NITROUS OXIDE
BY DOGMEAT
-PRELUDE-
WELCOME TO MALFEAS NOIR
Have you ever felt that what you perceived as reality was not real?
Have you gazed out of your window at night; past the ominous silence of the dark, past the rain falling as if the sky itself was no more than a broken canvas, bleeding away its contents over our heads, past the blocky silhouettes of houses lined up like cheap, poorly designed props on a stage, past the grey mists of the clouds painted onto the sky, past even the fleeting pinpricks of light in those depths blacker than the deepest thoughts of your own soul; have you gazed past all of this, and felt that reality was nothing more than a fleeting shadow, a pretty backdrop with the true works of the universe behind the sets, working in ways that you could never possibly conceive? Have you lain awake at night, feeling as though you could reach out with your hand and peel away the paper-thin set, revealing the strange and terrible world beyond? Have you been so petrified with worry that you cling to the slowly swaying shreds of this existence, wrapping yourself in it like a blanket, in the hopes that whatever lies on the other side will not see you peering in?
Well, you are right. For all the misery and suffering in this life, it is small pittance compared to some of the worlds that lie behind this poor stage. There are many world, layers upon layers of existences where the mind has fabricated realities to justify the chaos it sees. Some of these worlds are beautiful; ones that are the physical personification of joy and happiness, where you can live for all eternity and never have a care in the world; others are terrible, places where even the most demented and callous of souls would break down in despair and wail for eternity at the fates that brought them to this dismal existence.
The deeper into the multiverse one delves the darker and more horrifying these worlds become. You will find worlds of agony and torment, where demons of the blackest nature torture the living with all manner of physical and mental abuse. You will find bodies chained to altars, their limbs naught but blood-caked stumps and their organs exposed through their opened torsos, slowly roasting on the boiling earth under the harsh, never setting sun. The moans and cries they make from their scorched, punctured lungs will haunt you for the rest of your life, filling your dreams and fracturing your sanity into a million razor-sharp shards which will blast through your mind and tear at your very soul.
But this is not the bottom of the well. It is merely the surface. Continue down this dark, insane road and you will learn that there are far worse fates than simple blinding physical agony. That is a fate for the fortunate.
At the bottom of these planes is the one place all souls dread, which keeps you terrified at night and clinging to your reality in the blind hope that it will not collapse around you. At the centre of these bleak existences lies the lair of the physical embodiment of evil itself, the manifestation of all that is dark and perverse and defiled. It is here where all negative energy flows, feeding upon this beast which grows stronger with every act of darkness in all the planes. It is the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; it is the creature that whispered dark thoughts and feelings into the mind of Cain as his jealousy built for Abel; it is the driving force behind every evil that has befallen every plane in the multiverse, defiled every shrine, molested every boy and raped every girl in the death and destruction of its own malevolent design.
It is the Wyrm.
Our tale begins in Malfeas Noir, a realm of anguish and despair on the edge of the Wyrm's lair. It is a mirror of your own world, of the continent known to you as North America. Geographically it is the same in even the minutest detail. But there the similarity ends.
Malfeas Noir is dying. The trees are rotted claws clinging desperately into the sky, the ground barren, lacking even a single blade of grass. The sky remains constant, a blood red strip of flesh barren of even a single cloud, moon or star. No night ever falls here, no shadows to hide the black, broken earth from the weary eyes of its bleak denizens. There is no horizon; this plane stretches into the distance sluggishly and ill-defined, as if one was in a dream they could not awaken from. Nothing here could be enjoyed, the drinks were foul and watery no matter how hard one tried to make it otherwise, even the ecstasy of sex felt disjointed and unsatisfying.
The cities and towns were bleak slums no matter where you went, decaying skyscrapers and ramshackle homes where even the wealthy lived in poverty. The police were decadent and corrupt, owned heart and soul by the Wyrm and its underlings, who enforced their dark serpent's will and otherwise languished in the pleasure of the rewards reserved for its servants.
