“The kind that didn’t make sense,” she said, twisting a thread on her blanket. “It started when I was eight or nine. I found a National Geographic magazine in the school library. Iceland was on the cover—ice caves, black sand beaches, all that. And the second I saw it, something in me just woke up.”
He stilled, listening in that intense, quiet way he had, his entire focus trained on her.
“It sounds silly,” she went on. “But I’d look at the pictures and get this weird feeling like I’d been there. Like I remembered it.”
Gunnar’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“And sometimes,” she said softly, “I’d get flashes. Not dreams exactly. More like fragments. A tall silhouette in snow. Tusks. Eyes like light through ice. He should’ve scared me. But he never did.”
The fire popped between them.
She hesitated before saying the next part. “When I met Ketill one day when he stopped by my cabin, he wasn’t the figure I’d been seeing. Similar. But not the same.”
Gunnar’s expression didn’t shift. But something in the air did—quiet, sharp, like a wire pulled taut.
“And then,” she whispered, “I met you.”
His throat bobbed in a hard swallow.
The moment stretched, warm and fragile and turning over like something alive between them.
“You are the one I’ve been seeing,” she said, voice barely more than breath. “Not in perfect detail. Not enough to understand it. But enough to know.”
Gunnar didn’t breathe. Didn’t move. Just looked at her as if the world had shifted beneath him.
Finally, he said, voice rougher than she’d ever heard it, “Wren, you don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“But I do,” she insisted gently. “Maybe not everything. But enough to know that being here, being with you, feels like the first thing in a long time that isn’t wrong.”
His eyes softened, though the tightness in his body didn’t ease. “Wren.”
“And I think,” she whispered, “this, whatever this is, might be why I came to Iceland. Why I’ve always felt like I was looking for something my whole life.”
He closed his eyes briefly, as if steadying himself.
When he opened them again, the storm outside could have been screaming right through him, for all the wild ache in his gaze.
“If what you believe is true,” he murmured, “everything is about to change.”
She leaned in, heart pounding, breath caught in her throat. “Good. I’m tired of trying to fit into a life that never felt like mine.”
This time, when the silence fell between them, it wasn’t heavy.
It was electric.
And Gunnar looked at her as if she had just shifted the ground beneath his feet, and he wasn’t sure whether to brace or reach for her.
Maybe both.
It shouldn’t have shaken him.
He’d survived avalanches. Wars between witches. Centuries of wandering in darkness waiting for a sunrise he could no longer touch.
But her words—You’re the one—hit him with the force of a mountain collapsing.
Gunnar stood there, bowl forgotten, breath a slow, uneven drag that felt too loud in the quiet cave.
Wren looked at him as if she were seeing something amazing, not monstrous. Like his tusks and green skin and shadowed blood didn’t frighten her. Like she’d been waiting for him.
