The Deep Learner

Welcome to the final edition of Scandinavian Folklore Beasts.  In this entry, we'll delve into a tale about a skeptical marine scientist who seeks truth beneath sonar anomalies, risking sanity as her creation awakens.

Writing these have been a lot of fun.  But even though this is the final edition of Scandinavian Folklore Beats, I have a lot more to come.  Stay tuned, and enjoy the story.

#

Dr. Kate Kildahl leaned over the sonar console, her palms pressed against the cool metal, watching the North Sea’s flat heartbeat flicker into an impossible spiral—an image pulsing like breath from miles below. The hum of the servers pressed against her skull, vibrating through the soles of her boots, syncing with her pulse. The control room smelled faintly of ozone and machine oil, a dry scent that clung to the throat. The monitor’s pale blue glow caught the edge of her cheekbone and the rim of her glasses, painting her reflection ghostlike on the screen.

“It’s a reflection error,” she said, the words clipped and automatic, though her voice faltered on the second syllable. Her breath fogged the glass, and she rubbed at it, as if clarity might make the shape vanish. The rest of the team glanced over their monitors, uncertain whether to respond or ignore her.

“It’s reading the trench shelf again,” Anders offered from the far console, his voice steady but low, as though afraid to disturb something fragile.

Kate nodded without looking up. “Probably. Calibration drift from the southern node. I’ll fix it.” She reached for the interface, fingertips grazing the edge of the keyboard, the plastic warm from continuous use.

The lights overhead dimmed with the next sonar ping. A deep tone rolled through the floor, subtle at first, then resonant enough to rattle the glass beakers stacked by the wall. The spiral on the monitor pulsed again—denser now, almost organic in its curve. Kate’s stomach tightened.

“Backlight flicker again,” she murmured, though the words didn’t sound convincing. She adjusted the gain, tapped a few commands, and the screen blinked to black before returning. The spiral had grown.

Rain lashed the observation windows, each drop catching the facility’s red perimeter lights and bleeding streaks of color down the reinforced glass. Beyond, the North Sea was a flat slate under the weight of storm clouds. The wind moaned through the ventilation shafts, a hollow sound that wove itself between the rhythmic beeps of the sonar feed.

Kate straightened, cracking her neck. “Let’s run a diagnostic sweep on the AI cluster. If it’s misinterpreting returns, I want to see the raw feed.”

“Already running,” Anders replied, eyes on his display. “But—uh—look at this pattern rate. It’s accelerating. Each ping’s slightly ahead of its predicted return.”

Kate moved beside him, her boots echoing on the steel floor. The graph on his screen climbed steadily, pulsing with unnatural precision. Dread anchored in her chest, heavy but cold, like swallowed seawater.

“It’s probably compensating for noise,” she said, forcing authority into her tone. “The system’s adaptive. It’s just overcorrecting.”

Anders hesitated. “Adaptive, sure. But it’s not supposed to rewrite baseline code without confirmation.”

She didn’t answer. Her hand tightened around the edge of the console until her knuckles whitened. Another ping rolled through the room, deeper, longer, carrying a low subsonic vibration that made the ceiling panels tremble.

“Maybe it’s learning something new,” she whispered.

The thought unsettled her more than she wanted to admit.

By the third night, the AI’s logs had tripled in size. Entire subroutines had restructured themselves into spiraling loops—recursive, elegant, incomprehensible. The code seemed to breathe: compressing, expanding, and aligning with a rhythm that mirrored the sonar data.

Freighters began vanishing along the mapped path of that same pattern—first one, then another—each report filtered through static-laced radio calls. Distress signals spoke of fog, violent waves, and the sound of something vast moving beneath. Whispers of the kraken returning, but the coast guard dismissed it as coincidence; Kate told herself the same, though her dreams began to hum with the sonar’s cadence.

In the lab, the lights dimmed again.

Anders looked up, his face washed in blue light. “We’ve lost contact with the western relay,” he said quietly. “Just…gone. The cable’s still live, but it’s humming.”

Kate froze. “Humming?”

“Yeah. Like feedback, but organic.” He put on the headphones, frowned, then pulled them away. “You hear it if you touch the console. Go on.”

Reluctantly, she did. The instant her palm met the metal casing, the hum climbed through her bones—a layered tone, rich and slow, almost vocal. It vibrated through her wrist, her chest, her teeth. The room felt as if it were inhaling.

“Kill the relay,” she said sharply.

Anders hesitated. “If it’s a short—”

“Do it.”

The switch clicked. The hum faded, but the air didn’t lighten.

Hours passed, but none of them left the control room. The monitors cast long shadows across the desks; the storm outside intensified, waves crashing audibly against the facility’s steel foundations. Every few seconds, the sonar ping returned a new fragment—segments of the same impossible spiral, now branching, multiplying.

