It was early July, and the warm Bieszczady evenings were suffused with the smell of damp grass. Lena, Kuba, Antek and Veronika had come together for the first time in months to Lenka's grandfather's secluded cottage. They were surrounded by the vastness they had been waiting for all year - wild forests, a murmuring stream and mists drifting between grey peaks. Last night was stormy. When they went out in front of the house in the morning, there was a freshness in the air and something else-small, shiny footprints, as if someone had dragged a finger through the dew on the tall grasses. Antek was the first to notice them. He crouched by a trampled clump of wild mint. - 'Those aren't deer tracks,' he chuckled in a whisper. - See. The prints imprinted in the mud looked human, but they were too long and strangely wide. They led into the forest, to a place where the wall of trees thickened almost unfriendly. - 'Someone must have walked through at night,' Veronica said, but her voice betrayed uncertainty. Lena glanced at her friends and wordlessly set off to follow the footprints. The rest hesitated only for a moment. After ten minutes of walking, the footprints had arrived - now they were accompanied by scattered wrappers of strange-looking chocolate bars they had only seen in foreign advertisements. - Doesn't sound like a normal walk, does it? - remarked Kuba, rubbing his eyes tiredly from the bright light that shone through the leaves. The deeper they ventured into the forest, the more the path seemed to change. The trees grew closer and closer together, and the silence was only broken by the creaking of branches and their own breathing. At one point, Lena stopped. - 'Look,' she whispered and pointed to a small clearing. In the middle, among the ferns, someone had erected an iron gate, completely incongruous with the wild landscape. Behind it was a winding stone path, so old that it had almost disappeared under the moss. On the other side of the wicket someone had left an unzipped rucksack with a notebook and an old compass. - Who left this? - Antek asked, crouching by the wicket. The notebook had a suede cover and pages written to the edges in a language that resembled Latin, although the letters were strange, almost twisted in a spiral. Before they had time to work out what to do, there was a rustling sound behind them. Someone or something moved between the trees, and a gentle gust of air flipped a few pages of the mysterious notebook. All four held their breath, listening to the growing sound....