Golgotha: The Place Of Skulls

Raging Spirit looks at the Merlin, then at Gaia's Flame and says...

"The only good thing about leaches is that you can kill 'em. The only good ones are dead ones. Their existence makes a mockery of all that is good in Gaia. But I am here to learn and have been asked to keep an open mind, so tell me your tales so that this Fostern may learn."

The Merlin smiles...
"You are here to learn?  Alright, a tale then... one about Leeches and
garou... a tale for you all...."

(As he speaks, during the latter stages of the tale, the rock begins to show
Garou pictographs...)

"I was young.  I didn't really know the stakes.  I suppose none of us did.
That was the thing, we were all cock sure of ourselves.  I suppose that we
never really had a clue about what was really going on...until it was to
late.
I have to admit, I was only really there on the first day.  But it was
enough, God but it was enough.  The moment I held Erin Hair-That-Flows-Like-Sunlight in my arms and watched her die... but I get beyond myself.  I suppose I had better start at the beginning.  That's
always the best rule.  Start at the beginning and stop at the end.
Well, by the 1960's we were feeling proud of ourselves.  Our numbers were rising, the Summer of Love was coming, Albion was the centre of the world.
A great time to be alive.  I was but a cub then.  Actually not even that, I
was a small boy, growing up in County Down.  It was a great time to be Garou all right...unless you were Irish.  You see the bickering between the
English and Irish Fianna had grown over the years until by the 60's it was
at fever pitch.  We were so confident that we had crushed the Wyrm, that
we had become obsessed with settling old scores, ending old wounds.  Burying some very old and very sharp hatchets.  We thought it wouldn't matter.

