"Wait!"
Fawley came racing over on a reindeer sleigh, his voice booming from afar.
Shawn paused, then stopped using his Animagus transformation to turn his right hand into a dragon's claw. He continued silently watching the scene beneath the ice.
A minute later, the sleigh stopped before the altar, and Old Fawley leaped down.
Rather than speak to Shawn first, he dropped to his knees and once again prayed devoutly toward the altar below for quite some time.
Shawn glanced sideways at him, finding something about Old Fawley's behavior oddly incongruous.
The man was no fanatic, and his words showed little reverence for the gods of Norse mythology, yet the devotion he occasionally displayed was undeniably genuine.
Shawn weighed the possibilities. Once Old Fawley rose from the ground, he pointed down at the vertical recess in the triangular altar.
"That needs some kind of wand, doesn't it? Odin's? Thor's? Or Slytherin's?"
Old Fawley neither confirmed nor denied it.
"Perhaps any of those is possible, but Odin's and Thor's wands were sealed inside Asgard along with their alchemical equipment.
The Pure Land Society's predecessors once obtained all sorts of powerful wands. They even borrowed the Elder Wand from the Peverell family, but still couldn't get a reaction from the altar.
Now that you're here, it's up to you to solve these mysteries."
Old Fawley looked noticeably more relaxed after speaking, as though he had shifted the entire burden from his own shoulders onto Shawn's. Whatever happened now was Shawn's problem.
Shawn raised an eyebrow.
The Elder Wand's original owner had indeed been a Peverell, a member of the family featured in the story of Death and the Three Brothers in The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
The Potter Family had once been a branch of that family, which was why they