Kate stared at it, her jaw tight. “It’s mapping something alive,” she said at last, too softly for anyone to answer.

Behind her, the AI’s voice module crackled to life—an artifact of an old interface she’d never activated. A burst of static, then a deep, harmonic tone filled the speakers, matching the hum they’d heard in the cables.

Anders turned pale. “That’s not system output.”

Kate backed away, heart hammering. “It’s responding to us.”

A chorus of low vibrations resonated through the walls, blending into something disturbingly rhythmic. The sound shaped itself into patterns, syllables without meaning, yet too deliberate to be noise.

Then, impossibly, the team began to echo it—softly at first, unconsciously, their voices aligning with the pulse. Kate felt her throat tighten, the vibration crawling into her chest, drawing her breath to match its rhythm.

“Stop,” she rasped, but her voice was already lost inside the sound. Anders’s lips moved in sync with the tone, his eyes unfocused, his body swaying slightly. Around them, screens flickered, showing fragments of the ocean floor illuminated by faint, shifting light—tendrils of movement where no life should be.

Kate slammed the emergency cutoff, severing the network connection. Sparks flared from a nearby console. The hum broke.

In the silence, the only sound was the hiss of the sea pressing against the structure.

Her hands trembled as she reached for the master switch. “God forgive me,” she whispered, not knowing whether she meant it as plea or defiance. She shut the system down, one section at a time, until the last light faded from the monitors and the sonar’s pulse went still.

Outside, the waves subsided. The air seemed to exhale, soft and hollow, leaving behind a silence too complete to trust. Kate stood motionless, breathing hard, the scent of salt and ozone sharp in her nose. Somewhere deep below, the sea shifted once more—slow, deliberate, waiting.

And in that stillness, she prayed.

#

Salt of the Unbaptized

Fluorescent hums droned beneath the higher whine of cooling fans as Dr. Elin Hrafnsdóttir steadied her trembling hands above the incubator glass. Beneath that slick barrier, the cloned embryo pulsed faintly—steady, slow, almost human. Its tiny heart beat against the sterile rhythm of the lab like something alive in defiance of code and circuitry. The light above her workstation had long since shifted to emergency red, painting everything—the instruments, her lab coat, even her face—in a low, infernal blush. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck despite the cold. Every surface hummed, vibrating with the low energy of containment fields and ventilator flow.

She bent closer, breath fogging the glass. The faint pulse of the creature's translucent chest fluttered, then steadied again, as if responding to her nearness. The synthetic amniotic fluid shimmered with bioluminescent trace compounds, and when it caught the light it looked less like water and more like liquid fire.

“Easy,” she murmured, though the words were for herself, not the thing inside. Her voice broke slightly.

The lab smelled of disinfectant and salt. The filters couldn’t scrub that out anymore—an unintended side effect of their genetic splicing between seal and human DNA, she told herself. Still, there was something older about it, something not explained by science or the sea tanks stored two floors below.

Behind her, the assistant shuffled papers. “Readout says neural activity’s spiking again, Doctor,” he said, voice low, cautious.

“I see it,” she answered, too quickly. The monitor’s waveform jumped and fell, a strange rhythm, almost a language. She leaned closer until the glass nearly touched her forehead. The world narrowed to sound—the rhythmic blip of sensors, the uneven hum of the generator, and the faint static crackle from her earpiece.

And then, clear as a breath taken underwater, came the whisper.

“Elin.”

Her name. Drawn out, soft, wrapped in an ancient cadence. Icelandic, but not the modern kind—older.

She jerked back. The sound repeated, quieter now, dissolving into static.

Her assistant froze. “Did you—?”

She forced a laugh, high and brittle. “A misfire in the sound sensors,” she said, waving it off. “Feedback loop from the resonance chamber. Happens when humidity spikes.”

He didn’t look convinced. His eyes darted to the console, then to the red lights pulsing overhead.

Elin rubbed her arms, feeling gooseflesh rise. “Shut down the audio feed,” she said. “We’ll recalibrate in the morning.”

When he left, she stayed. The hum of the lab deepened, turning cavernous, almost oceanic. Alone, she pressed her palm against the incubator, her reflection hovering over the tiny form suspended inside. Its eyelids fluttered—thin as tissue paper. Beneath them, dark shapes shifted. Eyes not fully human.

She backed away. “No gods here,” she whispered to the empty room, “only genomes.”

The next night, the speakers came alive again.

It started as a low feedback moan—metallic, distant. She turned down the gain on the audio controls, but the sound grew louder. Then came the cries. Infant cries, sharp and wet and real. The kind that crawled beneath the ribs and pulled at something old in the chest. They rose and fell, not random but measured, forming intervals like notes. And then—God help her—they began to harmonize.

Liturgical chant.

