“Shifters are people with two souls,” Vani said. “Long in the past, the ancestors of the shifters enacted rituals that fused their souls with the souls of their chosen animals, allowing them to take the forms of the animals in question and even access some of the abilities of said animals in their human form. It is a very old form of magic that predates the Ikosian invasion of Altazia, and I’m sad to say that most shifter tribes have lost the knowledge of the original rituals they used to create their kind. These days, they grow in numbers purely through mundane reproduction, with children of shifters inheriting their parent’s dual soul. There exist, however, tribes that retain the knowledge of ritual magic and soul mechanics necessary to perform the ritual in the modern age. While the pur
