Runes in the Machine

Leaning closer to the monitor, the glow from cascading lines of corrupted data washed Andreas Winther's face in pallid blue. His jaw was tight, brows drawn as he traced the erratic spike in violent incident reports across the city grid. The data streams juddered, frames dropped, and somewhere in the noise, he saw it again—a flicker.

A fox-like silhouette, luminous and sharp-edged, ghosted across the interface, its eyes two fractured points of amber. As it moved, strings of symbols unraveled in its wake—no ASCII, no Cyrillic, no codepage he knew. The characters bent impossibly, angles meeting where geometry said they shouldn’t.

He exhaled through his nose, slowly. “You don’t belong here,” he murmured, as if the avatar could hear him.

The cursor danced under his command, isolating the segment, stripping away layers until the rogue process remained. The fox twitched, pixel-sheen rippling, and the room’s air thickened—then the screen buckled into black.

Rising out of nothing, a wave towering and gray-green, blotted the sunlight by its height. Copenhagen’s skyline fractured behind it. He heard the low groan of pressure before the collapse. His breath caught—then the vision broke, leaving the hum of servers in its place.

Andreas’ knuckles whitened on the desk. Combing through the fragmented logs, his fingers moved with a surgeon’s focus. The fox’s trail was faint but constant, threading between packet captures and timestamped anomalies. The symbols repeated—always in threes, always slanted enough to feel deliberate.

#

Colder than the rest of the archive, the hall's chill crept into Andreas' bones. Racks of aging servers lined one wall, their fans whispering beneath a low, electric hum. Opposite them, upright stones leaned at quiet angles, each carved with runes that caught and held the dim light like wet ink.

Andreas found Oluf near the far end, bent over a workbench scattered with old vellum sheets and a half-disassembled network switch. Under a heavy wool coat, the older man’s shoulders were broad, his hair silver but unkempt, as though he’d run both hands through it too often.

“You’ve seen them before,” Andreas said without preamble, dropping a printout of the fox’s glyphs onto the table.

Oluf glanced down, and something flickered in his expression—recognition without relief. He reached for a brass desk lamp, angling its light over the page. “Not in this order,” he replied, voice low, as if the stones might be listening. “But they’re kin to the wardings.”

They worked in silence at first, Andreas’ laptop balanced on a crate while Oluf’s fingers traced the lines of an ancient rune, muttering translations. The symbols, once mapped, began to form sequences—loops and calls, strange in their elegance yet executable in structure.

“Test this one,” Oluf said, sliding a string of mapped code to Andreas.

Andreas keyed it in. The system shuddered, then spat static into his headphones. Somewhere deep in the network, the Brunnmigi’s presence flared—a voice fractured into overlapping whispers, each naming a different catastrophe.

“Flood,” one hissed.

“Collapse,” murmured another.

“Fire,” breathed a third.

Andreas’ jaw tightened. “It’s toying with us.”

“Good,” Oluf said, already drafting the next pattern. “That means it’s paying attention.”

With each new sequence, the warding patterns pulsed brighter in the system’s visualization—arcs of light threading between nodes like a tightening net. Corrupted sectors flared, resisted, then folded inward as if dragged by unseen gravity.

At last, the map on Andreas’ screen warped. All remaining anomalies bent toward a single point—a dense, shifting construct at the network’s center. The Brunnmigi’s voice narrowed to a single, drawn-out tone that broke like glass before falling silent.

The server room shuddered as if the machinery sensed the coming turn. On Andreas’ screen, the containment protocols lined up in a row of loaded crossbows, each rune-strand looped tight and humming in the code’s unseen depths.

Oluf’s fingers hovered over his keyboard, his breathing steady but deep. “On your mark,” he said, eyes never leaving the central construct’s shifting lattice.

Andreas nodded. “Now.”

The trap sprung with a soundless jolt—streams of data folding inward, herded through narrowing corridors of light. Runes flared as they snapped into place, each a lock in a chain. The Brunnmigi’s form flickered, its fox-like shimmer shredding into static as the virtual well dragged it in. The walls of the well rose in layers, coded wards curling around it like stone rings descending into black water.

In the city grid display beside them, red warning markers blinked out one by one. Flow rates in the water system steadied, incident reports dropped to baseline. For the first time in hours, the hum of the servers seemed calm, almost relieved.

Andreas sat back, rolling the ache from his shoulders. “It’s in.”

Oluf didn’t smile. He watched the containment metrics with a mason’s skepticism—appreciating the mortar but doubting the wall.

Then Andreas saw a second cluster of signals, faint but unmistakable, blooming on a separate panel, but not here. The identifiers matched—the same pattern, the same heartbeat in the data offshore.

His stomach dropped. “Oluf…”

The older man leaned in, squinting at the traces. “That’s not possible. The wards—”

“They worked here,” Andreas cut in, fingers flying across the keys to confirm. “But it’s already somewhere else. Multiple somewhere elses.”

On the periphery of the offshore map, new points began to wink into existence, far from their containment, a scattering of seeds on the wind.

The well’s rune-barriers pulsed on the main display, holding fast. But Andreas’ gaze stayed on the expanding constellation offshore, his voice flat.

“This wasn’t a hunt,” he said. “It was a pruning.”