On the periphery of human society we have silently lived among you, for millennia untold a shadow in your nightmares and your most daring of dreams.  Below the surface of consciousness you know of us, and still thrill to the legend of our existence.  By whatever name you choose to call us - hengeyokai, loup-garou, werewolves - we are the Changing Breed, as much animal as we are man, and able to take the forms of both; but we are neither, and something in between.  My people, the werewolves; we call ourselves the Garou.  For centuries, in the dawn of civilization, my people hunted you.  Predators.  Top of the food chain.  In our arrogance, we decided that there were too many of you.  So we imposed a population quota on human villages.  Each time a baby was born that violated our predetermined limit, someone in your villages would die to make up for it.  We called this the Impergium.

            Because of this horror, human beings learned to fear us, and because it went on for so long, this fear became an instinctual thing, firmly rooted in your race consciousness.  This fear crystallizes particularly in our Crinos form, which is halfway between wolf and man, as we did most of our killing in this shape.  When people see it, they suffer an irrational, phobic reaction which we call the Delirium.  Later, you will find some way to rationalize what you saw (after all, werewolves don't exist, right?)  I've heard explanations as stupid as, "Same Man in Same Gorilla Suit Robs Same Hotel Twice."  Also, even in our human guise, you instinctively fear the Beast within us.  You avoid us, drive us out, pick on us at school.  We call this the Curse.

           Not that your fear is unjustified.  We're a race of psychotics.  Well, actually, according to my friend Terran, we're psychopaths, but Terran is a psychologist and I'm not.  We have a wild, predatory urge within us, which we simply call Rage.  It gives us power, mostly through superhuman speed, but sometimes it takes control of us.  Berserker rage.  Where do you think the name came from?  We lose our sanity temporarily and fly into a frenzy. Either we fight until we fall or we run like hell.  As we age and gain experience, we learn patience and some measure of control, but it always lurks just below the surface, ready to burst its dam.

            Then there came the Inquisition.  All of us denizens of the dark, like the vampires, the ghosts, the mages and the fey, became the targets of your hatred and fear.  The hunters became the hunted.  And slowly we began to disappear, wiped from existence like every other endangered species to fall before human greed.  I don't blame you.  The Impergium is over, ended by one of our tribes known as the Children of Gaia, but what have we ever done to pay you back?  To say we're sorry?

       So we can't tell you.  You see, there's a war going on.  It has been going on for millennia, and maybe that's why nobody sees it or hears our mournful cries.  Do you ever wonder why the howl of a wolf sounds so sad?  And we can't enlist the help of the other shapechangers, because centuries ago the Garou tried to wipe them out, believing them to be in league with our enemies.

        The problem is that we need you, for two reasons.  The first is that we are a dying breed, and we cannot breed among ourselves.  The offspring are infertile and usually deformed.  Therefore, we must breed with either wolves, or humans.  Secondly, we are no longer top of the food chain.  You are the dominant species.  The future is in your hands.  And our enemy moves among you, leading you down the wrong path, causing you not to care.  But I can't not care.  Every day I fight a war so that my children might have a future.  You with the necktie, working nine to five, raising your 2.5 kids, even you with your normal, everyday McJobs . . . I envy you.

            So I can't just walk up to you and say, "Hey, how ya doin'?  By the way, I'm a werewolf and this is the way it is."  But maybe I can get the message out.  Maybe if enough of you read it, even if you don't believe it, you still might take the message to heart.  So I'm going to tell you the story of one pack of werewolves.  My pack.

            The story begins without me, because I wasn't a member of this pack at the time.  There were five of them.  Two were born wolves, one was born human, and the other two were the sterile children of two Garou parents, which we call metis, one of whom is my best friend.  I'll tell you the story just the way I heard it.  And no matter what my friend Ryan says, they were heroes.