The shieldlike object on his forearm turned out to be an oval of obsidian stone, glossy and black, mounted in a leather frame. I didn’t know much about Azzie religion, but I did remember one piece of trivia from Rafael’s "discovering my roots" phase. The god Tezcatlipoca was said to have a similar "mirror" in which he could read the fate of any human. In a way, it made an odd kind of sense to find a similar object on the arm of a man who had been summoning a prophesying spirit.