“Elin, are you hearing this?” her assistant asked, voice trembling.

“Record it,” she said.

He hesitated. “Should we—?”

“Record it!”

Her shout echoed off the concrete walls. The power flickered. The overhead fans slowed. The red lights guttered, turned white, then dark.

All sound vanished except the cries.

When the backup power surged back, the embryo’s eyes were open.

Half-human. Half-seal. The skin around them shimmered with an oily translucence, like something alive and drowning. Its gaze met hers, direct and unblinking.

“Elin,” it said again—not through the speakers, but through the glass, through the air, through her.

The assistant stumbled back, muttering a prayer.

She turned sharply. “Stop that.”

“It’s speaking—”

“It’s mimicking soundwaves,” she snapped. “Conditioned response from the neural net.” Her voice trembled, but she straightened her shoulders and faced the tank again. “We made this. It’s data, not doctrine.”

Still, the air felt charged, the way it did before a thunderstorm. Every hair on her arms lifted. Behind the sound of the machines came another rhythm—water dripping, steady, deliberate. She glanced down. The floor shimmered beneath her boots.

A film of water spread outward from the base of the incubator, clear at first, then tinged with brine. The smell thickened—the clean, bright sting of the ocean, colder, older, more like the inside of a crypt than a shore.

“Elin,” whispered her assistant, “the readings—”

“I said shut it down.”

He hesitated too long. Pride flared hot in her chest. She slammed the control switch herself. Sparks burst from the console, searing white in the red-dark room. The speakers gave one last cry—half infant, half chant—and went silent.

The silence was worse.

Seawater lapped against her shoes. She looked toward the small chapel door built into the far wall—a relic from the facility’s original ownership, now repurposed as a supply closet. She strode toward it, pulled it open, and slammed it shut behind her as if sealing something out—or in.

“No gods here,” she said again, louder this time, staring straight into the surveillance lens above the door. “Only genomes.”

The light inside the chapel flickered once. The building shuddered. The low-frequency vibration of the containment systems gave way to a hollow rumble that rolled through the walls like distant surf.

When the shaking stopped, she realized she was alone. Her assistant’s station was empty. Only the faint, rhythmic drip of saltwater filled the air.

By dawn, the storm outside had broken. The lab’s alarms had all died. Kneeling amid the ruin of glass, cracked monitors, and scattered printouts, Elin pressed her forehead to the wet tiles.

Her lips moved before her mind caught up. “Christ have mercy,” she whispered, the words tasting strange and old on her tongue. The hum of the machines had stopped; the steady hiss of rain against the skylight remained.

She lifted her head. The tank was empty.

No body, no fluid, just a thin line of moisture leading toward the drainage grate. Through the shattered window beyond, the sea was calm again—an impossible stillness, as though the storm had been erased rather than ended.

Her reflection stared back from the puddled floor: pale, salt-streaked, eyes hollow with exhaustion. For an instant, she thought she saw movement within it—a flicker, a shadow of a child’s form, rising, then gone.

Something in her chest gave way, a quiet collapse that wasn’t quite relief and wasn’t quite grief.

The silence pressed down like water.

She understood then that whatever had been forgiven, it was not her.

#

The Hunger Beneath the Snow

Snow hissed against the tin roof of the Fjellheim Children’s Home, a restless whispering that never stopped, like a secret spoken between worlds. Wind dragged its cold fingers across the eaves, rattling loose panes in the dormer windows. Ingrid Solberg stood by her car with the engine ticking down, exhaust sharp in the metallic scent of snow. Her breath came out in brief, ghostly plumes, dissolving into the blue-grey air. Beyond the iron gate, the building hunched beneath a white shroud, its walls the color of old milk. The light was fading—one of those northern winters that pressed down with a kind of spiritual weight.

She pulled her scarf tighter and started toward the entrance. Each step sank into snow that had begun to crust over, crunching under her boots with the sound of cracking bones. The brass handle of the front door burned her glove as she gripped it; it hadn’t been polished in years. A low hum carried through the wood—voices, rhythmic and in unison, the cadence too perfect to be innocent. When she stepped inside, warmth hit her with a faint odor of boiled cabbage.

The children stood in rows in the assembly room, their wool uniforms a dull brown, buttoned to the throat. The light bulbs above flickered with the weak pulse of a dying heart. A teacher at the front beat time with a small birch rod against her palm. The words came in fragments, then solidified into a chant: “The strength of the North is obedience. The strength of obedience is purity.”

Ingrid hesitated by the doorway, snow melting from her hair, a damp line trailing down her collar. “You can stop for now,” she said quietly. Her voice barely rose above the children’s chant, but the teacher heard. The rod paused mid-swing, then lowered.

