The sky above was a cold, cloudy gray as Trey, one of the newly assigned shoreline guards, pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders. He adjusted his binoculars and scanned the stretch of frozen sea that glimmered beyond the rocky ice shelf. Most days were uneventful here — just the sound of shifting ice and the occasional seal — but today something felt off.
He narrowed his eyes.
A slow churning ripple, almost too deliberate, moved across the otherwise still waters.
Trey stepped forward, boots crunching the ice. And then he saw it—a massive whirlpool, slowly rotating in the middle of the sea, maybe thirty meters off the shoreline. The water seemed darker around it, unnaturally so, as if something was twisting the currents from below.
"What the hell…?" he muttered.
And then, just as he turned to grab his communicator, he saw them.
Fish. But not like any he had ever seen.
