What is Known (UAKM)

A collection of pieces of information found during the Under A Killing Moon chronicle.

On Dreams

See Dreams of the Bleeding Moon for full text of the dreams.

• Atlas, Jerome, Michael, and Winters have been experiencing the same dreams, starting a week before the encounter with Jacob that lead to his death.
  • The general structure of the dreams has been a first-person experience of walking in a ruined and increasingly alien street, surrounded by twisted and lifeless buildings, and amidst bitter chill and airless darkness. Something immense and tendrilous, like the strangling branches of a winter tree, is reaching out of the endless night to smother the moon, its surface split open and hemorrhaging silver blood into the world.
  • The intensity and complexity has grown since the first but growing in intensity and complexity. At first the city was like a rundown street in winter, while the moon shone silent but wounded above. The most recent dream was nightmarish in intensity, with ash and black sand spilling from gaps in monstrously-twisted streets, cold so intense that it burned, and the thin air rippling with dissonant choirs as something reached out of the night to strangle the scarred and bleeding moon.
• The wounds in the moon resembled some of the Sigils
• Michael heard the Words in the most recent dreams.
• Some of the four, most notably Atlas and Jerome, have experienced each others dreams.
  • Notably, this was just after the first encounter with Campbell. At first they saw their own nightmares of weakness, then as they found each other the dream grew larger and became akin to one of the Dreams of the Bleeding Moon. They saw an immense tree reaching from behind the bleeding moon as a great dragon gnaws at its the roots. Atlas reaches out to the Moon and her claws of shining silver sear the tree. The scent of woodsmoke and burnt herbs.

The Broken-Winged Moth

• Named for its behaviour, drawn to a cold and broken flames that ultimately destroyed it, and from Cerridwen's use of the term Gulmoth as a possible way describe it, though she was unsure it was such a being.
• From beyond the world and the Shadow. It was unfamiliar with basic aspects of existence, including causality and the linear progression of time, and was revolted by consciousness and sensation.
• Its mere presence was damaging the world, but the worst happened when it moved into or out of a host. Wherever a possessed body died, or the Moth claimed a new victim, a Sigil formed and a Black Tree grew. The Moth did not seem to be aware of this.
• In at least one case, when Michael Changed and killed the Smiling Man, an entity of darkness and cold light was birthed into the world when the Moth's host died. Michael killed and ate that spirit, but it is unknown if similar entities were created on the Moth's other deaths.
  • Jack Crow was very concerned about Michael following this. The essence of such a being may be very dangerous to consume.
• It was drawn to need and suffering, taking hosts from beings experiencing such things and flitting between worlds in places where the stains of such darkness lingered.
• It possessed Jacob, Rory Burton (the Smiling Man from the diner and the alleyway), and others, including someone lurking in the back of the small crowd in the Projects where Winters was found again, and the man whose body it wore at the end of its existence. After the first encounters with the four nuzusul (Jacob and Burton), it preferred to lurk and watch from a distance.
• Those it possessed were consumed by it, with some fragments of their memory and selves lingering and tainting the Moth with personality, memory and individuality. With each new self taken, it grew more capable of thought and intentionality.
  • Jacob was probably its first victim. The echo of him that remained within it remembered taking a hit after stealing the drugs from Felicity Memorial with Atlas, a dream of a dark wood and large wings, then nothing.
• The Moth knew nothing of the great tree growing in the heart of Merritt, but it feared it and wished to not be near it. It could explain little of what came before it reached the material world, the metaphors and memory fragments it used were contradictory. It spoke of escape and entrapment, fear and freedom, and of grasping darkess.

The Sigils and the Trees

See Black Trees for more information.

The Sigils

• The bodies of those taken by the Moth were left is twisted, monstrously contorted symbolic shapes which caused deep unease in any who saw them, even moreso than just from the grotesque violence and suffering it represents.
• Fairburn recognised the symbol formed of the twisted remains of Rory Burton as dangerous and destroyed the body with fire to minimise the effects on others.
• The scars on the moon in the Dreams resemble these sigils.
• Studying these sigils can cause it to burn into the mind and cause intense mental distress, as experienced by Michael.
• Jerome and Michael found mention and depiction of broken bodies twisted into symbols like Jacob in dark corners of the internet (conspiracy blogs, rotten.com), all in different shapes and scattered across the US.
• When Melusifel, the librarian at the Chequy, was shown one of the sigils by Atlas, she reacted with intense pain, physical revulsion and her flesh physically burning from its presence. She used several complex terms to describe it - Anathematic intrusion. Qlippothic metastasis. Nehashimic antiquale. - before Cerridwen intervened. Cerridwen described the sigils as alien symbols of a nature intrinsicly anathematic to reality.