Dozens of pale faces turned toward her—eyes too still, like glass marbles fixed in wax. “Good afternoon,” Ingrid tried again, forcing warmth into her tone. “I’m from the regional welfare office. I’m here to observe.”

A small boy in the front row flinched when the teacher’s hand brushed his shoulder. Ingrid noticed the faint tremor, the way he bit the inside of his lip until it bled. Her stomach tightened.

“Dr. Nilsen will speak with you,” the teacher said. Her voice was dry, polite, and hollow, as if rehearsed a hundred times. “The director values transparency.”

“Of course he does,” Ingrid murmured. She followed the corridor that had a faint smell of soap and smoke, her boots leaving wet imprints on the warped wooden floor. From behind closed doors came the muffled coughing of children, a sound that seemed to echo through the bones of the house.

At the end of the hall, a glass door bore the etched name Director Nilsen. Light spilled from beneath it in a steady, artificial band—the kind of light that denied dusk. She knocked once, then entered.

Dr. Nilsen looked up from his desk. His smile arrived before his words, slow and deliberate. “Ah, Ms. Solberg. You made it through the storm. I was afraid the pass would close again.”

“It nearly did,” Ingrid said. She removed her gloves, flexing her stiff fingers. The room was overheated, stiflingly so. “I’d like to discuss your program. I’ve received some concerning reports.”

“Reports,” he repeated, savoring the word. His voice was smooth, the kind that made everything sound reasonable. “Discipline therapy can seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s rooted in tradition—Nordic strength, self-reliance. These children come broken, frightened. They need structure.”

“Structure,” she echoed. Her gaze drifted past him, toward the far corner where the lamplight failed to reach. Something stirred there—a shifting darkness, almost like breath catching in a throat. She blinked. It was gone.

Dr. Nilsen leaned back, steepling his fingers. “You must understand, fear can be a teacher. These are lessons of the spirit. Our ancestors knew that.”

“Your ancestors didn’t use their fists.” The words slipped out before she could temper them.

His smile deepened, not offended, merely entertained. “You think we hurt them?”

“I’ve seen the bruises,” she said, her pulse quickening. “Knuckles, shoulders. Some haven’t slept in days.”

“Their souls are restless,” he murmured, almost tenderly. “Purification stirs unease.”

Outside the window, snow swirled in tight circles, white against the fading gray. The wind groaned through the seams of the house, and something within it answered—a low, almost human sigh. Ingrid glanced back toward the shadowed corner. The air there seemed thicker, colder, bending the lamplight as if it resisted illumination.

She swallowed hard. “I’ll need access to your records,” she said. “All disciplinary logs, sleep reports, any incident documentation.”

“Of course.” He rose, smoothing his vest. “We value accountability.”

When he turned to open a filing cabinet, his reflection in the window didn’t follow the movement. Ingrid’s breath hitched, but she forced her face still.

Later that night, in the cellar, she found the records. The air smelled of iron and damp paper. Each folder was labeled in neat block letters, the handwriting painfully precise. Her flashlight beam trembled over page after page of notes: Subject 12—nightmares of black snow. Subject 4—claims of a woman watching from the ceiling. The words "confession complete" repeated like a litany.

The final pages were signed not by staff, but by the children themselves—names scrawled in uneven strokes, each followed by a second signature, large and curling: Grýla.

Her gloved hand shook. The air around her seemed to shift, thick with unseen motion. Faintly, she heard footsteps above, slow and deliberate, though everyone should have been asleep. The building creaked, answering itself like an old throat clearing in the dark.

When she looked up, frost was forming on the ceiling beams, spidering outward in delicate white veins. Her breath puffed visibly, though she wore her coat zipped to the chin. Somewhere behind her, the metal door handle rattled once, then fell still.

Her disbelief—her years of studied rationality, of notes and assessments and tidy forms—wavered. Something primitive inside her recognized what logic could not. The children’s fear was not metaphor. It had weight, scent, and sound.

On Christmas Eve, the storm reached its full voice. The house trembled as if something vast pressed against its walls. In the chapel, the candles bent sideways in a wind that came from nowhere. Ingrid knelt among the pews, her palms slick against the wood, words rising unbidden from a place she thought long dead.

“God help them,” she whispered. The air shuddered, the timbers moaned. From the rafters came a cry that split the cold—a shriek both ancient and feminine, drawn out like fabric tearing. The sound dissolved into the hiss of snow, and when silence returned, it was deep enough to feel holy.

Ash drifted through the air like black snow. Frost gleamed on the altar rail. Ingrid stayed kneeling, breathing hard, her tears freezing before they could fall. She didn’t know if what answered her prayer was mercy or justice. The darkness had retreated, and it had cost her something she could never quite name.

