Post by cardinalmisdirection on Sept 23, 2020 15:22:00 GMT -5
In MY DAY, killing was better than sex...
A Memoir
It is not hard, for anyone, to spend a few days in Kentucky and become charmed. The rolling hills, the cities struggling valiantly to progress, and the cottage towns offering the honest life... Sadly, the third week on will be filled with a banality that smells like the seat of a stationary bike at a 24 Hour Fitness. The entire territory is stuck in a rut. The type of rut that leads to broken homes, broken promises and broken souls. The weave of the Bluegrass state is one of inevitable, apathetic decay. It reeks of loss so deeply all 8 of your eyes will water, and the future becomes little more than the "mostly" recycled napkin you blot your eyes with. It is the territorial equivalent of a New Money suburban W.A.S.P. starting an Organic Juice Business with her Yoga-go-girl Instagram friends. Safe, Sad, and driving a Used Land Rover directly into the mouth of failure. Unnoticed and inconsequential failure. That is Kentucky. Kentucky, my lil' arachnid... is a Karen.
The only thing that keeps any of us from assuming a Weaveresque imbalance is that this same poor, boring, rhythm is dotted with indiscriminate, widespread, and pointless killings. Not sexy killing, and not the sort of killing you can tell a Gigolo to Role Play with you... no fam. Nothing like that. There is no sex in this violence. It is instead a pointless bloodletting that lacks purpose. It is the playbook killing that only the Garou could achieve. Now don't get me wrong... I am the sort of person that finds the strike of a 4 Inch heel to be both savage, and liberating. Whips cracking on flesh, and silk ties groaning under tight knots are my jam. So a Claw cutting through flesh can be an aria. However, when that rending is revealed as the simple calculus of sloth; that is when I dry up.
Without being poetic about it... in Kentucky, people are killed because it is easy, and failure happens because that is what is done. The Bloodied Grounds let the immediate call the shots, and the long term is just a diary filled with 'could have been's'. And so... Kentucky has never been our People's Home. We are born here, and we have kin here. We arise from loam, womb, and garden alike, BUT we can never prosper within these blood stained valleys. So instead, once we undergo our Metamorphosis, the smart sisters teach us, and find another place for us to learn the ropes, grow, and figure out the important parts.
For some of us though, the Old Kentucky Home never leaves us, and a pride that cannot be understated over takes us. Once we are guided by that hubris boner, we return to The Bloodied Grounds. There is no subtlety, their is not art, there is no place to weave the delicate pattern. Our attempts to guide the pieces of the cosmic web are carried out through clumsy fingers. We are beings of seduction and manipulation, I have been told, and yet how do you manipulate a people that forget what they were doing once they walk by a warm beer? How do you guide a pawn that aspires to own a dozen unique UK Blue camp chairs? You don't. Instead you do something our kind are terrible at... You learn to play it by ear, and you learn be flexible, and you learn to build resources with no purpose.
For some of us though, the Old Kentucky Home never leaves us, and a pride that cannot be understated over takes us. Once we are guided by that hubris boner, we return to The Bloodied Grounds. There is no subtlety, their is not art, there is no place to weave the delicate pattern. Our attempts to guide the pieces of the cosmic web are carried out through clumsy fingers. We are beings of seduction and manipulation, I have been told, and yet how do you manipulate a people that forget what they were doing once they walk by a warm beer? How do you guide a pawn that aspires to own a dozen unique UK Blue camp chairs? You don't. Instead you do something our kind are terrible at... You learn to play it by ear, and you learn be flexible, and you learn to build resources with no purpose.
Enough Bitching
I am not the sort of queen to whine for too long, and if your going to live here, you have to use the same discipline. You have to be willing to see this territory for what it is, Warts and All. Then, you have to live in that toxic household, and be the better person. It is something we, the daughters of Queen Spider, and the students of Anansi himself, must do. See, when we are taught to see the big picture, and work on our arrogant little plans, we are being taught how to work elsewhere. We are taught to work with the leeches, and weaponize them. We are taught to prop targets up for the Garou to naturally rage against. These lessons are valuable, and there is wisdom in them... but they cannot be the only tools in our toolbox if we are going to do our job HERE. In lands like Kentucky, we must be willing to accept that our own ideals, and our own ways have flaws too. And so we are forced to view our ways honestly, WARTS AND ALL. Otherwise, we die.
IF you can wrap your head around that, and you can bite down the bile in your throat, then you can see the truth. The truth in all her sequined, fabulous glory. You don't gotta like the bitch, but if you hate on her, you are hating on yourself. That's the nasty way of truth. For us, that means the truth must be something like this... The pattern is not unaligned in Kentucky, it is the wrong pattern. It is not the pattern we have been taught to balance, no sister, it is the pattern that must be torn apart and replaced completely. It does not need a few threads pulled and tucked and padded and painted. It must be torn apart like a cheap wig and melted in a barrel.
