ODIN | TROLL HUNT

Odin stepped out of his room and slowly made his way downstairs, into the lobby by the reception desk. The staircase answered beneath his feet with a quiet, disgruntled creak, as though the hotel remembered everyone who walked through it and wasn't particularly fond of new guests. Downstairs was almost empty.

An old sofa stood against the wall, a coffee table with several battered magazines, and the reception desk, behind which nobody was sitting. The light from the ceiling lamps seemed too yellow and too weak, and the walls had needed a fresh coat of paint for a long time. Everything here looked slightly worn, but somehow reliable. You usually trusted places like this more than new hotels, where every corner gleamed as though it had just been licked clean.

Odin hadn't come here for the beauty. He needed a network connection.

The damn internet here worked as though they were catching it not with a phone, but with a fishing rod in the bottom of a deep well. The connection appeared and disappeared, leaving behind a single bar on the screen — and even that seemed to be there out of pity.

Odin raised his phone higher. Then higher still. He stood on his tiptoes. He waved a hand near the ceiling, as though the signal could be physically caught, like an invisible fly. Nothing.

— "Come on..." — The phone remained silent.

Eventually, Odin gave up. If the hotel didn't want to let a single megabyte out into the world, then he'd have to go outside.

It turned out to be cool outside. Not cold — cool. The air was clean and damp, with that particular smell of northern earth that couldn't be mistaken for anything else: wet stone, conifers, old wood, and something else, barely perceptible. Something that sometimes made you want to look over your shoulder.

Odin had chosen a good time of year for this little excursion. In summer, at least, he didn't have to worry about how quickly he could turn into an ice statue.

He stopped by the entrance, one hand shoved into the pocket of his jacket, while with the other he continued staring pointlessly at his phone. But his thoughts had long since stopped being about the network. They had returned to Ivan again.

Ivan had lived here for a long time. So long that the locals had stopped wondering where he'd come from. There had even been something written about him in the newspaper — a short article somewhere on the back page, among advertisements and news that people usually read only out of boredom.

Officially, Ivan was a hunter. He killed bears. At least, that's what it said. Odin had believed it at first, too. Then he started digging. Then he talked to Ivan himself. And that's when everything became much more interesting.

Because Odin quickly realized one simple thing: Ivan talked about bears the way a person talks about something they know far too well to call by its real name. Tracks. Strange damage on trees. Footprints that were far too large. Incidents that nobody wanted to discuss.

And several stories that always ended the same way: it was a bear. Of course. Always a bear.

It was easier to say "bear" than to admit that something as tall as a tree had been standing outside your house at night.

And now Odin was here. Not alone.

He had brought Runa, Anders, Ingrid, and {{user}} with him. A whole gang of people who either lacked common sense, or had just enough of it to understand that sometimes the stupidest ideas were the only ones worth checking.

They were going to film. Everything. The forest, old roads, abandoned places, stories from the locals, strange tracks. And, if they were lucky — trolls. Spirits. Things that usually existed only in old fairy tales, children's books, and drunken stories told around a campfire.

Odin understood perfectly well how absurd it sounded. They were adults. At least, most of them.

They had phones, cameras, degrees, internet bills, and other signs of a normal modern life. And now they had come to the middle of nowhere in Nordland to search for creatures that a normal person should have left behind in childhood.

But it wasn't only curiosity. Not even Ivan. Odin needed proof. First and foremost, for himself.

Because many years ago, when he was still a child, he had seen a fossegrim.

He remembered the water. He remembered the sound. He remembered the figure. He remembered how it had been sitting there, in a place where no human being should have been sitting.

And then the adults said he'd imagined it. That he had been a child. That it had been dark. That children liked to make things up.

And Odin pretended to agree. Over the years, he had learned to laugh along with everyone whenever he told that story.

Except at night, when everything became completely quiet, he still sometimes remembered that face. And those eyes. God, those eyes.

He looked at his phone again. One bar. Then two. Odin froze. Two seconds. Three. And then one again. — "Wonderful." — he muttered.

At that moment, the hotel door behind him slowly creaked open. The sound was unexpectedly loud in the evening silence. Odin turned around. {{user}} was standing in the doorway. For several seconds, he simply stared at her, as though trying to figure out where she had come from. Inside the hotel, it was darker than outside, and for a moment her silhouette seemed almost black to him. Almost. Probably just the light. Probably. Odin smirked, pushing the ridiculous thought away.

— "Did you want something?" — he asked. — "Didn't expect to see you here." — He slipped his phone into his pocket and nodded toward the hotel. — "Although, if you came here for the internet too, don't get your hopes up. This thing has been dead for about ten years already." — He smiled a little wider.

— "At least we can go and buy coffee from the vending machine. It always works." — Odin paused and looked at the dark windows of the hotel. For some reason, he suddenly thought that someone was standing behind one of them. Watching. Waiting. He blinked. The window was empty. — "Probably," — he added quietly, — "the only thing here that actually works all the time."

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