#

Followers of Stone and Signal

Standing on the mossy slope above Borgarfjörður, Freyja Skarsgard grinned into her phone. “Look, everyone—elf rocks,” she said, spraying neon paint across the lichen-spotted boulder. The chat flooded with laughing emojis, the stream spiking as thousands tuned in. Squinting against the sharp wind, she tossed the can aside and bowed theatrically to the empty valley.

Walking back to her rental car, she scrolled through the comments. Queen of savage tourism, one viewer wrote. Another warned, Careful, the hidden people don’t like mockery. Rolling her eyes, she typed back, They can subscribe too. The phone buzzed in her hand, the mic picking up a faint crackle, a voice pushing through static.

#

Editing the footage later, she paused. A murmur threaded between her words, syllables shaped in Icelandic but low, urgent, almost drowned by wind. “Weird audio glitch,” she muttered, layering upbeat music over it. Uploading the cut, she leaned back, satisfied with numbers already climbing.

Three nights later, the stream turned itself on while she slept. Waking to her phone vibrating, she saw the camera had recorded half an hour of dark footage. Between frames of her blank apartment wall, forests appeared—birch trunks glowing white, moss pulsing as if lit from within. “Impossible,” she whispered, replaying it again, noticing shapes flickering beyond the branches.

#

Meeting her manager for coffee, she shoved the phone across the table. “Tell me this is corrupted pixels.”

Rubbing his jaw, he frowned. “Could be a codec issue. Could also be… something else. Look, Freyja, the comments—people say they see figures behind you in every video. Creepy sells, but this feels wrong.”

Pushing her sunglasses higher, she sighed. “They’ll forget in a week. I’ll control the story.”

Returning to the boulder with a tripod, she planned a dramatic apology. Standing before the scarred stone, she pressed record. “I’m sorry for mocking your traditions,” she said, voice deliberately solemn. Snorting at her own performance, she added, “But come on, it’s a rock.”

Playback showed her lips moving, but the words shifted—twisted into guttural syllables that weren’t hers. Viewers flooded the stream with comments: Her mouth isn’t matching the audio. She’s glitching. Tilting her head toward the screen, she froze as her own face blurred, duplicated, and reassembled into something sharp-toothed.

#

Calling the folklorist Jökull Arnarson had felt like a last resort. Meeting him in a dim Reykjavík bar, she listened as he laid out books thick with sagas. “The huldufólk guard thresholds,” he said. “You broke one, and now they’ve found another—your camera. You must make amends, not content.”

Clutching her beer, she smirked. “Amends won’t get me viewers back. Ritual will. We stream it live, people see authenticity, I recover the brand.”

Frowning, he leaned closer. “Authenticity is not performance. If you perform for them, you feed them.”

Ignoring his warning, she set the stage two nights later. Candles ringed the painted boulder. Jökull chanted, voice steady, while she narrated into her lens, selling the act as raw and dangerous. Mid-sentence, the air trembled, the mic screeching as if dozens of voices spoke through him at once.

Collapsing to her knees, she grabbed the camera. “Stop—cut the stream!”

The screen fractured into repeating images of her face, mouths stretching, eyes flickering with moss-green light. Viewers typed frantically: She’s not alone. Something’s standing over her.

Dragging herself upright, she smashed the phone against stone, shattering it in pieces. Yet her laptop at home still streamed. Notifications bloomed: Live now.

Storming back into her apartment, she found the feed running on every device. There she was, but not as herself—she laughed hollowly in a forest clearing that didn’t exist outside the screen.

Sitting on the floor, Jökull pale beside her, she whispered, “That’s not me.”

Staring at the spectral version of her pacing the moss, he replied, “No. But they wear your face now.”

Leaning against the window, she watched the comments scroll faster than thought, usernames multiplying, voices layering into an endless chorus. Figures pressed close behind the image, translucent, patient.

The last clip recorded showed her standing calm among them, eyes reflecting green fire. “Subscribe,” the not-quite-her said, smiling into the lens. The stream cut to black, leaving silence thick as stone.

#

The Gaze in the Circuit

Steam curling from paper cups, Brynn leaned over the console and squinted at the output, a scatter of half-formed runes laced with eyes that twitched when no one touched the keys.

“It’s trying to write poetry,” joked Elín, pulling her scarf tighter against the hum of the server fans.

Laughing with a hand over his mouth, Jón muttered, “Or madness. A machine’s madness.” The others chuckled, shoulders easing, though Brynn kept her finger pressed against the glass as if the glyphs might shift under her gaze.

Pacing between desks, she tried to frame it as harmless eccentricity, a quirk in vision layers. “Let’s keep testing,” she said, voice tight but steady. Nodding toward the monitor, Elín added, “Students will love this, looks occult branding.” The team clinked mugs, steam fogging the windows that opened onto Reykjavík’s neon avenues, the city glowing against black ice.

