Bruce Carmichael grew up in Loveland, CO. He had a loving family. White picket fence, lawn, went to church. Mom and Dad were both around, as were three of the four grandparents. He had a younger brother and two younger sisters. Everything seemed peaches and cream from the outside, but no one knew how alone Bruce felt. He felt angry all the time. His siblings were both in awe of him and more than a little afraid. He hadn't hurt them... yet. He'd always been a big kid. He didn't bully, exactly, but he did scare the other kids. If he was angry, he didn't particularly show it until it became too much, and then he'd lash out scarily and violently. He was used to the anger and tried to keep in under wraps, but when it just got to be too much, he'd take a swing at a locker.... the locker always lost the fight. He was angry in school a lot, because he just didn't understand the things the teacher would try to teach him. They tried to harness it in football, but, while he liked the feeling of being on a team, too often he would just do his own thing. He'd go after the kid with the ball even if it was his job to block someone else. He got the kid a lot, but he was not a team player, and athletics weren't his thing.
The only times he felt calm were when he worked on his motorcycle. His parents let him get it when he turned 18 (He had been held back a year, so he was still a junior when he got it). When he worked on his motorcycle, he knew what to do. No one was asking him to understand the physics of it all- he just knew he needed to take a piece out, clean it, and put it back. So he could stop being angry, stop getting frustrated. As he worked, his mind cleared and gradually got in tune with the motorcycle. Then, on this particular day, he noticed a tiny hole in the transmission. A hole. He knew what that meant. He knew his motorcycle was dying. Sure, he could get that part replaced, but he didn't have the $1500 that would cost. It would be better to buy a new used motorcycle for that price. He felt sad. He felt like an idiot for feeling sad about a piece of machinery, but he felt sad. He mounted the motorcycle. One last drive.
He flew. And sobbed. "So stupid!" They weren't just tears about the motorcycle, though. He worried. He worried that he would hurt his siblings. He worried he would never fit in. He worried he would always feel angry. He skidded to a stop in front of a stop sign and sobbed, then he revved the engine and kept going. Night came on. The full moon rose. He had driven for 3 hours, and had calmed down. Life would go on. He was approaching his house. He saw his dad pulling out of the driveway. Probably on a fried chicken run. It was Wednesday night after all. He'd lost track of time, but it was probably the right time for a fried chicken run. He slowed. Dad rolled down his window, and opened his mouth to speak. Bruce didn't see the car coming up fast behind him. He only knew it was there when it hit him in the rear. He flew off his bike back into the windshield of the car, smashing it good. He didn't see it, but he felt the impact as his bike and then the car smashed into his dad's drivers side, and he flew off the windshield onto the hood of his dad's car. His eyes cleared for one moment. His dad's windshield just had the one crack in it that it had had from that time a deer leaped over the car. That was a strange story. It was stranger every time his dad told it. He had just been driving along the county highway when he saw a doe in the middle of the road. Dad had hit the breaks, but it wasn't going to be enough. The deer didn't move. It just stared. The proverbial and literal deer in the headlights. At the last second, it leaped... not out of the way to the right or left of the car. Straight at the car. Forward over the car. It's rear left hoof had just touched the windshield there, where the crack started. Dad always said he was gonna get it fixed, but Bruce thought he liked telling that story too much to actually ever get around to it. That was the only crack in the windshield. Bruce could look inside the car through the unshattered windshield. He saw his father, a smile still plastered on his face, but his upper body in the wrong place. Not on his lower body. Bruce screamed. Bruce wasn't dead, so he kept screaming. Then he stopped. He got off the hood. He walked over to his dad's passenger door and tried to pull it. He tried to pull it open. Then he saw the back seat. His littlest sister sat there. Only 5 years old. She didn't say anything, didn't move. She sat there, strapped in and safe. Bruce started to laugh. He opened the rear passenger door. The car started to move. It started to slide towards him. He didn't know why. Then it started to slide away from him. Back and forth. He looked up. The other car's driver was looking over his shoulder... He was trying to get out- to get away. He was moving. He was alive. Bruce got angry. So angry. He didn't look back at his sister, who was still staring at him, buckled in. He just looked at the criminal who had killed his dad.
