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The waveform bloomed across Kaja’s screen—peaks and valleys etched with deliberate geometry. Leaning in, she brushed dark strands of hair from her eyes, fingers flicking across the mixer board with a precision honed through years of sound engineering. The haunting fiddle piece rolled in layers: first a mournful melody, then something beneath it—barely perceptible frequencies hovering above silence.
Kaja adjusted the spectral display filter. “There,” she muttered. Under the swell of music lay a lattice of symbols—rhythmic, symmetrical, and uncanny.
“Runes?” she whispered. Her breath caught.
Her apartment was silent aside from the workstation’s hum. Half-drunk coffee sat cooling on a stack of case notes—incident reports of recent drownings. Seven were highlighted, each within hours of the track going viral. All near water. All random. Except Emil.
His name sat scrawled atop the stack in shaky handwriting.
Loading the track into her modulation software, she isolated the subharmonics. The frequencies mapped into repeating sequences. Old Norse runes. She pulled a reference text from her shelf, flipping through brittle pages. One symbol repeated—a curved mark resembling the laguz rune. Water. Flow. Subconscious. Death.
Kaja sat back, breath shallow. She rubbed the tired hollows beneath her eyes. The longer she stared at the waveform, the more it pulsed—tidal, alive.
“This is not music," she said. “Weird, it is, but I feel it's more a ritual than music; maybe a summoning.”
Her phone buzzed with a reply from one of the survivor interviews.
TEXT: “Yeah, I heard the track. Couldn’t stop playing it. Then the lake—Jesus, I can’t explain it. It moved. Like it wanted me. I don’t go near water anymore.”
She scribbled it down. Location: Östersund. Victim: Survived. Lake proximity: 0.3 km.
The pattern held.
She pulled up Svartálf’s profile again. A single press photo: obscured face, dark clothes, violin slung like a weapon. No interviews. No live sets. The track’s metadata was scrubbed, aside from a studio listed near Lofoten.
Her reflection in the screen showed eyes dulled by sleepless nights and lips pressed into a grim line.
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The studio clung to the cliff, its walls half-swallowed by fog rolling off the fjord. Stepping onto the threshold, Kaja's boots scraped stone slick with salt. The air reeked of damp pine. Inside, dying amber LEDs traced dim paths along the floorboards, the smell of rosin and wet wood thick in the room.
Svartálf stood at the mixing console, back to her. His long dark coat cut sharp shoulders; the violin hung at his hip, suspended by a leather strap, a ritual blade. Turning, his face caught the light—pale, drawn, eyes deep winter water. Neither dead nor alive.
“You came,” he said, voice flat, distant.
“I heard your song.” Kaja advanced, coat damp and humming from the portable filter rig on her shoulder. Fingers curled around the interface—three dials, one trigger, a silver coil winding across her collarbone.
“I didn’t write it.”
“Not a denial.”
A slow, wrong smile edged his mouth.
“It was written long before I was born.”
He raised the violin.
Kaja twisted a dial. A low hum bloomed—her filter locking phase with the studio’s resonance. Svartálf twitched, a man hearing static no one else could.
“I traced the waveform,” she said. “Layered runes, symmetry for invocation. You’re no musician.”
His head jerked. The next voice wasn’t his:
“She hears us. Clever, little bone-wrapped mind.”
It echoed across the boards, out of sync with his lips, a second tone beneath. Kaja tightened her jaw, nudged the gain.
“I know what you are,” she said. “You kill through music, memory, grief.”
Svartálf staggered, gripping the console. The violin clattered to the floor.
“It’s not me,” he hissed, eyes glassy, pupils blown. “You think I want this?”
The room vibrated. Low notes thrummed from the monitors, water traced rivulets down the windowpanes, though no rain fell. Kaja twisted the final dial; her field flared.
“You’ve killed dozens—my brother.” Her voice cracked, grip steady. “You don’t get to play martyr.”
He looked up, briefly a man—fraying, trembling, prisoner to what bled through his skin.
“Release us,” the other voice intoned. “Let the song finish.”
The studio darkened, thinning as if sliding closer to the lake beneath.
Svartálf reached for the violin.
Kaja moved first.
She dropped to one knee, ripped open the transmitter case, and fed the looped subroutine she’d built—an inverted harmonic counter to the Nøkk’s signature. Fingers flew, rerouting channels, and forcing interference into the core.
According to legend, the Nøkk was a shape-shifting water spirit with eyes like drowning depths, luring the living with music before pulling them beneath the surface forever.
“You want a song?” she growled. “Listen to mine.”
The monitors screamed.
Water burst from ceiling vents, the fjord tearing through the walls. Svartálf collapsed, clutching his skull while two voices—his and the Nøkk’s—shrieked in discord.
The studio lights flickered erratically, their last pulses reflecting in puddles forming along the warped floorboards. Kaja moved fast, dragging Svartálf’s limp body from the console. He was breathing—barely—his skin cold and damp.
She slid into the producer’s chair. Her hair hung in heavy ropes around her face, soaked from the burst vents overhead. The console blinked and glitched under the moisture, but it still lived. Enough.
The track—the original fiddle composition—sat open in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Its waveform shimmered with layered complexity: harmonic crescents, subsonic spikes, the runic rhythm embedded beneath it, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Kaja exhaled through her nose, steadying trembling hands.
“Loop the null,” she whispered, pulling up her prototype filter matrix.
She began slicing. Each time the summoning motif rose, she mirrored it with a phase-inverted tone—her null frequency was her weapon. Not to erase the Nøkk’s call, but to trap it in a space it couldn’t escape, forcing the spell to cannibalize itself.
The DAW glitched again. A low groan echoed from the walls. Water seeped through the floorboards, rising fast.
She opened a new track. Her voice.
One take. One final layer.
The mic hissed to life, red ring pulsing.
Kaja leaned in, mouth close, eyes locked on the levels.
“If this is the price,” she said, “then take me. But the song ends with me.”
She inhaled and sang—one long, piercing tone. No melody. No harmony. Just raw, vibrating resonance. Imperfectly human... mortal.
As the waveform blinked in real time, syncing with the null tone, the room shuddered.
A long crack split the plaster overhead. Cold water gushed from the ceiling, flooding the walls like bursting veins. The monitors blew out with a static shriek.
Kaja stood, eyes on the screen, still holding the final note. The mix rendered in slow motion. Glitching, but holding.
The Nøkk’s scream—inhuman and ancient—rose from the console, a feedback loop of rage caught in the shattered speakers. Svartálf jolted where he lay, mouth open in a silent cry.
The final file locked. Final.wav.
The system froze.
Water surged waist-high. Kaja didn’t move.
She waded to the center of the studio, mic still live in her hand, and turned back toward the console. Her lips parted in a whisper—her brother’s name.
Then the water took her.
The studio went still.
The null tone remained—looping, steady, quiet as breath beneath ice.
