Four friends from Irida uncover a hidden portal beneath an abandoned factory and step into a parallel world that should not exist, where the first voice they hear may not be their own.
The sun was dropping behind the forest, turning Irida the colour of old amber. From up on the roof of the sports hall, the town looked almost peaceful, which was a lie so complete it was hard not to laugh at it. The streets were empty, the houses were locked up tight, and the only sounds were a dog barking somewhere near the allotments and the thin hum of a summer evening settling over everything.
We sat in a row along the edge of the roof: me, Lena, Wojtek, and Igor. Four people who knew each other's habits too well and the town far too little. Or maybe it was the other way around. In Irida, every day folded into the next until even boredom started to feel like a kind of weather.
Wojtek had been the one to mention the foundations under the forest in the first place. He said it like it was nothing, like he was talking about a shortcut or a place to smoke after school. I barely listened. Everyone knew the abandoned factory at the edge of town had been rusting away for years, hemmed in by a chain-link fence and half-swallowed by nettles. Nothing ever happened there. That was exactly why Lena kept looking at me like she wanted to prove something.
"We should go tomorrow," she said at last, her chin lifted toward Igor, as if daring him to call it stupid.
Igor grinned. He was the kind of person who could make danger look like a technical problem. "If there’s anything there, I’ll figure it out."
That was enough to make it real.
We left before noon on Saturday, when the town was still slow and sleepy and no one was paying attention. The walk to the factory took us through the edge of the forest, where the trees grew so thick the light barely touched the ground. Branches snagged at our sleeves. The air smelled of sap, wet earth, and something metallic under it, faint but sharp enough to keep making me look over my shoulder.
By the time we reached the site, the excitement had burned away most of our caution. The factory itself was only a skeleton of broken walls and sagging concrete, but beneath the trees behind it lay a wide slab of foundations, cracked in places and buried under moss. In the middle of the slab, stones had been set into the surface in a pattern that was too precise to be random: a geometric mosaic, dark and pale, arranged with the patience of someone who had wanted it found.
Wojtek crouched first, his hand hovering over the pattern. None of us spoke. Even Igor had gone quiet.
Lena knelt and brushed away a thin layer of dirt with her fingertips. Her face changed at once. Not fear exactly. Recognition, maybe. Or the beginning of it.
"This is..." she started.
The sentence never finished.
A blue flare punched up through the stones so suddenly that all four of us stumbled backward. The mosaic shivered under our feet, then the stones sank, one after another, as if the ground had decided to open its mouth. In less than a heartbeat the foundation vanished, leaving a dark oval hole in the centre of the slab, full of light that moved like liquid.
Colours twisted inside it - deep blue, silver, something green and impossible to name. The edges pulsed with a low vibration that I felt in my teeth more than my ears. Cold air rolled out of the opening, carrying a smell like rain on stone and ozone after lightning. It did not belong to the forest. It did not belong anywhere I knew.
Igor pulled out his phone on pure instinct. The screen flickered, filled with jagged bands of colour, and died in his hand.
"No way," he breathed.
None of us moved. The portal kept breathing in silence, its surface rippling as if something on the other side had just pressed a hand against it.
Lena swallowed hard. "Do you think it’s a door?"
Wojtek had already taken one step forward. He leaned over the edge, and for a second his outline was swallowed by the light. Then he was simply gone.
My stomach dropped.
There was a beat of absolute stillness, and then from inside the portal came Wojtek’s voice, thin and warped, as if it had travelled through a long tunnel before reaching us.
"Come here," he said. "You need to see this."
I looked at Lena. She was staring into the opening with her mouth slightly open, fear and wonder fighting for the same space in her face. Igor took one step back, then stopped, as if the ground behind him had disappeared too.
The light deepened. The sound inside the portal changed. Something was moving in there.
Then, from somewhere beyond the shimmer, another voice answered - not Wojtek’s this time, but a low, unfamiliar whisper that made the hairs rise on my arms.
"At last," it said.
And the light reached for us.