The clip begins with John Charming’s voice doing a voice-over.
JOHN (VO): Previously on Tales of the Pax Arcana:
[CU of John Charming standing in a river up to his waist. It is night, and he is stripped down to his boxer shorts. He is leanly muscled and scarred, holding a crude staff in his hands while a longbow is slung over his shoulder. He is facing a patch of shifting darkness where a wila hides in the woods at the edge of the water.]
WILA: What are you?
JOHN: Would you believe room service?
WILA: There are no rooms here. And you didn’t bring me anything. In fact, you took something away from me and tried to kill me.
JOHN: I didn’t say I was very good at it.
WILA: What is this really about?
JOHN: Perhaps this is about the fact that my name is John Charming. Perhaps my family has protected humanity from things like you for more than a thousand years. Perhaps, sometimes, on nights like this, I remember who I really am.
[The wila’s voice begins to thicken, to deepen. There is a sense of shadows growing larger.]
WILA: Are you telling me that a Charming still lives, and he’s a werewolf?
JOHN: I did say perhaps.
Cut to a scene where John is naked in a forest, surrounded by growling wolves, on his hands and knees. He is changing into a wolf.
Cut to a scene where a six-foot-tall athletic-looking blond female, Sig Norresdotter, stands in the doorway of a bar while the narrator has another voice-over:
JOHN (VO): She smelled wrong. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I’d ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn’t entirely human. I later found out that her name was Sig.
Cut to a scene in a dark alley where John is unarmed and facing a vampire coming at him with a machete. The vampire’s fangs are bared. A spear flies over John’s shoulder and impales the vampire so that the metal point is emerging from his back and the wooden haft is lodged directly in his heart. Sig’s voice reverberates from some point above and behind John.
SIG: I’m a valkyrie.
Cut to a scene where John, Sig, and a vampire hunter named Stanislav Dvornik are talking to Ted Cahill, a homicide detective, over breakfast:
JOHN [reaching for a cup of coffee]: Has Sig told you about the Pax Arcana?
CAHILL: That’s the big “don’t ask, don’t tell” magic, right? She told me that before the elves went back to where they came from, they made the spell to protect all the little half-elf bastards they were leaving behind. The knights are like magical bouncers or something.
JOHN: It’s a little more complicated than that. Knights are immune to magical compulsions because they’re already under a spell called a geas, a magically binding oath. The knights swore to not harm any supernatural beings who aren’t threatening the Pax Arcana, and to eliminate any who are as quietly as possible.
A montage of scenes where monsters are being eliminated follows. Cut to a scene by a riverbank where a watery humanoid soaked in Greek fire is screaming and thrashing as it catches fire.
Cut to a scene where a pug-nosed humanoid with purple blotches on its skin has been impaled by a copper pipe from behind.
Cut to a scene where John and Sig are sitting on the ground with their backs against a suburban house in a lower-class residential neighborhood, staying low so that they cannot be seen through the window they are poised beneath.
JOHN: I’m not going to be able to stay in Clayburg after we deal with this hive, Sig. You know that, right? It would be too dangerous for both of us.
Cut to a scene where John and Sig are making out in a parked car on a dark street in front of a health food store.
Cut to a scene where John is in a forest reading a letter. Sig’s voice is recounting the words.
SIG (VO): I have feelings for you, very strong feelings, but that’s why you’re not good for me right now. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.
Cut to a scene where John is standing on the doorstep of Sig’s new apartment on a wintry night. John is holding a red rose.
SIG: You realize that if you pursue this, you’re going to get punched a lot.
JOHN: I’ll heal.
SIG [leaning forward to kiss him]: Yes, you will.
Opening credits begin to roll to the sound of Eminem’s “The Monster” featuring Rihanna.