In the forgotten wetlands of Podlasie, Lena, the granddaughter of an herbalist, follows a path into the forest on the eve of Dziady and finds something waiting in the dark.
Night settled over the marshes like spilled ink, swallowing the birch path as Lena made her way through the fog. Beyond the reeds, behind the black line of spruces, the old valley held its breath. Cranes rustled in the distance, frogs muttered under the water, and every now and then the wet ground answered with a soft, hollow sigh.
It was the eve of Dziady. In Milena’s house the windows already burned with small wax flames, and the smell of holy bread and smoke clung to Lena’s coat as if she had carried it out with her. Every year she helped her grandmother set the lights in place, every year she listened to the same warnings about open doors, restless names, and the thinness of that night. This year she had pretended not to listen.
She was no longer a child who believed in things hidden in the reeds. Or at least that was what she told herself as she walked deeper between the trees. The moon broke through the mist in pale strips, laying silver across the marsh and turning each boulder into something crouched and watchful. Lena tightened her fingers around the black stone Milena had pressed into her palm before she left.
Then she felt it again: that pressure between her shoulder blades, the unmistakable certainty that she was not alone.
She stopped so abruptly that the mud sucked at her boots. A rustle moved through the reeds to her left, slow and deliberate, not the frantic leap of a hare or the flutter of a bird. The wind shifted. Branches creaked overhead. Somewhere ahead, where the path narrowed between two moss-covered stones, something pale stirred in the dark.
A figure stepped from behind the trunk of an old pine.
He wore a shirt gone white with mud and a string of rowan beads dark against his throat. Lena could not see his face clearly, only the shape of him, too still, too close, as if he had been waiting there for a long time. Her breath caught. The black stone in her hand seemed to grow colder.
When he spoke, his voice was low and urgent, and the first words out of his mouth made Lena turn toward the forest without knowing whether she was running from him or to him.