That was our first mistake.
For me, all I remember was my sister's music taste moving from Elvis, to the Beatles right through to the early sounds of the Beach Boys and The Monkees (having a sister living in the states at the time helped).  Like all good little Catholic boys I worshipped at the shrine of St. George Best, and every Sunday ran home from church, because my mother had Ice Cream after dinner.  I always remember that it was sunny, except when it rained, and the whole world seemed simple.  Easier.  I was just a child and I had no idea what lay in store for me.  Would I have drank from the Bitter Chalice given to me if I had of known then what I know now?  I doubt it.
My family had a long line of Garou within them.  We were proud to be
Kinfolk.  My great-grandfather, 'Pappy Phil' I used to call him, was none
other than the great Galliard, Phil-The-Flute-Of-The-Hounds-Of-Ulster.  He
was an old man, with deep scars upon his arm and his chest and he smelt of
cough drops and every so often would pick up his flute and play a tune that
sounded like it could charm the birds out of the sky (what I didn't know
then was that he often DID charm the birds, but that's another tale). The
rest of my family were Kinfolk, and we helped out wherever we could.  I
could never understand why my Grandmother would spend days helping keep the trees in the middle of O'Ginty's field free from rubbish (the ones everyone said was haunted and we were barred from playing in), rather than cleaning St.Patrick's church like all the other grannies.  But then I never knew what a Bawn was until much later.
It was my brother Jim that got me involved.  He was young, intelligent and angry, articulate in a way that only a teenager who is unfairly bullied can be.  He had seen what Martin Luther King had been doing in America and when the Catholic Civil Rights movement started, had got involved right from the onset.  There were a lot of Kinfolk involved at that time.  A few Garou as well.  They were raging against a system, in which the Prod's lord it over them, and a large amount of Fianna who thought they were the bees-knees just cause they came from the mainland.
Jim had got arrested a few times.  They couldn't hold him either.  He was
too clever for that.  But things started to get a bit out of control and he
became a target for the 'Specials', the Prod. Gestapo that were jokingly
referred to as Police.  They put him in hospital.  Then came the riots and
the big crisis.  Finally the Government sent the army in to keep order.
God, but we loved the Army.  They were protecting us.  Keeping us from the Orangemen.  We thought they were saviours.  I remember one patrol going down our street; everywhere they went they were invited in for cups of tea, cake, biscuits.   It's funny, but it's true.  But then word got out that the English Fianna were looking for revenge on the Irish.  And they had targeted our family amongst several others as their victims.  My Da sent me away to live with my Aunty Anne in Derry.   Everything went bad from there.
I could tell the long version, but I won't bother.  Let's just say I  was
about 200 yards away from the Bloody Sunday murders.  I had my first change then and there,  Thank God Hugh O'Neill was there; if he hadn't of jumped me and threw me into the Umbra, Christ knows what the cameras would have filmed that day!  But I had changed, and now I faced a new world; the World of the Garou.  I had just come back from my Rite of Passage when I heard that my family had been killed.  I joined the Grandchildren of Fionn that very night and swore that I would never rest until the English had paid for what they did.
And so, for the best part of 15 years we fought; the Fianna; the Tribe of
Albion.  We killed each other whenever we could.  We attacked Caern's,
Kinfolk, each other.  We showed no mercy.  And when the Theurge's begged us to stop, when they said they had had visions of a great evil befalling the Garou nation, we ignored them.  We were righteous in our anger.  And we ignored them.  That was our second mistake.
I have to admit, I was good at the fighting.  I was not great in a straight
fight, but by Christ I had the brain's for it.  That's were I earnt my name.
Slaughtering English Fianna and English people.  Bombs, guns, claws.  They were all just tools in those days.  Occasionally we would drag in other Tribes (the Glass Walkers, the Gnawers and the Silver Fangs especially) and by '88 the Fianna Civil War was the single most important thing within the Garou nation.  Even the other tribes agreed.  That was our third mistake.
Anyway, I was asked, in a brief period of intertribal unity, to help make
up a pack of all Fianna that was to go on a deep quest into the Umbra.  I
went (and to this day I wish I hadn't) but that story is mine and Arawn's to
keep until such time as we see fit to tell others the horrors we saw.  But
when we came back, we arrived to hear that a Conciliation of the Tribes was taking place at the Great Oak Caern, in the South of London.  As a Galliard I was sent with the then Merlin, Lewelleyn Red-Hair and a few others.  For a few hours it was joyous; dispite the overriding stench of the city, to find so many Garou so assembled, in the one place, was amazing.  There were about 1300 Garou camped down at that site.  So sure of we of our might that we had no idea what was to come.  We were Garou.   We had nothing to fear.
We were an Army.  We had to sort out the War.  We were arrogant.  That was our final mistake.
I was in London city when it happened.  I have to admit that I was looking for sites to place bombs (yes, I was still consumed by the old burning
anger).  I was walking down Oxford street when I heard the cry:  The Call For Aid, that terrifying Werewolf howl, but issued by hundreds of Garou simultaneously.   I changed into Lupus (the Delirium took care of the witnesses) and I ran, drawn by that awesome sound, sucked towards it, like it held some kind of evil gravity.  How can I describe that sound?  The high pitch shrill call of the cubs; the bestial roar of the Elder Ahrouns; the
awesome beauty and horror of the Galliards.  It is a sound that will never
leave me.  It is a sound that I will never forget.
I ran, through legs and across roads.  Thank God, Lord Silvermane and a few of the Children of Gaia saw me as they drove past.  Although none knew who I was, they knew me for what I was and I was quickly invited into their camper van.  We raced though the streets running red's and having more near misses than I care to remember.  The atmosphere in the van was electric; most of us stayed in human (the sound was too terrible for our sensitive lupus ears) and none of us talked.  It was all we could do to keep ourselves from Frenzy.  The call for Aid kept going out.  Weaker and more desperate.  God knows how our driver managed to keep his mind on the road.   Jesus, I just remembered...we were trying to get into Brixton, when we were overtaken by a Garou.  In LUPUS!  He was probably doing about 50mph!  Must have been a Silent Strider.
