All around you, gray-brown marshlands or venomously iridescent jungle, and straight ahead, an open double-door of white stone in a low hill like a barrow, covered in reddish grass. The air is warm and heavy. Flies drone as they head into or out of the doorway like bees around a hive.
You follow the flies, trying to control your eagerness, sure that answers wait past the doorway. The hot air reeks of carrion, piss, and chemical preservatives. Garou glyphs mark the walls at irregular intervals—you recognize "death," "peace," and the design for "friendship," which always looked like a falling bomb to you—among more complex ideograms, those defaced beyond legibility. The corridor is less than ten feet long, and then you emerge into a central, circular tomb. Black Tarn told you about these places. You've never seen a tomb like this one, but you know this place has been worse than abandoned—it's been defiled.
Bones crunch underfoot as you fully enter the tomb. When you step to one side, the midday light streams past you and reflects off a beaten copper mirror on the far side of the room. Niches in the wall hint at generations of interment, and you see tools or weapons scattered among the bones. Between you and the mirror rises an oval catafalque of chipped stone. A corpse in stained linen lies on the catafalque, and just behind it is the creature that ambushed you. More than twice your size and wearing only a belt hung with jangling steel tools, it's curled lovingly around the corpse. Steel-tipped fingers caress the linen-draped chest; leathery lips touch the corpse's skull, hot breath faintly stirring scraps of gray hair.
"I didn't think there were any of you left," the leathery creature says, its voice a bellows-wheeze. Flies blow out of the asymmetric black mouth.
"Who and what are you?" I'm here for answers.
"Why have you defiled one of the sacred places of the Garou?"
"I'm here to fix what the Wyrm has defiled." I keep this monster talking as I look around this tragically dishonored tomb.
"Who's the dead guy? Friend of yours?"
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