"The Lord of the Lichyard," says Charles Dexter Ward in his self-conceived and self-willed grimoire, "appeareth in the form of an impossibly tall albino man clad in the blackest armor, with both hands wrapped around the pommel of a greatsword, whose blade and hilt are also of the darkest black; or he appeareth in the form of a wolf the length and heighth of a racehorse, fur blacker than black, teeth that glint pale and white in candlelight; or as a rotting corpse of regular height all in black, his bloodless skin now and then acquiring a greenish hew when exposed to firelight, surrounded by a murder of crows or ravens who flit about him, landing now and then on hands, shoulders, and arms, and snatching his dead flesh as it falls, or picking it up from the ground. And in all these forms he shall have the pink eyes of an albino, and a grim continence, and the manner of a man who has seen too much of life"