Tales of the Dark Eras Edited by Matt McElroy Howard Ingham, Malcolm Sheppard, Pete Woodworth, Renee Ritchie, Jess Hartley, Monica Valentinelli, Danielle Lauzon, Matthew McFarland, Michael “Hollywood” Tomasek, Jr., Eric Zawadski, Meghan Fitzgerald, and Dennis Detwiller Credits Written By: Howard Ingham, Malcolm Sheppard, Pete Woodworth, Renee Ritchie, Jess Hartley, Monica Valentinelli, Danielle Lauzon, Matthew McFarland, Michael “Hollywood” Tomasek, Jr., Eric Zawadski, Meghan Fitzgerald, and Dennis Detwiller Edited By: Matt M. McElroy Creative Director: Richard Thomas Art Direction and Design: Mike Chaney © 2016 White Wolf Publishing AB. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of White Wolf Publishing AB. 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Check out White Wolf online at http://www.white-wolf.com Check out the Onyx Path at http:// www.theonyxpath.com 2 TALES OF THE DARK ERAS Table of Contents Hoarse 4 Chronicles of Darkness (450 B.C.E.) — Howard Ingham Bone and Gold 11 Mage: the Awakening (330-320 B.C.E.) — Malcolm Sheppard Unmanned 22 Beast: the Primordial (830-840 C.E.) — Pete Woodworth Dry Spell 31 Vampire: the Requiem (1587-1593 C.E.) — Renee Ritchie Of Ravens and Roses 41 Changeling: the Lost (1600-1700 C.E.) — Jess Hartley Suffering of the Unchosen 52 Hunter: the Vigil (1690-1695 C.E.) — Monica Valentinelli Cross Purposes 62 Mummy: the Curse (1893-1924 C.E.) — Danielle Lauzon From Galveston 71 Promethean: the Created (1933-1940 C.E. — Matthew McFarland The Sea’s Own 80 Geist: the Sin-Eaters (1950-1955 C.E.) — Michael “Hollywood” Tomasek, Jr. War Spoils 89 Demon: the Descent (1960-1961 C.E.) — Eric Zawadski Top Dog 100 Werewolf: the Forsaken (1969-1979 C.E.) — Meghan Fitzgerald No Signal 110 Chronicles of Darkness (2015-2016 C.E.) — Dennis Detwiller About the Authors 118 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Hoarse Chronicles of Darkness (450 B.C.E.) Howard Ingham He is still there, desiccated, old; the hill once empty now covered in greenery, olive trees and grapevines, ivy and figs and oranges, fertile, lush, wild, but also somehow wrong, like a newly-painted fresco, the colours of the black grapes and blacker olives rich and full and flat. All these different kinds of foliage co-existing too close to each other, as if placed here to be painted, an artist’s arrangement. I am hungry, but I do not pick the fruit. It is too ripe; some of it has gone to rot on the tree. The lush colours betray an unhealthiness, an unwholesomeness. Under a weeping tree, cross-legged, his robes long since rotted away, he sits. Bones have long ago warped and twisted, have become wood and vine under mottled bark-like skin that carries the scars and splits and bore-holes of an old, old plant. Ivy wraps itself around his leg; three pale wildflowers grow from a split in the skin on his arm, red-spotted ants crawl in and out and over his tiny prune-shriveled penis, his abdomen their nest. One hand has become melded to the knee on which it rests, cemented with moss and deep, furry mold that fills this clearing with a metallic, nauseating odor. The stench coats the back of my mouth, squats on my tongue, and makes me want to spit. Patches of it are all over the ground here. Some of it is already on my sandals. His skull is elongated somehow, asymmetrical, the hairless dome bumpy. Eyelids lashless, concave, so deeply set under a heavy forehead, furious and pained. One cheekbone somehow crushed and flattened, the other rising like a blade. His brown skin is tight against it over a tracery of deep vertical wrinkles, the jaw pushed to one side, the wide, thin-lipped mouth fringed with deep crevasses, wrinkles like the bottom of the sea. I leaned over the side of the quinquereme that brought me here for much of the journey, the Carthaginians curious that I should care about anything other than the contents of the ship, watching as the sun lit up the water beneath me farther than I could imagine, down into deep black ridges of nothingness, beside what looked like the ruins of temples and palaces, at the silvery grey fish of terrible size, their only inhabitants now. The Carthaginians asked why I should come here, what there could be here on this coastline. Nineveh, I said, and the Captain looked at me, squinting, then shrugged and went back to his work, my gold jingling at his waist, a corrective to those who would offer advice as to the advisability of visiting the ruins. 