a warning

The blood spilled on the ground is warm enough to melt the snow. The one bleeding out here is still breathing quite shallowly, but who knows how long that’ll last. On her person, there is a hastily scrawled note written with trembling hands and stained with red in the corners.

“I know the stories you tell about me. About the shameful Garou who couldn’t keep her kin in line, right? Who lost someone’s eventual brood mare to the leeches. Well, here she falls, with her wrists slashed and a message for you. That kin will keep living, because she’s too stubborn to die and thinks she is above Gaia. She doesn’t matter, and neither does my reputation. I will not lift a hand to reveal to you whelps her location, because you don’t deserve to sink your claws into her. Her very existence scares you, doesn’t it? This kin, whose family did everything she could to elevate her station and make her equal, could still hate so much how she was treated by other Garou that she decided the leeches were better.

And instead of see it as the sign it is, you decided to shame the Garou who you deigned her keeper when you learned that she had run off. You broke another warrior simply because you only saw the value in a kin’s genitals, not in her person, not in who she could be. Exile from sept and pack drove me to drink to ease my pain. Lonesome nights brought me low and made it impossible to get out of bed. My blood spilled onto my floor in quiet darkness because it was the only way I could feel alive. I, who had no family, no heritage, no deep ancestral ties, was severed from the only belonging I thought I had because you refused to see past your own dicks.

Well, in this final act, I forsake your nation. I will never forsake Gaia, but you are not Her. Maybe She’ll have a new role in mind for me when she sends me back to the great wheel. One where I’ll belong, be able to help Her properly and not be cut off from my people. If a kin happens to find this, I’m sorry. Sorry you had to see this. Sorry you were born into this. Sorry you’re afraid to reach for something better, and sorry that that might be because of me.

I choose to die here as a warning to this sept. That maybe you’ll see this note and it might cause a singular seed of doubt in your one-track minds that maybe the way you treat your kin will destroy you. That you’ll realize that treating them as second class, only valuing their worth in family, not recognizing all they do for you, will only lead you to a genetic dead end. They’ll leave you one day. Everyone has a breaking point. All I fought for was to prevent that end.

But you won’t.

You’ll pity how far I’ve fallen and dump me in a grave in the woods, and I won’t even be worth a funerary rite. Then you’ll track her down and end her, because how dare an uppity kin want more. You only see the other facets of the world as a threat, and never think of how they could help this war. And that’s why the Wyrm is going to win. That’s why everything this Nation has ever done will amount to smoke and ash. Because none of you can look outward and see what you’re doing to those who aren’t like you.

Die mad about it.”