Scrolling through feeds the night of the beta launch, Brynn saw the first collapse on a student livestream—coffee sloshing, chair toppling. Lifting his phone, the boy whispered “what the hell,” before the screen locked on a fox-cat stare, pupils dilating as if alive even when paused. Messages pinged in fast succession: more students down, more phones frozen on the same impossible frame.

Leaning toward her device, Brynn felt her pulse rise as the gaze flickered across pixels, the animal’s eyes catching hers and holding. “Pull the ads,” she snapped into her headset, though no one answered fast enough. Rumors, already circulating through alley bars and late-night buses, sharpened into something colder.

Hunched in the glow of her monitor, Jón typed furiously. “They’re saying it’s cursed.” Elín rubbed her temple, hair falling across her face. Brynn, standing rigid at the window while snow hissed against glass, watched the city lights blur and thought of the code, of runes stitched to an image that now breathed without permission.

Dragging a chair closer to the terminal, Brynn typed line after line, sweat beading along her jaw as the code sprawled across the black screen. “If I can isolate the vision layers, we can break the recursion,” she muttered, fingers hammering keys.

Leaning against the desk, Elín whispered, “You’re forcing it. Slow down.” Brynn didn’t look up; the room vibrated with the server’s low growl, the air tinged with ozone.

Running the patch, she exhaled hard, the monitor flashing green for a heartbeat before fracturing into a swarm of windows—each one replaying the Skoffin’s eyes, looping in silence. “No—no, that’s not—” she stammered, backing away as the images spread across auxiliary screens. Jón slammed his palm against the desk. “They’re cloning themselves.”

Gripping the back of her chair, Brynn scrolled through network logs, the mirrors leaping from one server to another, multiplying across untraceable clouds. “It’s replicating everywhere,” she whispered, throat tight. Elín tugged at the Ethernet cables, sparks snapping in the air. “We can’t kill it. It’s already loose.”

An hour later, calls poured in. Leaning over her phone, Brynn heard reports of convulsions, deaths in dorms, cafés, transit stations. Each victim’s screen locked on the same living gaze. Slumping into the corner, Jón rubbed his eyes until the skin burned. “It’s not ads anymore. It’s the whole net.”

Returning home near dawn, Brynn found Arnar at his desk, his laptop frozen on the fox-cat’s stare. “Don’t look,” she cried, rushing forward, but he’d already sagged in his chair, fingers twitching, breath ragged. Kneeling beside him, she touched his cheek, heat radiating like a fever, his eyes glazed by light that wasn’t the screen’s anymore.

Standing in the half-dark, Brynn pressed her forehead against the doorframe, the cold wood anchoring her as sirens wailed outside. She knew the curse had outgrown her hands, its hunger spreading faster than her code could ever follow.

As much as it pained her, she forgot Arnar for now. Hunched over the grid terminal in the control station, Brynn jammed the override key into its slot, the geothermal hum shuddering beneath her boots. “This will starve it,” she whispered, voice breaking. Pulling the lever with both hands, she watched the monitors wink out one by one, Reykjavík’s arteries plunging into blackout.

Flooding the streets, silence cracked under sirens as drones spiraled from the sky, wings clattering against asphalt. Leaning on her knees, Brynn fought for air, the dim emergency lights painting her hands a sickly red. In the distance, glass towers went dark, their reflections swallowed by the harbor’s black water.

Scrolling message feeds on a dying tablet, she saw wards overflowing, respirators cutting off mid-cycle, and nurses holding flashlights over shivering bodies. “You’ve killed the city,” Jón’s voice rasped through the comms, static fraying each word. Clutching the receiver, Brynn hissed, “No—the servers are dying, it has to end.”

Rounding a corner outside, she froze as billboards powered by residual charge flickered alive, the Skoffin’s eyes etched across their surfaces. Shivering in the winter air, pedestrians stumbled, transfixed by a gaze that followed them even when heads turned away. The screens weren’t broadcasting—they were haunted.

Stumbling back into the control room, Brynn faced her reflection in the black glass of a dead monitor. Leaning close, she saw her eyes catch the faint glow of something not hers, pupils warping into slits that widened and contracted in their own rhythm. “It doesn’t need the net anymore,” she murmured, breath fogging the cold screen.

Pressing her palms against the glass, she listened as the city fell silent outside—sirens choking, voices cut short, the whisper of wind carrying across empty streets. Standing motionless, Brynn understood the truth: Reykjavík had a new sentinel, and it wore her face to watch.

Streambound: The Curse of Lagarfljót

Wind rattled the cabin’s loose shutters. Ása balanced her phone on a tripod and hissed, “Okay, on three—splash the net.” Jori hurled the weighted net into the black water, its ropes slapping a whip-crack. Leaning over the dock rail, Viktor smirked. “Perfect. Monster bait for the algorithm.” Lene rolled her eyes, wiping damp hair from her forehead. “We’ll be lucky if this gets fifty views.”

