| abstract | - The Garou’s sacred sites devoted to Gaia are reflected by tainted caerns created by the minions of the Wyrm. Some are former Gaian caerns, captured and desecrated; others are newly christened loci of foulness crafted anew on sites of great pollution. The first Wyrm caerns were created deep underground, marked by the green, cold light of their toxic balefires. Horrors writhed there, deep below the surface of the earth, but the surface remained free of their cancers. The Garou were stronger then, and if any beast pulled its way free to the surface, its murderous activities would be silenced before long. Human memories of these nightmarish raids have gradually evolved into human myths. Beowulf and Grendel, St. George and the Dragon, Marduk and Tiamat — each story masks a more horrible truth. Near the end of the 20th century, human activity brought these pollutants to the surface. Disastrous mistakes heralded the dawn of the End Times. Nuclear warfare, biological havoc, and ecological devastation on an unprecedented scale overwhelmed the werewolves’ efforts, summoning the Wyrm into the world in forms never witnessed before. As below, now so above. Throughout the last century, the Wyrm established and befouled more caerns on the surface, rejoicing in landfills, toxic waste, ecological devastation, atomic tests sites, and urban hellholes surrounded by crime and human suffering. The Wyrm caern, whether on the surface or still below it, does not advertise itself openly. Its guardians do not mark their territory. Instead, the signs are read on the faces and bodies of the humans who live there. Children are born wrong; the land goes sour. The horrors are hidden, shuffling, oozing and undulating in subterranean chambers around the balefires' sickly gleam.
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