Altar remembers nothing of the days before the sea and even less about his time within its depths. The last clear memory was of himself standing beside one of Thord’s runestones, scraping the velveteen from his antlers. Yes, Thord. Where was Thord? Despite the importance his mind insists upon, the name blows through his thoughts but still it cannot be tied down and it is swept away again by his still storming memories.

Dawn is beginning to break, sending swelling flames of colors across the sky and brightening the shadowed forest. The horn-crowned roan moves deeper into the unfamiliar woods, beyond bramble bushes and mushroom patches, listening to the footfalls of the one who followed. “You’re very loud,” she says, Altar drawing himself around to face the mouth piece of the terse, yet decidedly feminine voice.

The yellow eyed mare wore a headband of colored spikes and something near her flank glowed faintly in the tempered light, she was both a strange and curious sight. It is here that he reminds himself that he is salt-sick from the water and could be having visions, although his other senses seem to prove otherwise. Altar has never even seen another of his kind with horns, never mind what it was that grew from her mottled head. He shows nothing of shame or discretion as his gaze keeps being drawn back to the top of her head, “lost?” He takes a moment to answer and when he does his voice is guttural and resolved, “never lost,” he says firmly. “I am always where I am intended to be,” he says, his eyes moving curiously across her hairless, malformed tail, “what is the name of this place?” He asks, skin quivering as his tail swats away the wound flies that suckle in the blistered and cracked places down his burned back and flanks.


The soft rustling of wings brings another yellow eyed mare, as fascinating and peculiar as the first and for the first-time Altar considers if he might be dead. Dead and wandering through Freyja’s Fólkvangr fields – but that is no place for him, not he who burned for the pagans.

Again, his lack of tact is palpable as he has to tear his eyes away from the wings at her sides to meet her gaze, the brief eye contact bullied away as his attention is pulled towards the raven that now peeks from between her ears. Altar is shoveled over with thoughts  of Huginn and Munninn, Odin’s great ravens that rested on his shoulders forevermore.  She gives her name yet his eyes remain rapt upon the bird that shifts atop her head and he wonders if she knows that she wears an omen. “My name is Altar,” he offers, his flat black gaze sliding between the two yellow-eyed strangelings that came to him amongst the shadows.

An omen that could mean great power, or death.