[color=fff79a][h3][b]SILVER SPEAR[/b]
[i]Elatreis, the Wolf-Haunted Kingdom[/i][/h3][/color]

Night falls hard in Elatreis, a crush of darkness within which mortal hearts beat fast and mortal lungs breathe labored, and only the terrible music of distant howls moves clearly through the land after dusk. But here in the silver city, the falling night is pierced through by the great tower for which the city is named, and falls broken to be devoured by the light of ten thousand torches below. Those lights dance and flow, a great river of fire, and all the city's people are drowning within it - countless bodies moving through the mandala of streets, bodies whose faces are the slender masks of placid saints or heavy stone-shouldered helms made up in the image of wolves and worse beasts. The city sings with a greater music than any hunting pack could answer, and if something [i]does[/i] howl in the dark beyond its edges, its counterpoint goes unheard. Somewhere within the city a stone statue is being hefted by a score of strong men and women, snarling and snapping playfully at children and youths who come too close to their ceremonial burden. Somewhere, too, wild-eyed legionnaires are fighting against a drunk, delighted crowd, too panicked and frantic to remember the routes set aside for emergencies, and in any case too late, for the doom they would prophecy walks now in their shadows.

It is the night of the First Festival.

The jangle of countless instruments and the roars, laughter, and song of countless throats shudders even the walls of Verimos Cathedral, a looming Gothic structure of flowing stone and spider-like arrangements of glass that serve as both window and warding rune. Like its overrun exterior, the inside of the cathedral is swarmed with beasts - serpentine, lupine, feline, a hundred chimera shapes crawling down pillars and along ceiling arches, curled beneath low tables and encircling the central altar. Their shadows move with black intent, their silver eyes glitter - but is only the flicker of lantern-light. With every window glowing by the light of the parade's torches, these gargoyles of stone and metal are clear enough for what they are.

And whyever should the ones gathered amid stone shadows fear the night? They are damned to it, after all, and to them - to you - there is a music sweeter and clearer than that of the festival refrain or the forgotten howls of hateful things. [i]Power[/i], sings the dark within the cathedral. [i]Power is here.[/i]

So are the others like you. Eight faces, all in all, share the shifting shadow mysteries of Verimos' few tending lanterns. No druid attends the wandering this night, and the cathedral's god rests in a chamber above the vaulted ceiling, closer to the sky, the better to look out over its city. Its chamber doors are locked and sealed, and what danger to so enchanted a place on so enchanted a night? Who would dare disturb the undercroft below the cathedral, the spiralling catacombs where are interred a thousand years of Elatreis' royalty and city nobles? Who walks among the dead?

The cathedral has five great entrances and a few clandestine ones, but however you came to Verimos, here you are, arrayed in a circle with those who, like you, walk the night. It seems ridiculous to pretend you are here for some innocent purpose, but it seems ridiculous to admit your damnation to a stranger, if indeed strangers each of you be. Still - eight faces circle, cowled or masked or bare, and while silence is banished far from Silver Spear this night, within the cathedral a kind of hush exists. This is a place of sacred silences, and even conquered by the festival chorus, it remembers its nature and purpose.

Do you?

Alive above the dead.

How do you break from the symmetry of stares?