4 TALES OF THE DARK ERAS Nineveh is gone. I travelled through its ruins, burned, no sign of humans. It must have been a place in its time. I clambered over cyclopean columns, now broken in two across the back of a rise, their once-bright painted zigzags broken now like the stonework; I stopped for water, picking up two pieces of a pot, turning them in my hands to see if perhaps once they had fitted together. I found a skull, half-buried. I didn’t touch it. It had so much power, so much fear attached to it, this place. Once Nineveh leached the wealth of the world, her armies hosts of fork-bearded demons in gleaming helms and breastplates whose spears impaled the brave and the weak alike, who took women and children and youth in chains to live in bondage. Nineveh was power used for self, it was wealth grasped and gathered and kept in storehouses, it was strength without conscience. It was the greatest city in the world, and like all the greatest cities in the world there have ever been, it turned to dust. It took the Babylonians and Medes, the Persians and the Chaldaeans, even the barbarian Scythians and Cimmerians, all banded together — no matter how much hate they shared, they hated Nineveh more — and in a single night they sacked the place, carried its women and children off in chains and its cattle on ropes. They were merciful, this mismatched host of civilised men and barbarians. The Prophet who yet sits here, who bore witness to it, can attest to that. He is not representative of any of those peoples. His people, had they been present, would have murdered everyone, innocent or no, would have slaughtered the animals and burnt them, would have left the gold where it lay. Nineveh yet persists in some small diluted way in the blood of the Medes and the Babylonians, the Persians and Chaldaeans, its art treasures and books stolen but preserved, and so an influence on their thought. Nineveh is remembered. This man would have preferred to have seen the place obliterated. Removed from the annals of the ages. I stand here, the odor sickening me, the sight of him, man become twisted branch and soil and nest somehow twisting in my gut. I have no choice but to be here and I cannot deny that. The arbitrary systems of the world have brought me here to listen. What questions will he answer? What words will he give? What words from a century-old corpse? I sit, my back against a tree, wrists on knees, head bowed now, facing him, the Prophet. I dreamed that terrible twisted face, too old for even the hair that once grew on its chin. I dreamed that twisted mouth. It is night now, and in the dark a faint phosphorescence surrounds the Prophet’s body, the only light here, greenish, unhealthy. A slight judder takes the body, a shiver so faint I wonder if I imagined it. A second now, a parting of the twisted lips, an exhalation, a small cloud of phosphorescent spores. I jump up, find myself kneeling on the moldy ground before him, the mold crushing under my knees, soaking my robe. He judders a third time. He begins to speak, in Aramaic, his voice like a tree forming words, from somewhere deep within an ancient, hollow, rotted out body, as if I am not here — I wonder, does he speak at night when no one is here to listen? “I was fishing, I was fishing, and the torrent of the waves subsided, and it was violence and it was fear for the Wheel rose from the ocean before my boat and turned 5 Hoarse and turned the sea and the rushing of the Sky-Wheel and its paddles of bronze and wood spoke to me and lifted me from my boat into the gray cold sky, so gray, so cold, so high, and I turned with the Wheel and when the Wheel released me I was changed. And I cared not for the fish that yet filled my net, and did not trim the sails, and yet still it bore me to the shore and my son came running for me on the shore as if to embrace me and I dashed the boy aside and walked forth.