These Stories are True

You want to know about my father.

Everyone wants to know about my father.

Here's what I'll tell you: Malik Nanuq was the greatest hunter I ever knew. He could track a spirit through a blizzard by the taste of the Essence it left behind. He held Downtown for thirty years—not because he was the strongest, though he was strong, but because he understood that territory isn't about the Shadow alone. It's about the people. The commerce spirits, sure, but also the humans who feed them. The flow of money and want and ambition that keeps a city's heart beating.

He taught me that. Before I chose my own path. Before I became Forsaken.

[Long pause. Sound of a drink being finished.]

They call us traitors, you know. The Pure. Anshega. They say we turned our backs on Father Wolf's true children. But you know what I think? I think there's more than one way to be loyal. I think sometimes you have to leave home to see it clearly.

I was nineteen when I told my father I was joining the Suthar Anzuth. He didn't rage. He didn't disown me. He just looked at me with those eyes that had seen a hundred years of Alaska, and he said: "You'll understand someday. When you have something worth dying for, you'll understand why we do what we do."

I thought he meant the territory.

I thought he meant pride.

[Sound of ice settling in a glass.]

They killed him in September. The Forsaken who came up from the Lower 48, the ones who felt "called" north. I wasn't there. I was in Juneau, pretending I didn't feel the bond break. Pretending my father's death didn't echo through my blood like thunder in a canyon.

When I came back, they were already dividing up his territory. His territory. Like he was just another obstacle cleared from the board.

And now they want his journals. His ritual notes. The fragments of knowledge he spent his whole life protecting. They killed the warden and now they want the keys.

[Very long pause.]

I have the journals. Most of them. Grandmother's too.

I can read them.

I haven't decided if I will.

My family has been here for nine thousand years.

I don't say that to impress you. I say it so you understand: when you talk about "Alaska," you're talking about something you've known for less than a heartbeat. When you talk about the spirits, the Shadow, the things that move beneath the mountains—you're speaking a language you learned from books written by men who'd been here for fifty years and thought that made them experts.

The Tunraq don't care about your tribes. They don't care about your auspices. They don't care that Luna blessed you or that you swore some oath on the moon. They were here before the moon meant anything to anyone. They will be here after your names are forgotten.

[Sound of the tide, very close.]

The Forsaken killed the Pure.

The Pure were many things—arrogant, rigid, convinced of their own righteousness. But they understood one thing the Forsaken don't: some duties matter more than territory. Some obligations exist beyond victory and defeat. Some things must be done not because you want to, not because it serves you, but because if they aren't done, everything ends.

The Forsaken won a war. Congratulations. They also stopped a rite that's been performed for—

[He stops. A long silence. The tide turns.]

You want me to help you. To teach you. To speak for you to the Tunraq.

Why should I?

You come here as conquerors. You kill our guardians. You claim our lands. And then, when you discover you've broken something you don't understand, you come to us—the people you displaced—and you ask us to fix it for you.

[A sound that might be a laugh.]

No.

Prove you deserve it first.

I don't trust it.

Any of it. The journals, the rituals, the spirits who talk in riddles about "cycles" and "compacts." I've been a soldier. I've been a werewolf. I know what a con looks like, and this—all of this—smells like someone's playing a very long game.

Think about it. The Pure just happened to be guarding some cosmic prison? For thousands of years? And nobody thought to mention this before we fought a war over this territory? Nobody left a warning? Nobody said, "Hey, before you kill these people, maybe ask them why they're so determined to hold ground that isn't strategically valuable"?

[Sound of pacing.]

I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate. I'm saying we shouldn't take anything at face value. These "Tunraq"—what do we actually know about them? That they're old? That they're powerful? That the indigenous Forsaken seem to think they're legitimate? Well, some very convincing spirits have convinced people of some very stupid things throughout history.

And the King in Yellow? The Carrion King? Frozen Carcosa?

[A sharp, humorless laugh.]

That's a story. That's someone's mythology. Maybe there's something beneath the mountains—probably there is, this is Alaska, there's something everywhere. But does it wear yellow robes and sit on a throne of mammoth bones? Does it have a city of ice with the frozen dead seated at dinner tables?

That's poetry. That's symbolism. That's what happens when Bone Shadows let their imaginations run wild.

I'm not saying ignore it. I'm saying: verify everything. Trust nothing that can't be confirmed by claws and teeth. And keep your exit routes clear, because when this all goes sideways—

—and it will go sideways—

I want to be in a position to fight, not buried in someone else's mythology.

Babushka used to tell me stories about the Yellow Shepherd.

I was maybe five or six. She'd tell them the way Russian grandmothers tell all stories—as warnings, as lessons, as truths dressed up as fairytales so children would remember them. The Yellow Shepherd lives under the ice. He tends his flock. His flock is everyone who has ever died in Alaska. They sit at his table and wait for dinner, but dinner never comes, because dinner is us, and we're not dead yet.