The Black Trees

• Areas of the Shadow corresponding to those where the contorted body-sigils formed are deeply scarred. An image of the sigil that formed the scar is burned into the surface of the Shadow, seeping oily blood and surrounded by spiderwebs of cracks as if struck with great force. The Black Trees grow from these bloody scars, looking like emaciated, leafless and wind-broken trees formed of slick darkness and rough with coral-like ridging dotted with teeth.
• Deep scars and Black Trees also form in the corresponding location in the Shadow to where the Moth claimed a host.
• The area around a Black Tree is a brittle Wounded wasteland, bereft of all essence and tainted in some way that manifests differently with each Tree.
• The Gauntlet in the area influenced by a Black Tree is jagged and fragile. It is far easier to cross but wounds any being who dares to do so.
• All the locations where Black Trees grow correspond to places resonant with the pain and suffering of the Empty City. The inverse is not true.
• Spirits in the area are hollowed out and enslaved by the Trees, refusing to move away from it but attempting to attack anything that comes close. The Trees themselves are ravenous things that ensnare any being that comes near them in their countless tendrils, intent on devouring them with a hundred blunt-toothed maws.
• The area in the material world corresponding to where a Black Tree grows is tainted in subtle ways. Complex devices become unreliable, and dark thoughts and nightmares seep into those who spend time there.
• Known Trees: There are likely others that have not been found...
  • The Basement of the Goodwill: Where Jacob died. This tree grows from a catacomb on the boundary between the Shadow and the realm of the dead, surrounded by hollowed-out spectres whose touch burns the living.
  • The Steam Tunnels: Where Jacob slept, where the Moth first possessed him, and not far from the strange image of a Tree that called to Michael with the Words. This Tree grew into the steam pipes, its growth constrained by along strange machinery with no counterpart in the material world.
  • Rory Burton's apartment: Where the Moth possessed Burton. This Tree is a crumpled, angular thing that shed crushing depression on all that saw it, and had gathered a coterie of strange spirits around it.
  • The Alleyway: Where Michael has his First Change. The Tree here is a huge, twisted thing surrounded by choking, crushing darkness and a huge choir of hollowed-out spirits of pain and violence.
  • The Great Tree in Merritt Square: The large park where Niven and Sherburn avenues cross, location of a large homeless encampment. This tree is immense, taller than any surrounding buildings and distorting the Shadow that falls beneath its ever-sprawling branches. It, or an incarnation or representation of it, is visible in the portion of the Empty City that mirrors central Merritt.

William Sandoval and Pinnacle

• Disappeared around the same time that the four nuzusul started experiencing their dreams.
• Taught English at Blackmouth Metropolitan Community College and occasionally night classes at Merritt Community Centre.
• Was a widower and was hit very hard by the loss of his wife. It is unclear if he lost his son before the death of his wife or they simply fell out after the shared loss.
• Turned to narcotics to ease the pain. He ended up at Pinnacle, fell in with someone intense and mysterious, and started using fentanyl.
• His disappearance brought BCPD attention on and searching of parts of the Blackmouth Vaults under Merritt, but no further evidence was found and the case is dead in the water.
• Atlas trailed Sandoval's scent into the vaults, through a chain of empty basements and dead rooms into some steam tunnels. The trail grew cold in a buried 18th-century basement, where a large image of a tree covered one wall.
  • The image of the tree was strange. It was carved into the brick so long ago that the edges were crumbling, yet also cutting through graffiti as if new, and in places the pattern was raised rather than cut from the brick. Marks decorated the image; rusty old dried blood, some of which was relatively fresh and smelled of Sandoval. Michael heard the Words here.
• Sandoval's scent trail was almost untraceable, even to a supernaturally keen tracker, but it was found to move on from that room, deeper into the tunnels. It ended at a ladder rising to a manhole in a carpark.
  • Jacob's bedrool and belongings were found behind a warm pipe in the room with the ladder to the carpark. His photo of himself in military fatigues and a woman called 'Maria' was taken by Atlas.
  • A Black Tree grows here, tangled in archaic machinery within and behind the pipes.
• During the meeting with Mr Black, it was implied that one of Mr Black's associates (Jackie, who looked like a burned-out party-guy) had disposed of Sandoval.
  • Mr Black is aware of a cult in Merritt, one which he dislikes and wishes removed.

