Warned of a danger beyond their far border, the shamans employed by the emperor’s Grand Vizier immersed themselves into scrying. Their circle held trance with unbroken vigilance, from breaking dawn until dusk. Vision showed them a hound, no red-blooded creature, but a sorcerer’s construct, unveiled as a monster as it was stunned on the point of a copper-tipped arrow. Warrior, they named the man with the bow. He whose presence they could not discern through the warding that masked him. The adversary stalking his flight through Hell’s Chasm stood unveiled for one moment, as the spun continuity of cold-struck forces succumbed to the conductive matrix of copper. The vizier must receive the ill news at once: the pattern invoked was a shape-changer’s line, outside the known reach of their wisdom…