Blackfeather Woods death gazes in all directions, as curious as a hand, with blind eyes

She invites him to cross the borders and the berserker does as he is bid to do ( quite a change of pace from what he’s been used to ) and cross over the borders of pungent blood and littered with bones. Such displays do not faze him — after what he had lowered himself to do to survive the famine Atli knows there is nothing that can faze him anymore. There is no limit he would not cross to survive, even if it meant cannibalism. He knows the taste of wolf flesh, sinew and blood, knows it’s texture and knows that it nurtures just as well as any other meat. He’d contemplated eating his daughters to dispose of their bodies when he’d had to kill them, to put them out of their suffering. He didn’t simply because he hadn’t wanted to explain the lack of graves to Ondine; didn’t feel like going in to depth as to why his moral compass no longer pointed in a righteous direction. Atli hasn’t been righteous in a very long time: leading Odinn’s Cove had shown him that. It unlocked his mind from the bothersome constraints of high morals. The laws of the northmen are very different from the laws of the more refined wolves of the Wilds.

He focuses back in on Potema, keeping her in his good eye, his frosted, milky eye taking in the shadows of trees that writhe and dissipate like smoke. She introduces the place as Blackfeather Woods. “Vaati called it the dark woods,” Atli remembers aloud, struggling for a moment as to why there was need to hide the true name of the forest behind a similar alias. Northmen aren’t known for hiding, admittedly. He does not ask Potema out right if he is meant to keep what he sees, hears and does in these Woods secret to those outside of it’s ranks but it is heavily implied in his recollection of how Vaati had concealed the true name of the Woods from him.

“In my culture priests and priestess are as highly revered as the Gods themselves,” Atli states as he keeps pace with her, a flirtatious note to his tone. “Is that true here?” because I wouldn’t mind worshipping you. He does not speak this aloud, either, but he makes no means to hide that he is attracted to her without the saccharine lure of estrus. He does not forget the enigmatic night of passion they shared to conceive Vaati; dominated by hormones and temptations that neither could ignore or not. It was memorable and it stands out against the other nights he’s shared.