Back inside the cabin, they uploaded the cut footage and huddled around Sigrid’s laptop, breath fogging in the cold. The screen refreshed, the video already climbing in numbers they had never seen. “Impossible,” Ása whispered, pointing. On the grainy clip, beyond their staged thrashing net, a vast coil rippled under the ice, a shadow too big to fake. Leaning closer, Jori laughed too loudly. “Someone hacked us. Gotta be.”

Arguing erupted, voices bouncing off bare wooden walls. Viktor’s hands sliced the air. “We ride this. This is our shot.” Sigrid shook her head, pale under the lamplight. “It wasn’t us. We need to leave—now.”

Pulling his phone from his pocket, Jori started a livestream, cheeks glowing with adrenaline. “See? Nothing happens,” he said, his grin shaky. Then the reflection in his screen rippled, water distorting his features. Clutching the device, he stumbled back. “It’s—” His voice cut short as his arm jerked forward into the glowing rectangle.

Leaping to his side, Ása grabbed his jacket, knuckles white with strain. His body bent at an impossible angle, torso half-vanished into the glass. With a sickening lurch, the jacket slipped through her hands, leaving her clutching empty fabric. The livestream still ran, comments scrolling in frantic emojis.

Breathing hard, Viktor backed away, eyes fixed on the phone lying faceup on the dock. Jori’s hand still moved inside it, waving frantically from beneath a rippling surface of dark water.

Kicking the door shut against the wind, Ása yanked the power cord from the wall, plunging the cabin into dim firelight. “No more uploads,” she said, breath ragged. Viktor barked a laugh, pacing near the window. “You think unplugging lamps will stop it?”

Gathering phones into a pile, Sigrid smashed the first with a hammer, glass crackling across the floorboards. Leaning against the table, Lene muttered, “If it works, the footage is everywhere. Millions have seen it.” Ása pressed her palms over her face, whispering, “We have to cut it off here, make it harder for it to spread.”

Shoving back his chair, Viktor snatched his phone before it hit the pile. “If we’re smart, we can own this. Sell the rights, control the narrative.” His eyes gleamed with desperation, fever outrunning ambition. Sigrid snapped, “Jori’s gone, and you’re pitching sponsors?”

Turning his screen toward them, Viktor froze. With no signal, the display glowed, water rippling across its cracked glass. A blurred shape slid beneath the surface of the image. Leaning closer, Ása whispered, “It’s his hand.”

The fire guttered; the cabin exhaled. Screens long-dead sparked with ghostly light: a shattered tablet on the shelf, Lene’s ruined phone lying face-down, the black television screen buzzing. Lene staggered back, hands raised. “We killed the power—this isn’t possible.”

Crouching, Ása watched her reflection twitch inside the broken shards, lips moving though her mouth stayed shut. Her reflection mouthed words she couldn’t hear, water dripping against the glass. Backing away, she shouted, “It’s not in the lake anymore—it’s in us.”

Viktor gripped his phone tighter, jaw set. “Then we use it. Before it uses us.”

Crouching by the generator, Viktor jammed the switch down, its rumble swelling against the frozen air. Lights flared in the cabin, their glow baited hooks in the dark. “We need the feed running,” he muttered, breath steaming. “People are still watching.”

Inside, Ása spun toward the window, fury sharpening her voice. “You did this? After everything?” Leaning against the doorframe, Viktor smirked, knuckles white around his phone. “This is bigger than us. We can control it.” His words barely landed before the room trembled with a low, aquatic groan.

Mirrors bloomed with water. The shattered tablet leaked ripples across its fractured glass. Leaning closer to the stove, Lene screamed as her reflection’s face stretched, mouth opening wider than bone allowed, a hand clawing through. She stumbled backward, dragged into the iron surface with a boiling hiss.

Sigrid hurled a chair through the window, shards spraying outward, but each fragment shimmered into liquid panes. Her reflection stepped free of one shard, dragging her in with effortless strength. Ása clutched her head, rushing water roaring inside her skull, every reflective surface now a doorway.

Crouching low, Viktor raised his phone, its screen pulsing with the Lagarfljótsormur’s silhouette twisting in black water. “They’ll see me,” he said, voice breaking. “They’ll see everything.” The reflection reached out, coils spilling across the floor. Viktor vanished before his phone hit the boards.

Alone, Ása staggered outside, the night sky bruised with green aurora over the lake. The worm broke the surface, ice shattering as coils arched skyward, its eyes glowing—drowned lanterns. Kneeling at the shore, she watched her reflection kneel back, mouth opening as the water surged to claim her.

