'What do you want, bone shaker?' said Bjorn. He could not keep his eyes from the beast people drifting like mist from table to table.

'What do I want? It is not what I want. It is what your wyrd requires of you,' said Kva.

Bjorn let out a bitter laugh, halfway to the howl of misery of a wolf rejected by his pack.

'My wyrd asks a lot of me.'

'It will ask more of you. Much more,' said Kva sternly. He did not approve of Bjorn's self-pity.

Kva held out his hand in a fist, palm down. The power armour shook with palsy.

'Why?' said Bjorn in despair. 'Why must I be separated from my brothers? Why must I bear this burden? Why not a jarl, or a gothi? I am nothing.'

'This is why,' said Kva. He turned his hand upwards, and opened it.

Upon Kva's palm was a rune scorched into a wooden tile. The symbol had many meanings. While its mystic significance could be interpreted accurately only by the gothi, its mundane meaning was known by all the Vlka Fenryka.

Bear. It was the rune for bear.

Kva laid the rune on the table next to Bjorn's rough apotropaic eye.

'Tomorrow is the solstice, when Fenris is closest to the Wolfs Eye,' said Kva. 'Tomorrow, the door to the Underverse cracks ajar.'

Bjorn's eyes widened. Kva's ravaged features filled a world crowded with glowering spirit animals.

'You will come to the Krakgard with the primarch.'

'What?'

'Tomorrow.'

Bjorn lifted his head suddenly from the table, coming awake from a drunken stupor. Already, his oolitic kidney was purging the toxins from his blood, and his head was clear. The feast continued as it should, full of a warrior's joy at life. He blinked.

For a moment he thought he must have slept, for there was no sign of Kva in the hall, but his eye fell on the rune tile on the table, its scorched lines challenging him. Instinctively, Bjorn reached for his mjod horn. He raised it to his lips, but stopped, and slowly held it from him and poured the mjod away onto the floor.

Before he left, he scratched out the eye on the table.