Not all of those born into this existence were of evil design. Many were once free spirits who ventured too far out of curiosity and became trapped when the Gauntlet, the barrier separating the physical and spiritual worlds, closed around them and sealed them here. There were those with virtues decent and true, who fought against the Wyrm with a genuine determination to right the wrongs done to those who suffered here.
The most prominent of these were the Garou, spiritual guardians who in the physical realm were referred to as werewolves. Those who remained pure would fight the evils of the planes in the service of Gaia, the spirit mother. They were few and in-between, their screams and dying vows echoing unheard through Malfeas Noir as their spirits, unable to pass through the too powerful Gauntlet here, sank through the earth with all the other doomed souls to be inevitably deposited in the Wyrm's lair and devoured by the beast, processed and regurgitated as its hideous spawn.
But they do not always fail. A recent victory had seen the destruction of the capital city of Purgatory, and the death of Stryxoph, caretaker of Malfeas Noir and the first mate of the Wyrm itself. This victory was brought about by the efforts of Dogmeat, a now famous Garou paladin, who traveled to the depths of Stryxoph's realm and weakened her enough to be destroyed by his companions in the city.
But this did not come without cost. After his battle with Stryxoph, Dogmeat was trapped in those depths, with armies of Wyrm-spawn shrieking for vengeance on the killer of their mother. But their leaders had other plans.
Now Dogmeat's old pack is escaping from the ashes of Purgatory, running for the Border, the one place in Malfeas Noir where one can re-enter the Umbra and return to the upper planes. This fabled exit, located at the far south of the plane, is heavily guarded, and lies at the end of a long and uninhabited wasteland. With Stryxoph dead, it was decided among the pack that this was their best opportunity to escape, while the Wyrm was licking its wounds and reestablishing its forces, before it has a chance to exact vengeance on the cause of its downfall.
But they were about to be taught a harsh lesson. You cannot destroy evil. You can cut it out, blow it to pieces, and drive a stake through its heart, but all you will earn is a brief respite. Then, like a large, bleeding and cancerous ulcer, the evil will return. And, much like a constantly attacked sore that becomes a callous, it will be uglier and far more difficult to defeat than before.
The lives of the pack were about to take a turn for the worse.
BY DOGMEAT
-PRELUDE-
WELCOME TO MALFEAS NOIR
Have you ever felt that what you perceived as reality was not real?
Have you gazed out of your window at night; past the ominous silence of the dark, past the rain falling as if the sky itself was no more than a broken canvas, bleeding away its contents over our heads, past the blocky silhouettes of houses lined up like cheap, poorly designed props on a stage, past the grey mists of the clouds painted onto the sky, past even the fleeting pinpricks of light in those depths blacker than the deepest thoughts of your own soul; have you gazed past all of this, and felt that reality was nothing more than a fleeting shadow, a pretty backdrop with the true works of the universe behind the sets, working in ways that you could never possibly conceive? Have you lain awake at night, feeling as though you could reach out with your hand and peel away the paper-thin set, revealing the strange and terrible world beyond? Have you been so petrified with worry that you cling to the slowly swaying shreds of this existence, wrapping yourself in it like a blanket, in the hopes that whatever lies on the other side will not see you peering in?
Well, you are right. For all the misery and suffering in this life, it is small pittance compared to some of the worlds that lie behind this poor stage. There are many world, layers upon layers of existences where the mind has fabricated realities to justify the chaos it sees. Some of these worlds are beautiful; ones that are the physical personification of joy and happiness, where you can live for all eternity and never have a care in the world; others are terrible, places where even the most demented and callous of souls would break down in despair and wail for eternity at the fates that brought them to this dismal existence.
The deeper into the multiverse one delves the darker and more horrifying these worlds become. You will find worlds of agony and torment, where demons of the blackest nature torture the living with all manner of physical and mental abuse. You will find bodies chained to altars, their limbs naught but blood-caked stumps and their organs exposed through their opened torsos, slowly roasting on the boiling earth under the harsh, never setting sun. The moans and cries they make from their scorched, punctured lungs will haunt you for the rest of your life, filling your dreams and fracturing your sanity into a million razor-sharp shards which will blast through your mind and tear at your very soul.