She'd say: "The men who came before knew how to keep him sleeping. You do not wake the shepherd. You do not even speak his name loudly. You let him dream, and you pray his dreams don't find you."

I thought they were stories.

[Several lines are crossed out.]

My great-great-grandfather was Pure. Ivory Claws. He came with the Russian fur traders, already changed, already sworn to his duty. He married a local woman—love match, apparently, unusual for the time—and stayed when the Americans bought the territory. His journals are in the family vault. I've read them.

He knew about the rite. He participated in it. 1879, three months before my grandmother was born.

He wrote: "The King stirs in his sleep. The dreams grow stronger. The aurora burned wrong for three nights, and I saw my own death seated at a yellow table. But we spoke the words, and the seals held, and Alaska will remain untouched for another cycle. My children will not know the price. My children's children will not know the price. But someday, someone will have to pay again."

[The handwriting becomes less steady.]

The Forsaken killed the Pure.

My family's duty—my blood's duty—is broken.

I've been tending bar in Spenard for six years, watching the supernatural community pretend everything is fine, listening to gossip and gathering intelligence and telling myself it's enough. That someone else will handle it. That I don't owe anything to a tradition I never asked for.

But Babushka's stories are in my bones. And last month, I dreamed of a yellow table.

There was a place set for me.

Brothers and sisters, I have seen the true light.

Not the light of the sun, which abandons us for months at a time. Not the light of streetlamps, which only push back the darkness without defeating it. No—I have seen the light that exists within the darkness. The light that has been waiting beneath our feet, patient and eternal, since before the first humans walked this frozen land.

[Congregation murmurs. Sounds of affirmation.]

You have felt it too. I know you have. In the darkest months, when the sun barely rises, when the cold seeps into your bones and the nights stretch on forever—you have felt that there is something else. Something watching. Something that cares.

The church I was raised in told me to fear the darkness. To see it as the enemy. But here, in Alaska, I have learned the truth: the darkness is not our enemy. The darkness is where He waits. The one who will gather us all at his table. The one who has prepared a place for every soul who has ever suffered through an Alaskan winter.

[Voice becomes rhythmic, almost chanting.]

We are the Church of Luna. We worship the light beyond the light. The moon that reflects a greater brightness—a yellow brightness—a glory that makes even the aurora seem pale. When He rises, when the long sleep ends, when the ice gives up its treasures—

[Abrupt stop. Sound of throat clearing.]

I'm sorry. I—I don't know what came over me.

Let's... let's sing hymn number forty-three.

MEMORANDUM
TO: Section Chiefs, Research Division 13
FROM: Dr. Richard Webb, Facility Director
RE: Aurora Project Phase III Preparations

The dimensional stability readings from last month's tests confirm what our family has suspected for seven generations: the boundary is weakening on schedule. The 147-year cycle is not arbitrary—it represents a natural fluctuation in the barrier between states of existence. Our ancestors discovered this through observation. We have now confirmed it through measurement.

I want to be clear about our mission. There has been some... philosophical drift... among newer team members. Some have begun to ask whether we should continue this work, rather than focusing on whether we can.

Let me address this directly.

The Sundering—the event that separated the material world from the spiritual world—was a catastrophe. It fractured reality. It created suffering on a cosmic scale. Every ghost that cannot rest, every spirit driven mad by hunger, every werewolf torn between their human and animal natures—all of this is a consequence of a broken world.

The entity beneath the Chugach Mountains existed before that break. It remembers wholeness. It holds the key to reunification.

Our work is not destruction. It is healing.

[Handwritten addendum:]

Note to self: Personnel showing yellow rash patterns should be rotated to portal duty. They're already touched. Might as well use them.

[Sound of heavy breathing. Possibly from recent exertion.]

I don't know why I keep coming here.

There's nothing in Government Hill for me. It's not my territory. It's not even a good hunting ground—the spirits here are wrong, corrupted, and fighting them doesn't feel like victory, it feels like stepping in something rotten.

But every time I close my eyes, I see it. That building. Those lights. The aurora that burns wrong above the rooftops.

[Long pause.]

The name Webb doesn't mean anything. Plenty of Webbs in the world. Common name. My grandparents came up with the pipeline crews in the seventies—roughnecks, honest working people, nothing mysterious about them.

But sometimes I dream about a family tree that goes back further. Generations of Webbs, stretching back through American history, back through colonial times, back to—

[Abrupt silence.]

I've never met Dr. Richard Webb. I don't have any reason to think we're related.

But when I look at the RD-13 facility, something in my blood sings.

And that terrifies me more than any spirit ever could.