He woke up the next morning covered in blood, naked on the top of a mountain.
After waking up on the mountaintop, Bruce felt like he was walking through a dream. Better than the nightmare he'd just had, of death, blood and fur and the screams from a stranger mixed with a silence he could hear from his sister. The overcast sky seemed ominous. He could feel that it was cold, but he didn't feel cold. He felt like he was being watched. When he look around, all he saw were rocks and scraggly trees. The rocks looked so solid. Duh. Rocks are always solid. But he could swear these rocks were solider than rocks. He saw boulders and pebbles and mid-sized rocks. He could swear something was watching him, too. He could swear lots of things that wouldn't make sense, kind of made sense right now. He knew someone was watching him, someone that didn't like him, because they started the boulders rolling towards him to crush him. A rock slide would be dangerous, but not as dangerous as this. The rocks didn't just slide down the hill- they all slid towards him. He ran. He ran as fast as his two very human legs could carry him, and when the rocks caught him, they tripped him, and they buried him, and he tried to dig his way out, and he started to panic. He felt his heart beat faster and his chest rise and fall and rise. And the panic wasn't fear. He wasn't feeling claustrophobic. He was feeling angry. What right had these rocks to bury him? He lashed out in fury. If he weren't so angry, he might have noticed that he wasn't just pushing rocks away, he was tearing into them. His mighty claws rent the side of a boulder. And it rolled away. Uphill. All the little pebbles rolled away. Well, almost all. Those that didn't roll away faster than the boulder got eaten by the boulder.
Bruce didn't stop. He smashed and tore at the mountain until the mountain itself punched him. The immovable mountainside moved. It flung him over the edge and he flew... miles, it seemed until he landed in a cloud- rainy, wet, and oh-so soft, like cotton candy. Like cotton candy, it filled his mouth. Unlike cotten candy, it filled his ears and his nose and his eyes. Suffocatingly sweet. It began to smother him. He rent it with his claws. It cried out. It rained, and it deposited him on the earth. The cold, wet earth. The mud tried, in its way, to imprison him, sucking at his feet.
His rage became fear, and all at once, without knowing why or how, he howled a howl that asked the question "What? What must I do?!?" Abruptly, the mud stopped trying to kill him. He heard it... perfectly clearly. It burbled. It made mud sounds. It wanted him to mix water with dirt. That's all.
I'm Bruce. It's a dream. The mud wants me to make mud. Ok. Fine. He felt his body change. It wasn't monster anymore. It was human. He looked up at the cloud he had rent with his giant claws. It hovered above. "Give me some of your water," He said.
"Oh?" It wisped, "and what will you give me in exchange?"
"Um... I don't know. What does a cloud want?"
"I want a cool breeze to blow me over the town."
"Loveland? Are we near there?"
"Do you want to know that or do you want water? I'll give you either, but not both if you bring a breeze here."
I'm talking to rainclouds in my dreams, thought Bruce... why do dream rainclouds have to be this difficult??
The mud, listening to this back and forth, tightened its hold on Bruce. Bruce looked back at the mud and then turned to the raincloud: "If you teach me how to get water, I'll find you some breeze."
"Agreed", said the cloud.
The mud said, "You will keep your promise, Uratha, or my descant will hunt you."
Bruce, still unsure as to why he was learning new words in his dreams, agreed.
The cloud said, "The wind is up in those mountains"
Bruce began walking. When he tired of walking on two legs, he imagined himself a wolf, and then he was. This is a long dream, Bruce thought.
Bruce climbed for how long, he still doesn't know. He didn't rest. When he saw anything move, he avoided it. Nothing in this dream was to be trusted. Twice he was pursued. Each time he became the monster self and it ran away. Eventually he reached a cold, dark cave. From within the cave blew a cold, dark wind.
