His phone buzzed again. This time, it was a group chat. Seventeen people. All of them had downloaded the wallpaper from different threads, different forums, different languages. All of them were reporting the same thing: the image was alive. And it was spreading.

They formed text. Thousands of lines of it. Cuneiform small, buried in the noise of the volumetric fog. He zoomed further, his monitor groaning under the strain, and the text resolved into Old Norse. He didn’t read Old Norse. But the characters rearranged themselves as he watched—letters sliding across the screen like migrating serpents—until they were English.

Somewhere beneath the Atlantic, a lock turned.

He had downloaded the wallpaper from a forum thread titled "Valhalla—True North Reshade—Ultimate Realism." The user, a ghost with a Viking rune as an avatar, had posted only one message: "Look closer. The snow remembers."

Liam’s screen flickered again. This time, the image changed. Eivor was no longer looking at the horizon. She was looking at him . Her mouth was open, not in a battle cry, but in a whisper. And he could hear it. Not through his speakers—they were off. The sound came from inside his skull, a subsonic thrum like a longship’s hull scraping ice.