His Indian au pair used to tell about the country her parents had immigrated from; how panthers would come down fromt he hills during the monsoon season to dwell among human villages. The family's Zulu housekeeper once terrified his sisters with ghost stories about men who turned into hyenas and leopards and stalked the veld in the shape of beasts. Zulu never call the leopard by his true name, iNgwe, and Josephine Ngubane, as fondly regarded as she was and familiar as she was allowed to be, never called Niels' aunt Barbara anything other than 'ma'am.' As though there was something about the society matron that was deserving of greater deference, even beyond the capricious temprament everyone came to expect.

The revelation came in his early teenage years - on a family vacation, he watched one of his female cousins, a bit of an angry tomboy, storm out of the rented house and, before she hit the front gate, contort and shift - growing sleeker, turning into the leopard whose symbolism had touched his youth and vanish into the veld, only to return well after dark with her clothes in tatters. And, hidden in the attic above with one of his composition notebooks full of meticulous lists, he listened to that same aunt Barbara, normally so remote and unfeeling, patiently and warmly explain to her terrified daughter what was happening to her. As he grew into adulthood, he was half-compelled and half-terrified by the notion that he might wake up equally less than human, more than leopard. But as the years passed, that change never came about, and he didn't see it happen in anyone else. So, eventually, he moved on.

Instead of turning up for his required 2 years of compulsary national military service, he enrolled at the SADF military academy out of secondary school. Influenced, perhaps, by a couple of factors in his life - his older brother's death in a bus bombing, a schoolteacher's encouraging nationalist rhetoric, and the secret knowledge that he was apart from the common masses of his peers already. His uncanny eye for detail and inquisitive nature made him a perfect candidate for intelligence work. He graduated just in time to catch the tail end of the 30-year Bush War; seeing action in both Angola and SouthWest Africa/Namibia. During the middle of his first rainy season there, sifting reports in a tent on the middle of the pleateau, he stumbled across some information that would eventually guide him down the path he'd take the rest of his life completing. Even after he'd left the army behind.

In a nearby medical encampnment, an ops medic pulled a bullet out of a casualty that bore some odd engravings on its casing. It went down as a curiosity in the footnote or a report which eventually, along with the bullet, wound up in Niels' hands. He examined the markings carefully and wasn't as quick to dismiss 'native superstition' as quickly as the rest of his unit.

The entire plateau was logged in mud when he finally pieced together enough intercepted transcripts and reports to lead himself to a thatched-roof hut in the shadow of the Brandberg. He spent two weeks stalking around in the bush, monitoring the Ovambo cattle raider that lived in it. Made note of both the men who visited him, and left with their pockets full of bullets, and the lithe, dark woman who flitted the village's edge, disturbing only the ever-present chickens with her passage. Searching the hut while both were away, he discovered the interior walls covered in glyphs and markings - some blocky and primitive, others spiralling and indecipherable, even to the cryptographers back at post. He made meticulous lists, notes of everything, and, when he was trying to keep dry in his tent in the evenings and spare time, he worked with his own ammunition, a scalpel nicked from the medical tent, and a lot of concentration. He might have chalked up the way his aim seemed to become truer to coincidence, if he couldn't feel something different. The thready pulse of that intangible world he'd recognized living alongside his entire life.

His hard work both came back to haunt him and pay off when the unit he was attached to was ambushed by SWAPO guerillas. Partially because he was distracted, low on focus, and misreading reports. That added magical emphasis to his shooting skills bought him just enough time to help coordinate troops when the other officer went down and turn the tide. And when the dust had settled and casualties carried away, he found a single shell casing that had been shot into his tent by a sniper. With a zig-zagged and spiralling glyph etched into it.

In the sweep of the area that followed, he made sure to return to that hut near the mountain. Dispatching the man with one shot, and his elusive companion with another. And then he watched, with mingled fascination and horror, her lifeless body shift of its own accord. Coming to rest on the ground in the shape of a cheetah.

If his tour in SouthWest Africa was inspirational, though, Angola was a nightmarish hellhole. On the other side of the conflict this time - working with UNITA rebels against the Marxist government, he was captured once by a collaboration of Cuban and East German forces, and barely managed to escape. His then-wife would cite the psychological repercussions of the incident - one he never speaks of at any length - as one of the reasons for the gradual dissolution of their marriage. After returning to 'the States', he was posted under the command of a domineering English-speaking officer. Major Stuart Fowler had far more houding - that untenable attitude and strong sense of military discipline - than anyone Niels had met in the bush and most of his instructors at the academy, and he let noone rest easily. Least of all his junior officers. Their borderline antagonistic relationship carried them through a few places, until Niels, monitoring a rooftop in Zaire, caught his CO wearing the shape of a lion. And, whether it was in exchange for discretion, or grudging respect for the younger man's tenacity and mental fortitude, Fowler never lead on. Either way, their working relation improved considerably - the Major gaining a useful tool in Niels' growing sorcerous capability, and Niels gaining no small amount of useful information on the forbidden mystery that he'd been chasing since childhood. Albeit from piecing it together from all of Stuart's off-cuff remarks. That working arrangement would see both of them through a couple of promotions and all the way up to the ANC taking power in South Africa in 1994. Their falling-out was abrupt and vicious, and neither of them has ever spoken of the reasons to anyone else.

Shortly afterwards, Niels resigned his Army comission for the murky realm of the private sector. And it was around that time that his cousin Antjie - the tumultuous girl whose First Change had set his curiosity ablaze all of those years ago - approached him, almost out of nowhere. Sometime in those intervening years, she had grown up - grown sleek, and patient, and wise, and she sat him down and told him she was concerned for him. It was an awkward conversation on both ends - both the Bagheera and the sorcerer dancing the edges of everything, careful not to reveal too much to the other. Eventually, Antjie's more direct nature won out, and she started talking - filling in the gaps of his assembled knowledge that she thought he 'might need'. He listened to her allegories about siblings and jealous lovers. Corrupting anger made manifest, and the need to balance ones darker impulses with higher yearnings. He replied by giving her a square of engraved metal that had let him seperate truths from lies in a few debriefing rooms, and she seemed relatively satisfied. Though it wasn't until they'd parted that he realized she might have been giving him a warning.

For the most part, he's taken that warning to heed. The places he's traveled, things he's done and magic he's harnessed have all left their indelible marks on him, but he keeps himself far enough from the edge of grace to avoid falling from it completely. He's made tenuous contact with other Folk since then - and other Kinfolk, including the perimeter of the globe-spanning Bagheera Kin fellowship, but all save a select few often fall by the wayside in favor of his own search. For some kind of enlightment, or simple power, or maybe just greater control over an undeniably useful tool.. His own blood relations make up most of that number, along with a few rare outsiders - including a fateful encounter in a Cameroonian rainstorm that drifts in and out of his path at whim. He'd never admit out loud that having contact with someone whose path is similar to his own gives him any kind of direction beyond what he draws from within - the truth might be a little off-center of that.