Anduin Lothar had been a detective for the better part of the last decade, and a policeman for nearly twice as long. He was not the sort of person to believe anything without evidence. But with what had been happening in his city lately…well, even he had to admit that something was off.

It had started with the dreams. In and of themselves they would have meant nothing, and he'd put them down to an oddity that had sunk into his subconscious mind. The black bird with the glowing blue eyes he'd associated with Khadgar could be explained away as just that – an oddity, a quirk of his subconscious. The younger man's hair and eyes were very dark; Lothar's brain had probably just connected those features with the image of the raven. The bird had started appearing in his dreams months before Khadgar had.

Maybe it was Khadgar's spirit animal or something. Lothar didn't really believe in that kind of thing, but he could understand the symbolism. The color scheme, the quick intelligence, being way too clever for his own good…oh yes, the young man from forensics definitely had those same qualities.

He never would have given the dreams a second thought, if it weren't for the early-morning discovery of a black, very real feather on his bedroom floor.

Finding that feather had galvanized him. Before then it had just been a series of odd, occasionally sensuous dreams, but now…now he'd been confronted by an invasion of one of their prime elements into his waking world. Between that and his ensuing experiment with the window, Lothar couldn't shake the feeling that something strange was going on, something close by but unseeable, something he couldn't quite understand.

So when the bodies started turning up – bodies almost completely drained of blood, each with a black raven feather in close proximity – Detective Anduin Lothar immediately volunteered to take the case.