The ground shook. Islands sank into steaming seas, pulled down into the world forge. New lands of black stone were born to replace them, carried to the surface on upwellings of magma. Seas boiled, sending scalding fogs rolling across titanic waves and tides that swamped the highest land.

The Hrafnkel sailed northwards, over the open seas and plains.

'We return at the time of life,' said Kva. 'The wakefulness of Fenris will aid us.'

Tracts of lands buried beneath white snows for two Terran years turned a dazzling green, and though fires burned wildly across dry forests, they were too vast to die. Upon the plains of Asaheim herds of animals thousands strong moved across fruitful plains. Antlers dashed in the run. Predators grew fat on stolen calves.

The sea was stained with rusty brown streaks where billions of tons of kryll fed, bred and died. The water churned with monsters snatching millions of these tiny creatures up in cavernous mouthfuls. As on land, where the sea herds went, there were also things with teeth and claws.

'It will not last,' Kva went on. 'The solstice is days away and the short road to Helwinter beckons. We must be quick.'

Fire and frenzied life ravaged the surface, and through it all mankind struggled. In this hellish maelstrom men and women lived and died, competing with each other for the limited space in which to settle. As their home islands sank they took to the sea in wyrm— and wolf-boat. If they survived the water and the weather, if they evaded the monsters that swam the oceans, if they managed to overcome the rival tribes, they might find a new place to raise their halls. They might survive, they might live, but they would never prosper. Never that.

The struggles of the populace meant little to the Vlka Fenryka. The Fenrisians were heated by winter, hammered by storm, quenched in Helwinter ice, hardened for service in the Legion. So it had always been. For the Sky Warriors, this was but the natural cycle of things. The Rout descended to their lofty halls with greater things on their minds than the ordeals of mere men.

Nothing was left unsettled by the summer, not even the domain of Leman Russ. Not even the days and nights, for though Asaheim was athwart the pole, it could not rely on regular portions of dark and light. The Wolfs Eye tugged and pulled, tearing at the earth as a wolf tears at its victims, rocking it on its axis. A summer night at the Fang might last for a week, the next for a few hours. But the mountain stood firm in the face of the sun, defying it to break its stone and soften its roots, to pull it down and melt it in the world's troubled core.