Sheltering the Pack Vision

As you attune to the armor, your senses are overwhelmed by flashes of sensation. Sight, sound, smell and feelings all blast into your consciousness, like a series of moving photographs...

• A woman kneels next to a strange-looking forge, the armor laid out in front of her. In one hand she holds a blacksmith's hammer, the other works a final detail into the metal with no tool at all.

• The head of a rhinoceros juts from the armor, which surrounds a nine-foot tall female body, and squints into a sandstorm. Shapes of men and women trying in vain to save tents from blowing away are barely visible through the gusts. She smiles, and the people begin to succeed.

• The woman, human again, leads a group of people through a field of dead bodies, bloated and green with disease. The armor shines as the woman wills the disease away from the group, concern for her people furrowing her brow.

• Blue blood drips from the rhinoceros horn as she pulls it from the neck of an armored Fair Folk. A small village burns around her and corpses, mostly human, litter the ground. She moves to engage a hobgoblin poised to spear one of the few remaining villages through the chest, but is too far away. The armor thrums and what would have been a fatal wound somehow isn't, and the rhino's blood starts to leak from a seam in the armor.

• Dawn cracks over a ruined camp, the woman who forged the armor weeps and screams, the only sign of life for miles. Nearly hysterical, she strips the armor off piece by piece, throwing it to the ground. Once the armor is off, she rips the rest of her clothes off, still howling. She runs to the south at full speed. A rain begins to fall out of nowhere. The camp turns to mud quickly and the armor begins to sink.

The flashes stop and after a second, you think they may be over. Then...

• A silver-furred gazelle hound, sleekly muscled and inhumanly swift, bounds across the savanna. He comes to a sudden stop, ripping a cloud of dust from the ground, and nearly rolling over in its efforts to halt. He sniffs around on the ground for a few minutes, then rears up and becomes human. Even before he is done changing, he thrusts an arm deep into the ground, then pulls up a huge chunk of earth. As the scattered dust falls away, the armor shines in the sun.

• Ten tattooed men and women stand in a clearing in a snowy pine forest, making a circle around an eleventh. The tattoos of the one in the center are freshly made, traces of blood and healing contrasting starkly with the pale skin and blonde hair. One in the circle presents the armor to the one in the center, saying "Ninth Hunter, your defense of your tribe brought you to the attention and favor of Luna. May this armor allow you to protect them even better."

• Ninth Hunter sits in a smoke filled room, nose buried into a book covered with strange glyphs. A sleeping woman shifts in her sleep in a nearby bed, the armor piled haphazardly at the foot of it.

• The armor reflects the flickering light of a large campfire and the faces of the dozen or so around it. The blond man in the armor drinks and smiles, but isn't really paying attention to the man across the way weaving a stunning tale of how Ninth Hunter liberated a bag of powerful scrolls from the Lookshy Academy of Sorcery.

• Sweat beads from Ninth Hunter's face, falling to the stone floor below, the sigils and protective circle barely visible in the darkness. His animal eyes blazing, he whispers to the darkness, giving it a name—Ronwe—and ordering it, in the name of ancient oaths, to come forth and reveal its knowledge. Soon the darkness answers, the most desirable voice ever heard answering. A gorgeous Northern woman forms from the darkness. Clad only in ribbons of shadow that hover around her, she kneels in front of him and says "I serve you now, sorcerer. What secrets can the darkness reveal for you?"

• A single candle illuminates a small marble mausoleum. The shadow clad woman sits on a closed sarcophagus, slowly unbuckling Ninth Hunter's armor. He looks pale and stretched, eyes nearly dead. She whispers to him as each piece of armor clatters against the floor. He suddenly embraces and kisses her, metal fingernails slowly opening bleeding ribbons in her back. Exulting in pleasure, she snuffs out the candle with a flick of her wrist. Strange shapes move wetly against each other in the dark.

• A light snow falls on a blood-covered Ninth Hunter, calmly stitching together pieces from the pile of corpses next to him. Her voice comes from a dark archway, reflecting off the statues and walls of the ornate courtyard. "The shadows here whisper rumors of a book uncovered in the south."

• Ninth Hunter stands as a man-bear, fully armored, over a manacled rack to which a dead woman is chained, her belly sliced open. Ninth Hunter's black polar bear tongue licks blood from the green fur of a mewling, newborn cat-man nestling in his paws.

• A flashing orichalcum sword sweeps down from the darkness, separating a polar bear head from its armored body.

The loud thunk of this vision jars you back to reality.