Character design by  Kate-Venom

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There are a few more characters I want to populate Victor's (i.e. Dagskwerhe's) home era, particularly the period spanning his leaving home and finding the Box.

Throughout this time he was haunted by the visions he received during his ill-fated meeting with the Seer. Never being one to take bad news lying down, he decided to seek out a second opinion.

Victor immediately felt a rapport with Faergi, who like Victor appeared to be a foreigner: an arctic fox in a land too far south for him. Although perhaps it was a genetic mutation that caused his coat to remain white all year round. Shamans often had rather distinctive appearances.

Even his name, which simply means "white", suggested he was something unusual. A smilodon wouldn't call his brother "Big-Tooth" after all. At the same time it might have been a common tongue metonym he gave himself for communicating with Victor.

Whatever he was, Faergi could see that Victor was both a troubled young man and... unversed in the etiquette of dealing with shamans. For one thing he had no payment to offer, and Faergi didn't work for free. But Faergi had heard of the Seer and the mere fact that Victor had wound up here made his case worth investigating. He'd work out his compensation later.

Victor's true tragedy was that his tribe had been kept isolated from the outside world. As a result Victor had no idea what a shaman was supposed to be, which was a holistic healer—part-doctor, part-therapist, part-diviner. The Seer was more like a parasitical theocrat, the decrepit high priest of a religion centered around himself. The smilodon had been mis-raised, led to believe that the gods were petty, vengeful things who twisted fate for their own amusement when they weren't protecting the interests of the powerful.

At any rate, Faergi understood what Victor had gone through and assured him that even if what he'd seen was true, it was not a declaration of things that must happen but a prophecy in the proper sense: that is to say, simultaneously a foretelling and a warning. If Victor was afraid of his own destiny, all he had to do to change it was to display the proper pieties. Simply by embarking on his mission he was already showing great piety for his kin. In fact the worst thing he could do was continue dwelling on his vision, because his obsession was interfering with his important task.

But Victor was too ashamed (or too immature to articulate) that he had both volunteered for the task in bad faith and that certain elements of his experience had... followed him here. He instead insisted to Faergi that the Seer's "prophecy" was actually a curse, and curses could be reversed, couldn't they?

What do you do when the patient insists he is sick but you don't see anything wrong with him? There's something that needs healing, but the hard part is getting him to acknowledge what it is.