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The Bale Hounds (Asah Gadar)

The Bale Hounds aren’t a tribe. They don’t follow one of the Firstborn or hold to the Oath — though they might pretend to. Most are recruited from within the ranks of one of the eight tribes, and they might still feign loyalty to that tribe. Their true allegiances, however, lie with spirit patrons darker in nature than even the most savage wolf-spirit.

The First Wound was torn into the very depths of the spirit world long ago, some say with the death of Father Wolf. Since that time, more Wounds have opened in the Shadow Realm to mirror the atrocities of the flesh. A Wound is festered and swollen, thick with spirits of pain and hatred, greed and fury, violence and sin. Nature is fundamentally flawed, the Bane Howlers say, because the darkest emotions are the deepest and strongest within the human heart. In a sensible and just universe, positive, creative emotions would be the strongest emotions a human or werewolf could feel. But that is not the way of the world — the conceptual spirits of pain, rage, hatred and lust are far more numerous than the spirits of unadulterated love, joy or mercy.

The Bale Hounds want to be on the winning side.

They bow before the unspeakable lords of these negative aspects of the world, mighty spirits who grow ever stronger as the soul of humanity decays. If suffering and fear and loathing and lust are the most powerful forces within the soul, then the Bale Hounds will serve those forces on Earth. When those forces rise to ascendancy, the Bale Hounds will share a portion of their godhood.

So the Bale Hounds move subtly among the Forsaken and the Pure. Where they pass, more murders break out each year. More people commit suicide. Families self-destruct. A thick, corrupt perfume follows in their wake, along with the whispered word “Succumb.” It’s said that when they fall into Death Rage, they tap into a maddened, sickening strength that exceeds that of any Forsaken or Pure. Yet the true danger of the Bale Hounds is that they hunt without being seen for what they are. The marks of their allegiance are invisible to all but their own. The depths of their cruelty and loathing are hidden behind the healthy strength of their gaze. They could be anywhere.

Bale Hounds within Britain

(from Shadows of the UK, page 24)

Britain’s disproportionately high number of Bale Hounds is a function of the country’s equally disproportionate number of Ghost Wolves. Here, Bale Hounds in Britain are an independent force in their own right, with their own packs, their own lodges and their own territory.

Werewolves were long thought in British folklore to be born of unions between witches and the Devil. Although the common man’s belief in werewolves has long since faded into the past, there’s enough of a memory — and enough literature — for the stories of demonic werewolves to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

More often than not, it works like this: a young woman experiences her First Change. Alone, with no one to explain what she’s going through, she tries to make sense of it herself. Spirits begin to surround her, whispering to her, making offers, suggesting deals. She find some literature, maybe talks to a minister or someone who knows some of the stories. It dawns on her — and the whispering demon voices contribute to this — that she’s damned. She begins to talk back to the voices, tries to find a way out. Or maybe she throws herself right into the deal, reasoning that she has nothing to lose.

It’s then that her descent begins.

The Devil’s Arrow

The most common totem spirit for packs of Bale Hounds is some form of the sparrow. Although by all appearances pretty inoffensive, the sparrow has been a spirit of ill omen for centuries, the herald of devils and witches.

While the actual bird has done little or nothing to deserve this reputation, sparrow-spirits, either inspiring the legend or more likely feeding from it, are uncommonly malicious. The greater sparrow-spirits are drawn to werewolves, and will deal with them for sacrifice — blood, souls and worship.

The sparrow-spirits are often proxies for darker, greater evils, tithing most of the Essence they’ve gained to their masters and passing down messages from hellish, nameless entities to the Bale Hounds, whose minds and free will are
soon completely given over to the worse monsters they serve. The sparrow is so ubiquitous that often other spirits will manifest in the form of a sparrow for ease of dealing with the fallen werewolves, just as other demons will appear
as angels or other animals.

Devon and Cornwall: Beasts of the Moors; the Sparrowclaw Circle

(taken from Shadows of the UK page 25)

The largest and most powerful group of Bale Hounds in the United Kingdom by far is the Sparrowclaw Circle, which controls Exmoor, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. All three of these areas are bleak and haunted. Perhaps due to the ghosts — and other things — the wilds had been left uninhabited before the Bale Hound pack arrived, spurred on by suggestions passed on by their totem, the Clawing Sparrow. The pack has been here for 30 years now, and only Eleanor Hepburn, the now aged pack alpha, remains of the pack’s original numbers, the others having been sacrificed by their own, killed when they got too old or fallen prey to the other inhabitants of the moors. Still, the Bale Hounds keep coming here, guided by the Shadow sparrows, and the Sparrowclaw Circle still numbers a terrifying 16 members.

Thanks to the care of Hepburn’s enormous pack, Dartmoor Prison now stands alongside a small but festering Wound. A second Wound has recently opened around a heavily-guarded building near Torpoint, and the Sparrowclaws will do much to make the Wound open further.

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