When we followed the sound, we knew where it was coming from long before we arrived; Great Oak Sept.  When we got there it was Hell on Earth.  Nothing, no deed by the Wyrm, before or since has ever hurt me like the scene that confronted me that afternoon.   Hundred's lay dead, hundred's more wounded.
To keep away human interest most of the bodies and victims had been placed
into the Umbra, but all over the place you could see and feel the cause of
all the pain and death.  Silver dust.  Everywhere.  Finely powdered Silver Dust.  It got in you hair, your eyes, your mouth.  No wonder so many had been killed.  It must of been like being in a sea of it when it was dropped from the air.
Most of the dead had died in agony.  The dust had entered their lungs.
They had choked.  Slowly.  Drowning in their own blood.  And where the Gift of Mother's Touch saved some lives, there were too many.  Most took about 20 long minutes to die.  When I arrived it was those poor fools who were hanging on that were left.  And the horror went on.  We counted 37 who had been blinded by the dust...forever.  All took the Rite of The Winter Wolf that very night.  Some had been terrified and had even killed their own after the Fox had come over them and they had fought their way through crowds of pack mates.  Here and there Ahrouns cried over the butchered remains of some Ragabash who they had slain in their panic.  One Get of Fenris even killed himself in shame after slaying three of his own pack.
For those who arrived, all we could do was watch in horror, as the slow
realisation of what had actually happened slowly sank in.  And when it did,
we raged.  We RAGED.  Pure and strong we poured into the city.  We sought out the one's who had been behind this violation; this attack.  The
Vampires!
Oh, it seemed so obvious at the time.  The Vampires had done it.  We were even able to work out who...some group called the Brujah.  And at the time there was a great gathering in London, a, what do you call it, oh yes, a Conclave.  So in we poured, hundreds of us.  That night we took the war unto them.  Now, in my time I've seen some great fighters; Ahrouns that could tear your heart out just to look at you, but even they were as children as to the power of some of these leeches, I can tell you.   The words of my father rang true... 'The Older the Leech, the tougher he is!'.   Well, we found that out the hard way.  But that first night, we thought we had it; in small, flexible packs we tore into London, finding the Vampires where they fed, where they skulked and met in the shadows.  They never knew what hit them.   Finally near dawn we rested for a brief while; the next day we would pour into the city and expose the scum to Sol's powerful rays.  We would cleanse the Earth of their evil.  Although many had died, we still numbered over 700 and an army of so many Garou could not be stopped.  Using the cover of a large mortal protest, we thundered into London, and looked to a swift victory.
The homids of Britain call what follows 'The Poll Tax Riots'.
How naive we were to think that the Vampires control over society was but a brief thing.   How stupid to think that just because they were only mortal, that the Police would be no match for us.  How wrong we were about everything.
For seven hours they kept us at bay.  We screamed through the West End, burning cars and shops (the Red Talons were in their element), attacking any who stank of the Wyrm.   The homids near us were carried along by our rage; joining in the frenzy of our anger.  But for seven hours, the Police fought back.  No television camera ever picked up the small silver blades that tipped the truncheons; no photographer ever saw the marksmen with silencers who marked us off, one by one, the bullets filled with silver nitrate.  No human witnessed the 'infernal' allies the Vampires brought with them (or so we thought...).  And no human saw what happened that evening when the sun finally fell and the great host of Leeches awoke and descended upon us.
I have seen things that would make Cubs shit themselves with fear.  I have
been to the further reaches of the Deep Umbra.  I have stood at the gates of Erabus listening to the screams of the lost.  But nothing scares me more
than the memories of that second night, that terrible night.  Broken glass,
blood, screaming, roars, claws, guns, magic, the sweet dust left by the
corpse of a Vampire; the pitiful mewing of a Theurge who's legs have been
torn off.  It was a war, no more, no less.  A bloody, evil war.
I was with a group of five.  We were all Galliards.  Erin was the best
fighter.  Me, I was leading, though.  I could spot where to strike the
bastards.  Damn, we did some crazy things.  Like when we hit that truck full of Ghouls with about 9 molotovs...burnt about twenty of the bastards.  But then there came this one Vamp...he fought bloody well, I'll give him that.
One blow knocked me straight across the street, through some side door.  A
quick glance showed me that the others were keeping him under control and I went to get up.  It was then that I realised that I was a lot worse hurt
than I thought.  It felt like the bastard had broken my spine (which I later
found out he had).  I struggled to get up, and thus was unable to help the
Pack when the other two Leeches hit them from the shadows.  I managed to
crawl over to Erin and hold her while she died...her blood staining her
blonde hair a sickly, red colour.
I was still trying to heal my wounds two nights later when we gave up. We had lost.   Yes, we lost.  I'm not proud to admit it, but let's face it, it's
true.  Over those three days and nights, over 1000 Garou were killed.  The
Nation of Albion was never the same.  Our Elders were dead.  Our leaders were gone.  A whole generation of Garou were slain.  And now looking back, what is worse is to realise that the Vampires NEVER started the war...it was the Wyrm using us BOTH.  That was why the Black Spirals were there.  Not to aid the Vampires, but to goad us into acts of recklessness that would lead to our deaths.
We were so obsessed with our own petty struggles that we did not see the
Wyrm rise around us.  We were to stupid to realise that a war with the
Vampires was precisely what the Wyrm WANTED.  Arrogance...how long will that plague us for?
And the result?  Well, the Vampires are still there.  We are only now
beginning to find a new generation of Cubs to take the place of the fallen.
And what have we to show for it all?  A string of dead Caerns...lost because no one was there to maintain them.  We have a place where all it brings us are memories of what we threw away.  The South East of Albion.  London. The Place of Skulls.   Golgotha.
And the future?  Well, that is another tale.  But it is said that now,
slowly, the Garou return to the South.  I hope so.  I hope we can reclaim
what was once ours.  Heal the open wound that festers in our side.  As for
me, I will return.  Soon.  I must make my pilgrimage to Golgotha.  I will
bury the ghosts of those who died, and try and explain why we were to
obsessed with our own struggles to see what was really going on.  But I don't think I will succeed.  I will carry their loss forever in my mind.  But
then...we all have our cross to bear.
(When he finishes he sighs and gazes out into the mists... his eyes a
million miles away...)