If anyone ever wrote her obituary, Wren Taylor really hoped it wouldn’t start with:She died doing something stupid in Iceland.
Because this—this right here—was definitely one of her stupider ideas.
Snow crunched beneath her boots as she trudged deeper into the rock-studded ravine at the base of the Iceland mountains that loomed over the village where she’d settled for a few months. Wind bit through her red coat and straight to the bones of her optimism. Her pack, full of sculpting tools and questionable life choices, dug into her shoulder and thumped against her hip.
“This is fine,” she muttered to herself, adjusting her hat for the twentieth time. “Totally fine. Perfect day for creative inspiration and possible frostbite.”
She crouched to inspect a chunk of black volcanic rock half-buried in snow. It gleamed faintly, almost as if lit from within. Wren brushed the frost away and grinned.
“You, my friend, are Steve 4.0.”
Steve 1.0 had cracked on the flight over. Steve 2.0 rolled off her worktable in Reykjavik. Steve 3.0 had a tragic encounter with a hot spring.
“You’ll last, right?” She asked the rock. “You look sturdy. Reliable. Emotionally grounded.”
The rock, like most men and minerals in her life, said nothing.
Wren tucked it into her bag and looked around. Her rented cabin was somewhere back down the narrow trail—a cozy, timber-framed hideaway with a corrugated iron exterior she’d found online. Her nearest neighbors, Andrea and her two kids, had stopped by earlier in the week with cocoa, cookies, and stories about “the Christmas troll.”
Wren had assumed it was a local myth.
Then she met Ketill, Andrea’s husband? Mate? She wasn’t really sure what to call him.
He’d appeared one afternoon while she was sketching the cliffs behind her cabin—massive, quiet, and decidedly not human. His green skin had caught the winter light like polished stone. His eyes were kind but old, the kind of old that hummed with mountain air and secrets.
Most people might have screamed. Wren hadn’t. Something about him felt familiar. Comforting. Like recognizing a melody from a dream.
But something deep inside her whispered he wasn’t the one she was looking for. She wasn’t sure what that meant—only that the feeling left her restless, as if the wind itself was pushing her toward something more.
Maybe that was why she couldn’t stay inside, even when she should have. Iceland tugged at her bones. Always had.
Even as a kid in the foster system, she’d been obsessed with maps of the north—fjords, glaciers, volcanoes. She’d drawn them over and over in her sketchbooks like someone sketching memories, not fantasies. Her art professors used to joke she’d been a Viking in a past life.
She’d never told them about the dreams. The ones with glowing runes and voices in the wind calling her name. Now, in the middle of the Icelandic wilderness, the snow itself seemed to whisper to her—softly, insistently.
Wren.
She froze, pulse quickening, then shook her head. “Nope,” she said quickly. “Absolutely not. That’s wind. Totally normal, non-haunted, not-at-all-personalized wind.”
Still, the air shimmered faintly where sunlight filtered through the clouds. The snow glittered—not the way snow normally did, but as if it held light of its own.
Her breath fogged in front of her. “If this turns into a horror movie, I want everyone to know I called it.”
She took another cautious step, eyes scanning the ridge. The hush was deep here, layered—like the land was listening.
“Yule trolls,” she murmured, shaking her head. The locals had warned her about them, about how the old magic still lived in the valleys this time of year. Andrea’s kids, Lily and Kevin, had insisted they’d met one, that Ketillwasone, but now he was just their father or something like that. Wren had laughed, promising to leave out cookies just in case.
Now, surrounded by shifting shadows and whispering wind, that promise didn’t seem so funny.
She adjusted her pack strap and started back toward the cabin, the sound of her boots crunching over snow somehow too loud in the silence. A memory tugged at her. Ketill’s deep voicerumbling like distant thunder when he’d introduced himself. “Be careful in the mountains,” he’d said. “They whisper things you might not want to hear.”
He’d smiled faintly then, tusks catching the light. A terrifying smile, by most standards. But not to her.
The wind whispered again, her name riding on the breeze.
She swallowed hard. “I hear you,” she said under her breath. “But unless you’re offering central heating, hot chocolate with booze, and a toasty fire, I’m not interested.”
She adjusted her gloves and stepped forward—straight onto a patch of ice.
