Third person's POV
The cursor blinked.
She watched it. One blink. Two. Three. Her fingers rested on the keys, not moving.
She typed: The door opened.
Deleted it.
Typed: He walked into the room.
Deleted it.
Typed: She waited.
The cursor blinked. The words stared back at her. She waited. It was true. She was waiting. For what, she didn't know.
She typed again: A hero falls.
Her hands stopped. She stared at the screen. The words sat there, flat and wrong, like something written by a stranger who had only heard about heroes secondhand.
She deleted them. One by one. The letters vanished, but the shape of them stayed burned into the screen, faint ghosts of letters that had been there.
Backspace. Backspace. Backspace.
The cursor blinked.
She typed: A casket closes.
Her throat tightened. She didn't know why. It was just words. Just letters arranged in a line. It meant nothing. It was fiction. It was...
She deleted it.
Backspace. Backspace. Backspace.
The cursor blinked.
She typed: A whisper haunts.
Her hands were shaking. She didn't notice until she saw the letters wobble on the screen, the *h* and the *a* leaning into each other like they were trying to escape.
She deleted it. Slower this time. Watching each letter disappear.
S. T. N. U. A. H.
Gone.
The cursor blinked.
She sat there. Her hands in her lap now. The screen was white, empty, clean.
She felt the silence press against her ears. Felt the room shrink. Felt the light from the window fade...no, not fade. She just hadn't noticed it was afternoon now. She'd been sitting here since morning.
She looked at her hands. They were still. Too still. The hands that used to write for hours, that used to fill pages before breakfast, that used to create...
Now they just sat in her lap. Useless. Dead.
She looked back at the screen. The cursor blinked.
You killed me.
She didn't type it. The words appeared anyway, already formed, already waiting. She blinked. They were still there. She blinked again. Still there.
Her hand moved to the mouse. She dragged the cursor over the words. You killed me. Her finger hovered over the delete key.
You're a washout.
She hadn't typed that either. She stared at the screen. The letters were wrong. The font was wrong. Everything was wrong.
She pressed delete.
Backspace.
Gone.
The cursor blinked.
She sat there. The room was quiet. The window was dark now. She didn't remember the sun setting. She didn't remember anything. Just the cursor. Just the blinking. Just the empty white screen where nothing would ever be written again.
She looked at the crack in the wall. It was still there. It was always there.
She waited for the blood to come. It didn't. She waited for the hands. They didn't reach. She waited for the voice. It didn't speak.
She should have felt relief.
But the loneliness was louder now. Her mind, empty of whispers, was just... empty. No voices, no hands, no blood. Just her. Just the silence. Just the hollow space where something used to live.
She turned back to the screen. The cursor blinked.
She waited.
The words were still there. She didn't remember typing them. She didn't remember anything.
She closed the laptop. The light went out. The room was dark. She sat in the dark, her hands in her lap, and waited for something that never came.
24 minutes before, in the MD's office.
The air in Stefán Axel's office was still and scentless, like a museum. Sunlight fell through blinds that hadn't been adjusted in years, cutting the room into neat, predictable lines.
Stefán watched the younger man from across the desk. Laurus Daníelson was not a large man, average height, lean build, the kind of frame that could disappear in a crowd if it wanted to. But it never wanted to. He wore his authority like a second skin, the sharp cut of his suit less an outfit than a uniform. His hair was dark brown, silky, always precisely in place. It was the only thing he'd ever been given that he couldn't return.
His hands were the only restless thing about him: long fingers, precise movements, always turning something over, a pen, a paperweight, an idea. Right now, they were still. Waiting.
Stefán had seen that stillness before. In men who had already made up their minds and were simply letting you catch up.
Laurus sat not in the guest chair, but slightly turned away from it, his posture an elegant dismissal of the implied hierarchy.
"I'm satisfied with the cast so far." His voice was clean and sharp. "The necessary cuts have been made."
A subtle, cruel smile touched his lips. The logistics were in place. The only remaining variable was the one they both knew.
"We need to find a way to reach her."
Stefán's voice was quieter than Laurus expected. The Managing Director was in his late forties, grey at the temples, his face lined not with stress but with the particular exhaustion of a man who had spent too many nights worrying about someone else's child. His suit was immaculate, but his hands, usually so steady, were wrapped around each other on the desk. Not impatient. Anxious.
Laurus said nothing. Let the silence work.
"She's been coddled too much in this company." His fingers drummed a slow, deliberate rhythm on the armrest.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
He wasn't suggesting. He was stating a fact.
Stefán's jaw tightened. He wanted to argue. Laurus could see it, the instinct to defend, to explain, to say you don't understand. But he didn't. Instead, he looked away, just for a moment, at the framed photograph on his desk. Laurus couldn't see the image from where he sat, but he didn't need to. He knew the shape of regret when he saw it.
"The cast," Stefán said finally, steering back to safer ground. "You're satisfied?"
"I am."
A pause. Stefán's fingers uncurled, curled again. His mouth opened, closed.
Laurus waited. Reading him was easy. The man had something lodged in his throat, something he couldn't quite swallow or spit out.
"Is there something else?" Laurus asked. Not impatient. Just observant. "Someone you'd like to add?"
Stefán met his eyes. For a moment, he looked like he might speak. Then he shook his head, a small, defeated motion.
"It's nothing. Just..." He stopped. Corrected himself. "I worry about Ás.. Miss Njáll."
