Hiram Vittorio Fain, more commonly known by his deed-name Eater-of-Names, was a Black Spiral Dancer theurge in the Pioneer Valley. He is one of the primary antagonists of The Book of Hungry Names, the other being his 'partner', the Answering Tiger.
Biography[]
Early career[]
Before his existence as warlord of the Wyrm consumed his life, Hiram Fain was the son of a French industrialist and an American mathematician. An MIT graduate in astronomy and computer science, his First Change did not sway him from working for NASA, Sikorsky, and a string of satellite-launch and WiFi startups.
After being inducted into the Broad Brook Sept, Hiram struggled to keep up in this new world where mere intelligence could no longer translate into action and his wealthy upbringing meant nothing. Drowning in his mediocrity and looked down upon for holding the other Garou back in the process, he eventually defected to the Wyrm and swore himself to Bat, abandoning the sept.
Eater-of-Names was mentored by Breaker-of-Wings, a fellow theurge who gifted his pupil a talismanic suit of armor that Eater-of-Names now perpetually wears in his crinos form. Continuing Breaker-of-Wings' work into the realm of telecommunications, one of Eater-of-Names' companies lobbied the FCC to maintain the high rate of spam phone calls; another worked to route around adblockers online. He had a direct hand in the creation of GRC Media, Biosphere Zero, and Neo Albion in addition to a dozen other post-9/11 security companies.
Eater-of-Names was one of the Black Spiral Dancers who worked in opposition to the Broad Brook Sept during their efforts to shut down the Vermont Yankee power plant up until 2014. Although he and his allies failed and he himself was considered only a minor nuisance by Broad Brook, Eater-of-Names' survival of the conflict did lead to a significant "promotion" among the legions of the Wyrm due to the sudden lack of much of their regional leadership, and gave him an opportunity to encounter what he named the Answering Tiger, the spirit of the power plant.
Destroying Broad Brook[]
In the Answering Tiger, Eater-of-Names saw a god who had come to revel in its falsehood after the death of Gaia. He believed that the work of creating a new world could only begin once reality was finally free of the 'ripples' of the disharmony of the old world's remnants and all was still. However, for as long as the Garou raged against his tribe, disharmony would remain. In the Tiger, he saw an alternative to that conflict: Now that there was no difference between the "false" realities of the Tiger and the "real" corpse of Gaia, the Tiger could trap the Garou in a dream of their victory, where they could live out their ideal world while the Dancers finished their work upon Gaia.
He struck a deal with the Tiger, offering to guide it to a new source of power after Vermont Yankee was shut down, and help it guide the Garou of Broad Brook to a victory all their own.
During the Battle of Graves Farm, Eater-of-Names fought the nearly fifty Gaian soldiers of Broad Brook almost alone. Despite the workings of the Answering Tiger turning Broad Brook against itself, Eater-of-Names himself was killed in the battle by Knife-Eyes and Katherine Aslanian-Dey working together to tear him apart in crinos form.
Return[]
Unbeknownst to all, however, Eater-of-Names was not so easily killed. His research into ideas, names, concepts and how to kill them, had given him a unique mastery over his own essence. His ego remained within the unreal worlds of the Answering Tiger, stable so long as it never exited the pocket reality. While this kind of 'living on' was far from unheard of for others, especially Garou, for Eater-of-Names it was both more literal and more reversible.
His remaining followers - particularly his trio of Bane lieutenants Kemod, Pakolit and Tekenjat - each set about attempting to bring one of Eater-of-Names' dozens of proposed methods of resurrection to fruition, so as to let him cleave soul to body once more. While many of these methods bore no fruit, certain more obscure servants of his began poisoning the ground around the galliard Scarper while he slept, allowing Eater-of-Names to worm his way into the dreams of the master of information and names and bit-by-bit make his body his own.
In early 2023, Scarper found himself at Esther's, the nexus of a Pattern Line secretly dedicated by Everlite to Eater-of-Names' essence. Here, in front of the surviving members of Broad Brook, the transference of Eater-of-Names' ego was finalized, and the Dancer pulled himself out of Scarper, reforming his suit out of spiritually-infused chunks of the bar and the bones and blood of the human patrons. The Garou present attempted to do battle with him, but he survived and escaped to finalize his work.
