Altan has a greater need for sincerity than most would credit him for and, rattled, answers without snarling himself in even a quick calculation of whether it would be funnier not to. “The vision - the weirdest thing, the first thing I noticed was that I was wearing a coat? A big fancy one, like I was making a joke of the term dog-lord. It was somewhere in the Marches, I didn’t know where. A battlefield. A bad one.”

“Not as bad as Ostagar,” he adds thoughtfully.

“And there was an abomination talking to me like we were old friends. And I was talking back in that way. Somehow that was stranger than the fact that he was holding a bloody head in his hand - by the hair.”