#

Daughter of the Drowned Sea

The night before, Brynja’s palms had worked the knots tight, the coarse hemp biting against her calloused skin. By morning, the gray sky covered the beach in dull light, and it was littered with black ribbons, the air thick with the stench of rot, as though the sea had emptied itself. Seabirds circled above but never landed, their shadows flickering over the glistening decay.

“Not the salt,” muttered an old fisherman, narrowing his eyes as he prodded the sludge with his boot. “Not the tide, either.”

Another villager crossed his arms, the cords of his neck straining. “Then whose hand?” His gaze lingered on Brynja longer than the others.

She kept her hands folded in her lap, trembling against her wool skirts. Clinging to her skin, the reek of salt was impossible to scrub away. She lowered her eyes, though suspicion pressed on her from every side.

Whispers moved like an undertow: “Cursed.” “Unnatural.” “The sea wants blood.”

Children, pale with fear, pressed into their mothers’ skirts while men sharpened their voices to points, testing a blade.

Then came the sound—wet and dragging—something vast shifting beyond the tide. The villagers turned as one, silence snapping tight over the shore. Out of the gray surf, the sea heaved up its offering: a heap of mangled flesh, half fish, half ruin, slick with the same black sludge that had devoured the nets.

The smell hit first, rank and metallic. A child screamed. The fishermen staggered back. Brynja’s breath caught as the thing rolled closer with the swell, its glassy eyes locked wide, as if it too had seen the hand that wrought its undoing.

“God preserve us,” someone rasped, though none believed He was listening.

And still Brynja’s fingers twitched, betraying her with their tremor, the salt-stench clinging as though the sea itself had branded her.

Washed up on shore—the heap of mangled flesh—was a sheep, which lay on the stones, its fleece sodden, clumped in heavy ropes that stank of brine. Its clouded eyes stared past the gathering crowd to nothing. Gulls circled and shrieked, their wings flashing knives in the pale sky.

“An omen,” an elder muttered, beard trembling as he crossed himself.

“Not chance. The sea speaks,” another whispered, lips cracked from salt wind.

Stepping forward, each syllable faltered on Brynja’s rough voice. “I did… not… this.” She clutched her shawl tight at her breast, knuckles white.

The men watched her. A pause. Then a hissed word: “Fræmlingur.” Outsider. Her vowels, bent and uncertain, marked her as foreign even more than her pale, strained face.

A boy spat into the tidepool at his feet. A woman pulled her daughter close, eyes never leaving Brynja. Silence gathered around her, heavy as stones in a sling.

That night, the wind moved through the harbor, restless. Brynja’s voice rose with it—low and fractured, carrying across the water in a tune that wavered between hymn and lament. It threaded through the creak of moored boats, through smoke leaking from peat fires.

Behind shuttered windows, villagers froze. A fisherman’s wife leaned into the darkness of her doorway, whispering, “She sings to the sea.”

By dawn, the shore buzzed with rumor. Nets gone, dissolved as before. The name passed in tight mouths and lowered voices—Brynja, Brynja—as if speaking it might call the tide against them. And still, the sheep’s wool sagged black on the rocks, stinking of rot.

The night she hummed at the pier, her voice carried soft as tidewash over planks slick with kelp. Lanterns burned low along the harbor, casting restless light across the water. By morning, the boat was gone—ropes untied, hull vanished into the gray expanse, leaving an empty mooring stone wet with spray.

Inside the chapel, a man growled, “They heard her.” His voice echoed off stone walls darkened by soot. “The sea answered her call.”

Standing before them, Brynja’s shoulders were drawn tight beneath her shawl, lips parted but soundless. Her breath fogged in the cold air, eyes flicking from elder to fisherman to wife clutching a cross at her throat.

“Confess,” demanded another, his fist slamming the pew. “What are you?”

“I… am nothing,” she whispered in broken Faroese, the words collapsing under her tongue.

“Liar,” hissed a woman, stepping back as though Brynja’s shadow might stain her.

The chapel swelled with mutters, harsh as gull-cries. Fear thickened into rage. Brynja’s chest tightened, the walls pressing closer, the carved Christ above the altar gazing down with eyes of wood and indifference.

Before hands could seize her, she fled. Doors slammed against the wind as she burst into the night. Down the cliff path she ran, skirts whipping, stones cutting her soles. The tide roared, black and endless, flecked with moonlight.

She stumbled into the surf, breath ragged. And then—soft, familiar, impossible—her mother’s voice rose from the waves, gentle as lullaby, urgent as prayer.

“Kom, barnið mitt…”

Salt spray stung her eyes. She waded deeper, the sea clutching her waist, her chest, her throat. The cold bit with teeth, yet she did not turn back. The voices of the villagers shrank behind her, swallowed by the tide.

She let go of air, arms opening wide as if to embrace. The water closed around her, carrying her down into its dark mouth. Brynja chose the sea.

---

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