PROCESO DE POSTULACIÓN, SELECCIÓN Y LEVANTAMIENTO DE LA LÍNEA DE BASE

Understanding the tribal vow of the Bone Shadows is crucial to understanding the tribe. During initiation into the tribe, young werewolves hear several different reasons for the tribal vow, three of which are articulated below. No one story is presented as the “truth” (in fact, Bone Shadows are usually told that all of these stories really hap- pened), but all of the perspectives are considered valid to remember. Curiosity can be fatal, and the tribal vow helps to mitigate it. Not every were- wolf is honorable, but the tribal vow helps even an unscrupulous werewolf to keep honor in mind.

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Stories of the Tribal Vow with reputations for giving as good as they get

(apart from spirits of the deception and the like, of course).

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We were always curious. Other tribes think that our defining characteristic is being morbid, but that’s not true (and are we really that morbid? Come on). No, if our tribe has a weakness, it’s insatiable curiosity and the desire to uncover every rock and name every crawling thing we find there.

And that got us into trouble, of course. We bound Death Wolf, finally, after creating a ritual so powerful and so intriguing that she couldn’t resist. We knew that she had the right to extract a vow from us, and we saw that the other Firstborn did the same for their beneficia- ries. There’s Fenris-Ur, demanding some gobbledygook about accepting surrender or surrendering to accep- tance. Here’s Hikaon-Ur, keeping it basic — we can appreciate that. But Kamduis-Ur, well, she decides to hold off on the vow thing until she gets to know us a little better.

And it’s just as well, because meanwhile we’re getting utterly demolished in the Shadow. Our defining curiosity is getting us killed, because there are plenty of spirits that are pissed off at us and they’re luring us into the dangerous bits of the spirit wilds (which don’t take a lot of effort to find) and then attacking. A Bone Shad- ow’s packmate might go after the spirit that killed him, but that by itself doesn’t mean much. And so Kamduis- Ur sees this and realizes that she either needs to set up some kind of check on our curiosity or she needs to make the spirit world understand not to fuck with the children of Death Wolf.

So she does both. Su a sar-hith sa, she tells us, pay each spirit in kind. And she doesn’t make that a secret at all. She howls it from the mountaintops, and every spirit in the world knows now that you can’t mess with a Bone Shadow and not expect retribution. But, at the same time, she sends us a message, too: Don’t go interact- ing with spirits unless you’re prepared for it. Don’t take anything from a spirit that you can’t repay. Don’t get into a fight you can’t win.

If our tribal vow is about anything, it’s about tem- perance. Not temperance from the desire to kill things — all werewolves have to cope with that on their own. For us, it’s temperance in dealing with spirits, because the denizens of the Shadow absolutely will screw you over if you give them the power to do so.

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There’s only one way to deal with spirits, and it’s been obvious to the Bone Shadows since Pangaea. You

have to pay each in kind. That means you don’t let the moon rise on a debt or a slight. A spirit gives you some- thing, you repay it. We’ve always known that.

In fact, that’s how we got to be a tribe. You’ve probably heard that the Firstborn weren’t exactly easy to bargain with. The Uratha had to come up with all kinds of weird methods of finding and locking down their associations with the children of Father Wolf, but Death Wolf was the trickiest. I’m not going to say that she was the smartest, because I wouldn’t want to insult any of the Iron Masters in attendance tonight, but I will say that she just didn’t have the same weaknesses as the other Firstborn.

So the werewolves who would become the Bone Shad- ows followed her and watched her. They crept through the dark places that she did. They pawed through her leavings and the remains of her kills, looking for some way to ap- peal to her. Where was her pride? It wasn’t her strength or her speed, her honor or her virtue. It was in something a little harder to define, and finally we nailed it.

We approached her and made a simple vow — we would always treat her as she treated us. If we didn’t, she was free to abandon us, singly or as a whole. And Death Wolf, knowing when she was on the good end of a bargain, accepted. Of course, the vow got gener- alized to the entire spirit world, because Death Wolf wanted us to be able to navigate the Shadow as well as she did, but the fact remains: our tribal vow is the way it is because it’s how we became a tribe in the first place.

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Here’s a story that we don’t repeat in front of other tribes, but you need to know. You need to know because I see you messing with spirits, learning the bans and then fucking with them, and that’s got to stop, okay?

Here’s why. When the Bone Shadows were first made a tribe, when Kamduis-Ur chose us for her own, she didn’t give us a ban. She wanted us to be the “Un- bound Tribe,” not hemmed in by big, heavy promises. She figured that the things that the other tribes’ Firstborn patrons made them swear were intuitive enough, and why ask for something that a right-thinking person would know anyway?

So there we were, in the spirit wilds, messing with spirits just like you do. And we knew enough from being Death Wolf’s children to mess with them pretty good, exploiting bans and compulsions to get them to serve us. But what we forgot was that the spirit world is a whole, not a sum of parts. You know what I mean? You fly off into Death Rage enough, and it’s not just individual spirits that start to avoid you, it’s the whole

Chapter II: Bone Shadows Chapter II: Bone Shadows

Shadow. And so the whole Shadow stopped trusting us, to the point that loci wouldn’t even admit us or give us strength anymore.

Well, that would’ve been the end of the tribe but for Death Wolf. She worked out a compromise, really. More of an ultimatum. She told us that we could either start treating spirits appropriately, or we could fuck off.

Now, the wording’s important here (that is, “ap- propriately,” not “fuck off”). She didn’t — and doesn’t — want us to treat spirits better than they deserve. She wants us to treat them as they treat us, and that’s fair. That’s not some arbitrary “don’t eat bacon” kind of bullshit rule, that’s one you can live by. And so we did, and here we are — we still use our knowledge of spirits against them, but only if they piss us off.

So it’s great that you know how to mess with spirits. But I’m here to say — they can mess with you, too. So you either treat them appropriately, or you can —

Yep, you got it.