If not for the woman’s small series of defiant barks she might have slipped beneath the norseman’s radar. His attention is on one of Sawtooth’s many waterways, lapping at the cool, refreshing water cleaned by earth and smooth honed stone. It chases down the fox he had devoured recently, it’s blood still dribbled on the platinum silver of his chin. His head rises, ears alert atop his skull as her barks reverberate off Sawtooth’s citadel walls. He has made his “bedding” here where the jagged peaks rise like truculent teeth of Midgard. He sleeps beneath the stars for the most part close enough to an outcropping of rock to seek for shelter when necessary but otherwise content with the small amount of shelter a nearby gnarled tree offers him. Salmon pink tongue swipes across his jowls to catch the droplets of water and clean the macabre mess he had previously left behind.

It does not take him long to find her for she stands out a bit like a sore thumb amidst the green, stone grey and brown coloration of Sawtooth. Her pelage is the color of a raven’s. Like Huginn or Munnin, he thinks. His approach is weary, with hackles raising along his nape and dorsal, a slight rise to his tail. He cannot lay official claim to Sawtooth but it has been his home for near two weeks and he has no intentions of departing it any time soon. He does not foresee his plans changing any time soon. “Who are you?” The words become redundant as he demands them over and over with each stranger that finds their way to Sawtooth where he lingers as it’s sentinel despite that both he and the spire are free. “Why are you here?” Kjalarr considers that perhaps he should alter his words from time to time so it does not feel like an interrogation he has done a thousand times but they are simple questions and ones that demand to tell him what his nose cannot.

The sable woman bears a pack scent upon the tendrils of her pelage, it wafts around him: of salt and sea and for a moment it reminds him fiercely of Stavanger Bay. Of Ankyra Sound. The ache in his chest is a harsh stab but it abates as quickly as it rises. Twice his home has failed upon the coast. The Bay during his time spent away from his family and the Sound a few months after Caiaphas’ death. His future, he knows, is not on the coast. He believes it is here on Sawtooth, at the convergence of the Gods. The Norns have led him here and whether the path he believes they have set before him comes to fruition or not remains to be seen. He is hopeful. His tenacity is great and utterly unyielding. Glacial caribbean gaze assess her unbidden, pupils narrowing within polar irises as she responds. She does not rise to his demands, instead places her own inquiry before him. There is a bird-like cant of his head and a small, coy smirk that tugs at the edges of his lips. “They are just questions,” The scarred northman responds coyly with a simple rise and fall of broad shoulders, lilting accent fills the air between them. Two can play at that game. Whether Kjalarr inherited his father's natural skill for it yet remains to be seen.

Polar, Caribbean gaze studies her sharply an abecedarian spark of beguile in the sharp shards of silver accenting the blue around his pupils. She is attractive — he would have to be blind not to see it — and the libertine feels no shame in his ways and has no true desire to change. It is some of why his marriage to Ondine dissolved so horribly. In part, it was her in what she allowed to happen to Neverwinter but it is equally his own fault, too. Kjalarr is not ready to settle down, not ready to commit for the long run though he tried (and failed) to do what was right by Arrille. There is a husky rasp to the umbra woman's voice that catches the scarred northman’s attention and draws him from his thoughts. “Perhaps,” Soon, he thinks. He hopes. Nothing is certain in life Kjalarr knows but he does know that even if he does not succeed in building an empire with Eshe that it is unlikely he will be easily uprooted from Sawtooth. It has become sacrosanct to him — a believed convergence of his Gods and he is possessive of it. Whether he can turn that possession towards what he seeks to accomplish is yet to be seen. Only the gods know and they have been infuriatingly vague and withholding with their knowledge. Even Kjalarr’s dreams have been vacant. Wisps of things that do not make sense to him and leave him with more questions than they do answers are all he receives. It is little more than white noise.

“What has brought you here? To brave the treacherous paths that bring you to the apex of the world?” For that is what it strikes him as sometimes: the apex between Midgard and the cosmos. His desires to climb the Sawtooth Spire are his own and he suspects vastly different from the lure of others.

“Mhm,” Kjalarr offers her as she repeats his poetic words back to him. It is the simplest way he has to describe what Sawtooth means to him without getting into his culture and religion. He believes it to be a convergence where the power and presence of the Norse gods linger. Sacrosanct. A holy place. Ragnar’s holy places had been Ravensblood Forest and then Stavanger Bay but Kjalarr was not his father and he has begun to learn that birthright means little to the Æsir. Just because his father discovered the Bay did not mean that Kjalarr was destined to return there to claim it. It was a hard lesson to learn, to shake off the thought that lands are congenital: a belief that has long since been ingrained within his mind. He watches as she picks up her paw and draws it across the dirt as she speaks, a movement he takes to be coy. Curious as it is not a gesture he has seen before and it’s meaning escapes him. The woman admits then about a hare that escapes her, musing that it must feel safe here and the grin that the scarred northman offers her is nothing short of predatory. “It is not safe here.” Sawtooth Spire was a harsh territory meant only for the most hardy creatures and hares are prey animals that Kjalarr has always seen as frail.