That leaves us with the duty of being part of the solution, while also recognizing that this problem requires us to go into a great amount of debt. We have to cut this knot, if we are are to solve this problem, and that leaves us responsible for retying the knot afterwords. What else can we do though? It isn't like we are allowed to just roll into Kentucky, look around, and say it's too big of a problem. The Garou are out of control, the land is so soaked in blood that even their brightest cubs are being raised to feed the blood god and continue on being negligent tyrants. We are not allowed to just say fuck it and move on. Somewhere in the great queens plan, we ended up here, we were called back here, and we MUST fix The Bloodied Ground. So... we have to not only burn it down... we have to burn it down in such a way that we can then build it back. This time correctly.
Now we Spill the Histor-Tea
We played the Mysterious Stranger role for most of Kentucky's history. Witches in caves, cunning men leading cults with no tribe. Advisors to Bears and Cats, last options for the wolves, so on, so on, and so on. It was when the Tribe of Wolves called the Croatan held their final medicine circle with the Bears that we should start our unique history. I know your chitin will crawl when I start our history on the actions of the Garou, but I ask you... Do the Dinosaurs complain about their reign being book-ended by the Lovecraftian intervention of a meteor? Us spiders should just accept that our alternate pattern began the moment the Bears and the Croatan Wolves broke peace with a pipe and a sorrowful song. The wolf tribe went off to die, and a few Bears even went with them. If you can find the story, and are willing to slog through it, it would give more details than I have. However, the jist is this...
Wolves find enemy, really big enemy. They decide they are going to band together and kill it. The Croatan trusted the Bears, and came to them to ask about the Wisdom of their plans. The Bears said they would be successful, but at a great price. This was enough to get the Wolves frothy and rigid. They head off, and never come back. OUR part in this comes next. The Bears are sitting there ringing their paws, and one of our elders comes from the caves below and asks why. When the Bears share the rest of their visions, and cop to knowing the entire tribe of wolves would die in this war. The Elder Spider's jaw dropped open, I imagine, and a razor sharp spinneret flayed the bear from shoulder to ear. To this day, many of our sisters are looking through this land for a fetish that is said to be made of a Gurhal's Hide from this encounter. In short, the Gurhal were so terrified of the Wolves wrath, they told the wolves what they wanted to hear, in the blind attempt to appease them. The Bear Mother sat weeping from what it had done, and us spiders immediately turned our attention to preparing for a vacuum in power that most could not imagine.
Even our imagination was found lacking, but in the wake of the Croatan sacrifice, we did fair the best. We found the secret places and spun webs to protect them. We found the wolf kin, and manipulated the best for their own good. In short, we spent our time salvaging all those things the Garou left behind, and unlike the others, we knew other wolves would be coming. When they arrived, we wanted them to find family, fetish, and fields safe and sound. We also knew what was going to happen in the Umbra, and how the spirits were going to react. What energy we had left was spent balancing and addressing the over reactions of allies and foes alike in the Spirit World. Legend has it, our numbers were cut by a third at the time, our numbers falling as the price of stability became clear. The one thing we did not plan for, and the only thing that could have ruined our efforts came next.
Say what you want about Wolves, but they really are not so mysterious. They are rather easy to predict and plan around as long as you ignore the legends and hype. So when we literally killed ourselves keeping things together and preparing for the other tribes to arrive, you can be certain our investments were made wisely. It was the reaction of the other Fera that caught us off guard. They acted like Fucking Idiots, using this time as the perfect opportunity to rape, pillage, and steal whatever the little bastards thought they were owed. EVEN the Gurhal stepped into the wolves Holy Sites and set up shop. I don't know how they ever thought this would go unnoticed, or what their end game was. What I can say is that all our fucking hard work was deeply undermined by their short sighted outbursts, and when the Garou did return to Kentucky, our people were in no shape to handle the inevitable bloodbath. Instead, we just kept it as small as we could, while protecting those that were deemed necessary for rebuilding the region. It was the biggest slap in the face our kind had ever suffered on these Bloodied Grounds, and is the reason we keep ALL other Fera at a safe distance to this day.
Wyrmbringers, and Vampires, and Miners, OH MY
The Centuries that followed saw our kind called to a more flexible role. The balancing of the scales, and our seeking of the Queen filled our peoples spare time. We learned our lessons when it came to helping the Fera, and candidly the effort put into the Garou had proven to be successful. So with a beleaguered "Bye Felicia..." we headed back to our own tasks. We DID keep our webs cast wide, and we DID check on the rumors that reached us. What we DID NOT do was freak out about the numerous mini Apocalypse that the other Fera obsessed over. This brings us to the White Man. It is not a popular opinion, but the Settlers and the White Garou of Europe brought a level of stability to the region that was needed. Prior to them moving in, there was just a spiral of hurt feelings, and more slap fights than a Bachelorette Party after Truth or Dare.