A Foregone Hound is a tall, gaunt hound like a greyhound grown to the height of a calf, deep-chested and narrow, its short coat the grey of dawn and so smooth it seems polished. Its eyes are white with a ring of gold, like the eyes of the zone’s Seers, and they look past whatever they watch, at what it is about to do. It moves slowly, as if already walking a path it has seen, and is found sitting more often than running. It does not bark or growl. The only sound near a pack is the zone’s ticking. It casts sharp, unmoving shadows.

They live along the zone’s ridges and cliff edges, near the precipice where the future hangs in images, in small packs, and are seldom seen anywhere but where they are waiting.

A hound does not chase. It sees, as the zone lets everything see, the line a traveller’s future most heavily bends along, and it goes to the place on that line where it will meet them, and sits, and waits. Whatever the traveller does to escape, if it is what the line foresaw, brings them there. At the meeting a pack kills quickly and without a sound.

They see the most weighted future and are always where it leads. They cannot be outrun, out-hidden, or outwaited, since running, hiding, and waiting are all on the line. They are not fate: the zone’s future is near-certain, not fixed, and a traveller who breaks the line, by an act it did not foresee and at the zone’s rising cost, may come to a place where no hound is waiting. Those who do it seldom do it twice.

Pups are born on the ridges and are said to open their eyes already looking ahead. They live long and grow slowly, and an old hound is said to see further than a young one.

The Seers keep them, or the hounds keep the Seers; travellers cannot tell which. The zone’s own advice is the only defence: close your eyes, do not look at the horizon, and act without foresight, as the Blind do. Those who come to the Edge to learn their future are in the most danger, since the clearer they see their line, the clearer the hounds see it.

Travellers bring home the belief that the hounds are fate itself and that whoever they wait for is already dead, and on the Material Plane, at cliffs and observatories where Horizon-Gates open, a grey dog sitting on the road ahead is taken for a death foreseen. Scholars who argue the Fate-Songline Doctrine in the highest circles cite the hounds, by report, on both sides of the question (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

The songs are full of warriors who met a grey dog on the road before their last battle, and of the one who drew his sword on it, killed it, and lived; whether the doom was broken or only delayed, the song does not say.