  The world was once far stranger than it is today. Where your ancestors walked, there walked also beasts of true magic, and many of them are gone from every field and forest now.
<~><~>  The vampires who ruled the long nights, the flying monkeys that darkened the sky in chattering flocks, and a dozen stranger things besides, have all slipped into extinction, or clung to the very edge of it. Their bones and remains are nearly all that is left.
<~><~>  Yet magic remembers what the world forgets. It is whispered that a magician of sufficient power need not accept that a thing is truly gone forever. To draw a lost species back into the living world, or even to take its shape upon oneself, is said to be within reach of the truly practiced. What has died is /inot always beyond calling/z.


