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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