The first day at the fourth altar's location was work.
He rose with the forest, not at any particular hour, just when the quality of the darkness above the canopy shifted from the static dark of deep night to the moving dark of pre-dawn, the kind of change that registered even through closed eyes.
He ate what he had and drank from a stream the root formations were channeling.
Then he summoned Fenrir.
Not for combat—or rather, not only for combat. For tracking. The fourth altar's section of forest was unknown to him, and unknown terrain had unknown residents, and the fastest way to find the residents of unknown terrain was to move through it with a creature whose nose had never failed to locate what it was looking for.
Fenrir found the first group within twenty minutes.
