The First Wound

2.1 The Trail of Tears: A Land Choked with Ghosts

They came west carrying what little they could—bodies, memories, grief.
And the land swallowed them whole.

Between the 1830s and 1850s, the forced relocations known as the Trail of Tears brought thousands of displaced Tribal peoples into what would become Oklahoma. With them came ancestral spirits severed from sacred lands, broken rituals, interrupted bloodlines, and a depth of suffering that the spirit world had never been asked to contain before.

The local Umbra was overwhelmed.

Totemic spirits—already wary of colonial encroachment—began to fragment.

Place of power turned silent.

Some caerns collapsed outright.

Others twisted.

This wasn't just relocation. It was metaphysical detonation.

The Gauntlet began to thicken in places where it had once been thin, or tear open where the spiritual membrane could no longer contain the grief.

Beneath it all, something deeper began to stir.

The Red Dirt, not yet named, began to form.

A metaphorical rot—a pressure in the soil, in the dreams, in the bones of displaced dead who were never buried properly.

2.2 The Vision That Was Ignored

She saw it coming. The fire. The flags. The split.
But no one listened. And then, they silenced her forever.

Cvtoce, a great Theurge of the Uktena, felt it first:

A pressure in the spirit world, a tension winding tighter with each passing season.

She called it the Great Conflict—a vision of coming blood, betrayal, and the end of unity. She tried to rally the Tribes, both spiritually and politically, to prepare, to resist, to heal before it was too late.

She was met with silence.

With dismissal.

With fear.

Then, she died.

Her body was discovered on the banks of the Canadian River, not farm from the crumbling post of Ft. Holmes. The death was ruled suspicious but inconclusive by both Creek and Choctaw officials. No one claimed responsibility.

But she was not simply lost to history.

In truth, Cvtoce was murdered by an outside party. Smothered by Abyssal force, her final breath taken in absolute silence. Her death was not spiritual imbalance—it was an assassination, done in the name of a rising ideology:

Peace is antithetical to business.

And with her, hope died.

2.3 The Collapse of Honor

They watched her lose. Then they watched her break.
They called it unfortunate. But no one called it betrayal.

Shikoba, an Ahroun of the Wendigo, was a warrior of iron will and uncompromising rage. She led her pack in skirmishes against encroaching Settlers and U.S. Army forces. For a time, they held their ground.

But when her campaign failed—when the soldiers came in numbers too great to resist—she turned to her own people for aid.

They did not answer.

The Civilized Tribes, already under political pressure and internal division, refused to intervene. Shikoba and her warriors were abandoned, stranded, humiliated.

She took her pack to Black Mesa.

And there, before the few still loyal to her, she tied the noose herself and walked into it in silence.

Her death was not one of rage.

It was one of despair.

And her pack—those who remained—fell with her, into something deeper, darker, colder.

2.4 Hivebirth

A spirit cannot scream forever. Eventually, it either falls silent...
Or it begins to whisper back in new tongues.

From the ashes of these failures came the Hives.

The Uktena, already frayed by Cvtoce’s death, unraveled into conspiracy, suspicion, and a slow-burning metaphysical rot. They became the Undercroft Hive—twisted not by the Wyrm at first, but by absence. By spiritual corrosion. By hopelessness weaponized into ritual.

The Wendigo, betrayed and shamed, turned inward. Their grief fermented into hate. They became the Crowfoot Hive—an expression of pure, directional rage against not just colonizers, but the Tribal structures that abandoned them.

These were not random Black Spiral conversions. These were monuments to betrayal.

2.5 The Wound That Remains

The fall of the Uktena and Wendigo in this region did not simply break two packs. It broke the land.

From this point forward, the spiritual world would never fully heal.

• The Gauntlet tore unevenly.
• Spirits became erratic or predatory.
• Caerns lost their guardians or were repurposed for corruption.

And under it all, the Red Dirt thickened.

What had once been a metaphor became a condition of the land—a sickness that could not be explained by the Triat, nor easily cleansed by rite or tooth.

The First Wound was not caused by monsters.

It was caused by silence, division, and the murder of peace.

And it has never closed.

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