You just know. The evil shows itself.

Every surviving hunter tradition treats identification before engagement as first principle, and records — by the lineages that end without explanation — what happens when it is skipped. The reconstructed framework has two phases that must not be collapsed. Initial identification is surveillance at distance: gait, thermal deficit, the pallor of a porphyric film, a lunar-phase absence from work, a feeding pattern in a parish. Verification is close-range and clinical. The traditions are emphatic because collapsing the two, under a crowd's urgency or a practitioner's certainty, is the common fatal error.

What you are verifying is tissue, not wickedness. Cool skin against a 37-degree room. A mirror that returns less than it should. Dentition that does not sit right at rest. For the Lycian, between moons: CK that looks like rhabdomyolysis, sleep architecture wrecked on opposition nights, the enthesopathic markers of a skeleton that has been used as a hydraulic chassis. The pharmacopoeia is for after the diagnosis. The diagnosis is why some practitioners lived long enough to write the next line.