Styrhildur grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Garún! Snap out of it! Stay close to us – we’re going to m—”
A loud shot sounded over the noise. On the roof balcony of Landsímahúsið, the head offices of the National Telephone Company, were soldiers with a mortar. They had fired something over the crowd, going up in an arch of trailing smoke. People panicked, trying to get as far away from the shell as they could, but it was futile. There was nowhere to run now. The canister exploded almost ten metres above the centre of the crowd. Garún tried fleeing away, covering her mouth and nose with her sleeve, expecting toxic gas or something worse. But gas hadn’t come out of the canister. It was something else.
A being floated in the air above Austurvöllur. It was formless, colourless – but simultaneously not. It was an uncolour that didn’t match anything found in the spectrum of this world. Initially it was only a small, floating orb. It looked harmless.
Then it started to grow.
The uncolour spread through the air like oil over water. It grew, unwinding itself like an octopus uncoiling its tentacles. It reached out and down towards the crowd. Garún fought trying to stay upright, to keep the mob from trampling her into the ground in the panic. This was like nothing she had ever seen before, but it had to have some sort of explanation. A source. She suddenly remembered her goggles and hurriedly put them on.
The air was bursting with vibrant colour – an unnaturally high condensation of seiðmagn in the air. A supercharged stream of raw seiðmagn flowed down from Landsímahúsið towards the uncolour. The uncolour was a void of colour, the seiðmagn hypercoloured – the former unnatural, the latter supernatural. Some of the hues in the seiðmagn reminded her of delýsíð colours, others were more akin to other-worldly colours that reminded her of the ruined world of the huldufólk.
Garún fought for a better look at the top of Landsímahúsið and then realised what was happening. Three royal seiðskrattar stood up on the roof, soldiers filed behind them, skorrifles trained up at the sky, shooting down any approaching náskárar. The seiðskrattar wore dark and heavy robes, covered with crimson symbols of seiður. Black masks of leather covered their faces, with long, ivory beaks and dark red lenses. Mysterious materials and herbs were placed inside the beaks, a mixture infused with seiður that boosted their powers. She recognised one of the masks, decorated with red, hand-drawn sigils, and gritted her teeth in hateful frustration. The seiðskrattar amplified and contained the seiðmagn and cast it towards the uncolour, manipulating it. She saw that some kind of faint energy emanated from the uncolour itself, a force that was strikingly different from what the seiðskrattar used. As if it were from another world entirely.
The thing spread out like an umbrella, sending out slow-moving tendrils. Its furthest reaching feelers reached the panicked crowd. The tendrils, not exactly liquid or gaseous, grabbed hold of their first victims and pulled them into the air. They struggled, trying to resist, grabbing hold of their friends, but their efforts were futile against the creature’s unnatural strength.
Garún watched in horror as people lifted into the air were drained of life in a matter of minutes, from the moment the first feeler hooked itself into the flesh of its victim. First, the vision went, the eyes swelling up as dark clots of blood coagulated, sometimes bursting. Delirious from pain and fear, the people fought against the overwhelming strength of the feelers, but more constantly grew out of the uncolour’s mass, further hooking themselves into the victim’s body. They shook and trembled. Eventually they stopped resisting. Their skin turned taut and grey. Their cheeks became hollow and their lips shrunk into nothing. When the tentacles dropped their prey to the ground all life had been drained from the bodies, leaving only withered and dried-out corpses behind.
Then the tendrils moved towards fresh prey.
All thoughts of fighting back had been abandoned. Escaping was the only option. The army and the police held the line at all fronts, trapping them in the square. A wave of people crashed on Garún as they rushed away from the floating uncolour, hitting her so hard that she lost her footing. She was only spared from being trampled into the ground because she was crushed so tightly up against others, somehow managing to keep herself upright. She’d lost sight of Styrhildur and Hraki. More people rose into the sky, hooked on the uncoloured tendrils, dropped moments later as lifeless husks. Garún could barely move her limbs. She struggled to breathe, pressed in between people. Suddenly she found her footing and pushed forwards, fighting for some room. Before she knew it the crowd had violently pushed her back, shoving her to the edge of the no man’s land in the middle of the field.
The ground was already scattered with grey corpses: humans, huldufólk, marbendlar. A náskári had been trapped in the sky and crashed down in the middle of the field, its muted feathers falling from its body like autumn leaves. The uncolour kept on growing, hooking itself into anyone who found themselves at the edge of the crowd. The unnatural feelers danced above her, feeling blindly like lethargic lightning. She tried to squeeze herself back into the mass, into the safety of the crowd, but she might as well have been running into a brick wall. The feelers came closer, splitting into more, ravenous tendrils.
She didn’t think. She ran.
Shrivelled flesh and brittle bones cracked under her feet. She kicked up grey ash with each hurried footstep. She tried not to look
