The call came just as the dawn began to paint the sky in all muted shades of grey and pink. Relentlessly, my phone buzzed on the nightstand, pulling me from dreamless sleep. I reached groggily for it, squinting at the screen. The number was unfamiliar, yet local, and a part of me knew whatever awaited on the other end wasn't good news.

Vesper?" a gruff voice said, not wasting time on introductions. "It's Detective Lukas Jensen. We've got a situation."

My heart sped up, a tangle of dread and curiosity. Jensen's reputation preceded him-efficient, no-nonsense, and not one to involve outsiders lightly. "What kind of situation?"

"A murder. Gruesome one. We need your. expertise.

I hesitated. My so-called expertise was unconventional, to say the least. But I had my reasons for moving to Svalbard, and maybe this was one of them. "Where?"

He rattled off a location I knew to be the archipelago's northernmost point-a secluded area where only people seeking solitude, or the occasional illegal catch, ever tread. "I'll be there in an hour."

It was a long drive on serpentine roads that cut through snow-clad landscapes and skirted dramatic cliffs plunging into the icy sea below. Svalbard was beautiful, yes, but it held its share of secrets. Locals were tight-knit, wary of outsiders even, and more so someone like me-a private sleuth with no formal ties to the law.

As I approached the scene, the air grew colder. A cluster of police cars and an ambulance marked the location, their lights casting an eerie glow against the grayish morning light. The salt and ice filled the scent, combined with something more metallic, as I stepped out of my car.

Detective Lukas Jensen stood a little ways off, his silhouette framed by the rising sun. He was broad-shouldered, with a permanent furrow in his forehead and between his eyebrows, which gave him an older appearance than he probably was. His eyes met mine, a flicker of skepticism apparent.

"Vesper," he said briefly. "Over here."

I followed him past the police tape, the ground beneath our feet icy and uneven. The victim lay sprawled on the frozen ground, a local fisherman named Johan Lindqvist. His body was a canvas of violence-brutal gashes, the ground around him soaked in blood. But what caught my attention was the rune etched into the ice beside him: Algiz.

Algiz-the rune of protection. It was here; the fact seemed a cruel joke, an irony twisting my stomach into knots. I hunched down, peering at it more closely. This had not been some random act of violence; this was methodical, a message left by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

"What do you make of it?" he asked, his voice cutting through the silence.

I looked up at him. "It's deliberate. The rune isn't just decoration-it's communication. Whoever did this wants us to understand something."

He crossed his arms, skepticism mingling with reluctant intrigue. "And you think you can figure out what?"

"Maybe," I admitted. "But I'll need access to everything-scene reports, interviews, the lot.

He hesitated, still visibly uncomfortable with the idea of entrusting an outsider with this case. But Svalbard had never seen a crime like this, and the pressure to solve it was palpable. "Fine. But you follow my lead, Vesper. We do this by the book."

I nodded in agreement to his terms and, from here, pieced together with him the life of Johan Lindqvist-a nondescript individual as far as we knew, though with no reported enemies. But this particular someone had chosen to kill him with the apparent brutality that implied personal vendetta, if not ritualistic significance.

By evening, it was bleak beauty that shrouded the truth beneath its surfaces, and locals were already whispering to each other, fear threading through every word. Murder was foreign here; it was the breaking of this world.

Back in my small, rented cabin, I pored over the details, my mind haunted by the Algiz rune. What protection could that promise in such a scene drenched with death? The killer was quite fastidious, leaving nothing of himself behind, save that one symbol.

With night starting to fall, I knew this was only the beginning. The rune was a thread, and I had to follow it wherever it might lead. The secrets of Svalbard were unraveling, and I was caught in the middle of them, an outsider with a puzzle to solve and a killer to find before he could strike again.

Detective Jensen might not trust me yet, but the underlying desperation in his tone was palpable. This wasn't a murder investigation; it was a race against time, tossed by a calculated and dangerous mind. And I was determined to get to the bottom of it, no matter what it took.