Campbell and his Associates

• The man who was surveiling Winters apartment was Max Hopkins, an employee of Morland Farms who MMSed the photos he had taken then killed himself by slitting his own wrists with an insufficiently sharp knife.
• The number Hopkins sent the photos to was later traced by Fairburn to the Morningside Plaza area of Merritt.
• On investigating Morningside, Michael was drawn by a familiar scent toward Morland Farms. The scent was of the acrid, reptilian stink of the monster that consumed him in his nightmares, undercut with woodsmoke and burnt herbs.
• Atlas, Jerome and Michael followed the scent to Campbell, intent on threatening information out of some middle manager. Instead they faced something horrifying and fled in terror.
  • Before things became violent, Campbell admitted to monitoring Winters as they were the easiest of the four to find. He demanded to know who they were, what they knew of the Sleeper, and what their threat to it was.
• Campbell later contacted the pack through Jerome to arrange to meet, to clear the air and discuss matters. He made pointed compliments about Jerome's family and home to ensure they said yes to the meeting.
• At the meeting in the church: He came close to but did not apologise for what had happened with Michael's nightmare. He wanted information, felt he was being manipulated. He asked if the pack knew of a woman, pale with dark hair who smelled of woodsmoke and burned herbs (no, but they had smelled that scent around things of significance). Campbell called the woman Berith, someone he had thought was an ally and he now thought to be opposing him for an unknown reason.
  • Michael heard the Words on the wind and spoke them. Campbell reacted as if struck, said such things are not to be said so flippantly.
  • Further discussions were impossible as a sniper struck and chaos erupted. Campbell escaped, looking shocked at what had happened. The sniper and the gunmen did not.
• Winters later made their own attempt to talk to Campbell. Campbell thought that Berith had definitely turned against him and gave Winters a piece of cloth with her scent so that the pack can track and revenge themselves upon her.

Morningside Plaza

• Morningside Plaza is an ugly little strip mall just to the east of central Merritt, built in finest 1980s brown. It is a sea of concrete with half-dead trees in haphazard planters and endless seas of graffiti on rollerblindes. It smells of grease, cheap liquor, emptiness and the sad, acrid sting of lost hope and desperation.
• Campbell manages the branch of Morland Farms, a grocery chain, based in Morningside Plaza. It is a grey temple of despair and need, where cashiers sit behind bulletproof glass and tinny, actinic lights irritate the eyes and ears.
• The right wing gunmen who interrupted the meeting with Campbell in the church had the keys to Coleridge Arms, a gun shop in Morningside Plaza.
• A patient that Winters treated just before they were kidnapped, and who they were unable to save, was the owner of Wells Discount Liquor, at Morningside Plaza. He died choking out curses as Winters, and only Winters, saw an oily darkness fuming an out of his mouth and nose with each breath, bubbling liquid clogging his airways and choking him slowly to death. His final words were "Bastards. Did everything they wanted. Bitch. Stupid fucking kike bitch. She's so good she shoulda done it. Couldn't get there. Fuck did they want me to do? Fucking bastards. Hope he eats them all slow"
• Other stores in the plaza include Easy Cash Trading, a payday loan and pawn shop, Danforth Drug Mart, Prime Value, a large thrift store specialising in clothing, and a branch of O'Tolley's.

BCPD and the other Authorities

• The BCPD were more interested in the death of Jacob than expected, including trying to put pressure onto Winters about the drugs Jacob and Atlas stole. One of the cops leading the questions was Vice Detective (Whitfield) rather than Homicide (Matthis).
• Whitfield and Matthis were very quick to raid Winters apartment to find the missing doc, doing so the morning after their disappearance.
• Atlas' father, Sgt. McCullogh, was part of the investigation as well. He did not survive his daughter's First Change.
• Matthis was among the other BCPD officers who saw Atlas Change, and was one of the most badly hurt.
• James Rojas, uncle or "uncle" to Atlas on her mother's side, is a BCPD detective and werewolf. He is aware of much of the chaos that the nuzusul have been causing, and seems likely to wish to help them.
• OOC (from side scenes): There is a group of three investigators following threads related to the events in Merritt and northern Blackmouth, including the violence at the Precinct. One of their number is able to draw prescient images and has experienced a seizure related to a Tree image.

Hecate and Other Strangeness

• Hecate: The enigmatic entity has appeared several times to the nuzusul since their dreams began. Most recently, Atlas chased her down and counted coup on her, and Hecate gave her a Gift of her mark (the gift of cities) and answered questions in her odd, roundabout way. Her answers were:
  • "Untrust the string-dancer, the many-faced ash liar. You have seen one mask. The serpent child has seen another. None have seen beneath." in general.
  • "Hard father serpent child. Great mawed and hungersome. Subtle and venomous as his ill-sleeping father-god" on Campbell.
  • "Shadows of cold ash and ice hate trapped in amber absence, dredged from darkness by fitful sleep and carmine hunger." on the Trees.
  • "Mimicflying moth drawn to sup on guttering flames, seed-shedding wings woven of tears and embers. Dreaming too great for its broken shell mind." on the Moth.
• Marius Steinfaust: owner of the new age/occult shop, Die Welt in Fallon Heights. He tried to do a tarot reading for the four nuzusul and got the same reading - Tower (reversed), Moon, 2 of Swords - repeatedly for each of them. It unsettled him greatly.