on dreams and spirits of hope

Sometimes I wonder if I’m cut out for the totem spirit that found her way to me.

In my darkest hours, she came to greet me in dreams and gave me the veiled guides that marked my path to recovery, and then she stayed by me. But I know what she is to people like my friend, and I know what she stands for. Elpis is what the Created name their propensity for prophetic dreams, but she’s much more than just that. She’s the embodiment of Hope. For the future, for the world, for loved ones. Hope, for everything. Surely one of the closest to Gaia’s heart, if She really does love everyone and everything that way.

But what exactly does that mean for me? Why did this unknowably powerful spirit, ancient and sacred as she is, decide that I was the one who was worth her time?

I still think about that dream, and the circumstances around it.

I have always been packless. A failure of a Garou, really, but I hauled my weight enough to carry some rank. But it was lonely living, and… well, you know how that goes. It’s how we hit it off as well as we did. All I had was my family, really. So naturally, that would fall apart the second it was able to.

Once... she, left, I picked up a bottle, and I started drinking. The pain stopped. The Rage in me died. So I drank some more. Some people, they’re angry drunks, and if I was that, I would have been a terrifying sight to behold. But I wasn’t. Everything felt blunted and dim, and in the moment, that’s what I wanted. There are some times where I can’t remember anything, and maybe I did things I would regret, if I knew what they were. And this kept going. It just kept continuing, downward and downward into the black. It’s a miracle nothing decided to possess me during that time.

It kept going, until one day, I found that I couldn’t change shape anymore. And somewhere deep inside of me, maybe I was alright with that. I no longer had the strength to be concerned, I was lost and tired, and I had gotten good at hiding it. During that time, I met Zerah. He was so bright, so brilliant. A beacon of… hope. Despite his circumstances, he wanted so much to be human. To be real, and whole. And I couldn’t help but admire that. For a moment, there was a little spark inside me. Some little hint of will.

I hid my vice from him for a while. He didn’t need to know what was wrong. Then, though… then my mother died. After that, all bets were off. I know he was worried. He had his own things to do, but I started seeing him more. He pushed me to get a roommate, and having her around helped me, but she also has her own life. On top of that, we would go out drinking together. I wonder if she knew how bad it was. I don’t think she would have stood for it if she did.

Things were hazier than ever before when I had that first dream. The light inside me was dying, I was close to losing the wolf again. I could feel Banes watching me, waiting for the moment they could latch on to my soul and destroy me forevermore. I could only really hope I keeled over before then so all they had was an easily disposed of corpse to play with. In a way, I guess that’s what I wanted. I couldn’t muster the will to end it quickly, though, because it all seemed like a lot of trouble that I almost certainly would have been caught in the act of.

First, I was suspended in a pitch black void. I could hear nothing, I could see nothing, I could feel, smell and taste nothing. I hung there, neither falling nor ascending nor moving at all, for a very long time. Eventually, in the distance, I began to see a light. I don’t know if my eyes adjusted, or if it really did just manifest there, but I began to walk toward it. Walking for a very, very long time.

When I reached it, finally, I was greeted with a wolf. It wasn’t me, no. This one was made of filigree that looked like stitchwork, holding in a bright and immense, beautiful light. The brightest I had ever seen. Underneath its paws, the void below us began to burn away, revealing a trail of glittering silver. The void, pitch black and unending, fought back against the brightness of the wolf, but found itself repelled and wounded by his brightness. Together, me and that wolf followed the silvered trail. With every step, my companion burned away at the void around me. It tried to choke me, deafen me, blind me, but I was never allowed to be swallowed by it. Not completely.

I’m not sure when that trail turned from silver and stardust into a flower field. Sometime in that walk, though, it did. At some point, I found myself walking through a field of lilies and snowdrops. I saw another radiant light in the distance, and I began to move toward it, through the multitudes of blossoms before me. As I walked, long and quiet, the sky above began to clear away, the fog of the void retreating from the brightness that I was approaching and revealing beneath it a sky filled with brilliant stars. In the center of that field, the source of brightness stood. A woman, tall and proud, with flowing robes of light and a clay jar in her arms.

“You are loved,” she told me, “and you are strong. You are brave, and you have always mattered. Your heart drowns in pitch, but better days will come. I will watch you. I will aid you. But you must always keep walking through the night toward a new dawn. You must stay determined. You are the future of the world.”

When I woke up, I wasn’t in my apartment. I was in a clearing outside of town, and I felt more sober than I had been in months at that point. I began to panic, because I was clear-headed, and sober me knew that I had imbibed too much, that I was in deep trouble without a drink nearby. I had to call Reva to pick me up, and the second I got home, I drank deep and staved off the tremors that had already begun to set in. But try as I might, that little spark just wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t help but remember that dream, and think to myself, maybe things really will get better someday.

Even despite that little ember of hope, it was still hard to keep from getting worse. I started staying out later. Stumbling home in stupors from the bar. Not sleeping even more than I already did. It hurt, still. Even though I hoped for better, even though I couldn’t bring myself to want to die anymore, everything I had lost still took its toll.

One night, I again had a dream. Though I was tenuously clinging to the root of a nearby tree, I was in danger of being sucked into a murky swamp that reeked of blood, tears, and viscera. I struggled against a sucking tide, trying to pull my way free, when a hint of silver-blue caught my eye. A fox-spirit watched me from the tree branches, and when I met its eyes, it jumped down and sat next to a sturdier-looking hold than the one I clung so desperately to. I was able to pull myself free on that branch, but the dream didn’t last much longer than that, because I struggled to stay asleep still.

That morning, I decided to go to the thrift store, and what a bargain I found. A copy of a game I had been hunting down for years, and a rare and valuable one to boot, sitting in a pile of used cartridges marked at five dollars each. Well-taken care of, like it hadn’t been touched in years. Naturally, with the little bit of pocket change I happened to have, I bought it. Immediately, it took the most important spot in my collection. I displayed it as proudly as I could, because it was one of my favorite games.

And, well, I guess you know what happened from there.

I still don’t know why me. Everything I’ve found suggests that she just doesn’t take Garou on most of the time, and there’s next to nothing on packs that have ever patronized her. So why? Why would the embodiment of Hope want a schmuck and a drunkard like me? What do I have to offer the world?

I guess she was right, though. Better days did come. My sister started talking to me again, not long after I started noticing the weird stuff going on in the apartment. I kept seeing someone out of the corner of my eye, so I got out the Waluigi board to open a dialogue. Reva finally cottoned on to how bad I got and now she only lets me order virgin drinks when we’re out. Zerah was thrilled when he realized that I could be near him without feeling that strangeness about him. There’s still a hole in my heart from everything that happened, but it doesn’t hurt as much anymore.

Maybe I am meant to do something one day. I don’t know. Maybe this was Gaia’s way of telling me to keep holding on. I guess that’s a possibility too. I’m pretty divorced from whatever others like me believe, so I don’t know what their take would be on it. Maybe what they think doesn’t matter. But she was right, so that’s reason enough for me to keep looking for the dawn.