Sawtooth Spire i am; ravaged, but spirited

The Sawtooth’s peak towers above him as he roams the familiar forest and he draws in a deep breath. His claim upon Sawtooth was an almost was but one that he’s long since abandoned. He does not know anything else aside from being a leader, from being a vagabond. In many ways, that are two sides of the same coin only as a wanderer. No one can tell him what to do and that taste of unrestricted freedom is familiar. He craves it. He is selfish in wanting it for himself but his heart aches with guilt as he thinks of his son. A son he had sworn that he would make a better home for. He had considered taking the boy to Odinn’s Cove with him but for all that the boy looked like him Atli is glad that he had not; that he’d let the boy in the protection of his mother and Neverwinter Forest where he presumably still is. Odinn’s Cove would have slaughtered him. As they nearly had done him. He bears the scars and near absence of sight in his left eye as a reminder: of a battle he had fought hard and had came close to losing. A shadow darts across the vision of his left eye: and he moves his head harshly so that he can fix the hare that hops leisurely a few feet from him ( brave or stupid for not noticing him, the berserker isn’t sure ) in the sight of his good eye. He is not completely blind in his ruined eye but seeing through it is like seeing though thick, choking fog that never dissipates. He sees vague shadows like writhing smoke when things are directly in his line of sight and his far away vision is entirely gone.

It’d been horribly disorienting at first: one eye stuck between blindness and seeing as if he is connected to the world of Niflheim and Midgard all at once. A blessing, the seer of the Cove had told him as she treated him. A curse is more like it. He had to entirely re-train himself to function, to hunt, to fight with this disability and even now he is not entirely where he had hoped to be. As a child, he’d seen the world in a monochrome spectrum of black, white and grey and when he’d outgrown it he’d grown horribly used to having both eyes and to see a full spectrum of color; but he hasn’t forgotten what it was like to live in the world of shadows and thus he had a slight advantage.

The scarred northman lets the hare continue on, not hungry enough to give chase to it. The daylight is waning as dusk settles over the Wilds and he thinks it is better to bunk down here in Sawtooth for the night and that he will get back to his mission when the sun begins to rise the following morning.