Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Behind the city of Bergen on the western coast of Norway there is a valley the local people have long called Isdalen, the Valley of Ice. It is a somber, steep-sided place of dark water and colder stone, and it carries an old and unlovely reputation. In centuries past it was said to be a valley where the desperate came to die, where suicides threw themselves from the crags and where more than one traveler had simply vanished into the mists that gather between its walls. The old Bergensers gave it another name in their whispers: Death Valley. It is the kind of place that seems to have been waiting a very long time for exactly the sort of thing that happened there on the twenty-ninth of November, 1970. On that cold Sunday a university professor was hiking in Isdalen with his two young daughters when they came upon something dreadful among the scree and scrub. A woman's body lay sprawled in a hollow between the rocks, badly burned across the whole front of her torso, her arms drawn u...

There is a valley outside the Norwegian city of Bergen called Isdalen, which means the Valley of Ice. It is a steep, brooding place of dark water and bare rock, and it has long carried a grim reputation; in the Middle Ages it was said that people came there to die, and locals gave it a nickname that translates as Death Valley. On the last Sunday of November 1970, a professor and his two daughters were hiking a slope above the valley floor when they came upon something that has never stopped troubling Norway. Among the stones lay the body of a woman, badly burned, her arms raised in a boxer's guard, surrounded by the small, deliberate wreckage of a life someone had gone to great lengths to erase. A Scene Arranged to Hide The woman was dead, her front scorched by fire though her back was untouched, as if she had been burning where she lay. Around and beneath her the investigators found a strange assortment of objects, and stranger still was their condition. There were the remains ...