Norwegian fjord horror: something was breathing on her salmon farm

Okay I wasn't going to share this one but it's been living in my head so here we go.

So there's this story about Ingrid, a manager at one of those high-tech floating salmon farms way up in northern Norway. Like, deep inside a fjord, dozens of kilometers from the coast, cliffs hundreds of meters tall on both sides, drift ice floating by 9 months of the year. Her only neighbors were the cliffs, the ice, and hundreds of thousands of salmon swimming under her feet in a giant net. She CHOSE this btw. She liked being alone.

Then polar night hit.

December. The sun literally doesn't rise. The whole world is just blue and black, with the aurora drifting around like a ghost. Her job was simple. Watch the monitors, check water temp, feed the fish, look at the underwater cameras. That was it.

And the horror started with the tech she trusted most.

One day the underwater sonar starts pinging. Normally that means seals or a small pod of whales passing by the nets. Whatever. But the shape on the screen was... different. It was HUGE. Way deeper than the drift ice, right under the nets, circling at this unbelievably slow steady pace.

"A whale?"

She tilted her head. But the sonar wasn't picking up any biological signal. It just labeled it "object of massive density." Then the shape drifted out of range.

That night, camera 10 auto-triggered an alarm.

The monitor switched over. The LED lights lit up the pitch black water and she could see thousands of salmon. Except. They weren't moving. Not a twitch. All of them frozen in place facing the same direction, like time had stopped.

"What the... oxygen drop?"

She reached to check the system. And right then, right in front of the camera lens, something huge and pale drifted past. Very slowly. She thought maybe it was the belly of a whale, but the surface wasn't smooth like scales. It was... pale and bumpy. Like the skin of a frozen human.

KRRRRRRRK-

The sound of it scraping against the net came through the hydrophone like something tearing.

After that night, she couldn't sleep. The sonar stopped catching anything. But the hydrophone kept picking up sounds.

...thud... thud... thud...

At first she thought it was distant drift ice cracking. But the sound kept getting closer. And more regular. Like someone. Was underneath. The steel floor of the floating platform she was standing on. From under the water. From below. Hitting it. With a giant hammer.

She tried to radio the coast guard but a blizzard had rolled in and the satellite antenna was frozen solid. All comms cut. She was completely trapped. Hundreds of kilometers of ice and water in every direction.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

The whole farm was shaking now. Her coffee cup fell off the shelf and shattered. The salmon were panicking so hard they were slamming into the nets and dying.

She screamed and flipped on every searchlight in the control room. The black water around the farm lit up bright.

Nothing.

There was nothing there.

And in that exact moment.

A thud.

Came from above her head.

From on top of the roof.

The next morning, miraculously, the blizzard stopped. A coast guard helicopter on routine patrol found her farm with comms still dead. When the rescuer opened the control room door, he froze in place.

Ingrid wasn't there.

The inside of the control room looked like someone had opened the door of a giant freezer. EVERYTHING was covered in thick white frost. Walls. Monitors. Ceiling. And the floor, frost EVERYWHERE, except for one spot. The exact shape of where Ingrid would have been standing.

And the reinforced glass window of the control room. From the OUTSIDE pushing IN, like someone had been blowing a giant icy breath against it all night long, the thickest ice crystals had bloomed across it.

Like flowers.