(This page is The Other and was redirected from The Shadow)

The Other

Few countries on the planet have been so comprehensively altered by the history of the human race as the United Kingdom. There isn’t, arguably, a single square inch of the island of Britain where a human foot hasn’t trod at some point in history. Even the remotest places bear the marks. Even in the remote fastnesses of Dartmoor, the fens or the highlands, humans have mapped every detail, and sliced across them with roads and railway lines.

What’s left of nature on the island retreats to these places. Their wildness is a kind of reaction. A visitor to the wilderness often gets the feeling that the place exists in opposition to the domesticated lands lying nearby. The land lies, wounded, resentful, impotent. It watches. It waits. It looks upon the traveler and the visitor with malice.

The sensible traveler knows this is nonsense, of course. It’s the pathetic fallacy writ large. It’s the environmental guilt of the townie projected onto harmless countryside. The sensible traveler is wrong.

Over thousands of years, the land has been scarred, over and over again, grazed and worn down to the bone by the effects of century after century of human habitation: farming, enclosures, wars, industrialization, culture after culture, century after century of humanity taming the land. Each layer of history has been built on others before it, covering but never quite removing the traces of the layers beneath.

Step over to the spirit realm and see: in the cities, the fossilized bones of the past intrude on the present. In the countryside, the land’s resentment festers and grows.

The Shadow, the “Other” as the British Uratha call it, is full to bursting. And as time goes on, it begins to impinge on the material realm more and more. Spirit-infected inbetween places begin to nudge themselves into gaps that weren’t there. Other places change, suddenly, drastically, for a night, and then change back. Others still might lose their people for a day, or a week or a month, all of them vanishing, their place taken by ghosts and spirits until such time as things right themselves.

Ordinary people don’t see it happening. The few rare people blessed with the second sight can see it. The magicians see it; so do the undead. The werewolves, however, understand it. They know that the Shadow might one day swallow the whole nation, if something isn’t done.

Few of the Uratha, if any, have any idea what it is they’re supposed to do to keep Britain for the living and the material. While the Forsaken argue the toss with each other, the Ghost Wolves keep on growing and the Pure stagnate, the times when the worlds of the dead and the spirits encroach upon the world of the living become more frequent, longer-lasting and greater in area every time. Spirits and ghosts alike reach through a weakening Gauntlet, punching through with increasing violence, often dragging victims who go unnoticed, unmissed.

The Gauntlet across the land, battered from both sides and gnawed at by hordes of Beshilu rats, is growing weaker with each passing year, and, as the Gauntlet withdraws, the Shadow leaks into the material.

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