The correction was subtle. A beat too late. The first syllable had already left his lips before he caught it, swallowed into something more formal. Laurus filed it away without comment. Some things were more useful left unacknowledged.
"That," Laurus said, rising from his chair, "is precisely why I was brought in. You're too close to see clearly."
Stefán didn't deny it. He was on his feet a half second later, not out of servitude but out of habit, the instinct of a man who had spent his life making sure the people in his building found what they needed.
"I requested you," Stefán said, choosing his words with the care of a man defusing a bomb, "because no one quite... handles difficult talent like you."
Handles. It was a euphemism for breaks, bends, or discards. Laurus accepted the compliment for what it was.
"I'll handle it." He waved a dismissive hand, already moving toward the door.
Stefán moved ahead, a half step, to open it for him. Not servitude. Protocol. A silent industry-wide acknowledgment: when Laurus Daníelson finished speaking, you cleared his path.
Laurus passed through the doorway without a glance.
The hallway was too bright. The low hum of central heating was an irritant. He pulled out his phone. The screen displayed his last text to Ásta, still unanswered.
'How haughty', he thought.
His thumb glided over the keyboard.
'My office. Now. We are discussing your lack of progress.'
His strides were purposeful. In his mind, it was pertinent that she reached his office before him.
He stood behind his desk, watching the silent phone. One minute. Two. Four.
No blue ticks. No reply. Nothing.
A hot, sharp wire of irritation tightened around his temples.
She's challenging me. Deliberately. Publicly.
The disrespect was a slow-acting poison. His patience had been spent. He had gone bankrupt on it.
He left his office. His stride was long, silencing.
The hallway of Haukar was its usual chaos; producers in doorways, assistants with armfuls of scripts, the constant low hum of people trying to be seen. Laurus walked through it like a blade through water.
A pair of writers fell silent mid-sentence as he passed. One of them stepped back, a reflexive clearing of the path. A producer on a phone call turned his shoulder, lowering his voice, not out of fear, exactly, but out of the instinct to not be noticed by someone who could decide, with a word, whether your project lived or died.
A young lady, intern, maybe, or a junior director. Her eyes caught on his profile, the sharp jaw, the dark hair swept back, the utter stillness of his expression. She looked away before he noticed. Or before she thought he might notice. It was impossible to tell with men like that.
Laurus didn't acknowledge any of them. He didn't need to. The path cleared because it always cleared. Because he moved like a man who knew exactly where he was going, and in a building full of people pretending to have the same certainty, that was enough to make everyone step aside.
Her office door was just another barrier. He didn't knock. He grasped the handle and flung it open. The sound made a sharp crack as it hit the wall.
"Njáll, I won't tolerate this..."
The rest of the sentence evaporated.
His anger was replaced by a forensic curiosity.
She was at her desk. Not working. Not sleeping.
Just... sitting.
Her hands were in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the wall opposite her, a wall of pale grey, bare, unremarkable. There was nothing there to look at. She was looking anyway.
He filed the image: Subject positioned toward blank wall. Suggestive of internal focus or complete withdrawal.
Their first encounter surfaced from the cabinet of his memory. Her head snapping up at the wrong name. 'Astrid.' The automatic, irritated correction. 'Ásta.' A spark. A reflex. Useful data.
He tested the same input now. His voice was flat, clinical.
"Astrid."
Nothing. Not a flicker. Not a flinch. Her eyes didn't move from the blank wall. Her jaw didn't tighten. The name fell into the silence and disappeared, a stone dropped into a well that had no bottom.
A system error flashed through him. A sharp, static jolt that locked his joints. The equation he'd been running, the one where she was his rival, his adversary, the one person worth pushing against, that equation had just returned an impossibility.
For three seconds, maybe four, he was just a man in a room that had stopped making sense.
A gasp in the doorway broke the silence.
"Is she ok..."
He turned. His glare was enough.
"Out."
The woman vanished.
He looked back at the shell at the desk. The superstitious chill was now a cold, certain dread in his veins. He had pushed, and he hadn't found the fight he thought he would. The person he had come to defeat was gone, and in her place was a problem his arrogance could not solve.
He left. Not quickly, he didn't run from anything, but without his usual economy of movement. His hand found the door handle. He pulled it closed. The click was soft. Final.
The walk back to his office was quiet. His mind was already writing, already documenting, already trying to build a framework for what he'd just witnessed.
He sat on the edge of his desk, the posture of a man who had just received unsettling news. He pulled a blank sheet of paper, his movements mechanical. The pen felt heavy. He wrote as a witness forced to document a disappearance.
Subject: Ásta Njáll
Time: 17:43
Status: Catatonic. Non-responsive to all stimuli, including direct provocation (see test: use of incorrect name, previously effective).
Observation: All previously observed markers of personality and defensive reactivity are absent. This is not resistance. This is the absence of the subject.
Conclusion: Denial is no longer a viable position. The subject previously identified as the primary obstacle to this production is currently non-existent. A new framework is required.
New priority: Locate the subject.
He set the pen down. For the first time in his adult life, Laurus Daníelson didn't have a strategy. He had a problem without a solution. A variable without a value. A woman who had been there one moment and was gone the next.
He knew what needed to be done. Find her. Understand her. Restore the variable to its proper place in the equation.
He just... didn't know how.
"There are deserts inside us, too, you know. Vast, dry stretches where nothing moves but the wind, and nothing lives but the things that wait in the shade for you to lie down."
-Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools