The Uratha honestly don’t know what happens after they die. Some say their souls move on to a place that no werewolf fully understands. They might enjoy a reward for their toils on Earth or they might, as the Pure seem to feel, be consigned to a special Hell for kinslayers. Some werewolves believe that they return to this world, living many separate lives, while others feel that once the Funeral Rite is performed the last bit of a werewolf’s soul rejoins the spirit courts. Some werewolves aren’t even sure that werewolves have souls at all. No one knows for sure, but the Lodge of Voices has some compelling evidence for its theories.
The Querents, as members of this lodge sometimes call themselves, have come to believe that when werewolves die, their souls pass on to a reward (or punishment) that no living Uratha can fully understand. Even so, the Querents say, some part of them — their memories, their knowledge or perhaps a random collection of thought — becomes what werewolves know as ancestor-spirits. These spirits are not the returned souls of dead werewolves, not “ghosts” as humans understand the term. Instead, they are spirits of the Uratha race, just as a cat-spirit is a spirit of cats in general rather than the reflection of one specific animal. On the rare occasions that a given ancestor-spirit might resemble a specific werewolf, this is a reflection on the living werewolf in the conversation, not the spirit. The spirit appears as a fallen packmate or parent to garner additional emotion from the summoner, not because the spirit is that loved one’s spirit. The Querents refer to the descant of these spirits as the Affahissu, the Ancestor-Shadow. These spirits differ from, but seem related to, ancestor-spirits that watch over a particular family line of werewolves. The latter spirits, called Imria Hithim, act as guardians to specific families rather than patrons of the race as a whole.
Prerequisites
Merit: Language (First Tongue), Wisdom ••, Purity •, Occult ••, Rituals •.
Benefits
Lodge members can purchase the Ancestral Vessel Merit. In addition, they gain a free Academics Specialty (Uratha History).
