Barrow Fields permafrost giants

There: a ghostly black wolf with yellow eyes materialized out of thin air.

Skífa stopped midstep and cautiously squared his shoulders. He stared at the stranger with an intense hunter's expression, wary and apprehensive at first.

Then he prowled one single step closer. Then another. His ears pointed stiffly forward. His head lowered and his hackles bristled like pine needles on his shoulder blades. He smelled the other wolf, now. He saw the tension they carried in their body.

Skífa smiled, barely exposing the points of his teeth between his dark lips. The rigidity in his shoulders eased and his hackles laid down. "I thought you might be a ghost," he confided, amusement in the low sandy tones of his voice, "... Or a god." He almost chuckled. But for his apparent sense of good humor, he exuded little warmth or kindness, and he continued to watch the stranger with hawkish intensity. "What is this place?"