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Beshilu; the Rat Hosts

• more detail on Beshilu; the Rat Host
• Thisrah; the great prophet
• Plague King; the Great Rat
• Rat Scripture; the Book of Broods

The Rat Hosts were born from fear, and fear drives them. Werewolf legend tells that long ago, one of the most persistent foes of Father Wolf was the Plague King, a great spirit that drew power from illness and disease. But although
it could strike down mortals and spirits alike with wasting plagues of supernatural strength, it could not do the same to Father Wolf. Perhaps the Plague King suffered from a ban that forbade it to face Father Wolf or that rendered its powers useless against the great hunter. Perhaps it simply
wasn’t strong enough. When Father Wolf caught its scent, all the Plague King could do was flee. And in its fear, it devised a desperate plan. It broke itself into thousands of shards, imbedding each shard into the body of a living rat in the physical world. With its scent and essence so diffused, Father Wolf was unable to find it and mete out his predatory justice.

But when Father Wolf was killed and the Gauntlet arose, the many shards of the Plague King lost their connection to the spirit world. Some withered and died with their hosts. But those that survived gradually became stronger, and eventually became shartha in their own right.

The Beshilu, like other Hosts, are creatures driven by an instinct they do not fully understand. It is in their nature to gather in swarms, and they can subsume ordinary rats into their composite forms. Some take the form of folklore’s Rat Kings, as small groups of rats all connected by their tails. A powerful Beshilu that has assimilated a few shards and many rat bodies might take the form of a tottering monster half rat and half human, or a strange, immense, long-legged rat that seems to parody the Uratha’s Urshul form in some strange memory of Father Wolf.

The Beshilu are the Azlu’s antithesis. Where the Spider Hosts work to spin a stronger Gauntlet, the Rat Hosts frantically work to gnaw the Gauntlet down. Where the Azlu try to close down loci and control the remnants, the Beshilu try to create as many loci as they can. Their instinct seems driven by some unconscious belief that if the Gauntlet is lowered, they will be able to reunite into the Plague King again. Yet their quest for unity damages the
world around them. Perhaps it is the memory of the great power of disease, but when the Beshilu successfully open another area to the influence of the spirit world, it is usually a direct font for the festering power of a Wound.

This is more than enough reason for the Uratha to take up their Father’s work and destroy the Rat Hosts, but it’s never an easy task. Tiny tunnels prevent easy access to a Beshilu nest, and hordes of Beshilu might share a single nest without combining themselves. Most seem to be content with human size and intelligence, and a pack of werewolves inevitably finds that a group of Rat Hosts outnumbers them. When further taking into account the powers of disease that some Rat Hosts manifest and the frenzied state of fear-driven madness
that Beshilu fly into when confronted with the descendants of their long-ago hunter, the Forsaken have much to worry about when they find too many rats in their territory.

Beshilu in Great Britain

The Beshilu, the Rats, are everywhere on the British
mainland. They’re numerous, they’re powerful and they’re a
constant danger. The weakness of the Gauntlet isn’t entirely
their fault, but they’re partly responsible for the worsening.

Through history, they’ve run through the cracks and gaps of
the cities of Britain, hiding within human skin, spreading
plague, gnawing the Gauntlet apart. The Rat Hosts nestle
under the floorboards of suburban terraces built a century
ago. The Rat Hosts swarm through the sewers of every
country in the land. The Rat Hosts’ bolt-holes lead to places
larger and more unpleasant than just simple holes.

Britain is the Beshilu’s paradise. While, like all Beshilu,
the British Rat Hosts survive on their instinct, at some
point their instinct has expanded to include religion, God
revealed in the heart of a rat.

Without the Azlu in any numbers to act as a limiting
factor, the Beshilu have a confidence, a “knowledge” that
they will triumph here first. When they do, the hole they’ll
have created will be all that’s needed to make the physical
realm and the Gauntlet one — like a rip in cloth that,
once started off, gets wider and longer by itself. A hole the
size of the British mainland is enough to finish the Plague
King’s work. They’re sure of it. Because in the back of the
twisted, verminous half-mind controlling each Beshilu is
the touch of God. God has foretold the Beshilu triumph,
and has laid it on every Beshilu heart.

