They cursed him. They did it before slicing his throat and pushing his head back. Fear's fog wrapped the forest clearing. Bush branches and incense mashed with bovine juices combined to make the air wretched. Jun Hunssen felt the thud of the pentagrammed earth he fell into. His last senses delivered their hell driven chant to his ears and their mesmerising dance to his eyes. The horror of his soul was to be the glue to bind a door between dimensions. One conjurer for every point made a sum of five. While the five's door would open for a moment and something terrible would slip through, its presence in this world was tied forever to the five lives of its summoners.

Oxxad's universal entitlement to the souls of the dead was denied when these warlocks and witches executed their spell.

Gum, a Dheathain shaman, was the hand of the Pantheon's reaper in the land of the alive. Oxxad called on his weary servant to perform a duty in the middle of the night.

Gum woke from his sleep to find his body had morphed from man to beast. Inside his flesh, nightmares had masked the pain of his twisting bones. Sleeping, his skin split open for the growth of a plush coat. Hands and feet lost their length for girth and claws. Gum's face at the point of mutation was grotesque. Dull brown eyes warmed up to buttercup yellow. Side-mounted ears, fleshy and oval, pushed forward and morphed into triangles on the top of his head. Flat and frowning, his mouth bulged into a stout muzzle. Human teeth, utterly impotent, dropped from his mouth and onto his bloodstained bedding. In their place grew a predator's arsenal of skull piercing canines and marrow munching grinders.

When Gum hit the ground, he hit it with the vigour of the eternal jaguar. The creature he became was an alien invader to Althanas, but the forests of the Xangu Basin were his kingdom.

Gum claimed a harvest of five souls in place of the one wrongly taken.