Five Bouroughs, complete with a Regent Secundus who's been investigating Hazimel's other eye. Said Secundus gets killed by an Assamite in the chantry during a ritual gone wrong. (A brief history of the Tremere clan. The clan got its start in a system that predated the modern World of Darkness as a human Hermetic magical order. As the system expanded, they became a House of the Order of Hermes, who were losing access to magick during the early medieval period. As such, Tremere's disciple Goratrix found a way to turn eight of the disciples into vampires. Which was all well and good, until they realized that they lost access to true magick, the Order now hated them, and the rest of vampire society hated them. The seven disciples diablerized themselves up to Fourth generation, while Tremere himself ended up eating an Antediluvian, Saulot, who at the time was Vampire Jesus. [Saulot got revamped a lot the longer the game went on. Indeed, he started becoming much less the Enlightened One, and much more sinister.] Of the Originla Seven, about 4 are still active at this point in the Novels. Goratrix joined the Sabbat in the Victorian Era, Meerlinda runs North America, Etrius runs the Clan from Vienna.)

Anyway, we do fill in gaps as to how Sturbridge got the sketch of Leopold that she presented in Baltimore. But that's really about it in the greater scheme of the plot. For the most part, she (and just about everyone else at the chantry) is dealing with Tremere internal politics and one poorly defined Acolyte who evidently has connections in Vienna.

So yeah. It's readable, but that's about the best I can say about it.

I saw a werewolf at Trader Vic's...

So, as part two of the two-or-three-fer, I offer up the third compendium in the Werewolf Tribe Novels, Red Talons by Philippe Boulle and Fianna by Eric Griffin.

Red Talons are a tribe that all come from Lupine stock. None of them particularly like humans, and indeed, go out of their way to avoid or punish them. Storm Eye is no exception here, although her backstory makes her a lot more sympathetic than I would have expected. Having returned to the pack of her birth, she finds that she no longer fits in among regular wolves. Indeed, she winds up using her brother to do something she feels is right, and is rightly ostracized for it by her tribe. She seeks out her father, and winds up going to the Sept of Anvil Klaiven for the meeting that set off the Tribe Novels. (Most of this is told in flashbacks as the rest of the story progresses.) Anyway, after the events of the last volume, Karin Jarlsdottir sends Mephi back to New York with Mari, and sends Storm Eye with Cries Havok to meet up with Antoine in the Catskills. Storm Eye isn't exactly fond of metis (the entire tribe considers them anathema), so she tends to view her task as one of humiliation.

Given the Umbral storm raging as they try to leave, the Glass Walker Julia steps in and gets the 3 of them out of Scandinavia, also annoying Storm Eye, since Julia tends to use Weaver tolls to escape the Wyrm. this also leads to the three escaping to London, and taking the Concorde across the pond. (Much of Storm Eye's time in human form is played for laughs. Which does help leaven the mood, although honestly in invokes pity for her as well.) In New York, They meet up with the Bone Gnawer Carlita (aka Big Sis), who's supposed to help get them up river to the Catskills. However, first oin the City itself, and later up the road, they get attacked by a Black Spiral Dancer and his Fomori friends. Including one wyrm wolf who keeps going after Storm Eye. The four wolves end up being joined by John North Wind's Son of the Wendigo, who was sent to escort them to Antoine. A final attack happens that winds up with the group pulled into the Umbra by the totem spirit Uktena, a powerful spirit who's technically the totem of the tribe of the same name. It is Uktena who winds up forming them as a pack, the prophesied Silver River Pack. Which none of them are particularly thrilled about, but ultimately, it's Storm Eye who points out it's easier to swim with the current than to try to fight it. And with her new pack and Alpha status within, she is redeemed by her tribe.

Then we start Fianna, and we meet Stuart Stalks The Truth, the only one to speak up on behalf of the supposed traitor Arkady at Anvil Klaiven. As such, he and Arkady's packmate Victor set off to find the truth. It doesn't go well, as the place that the knockerwyrm came from that was redeemed by Dawntreader is shrouded in mist and the Gauntlet between the worlds is non-existent. Indeed, the remains of the pack that was guarding the place sort of remain, but they're basically crawling flesh bags.

Eventually, Stuart finds his way to the guardian, whom we know little of. (We know she's from Appalachia, and she sold her soul for eternal youth. In an attempt to get her soul back, she's guarding the cave Stuart is trying to explore.) He ends up besting her, and descending down the troat of the wyrm guarding the cave. There in the base, he finds Arkady, who's already destroyed 2 of the 3 glyphs on the wall, mainly because they reflect badly on the Silver Fang tribe. On the other hand, it's Stuart who suggests that Arkady can take the fight to the Wyrm in Malfeas by finding and traveling the Silver Spiral, which lies in opposition to the Black Spiral and might provide a path that won't corrupt Arkady any further.

As I've said before the Tribe novels have a much more conventional time line, while we keep returning to the initial meeting that set off the events, each story is a forward progress, and there's a lot less backtracking to the stories.

Fun books.

Shadow of the Get

As promised, I'm alternating the Clan Novels with the Tribe Novels, which follow events in Werewolf: the Apocalypse. When they released this particular series, they released 14 books in 7 volumes, thus why you're getting a twofer with the Werewolf entries.