But this is not the bottom of the well. It is merely the surface. Continue down this dark, insane road and you will learn that there are far worse fates than simple blinding physical agony. That is a fate for the fortunate.
At the bottom of these planes is the one place all souls dread, which keeps you terrified at night and clinging to your reality in the blind hope that it will not collapse around you. At the centre of these bleak existences lies the lair of the physical embodiment of evil itself, the manifestation of all that is dark and perverse and defiled. It is here where all negative energy flows, feeding upon this beast which grows stronger with every act of darkness in all the planes. It is the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; it is the creature that whispered dark thoughts and feelings into the mind of Cain as his jealousy built for Abel; it is the driving force behind every evil that has befallen every plane in the multiverse, defiled every shrine, molested every boy and raped every girl in the death and destruction of its own malevolent design.
It is the Wyrm.
Our tale begins in Malfeas Noir, a realm of anguish and despair on the edge of the Wyrm's lair. It is a mirror of your own world, of the continent known to you as North America. Geographically it is the same in even the minutest detail. But there the similarity ends.
Malfeas Noir is dying. The trees are rotted claws clinging desperately into the sky, the ground barren, lacking even a single blade of grass. The sky remains constant, a blood red strip of flesh barren of even a single cloud, moon or star. No night ever falls here, no shadows to hide the black, broken earth from the weary eyes of its bleak denizens. There is no horizon; this plane stretches into the distance sluggishly and ill-defined, as if one was in a dream they could not awaken from. Nothing here could be enjoyed, the drinks were foul and watery no matter how hard one tried to make it otherwise, even the ecstasy of sex felt disjointed and unsatisfying.
The cities and towns were bleak slums no matter where you went, decaying skyscrapers and ramshackle homes where even the wealthy lived in poverty. The police were decadent and corrupt, owned heart and soul by the Wyrm and its underlings, who enforced their dark serpent's will and otherwise languished in the pleasure of the rewards reserved for its servants.
Not all of those born into this existence were of evil design. Many were once free spirits who ventured too far out of curiosity and became trapped when the Gauntlet, the barrier separating the physical and spiritual worlds, closed around them and sealed them here. There were those with virtues decent and true, who fought against the Wyrm with a genuine determination to right the wrongs done to those who suffered here.
The most prominent of these were the Garou, spiritual guardians who in the physical realm were referred to as werewolves. Those who remained pure would fight the evils of the planes in the service of Gaia, the spirit mother. They were few and in-between, their screams and dying vows echoing unheard through Malfeas Noir as their spirits, unable to pass through the too powerful Gauntlet here, sank through the earth with all the other doomed souls to be inevitably deposited in the Wyrm's lair and devoured by the beast, processed and regurgitated as its hideous spawn.
But they do not always fail. A recent victory had seen the destruction of the capital city of Purgatory, and the death of Stryxoph, caretaker of Malfeas Noir and the first mate of the Wyrm itself. This victory was brought about by the efforts of Dogmeat, a now famous Garou paladin, who traveled to the depths of Stryxoph's realm and weakened her enough to be destroyed by his companions in the city.
But this did not come without cost. After his battle with Stryxoph, Dogmeat was trapped in those depths, with armies of Wyrm-spawn shrieking for vengeance on the killer of their mother. But their leaders had other plans.
Now Dogmeat's old pack is escaping from the ashes of Purgatory, running for the Border, the one place in Malfeas Noir where one can re-enter the Umbra and return to the upper planes. This fabled exit, located at the far south of the plane, is heavily guarded, and lies at the end of a long and uninhabited wasteland. With Stryxoph dead, it was decided among the pack that this was their best opportunity to escape, while the Wyrm was licking its wounds and reestablishing its forces, before it has a chance to exact vengeance on the cause of its downfall.
But they were about to be taught a harsh lesson. You cannot destroy evil. You can cut it out, blow it to pieces, and drive a stake through its heart, but all you will earn is a brief respite. Then, like a large, bleeding and cancerous ulcer, the evil will return. And, much like a constantly attacked sore that becomes a callous, it will be uglier and far more difficult to defeat than before.
The lives of the pack were about to take a turn for the worse.