God Have Mercy Upon Our Souls

Maybe the rats take more from the humans they infest
than even they know. How else would the Beshilu of Britain
have found religion? Hundreds of years of eating Christian
Englishmen from within appear to have had an effect on the
Rat Hosts. From the half-rat greater Beshilu, right down to
the near-mindless minor shards that swarm across Britain’s
urban sewers, the hankering for divinity fills them all.

Ancient, human-like Beshilu “Ministers” preach to
congregations of rats and homeless alcoholics; sheets of
paper scrawled in blood and feces reveal the existence of
a Rat Scripture, complete with chapter and verse. Each
Minister takes a title — the Minister of Sickness, the
Minister of Filth, the Minister of Rot — and each has a
Sacred Mission. Like savage sleepwalkers, they spread the
word of Thisrah, the Rat of Unrest, a near-divine spawn
of the Plague King, a Rat Messiah whose return will bring
about the End Times and the Tearing, and the ascension,
the Final Joining of the faithful (read: Beshilu that accept
the Rat Gospel) with the Plague King.

They scream fragments of it at enemies and converts
alike, a shrill, endless hellfire sermon, chapter and verse.
It’s written on the walls of the tenements and subways of
England, literally, chapter and verse in ink made of urine,
invisible to the naked eye, but there all the same, the
Gospel of Thisrah.

It’s a peculiar heresy, and includes a creation myth
that bears hardly any resemblance to the accepted tale of
Father Wolf, the Spinner-Hag and the Plague King as told
by the Uratha and the other Hosts. There’s no mention
of Father Wolf’s destruction of the Plague King and the
Spinner-Hag. From what little the Uratha can decipher,
although clearly composed from a rat’s point of view, the
Gospel of Thisrah has a flavor of human fervor and bigotry
that leaves a strange, uncomfortable impression on those
who hear the Gospel or read it, made all the more unsettling
by the Ministers’ habit of quoting from the Gospel, using
references to chapter and verse.

The Rat Scripture ascribes the death of the Plague King
to the jealousy of the Wolf and the Spider, and claims that
they colluded, that the Wolf agreed to allow the Spider to
bite her, and told the Wolf to kill her, so that she could escape
God’s wrath for a sin of some kind. Bitten by the Spider,
the Wolf had the Spider’s poison in his teeth, and could,
so this version goes, murder the Plague King. However, the
Plague King was told how to escape by God, by allowing his
children to take on fragments of his soul, so that he could
live on. Meanwhile, the Rat Scripture claims that the death
of Father Wolf was God’s judgment on him — God, they
said, cursed his children and drove them mad, so that they
killed him, not knowing what they were doing.

If the amount of time the figure is referred to is any
indicator, the most important figure in the Rat Scripture,
even more than the Plague King (“the Great Rat”), is
Beshilu Thisrah (“Rat Host of Unrest”), or just Thisrah,
which seems, from the bits that Uratha who care to know
have pieced together, to have the role of some sort of avatar,
or possibly a favored son or prophet, of the Plague King.

Thisrah was, apparently, the bringer of the Great
Plague — the rats’ Great Triumph — to Britain in 1665.
At some point, Thisrah was martyred by the Wolves, but
escaped and shall come again. Whether Thisrah shall return
as an individual, or as the result of the joining together of
all the Rat Hosts in the British Isles, seems to be a matter
of some difference among the Ministers themselves, which,
like the hellfire Protestants they echo, are prone to schisms
and splits.

On one memorable occasion, in fact, a group of Uratha
on the Shetland Islands stood back and watched, bemused,
as two rival groups of Beshilu tore each other to pieces,
screaming at each other about some point of theological
difference as they did so.

The Rat Hosts don’t even realize what they’re doing.
Their “religion” is almost unconscious, a fundamentalism
seemingly imposed on them from outside. What if it really
were the act of God? Or a God? What is pulling the
strings?

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