ong before the Festival at the Friars’ Gate echoed with fiddles and firelight, before the Cockspur Clan danced and the Serpentine Society whispered, there were the Wolves—silent, watchful, and sharp as the winter sea.
Their story begins on the salt-bitten cliffs of Whitby, where the wind howls like a hunting horn and the gulls scream like ghosts. There, in the cold and the mist, a family once made its home—not a family of blood, but of bond. Outcasts, widows, orphaned children, and wanderers who had nowhere else to go.
They lived by the tides and by each other, knitting warmth from the bones of the cold world. By night they fished or foraged, by day they vanished.
Locals feared them, called them wolves in human skin. Perhaps they were right.
For it is said that on the longest night of winter, when the sea froze silver and the moon rose full, the family gathered on the clifftop, cloaked in oilskin and fur. They raised their voices in a wordless howl—not of mourning, but of power. It was not a song for gods or kings. It was a vow to each other: We watch. We endure. We protect our own.
They became known as the Whitby Wolves.
When the Abbey at Friars’ Gate fell to ruin and the first festival was called to bring life back to the land, the Wolves came south—not in wagons or parades, but on foot, at twilight, cloaked and quiet. They built no walls, lit no fires. They kept to the edges of the fields and watched.
When a child went missing in the woods, it was a Wolf who found them.
When a drunk stumbled into the river, it was a Wolf who pulled them out.
And when trouble brewed, the Wolves were already moving—silent, swift, relentless.
Over time, a lodge was built at the edge of the festival grounds: simple, weather-worn, and open only at moonrise. Inside are tokens: a salt-damp lantern, a bell with no clapper, a circle of teeth carved from driftwood.
If you need help and have no one else, you may go there. You may knock once. But only once.
The Wolves wear no crest, only a grey armband stitched with a white thread in the shape of a crescent moon. You might find jewelry or pins on them in a crescent moon motif; silver as the moon herself.
They answer no questions about their numbers or their names.
But they are known.
They secure the festival and ensure that guests have no call to think of their comfort or safety; it is simply ensured by their fur-trimmed presence.
Their motto is spoken only once, when the pack meets beneath the pale moon:
“We are the quiet between the cries. The teeth in the dark. The hand that does not falter.”
To join the Whitby Wolves is not to seek glory or revelry. It is to serve the night, and those forgotten by day. Most festival-goers will never notice them.
That’s exactly how the Wolves prefer it.