In this particular case, we get Shadow Lords and Get of Fenris, which follow in particular Oksana Yahniva and Karin Jarlsdottir. Oksana currently lives at the Sept of the Dawn, run by Sergiy Dawntreader of the Children of Gaia. While she's a daughter of Margrave Konietzko (who shows up in Apocalypse), right now she's busy representing her tribe among a rather mixed group of Garou, who are in turn hosting the notorious Silver Fang Arkady, who is followed by rumors of Wyrm taint. (OK, since we're dealing with a setting some readers may not be familiar with,Werewolf runs under the concept that werewolves are mostly servants or the Earth, aka Gaia, with gifts from crazy Aunt Luna, aka the moon. There are three concepts that govern their worldview; the Wyld (primal chaos or creation), the Weaver (primal order, or pattern), and the Wyrm (primal balance, although corrupted). In long ago aeons, the Wyrm got ensnared in Weaver's creations, and became corrupted trying to escape her designs. As such, Wyrm is trying to destroy everything to free itself. Thus Wyrm is bad.) Any rate, the Shadow Lords feeling that they should be the rulers of the Garou Nation rather than the Silver Fangs, Oksana is involved (with plausible deniability) in a plot that winds up roping in Arkady, his cousin, and a fosterling Get of Fenris Cub named Arne Wyrmbane. Since the plot involved Fomori trying to kill off Arkady's cousin, the Shadow Lord Yaroslav Neyizhsalo (who was consorting with the Wyrm corrupted humans) winds up taking the two Silver Fangs and the Get of Fenris cub looking for a tin mine where the Wyrm taint is supposedly coming from.

Anyway, a Wyrm creature does indeed appear, manages to kill Arne, but strangely, Arkady seems to be able to control it. Thus setting up the second half.

The Get of Fenris got revised a lot over editions of the game, since in first edition, they came off as Werewolf Nazis. in later revisions, they remained Norse in tone, but lost much of the worst connotations of their Heathen nature. Their Tribe history evidently now is something to the effect that Fenrir wasn't the bad guy, Wotan was. Anyway, Karin Jarlsdottir runs Spearsreach north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. It was from her caern that Arne Wyrmsbane came, and in exchange, they hosted Cries Havoc, a metis Child of Gaia. (Metis are the deformed children of two werewolves. In Cries Havoc's case, his deformity manifests as a pair of ram horns growing out of his head.) Arne's father insists that Cries Havoc must die to pay off the weregild for the death of his son, which manages to get all the other tribes involved. Which gets a boost due to Arkady's involvement in the situation, since he's supposed to be the best of the best, other than the whole being a servant of the enemy.

So, everyone shows up at Spearsreach, including Margrave Konietzko and the Stargazer Antoine Teardrop. The moot ends up condemning Arkady as wyrmspawn, and Karin against the advice of most of the rest of the tribes, does sacrifice Cries Havoc. Although she really only knocks him out and adopts him into the Get to fulfill Antoine's prophecy of a third pack, the Silver River Pack, who we'll hear much more of in 4 books (or two volumes).

As I said when I first read these, the plotting in the Tribe Novels is much more cohesive than the Clan Novels. (We'll see how much that remains true as we go through the re-reads; I think half the timeline issues with the Clan Novels had to do with the eternally delayed release schedule.) While I was never a big Werewolf fan, the fiction was usually better than average for the setting. As such, a volume wherein the story picks up almost directly from the preceding volume is a welcome relief.

Vykos's March to the Sea

Lesson learned, reading Eric Griffin's Tzimisce, the second of the Clan Novels, on lunch is a bad idea.

As a bit of explanation before we get into the actual review, the Tzimisce clan are one of the two founding clans of the Sabbat, and their signature power, Vicissitude, has such abilities as flesh craft, bone craft, etc. They have the nickname "Fiends" for a reason.

So, their Clan novel picks up about 2 days prior to the main events in Toreador, showing the planning involved in the Sabbat takeover of Atlanta, which means we're mostly concerned with a bunch of Lasombra from Miami, New York City, and Madrid backbiting for control along with the nomadic packs that are helping in the attack. Entering into this wretched hive of scum and villainy is the Tzimisce "signature character" Sascha Vykos. While her backstory gets covered in much greater detail outside of the Clan novels (she started off as Myca, a young man of African descent in the days of Constantinople, chose to become female sometime much later, and then became pretty much genderless in more modern eras. There's quite an extensive biography of her out there, if you really want to look. In later books, she starts using the neutral gender terms, or occcasionally "it".), here she's mainly presented at the outset as stirring up the various contenders for control of the raid before taking over events for herself.

Let's see, an Assamite she hired to take out Atlanta's Tremere regent kills her ghoul servant, so she uses Vicissitude to turn said Assamite assassin into a copy of the ghoul, all while turning him into her servant in other ways. It's really kind of creepy to read.

Anyrate, about halfway through, we catch up with the raid on the Camarilla of Atlanta that ended the first book. We get peaks into Prince Bennison's madness, as his power of Dementation transports both the Brujah Archon and the Sabbat pursuers into a battlefield hallucination around the time Sherman was getting ready to burn Atlanta to the ground. Which ends about as well for the Camarilla as it did for the Confederates.

Victoria Ash, winds up among the captured. She gets tortured and eventually gets rescued by Settites looking for Vegel, who died in the last book.

Vykos eventually supervises the fall of the Eastern seaboard as far north as DC, which is about where this volume ends, as the reason for her transformation of the Assamite becomes clear. He fails though, so Marcus Vital, Prince of DC becomes Prince in Exile. Vykos, on the other hand, becomes Archbishop of DC.

It's a well written, if mildly disturbing volume in the series. It does a good job of showing us what the Sabbat had been re-envisioned as in Revised. Unfortunately, the next volume, which I'll be reading after a detour into the Werewolf novels, is the one I kept throwing across a room because it annoyed me so much. Tune in in two entries to find out if history repeats itself.