"Wind?" Bruce muttered in this new dream language he seemed to be speaking.
"What does the Uratha cub want from North-Wind-That-Blows-Before-
A-Storm?" grumbled the wind with a vicious edge that seemed unwilling to do him any favors.
"I want you to blow the cloud over the city."
"My goodness, so great a favor requires a great favor in return"
"Um... is it so great a favor? Isn't that what winds do naturally? Especially you, who blows before a storm anyways?"
"Disrespectful, little cub!"
"Oh, I'm sorry," Bruce was confused, but contrite. What finicky peronalities people my dreams, he thought, though not in those words. "What do you want, North-Wind-That-Blows-Before-
A-Storm?"
"There's another Uratha not far from here, who's been marked by Lightning-That-Strikes-The-
"Uratha? You mean, like Mud called me?"
"Yes- Uratha," the wind whispers in Bruce's ear. "The spiritless ones call you Werewolves. Do you prefer that?"
"Um. No." What? This dream gets weirder and weirder. "I'll go get that other Uratha."
"She lies that way."
Bruce has only about a hundred feet to walk before he sees her. He looks up to see what she sees. A gibbous moon. Days must have passed... or only minutes, it's just a dream, after all. Anything can happen. As he watches, she stops being a woman looking at the moon and becomes a monster. As she does, he sees lightning - perhaps the Mr. or Ms. Lightning-Who-Blah-Blah-Blah that he's supposed to keep her from - flashing across the sky towards them. He fears he's too late. He runs towards her. He's not fast enough. He changes, becomes a monster. She turns, she sees him. He has no time. Lightning is get closer. He runs to her and slams his paw into her driving her just out of the reach of Lightning in time. Lightning strikes him, instead. His claws miss Lightning. It's so fast, but if it wants to hit him, it has to get close. I'm battling lightning. It's like he's alive, for the first time. He gets a good look at Lightning. It's strong. It's fast. It's weak. One good hit will destroy it. He knows this. He doesn't know how, he just knows. He watches it dance. It wants to hit him again. Perhaps if it does that'll be the end of him. If you die in your dreams, do you die in real life? He's not going to find out, because it dance away from him. It wants the other one. He sees it dance through the sky towards her, lying on an outcropping, thirty feet below. I can't catch it, it's too fast, but if I strike where it WILL be... He leaps for the woman... She is a woman again now, naked, unconscious, vulnerable, but not weak. He does not need to save her for her sake. He needs to destroy Lightning so that he can get Wind to blow Cloud and Cloud give him Water so he can make Mud... because he promised. His teeth close with a mighty sizzle on lightning. It breaks, and he feels its power enter his body. He had been hurt and fatigued, and now... the burns on his chest heal and he feels re-invigorated.
He goes to the woman. He lifts her and carries her back to Wind. (She can be awake anywhere in here-even during the battle. Maybe that stops the battle, but without JB to tell me what she does, I'll leave her unconscious, and resolve the story as I planned it.)
"I will blow Fluffy-Raincloud-Who-Moistens-
"Not before I receive my gift from him...her...it"
Wind and Bruce and the woman travel down the mountain. It is almost as if the path is actually shorter going down than up...perhaps it is. In a dream, anything is possible. When they arrive, and Cloud hears what Wind will do, she begins to teach Bruce the secrets of calling water. While she does, little spirit versions of a full moon descend from the light of Luna's gibbous face.
"We are the Ralunim. Our mother and yours witnessed you keeping a promise to a spirit when it was not in your interests to do so. She sends us to award you the first sigil of Purity. The spirits witness your renown."
"We witness it," they agree.
The Ralunim carve the sigils into his back. "You are He-Who-Would-Fight-With-
This dream could not get any weirder.
To be continued.
(Who is this woman? What is happening outside the Dreamworld aka the Shadow? What happened before he awoke naked and covered in blood on a mountaintop? How did he get here? aka cross the Gauntlet?)
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