Final death[]
Upon his return to life, Eater-of-Names immediately set about consolidating and redirecting the Wyrmish forces scattered across the Valley: He used his barely-informed minions in Neo Albion to manipulate Huvud Development into bulldozing spirit-rich forests and constructing fortifications for his forces before tricking the company's Cult of Fenris controllers into breaking themselves upon his lieutenant Kemod. Furthermore, he used the resources of the local Pentex Group fronts Chemikon and Everlite to corrupt the police and municipal government, bribing them against the remaining Garou at every turn.
He also anonymously lobbied for the construction of STATZ, an almost one-to-one simulacrum of Northampton that he hoped would appease the Answering Tiger in an incredibly massive form of chiminage and pay off all the debts that he had incurred to the Bane. When STATZ proved to not be enough for the voracious Tiger, he began to plan the destruction of the caern as a show of force to the Tiger. After his plan was revealed, his base was attacked by the remaining Broad Brook Garou, and he was eventually struck by a levinbolt from Elton Dey and obliterated.
Ideology[]
| “ | We are prisoners on this blackening blue globe. Why spread our poison to the stars? This is the price you pay for everything you've been given. Maybe there are no stars out there at all. We have let humanity dictate what is true for too long. Why have we tolerated their naming-of-things for so long? We are their gaolers, but we have failed in our duty. We have let their mind-children spread. No more. No more. They thought I was dead, but some dreams cannot... cannot... | ” |
| — Scarper, seconds before Eater-of-Names erupts through his chest | ||
As with all Black Spiral Dancers, Eater-of-Names believed Gaia's fate to be a done deal. The Era of Apocalypse is not a reckoning in which she can be pulled from the brink, but the settling of her corpse as the Wyrm finishes its great work and restarts the great cycle of existence anew.
However, like his predecessor and mentor Breaker-of-Wings, Eater-of-Names did not view the work of the Wyrm's servants as complete. He believed that for the next universe to realize its full potential, it needs to possess absolutely no trace of the old. To Eater-of-Names and his teacher, this meant ensuring that none of humankind's runoff could escape Gaia into the void where it ran the risk of surviving the Wyrm's consumption. While Breaker-of-Wings focused on the pollution of the void of space, Eater-of-Names focused on the void of the world of information. He sought to free reality from humankind's imposition of the Weaver's stifling nature in the form of its understanding and 'naming' of reality - in other words, locking it into a single state of being and collapsing all other forms of possibility, which would forbid the next iteration of the Wyld and Weaver from working with a truly blank slate.
As stated in his plans to achieve immortality, the series of 12 notebooks collectively titled Resurrectionism, alternatively the Book of Hungry Names, Eater-of-Names believed that with the death of Gaia stripped reality of the possibility of 'realness' - meaning purpose and direction, in his eyes - making all things, especially the gods, empty and false, nothing more than echoes of the corpses of their true selves, like spiritual photons bouncing between two mirrors long after the thing that first cast the light is gone. Knowing that he was dead and unreal, Eater-of-Names devised multiple ways to treat "alive" as a mere property, not something essential, which allowed his spirit to persist in a retrievable state after his death.
Eater-of-Names also believed that this naming-of-things cut both ways: The Book of Hungry Names states his belief that Renown, supposedly the Umbra's naming of a werewolf, is responsible not just for a werewolf's ability to call upon Gifts, but their shapeshifting and regeneration - essentially all things that set a werewolf apart from ordinary humans. Their very flesh is made of spirit-recognition. The flesh of a werewolf is a name that is constantly being rewritten.
Abilities[]
Notable to other Garou was Eater-of-Names' command of balefire, which he used to great effect against other Garou. The Wyrmish flame made the elderly theurge a potent physical threat even to seasoned ahrouns. The power of his suit combined with his disdain for the Deep Umbra made manifest allowed him to disregard gravity slightly, flying to a sluggish and limited extent.
Gifts[]
- Luna's Armor
- Sight From Beyond
- Inciting terror in humans
- Warding against being directly targeted by other Gifts
- Shrouding himself in toxic smoke
Trivia[]
- The image of Eater-of-Names' suit makes visible that the suit is embossed with the original symbol of the Black Spiral Dancers, rather than the new version used by 5th edition. While it is possible that, since The Book of Hungry Names was made in conjunction with the earliest W5 material, Amy Wilkins simply drew Eater-of-Names' character portrait prior to the decision to change the symbol, it should also be noted that the new symbol is only a simplification of the original, with the basic layout and concepts still fully intact. This raises the possibility that the old symbol still exists in-universe as an embellished, 'fancy' version of the baseline 5th edition symbol.