On the Third Day in the Sixth Month of the First Year of This Chronicle, Known as the Year of the Shadow:

In the gloom of night a mist rolled low along the ground outside the City of Kaffa. An uncanny silence settled on the surrounding terrain, and the breeze stilled, leaving the banners and pennants of the score of armies encamped near the city limp in the darkness, their shadows no longer dancing on the ground, but still and quiet as if awaiting an impeding tempest. The mist spread through the encampments, but many of the guards took little note, for mist commonly prowled the damp ground near the city. They focused instead upon the silence, unlike any they had ever encountered. In one of the larger camps, that of the Knights of the Rose, of the powerful Tamarkand Empire, the battlemage Alcina walked from her tent and went to the edge of the camp. There, although she gazed out upon the shadowy landscape, in her mind she saw visions brought on by the dark poetry of the bard Rowan mac Clann:

Dark priest to bloodied crimson alter steps,

To raise bare arms to receptive sky above,

Invoking ancient words in archaic chant

To call upon arcane roots of power and death,

And weave his dark god's magic in the sky.

His acolytes start to beat on great war drums,

A roaring thunderclap, a rumbling swell,

That pulsates 'cross vale to city wall,

Chilling dark choirs chant in counter cadence,

A vastness of voice they form, to vaulted ceiling rise.

A deadly counterpoint, descant, she chants,

His temptress, his priestess serenades him

While darkened sky belches black, roiling clouds.

Green lightning snakes along its misty ravines,

Yet haughtily deigns to drink smoky waters,

Its hungry tongue instead runs and slips

Through smoking, inverted valleys in the sky,

While bloody rain falls from those mountaintops

To touch the ground and bring withering death

For all who feel that fatal touch of crimson rain.

Alcina recalled the poem going on to describe the undead who scrabbled their way from under the ground, "across the field like bone white grain they bloom", and at their evil overlords' command went on to overwhelm the defenders of the land. As she moved away in the darkness to contemplate the visions, the mist crawled along the ground, making its way to the tent of Grand Marshal Prester John, who slept soundly within.

Prester John dreamed visions in his mind's eye. At first the visions seemed to be of the land of Lorasia, indeed, of the very environs of the City of Kaffa. But Prester John did not see any familiar banners flying there; the armies nearby were unfamiliar to him. Nor did their names or colors or emblems match any known within the land, and he knew many for his scouts and the scouts of his many allies had covered the land and provided this information to him. The City itself seemed to have fallen on hard times, its once lucrative markets all but dried up, its people in distress, and the city leader, Hassan, issuing increasingly oppressive decrees to maintain order. Yet, somehow, this Hassan was unlike the man he knew. He saw visions of other cities and territory in Lorasia, and it was at once familiar and also different. While the names of many of the cities were the same, many of the armies he saw in his mind's eye were different, composed of names and peoples he did not recognize. The land he saw in his vision seemed at once close at hand, and yet, far away, as if on some distant shore, separated by a mighty ocean. And slowly it dawned upon him an alternate Lorasia, the same, yet different. On a different plane, in a different dimension. And through it all, it seemed as if a mist was all that separated his Lorasia from that of his vision.

Prester John awoke with a start in his bed, sitting bolt upright. The magnitude of what he had seen staggered him, awed him beyond his comprehension. What had the Greater Ones, the True Powers in the Multiverse, the Beings referred to by his priests only as the "Cosmic Balance," chosen to reveal to him, and why? His eyes fell upon a strange shaped mist upon his floor, in the shape of a scale, a golden light from a table lamp reflected in the moisture that composed it. They were speaking to him. Slowly Prester John began to understand the Greater Ones had decreed that he communicate with the inhabitants of this alternate Lorasia, for the greater goal of Those and known only for Their desire that all things be in balance and harmony. Had he but known of Alcina's visions, he might have then realized the vision perhaps carried a different portent, for such things are always multi-faceted.

With renewed vigor he put on his plated mail and strode forth from his tent, there to confront Alcina and a host of seers. He said simply, "The Greater Ones have brought us together tonight. Come with me, we have much to discuss." With that, he turned, and entered the tent which served as a shrine to the Cosmic Balance. A breeze blew threw the grassland, stirring the banners and dashing the mist into nothingness.