You sit beside the frozen river and try to assume a meditative air, but it's like remaining still on a ship at sea. Your spirit is tossed around, and it's clear that you will have to act, even if it's all to remain still. You reach out to stabilize yourself, and your hand slides through the ice, parting it like a knife through damask. But when you pull your hand back, your fingers aren't wet or cold.
Silver-white ripples spread across the surface of the frozen river, then little wavelets wash around your knees, lapping at your haunches as if you were seated before the ocean. When you lean forward, you realize that the whole river is open, now—a gateway to the Umbra. You prepare to rise and step through.
As the wind howls and the wall between the worlds starts to come down, Black Tarn appears as an occulting of the frozen stars. She drifts toward you, half wolf and half woman, eyes like galaxies, her clawed hand reaching for you. But you can see her inner struggle, and as the barriers fade and she floats within reach, her expression grows vague again in a way you recognize…then hard and cruel.
"Stupid cub," she says, her voice wild and mad. "Let it end here! No more ambitious little pups! No more footprints in the snow! Leave us alone!"
And she brings her fist down on the wall from the other side. It shatters and collapses, blasting you with ice and grit.
When you can see again, the river-ice is cracked and frozen, and the way is shut.
Next
The spirit world retreats like it was never there, the enchantment bleeding out of the world as the half-moon disappears below the western horizon, as if the moon has dissolved in the light pollution of Buffalo. From somewhere, the angry blat-blat-blat of a truck's air brakes. You are terribly cold.
You were almost swallowed up. The spirit world can drag you down if you're not careful.
Who said that? Who thought that? Your head swims.
Don't you know who you are? Where you begin and end? Perhaps you don't have my clarity of will. At least not yet. Sitting on a crumbling brick wall is a little gray house cat. That's right, here I am. Well, here is a body. A bit scrawny. Sick, I fear—one last moment of glory before the end.
Next
don't think your companion wants anyone following her, and I doubt she can save herself or Eyes-of-Clay. If you want to help him, you'll have to do it yourself.
Maybe you're the metaphor. You've thought of that. The Umbra is the shadow of Gaia, but the physical world you occupy is also just an echo of what She is. Neither of us see the real thing. What would happen if we did? You reach out, understanding, finally grasping the true nature of the threat that wai
No. You are straining because I am making you strain. But I no longer have the strength I once did, and can no longer write my desires into the book of the world. I cannot make you what you need to be. I cannot make you see the truth.
But maybe we can get a little closer to the truth right now. And if nothing else, someone needs to clean up that mess in the woods behind the Speedway.
That's a good point. Of course it is, I thought it.
The storm-colored cat hops off the brick wall and starts cutting through the woods. You shake off the snow covering you and stamp your feet.
The spirit turns and beckons for you to hurry. She looks tired and thin, with patches of missing fur and blood on her paw pads. No, I…do I really look like that? Great Gaia, you're right. Once, I shamed the sphinxes, haunted the dreams of tigers.
And you don't have many chances left. You've failed twice tonight: first when you failed to kill the rider, then when you let Black Tarn kill the traveler. What will they do if you fail a third time tonight? If you can't learn something to help your wounded packmate?