Thirteen-year-old Leon notices the forest behind his house is changing: the animals are unnervingly quiet, and at night something pulses out of the dark. Then he follows the sound into the trees.
Leon had always thought the forest behind his house was ordinary: tangled paths, slick moss on the stones, mosquitoes whining in clouds at dusk. Lately, though, it felt wrong.
The birds that should have been noisily fighting over the branches were gone silent. The neighbour's dogs no longer barked at the fence. And after dark, when Leon lay in bed with the window open, he kept hearing it again: a low, steady pulse from somewhere deep among the trees, as if the forest had started breathing.
He tried to ignore it. He really did. But that afternoon, walking home from school, he saw a deer standing at the edge of the road where the tarmac gave way to roots and bracken. Sunlight caught on its coat, turning it almost silver. It should have bolted the moment it saw him.
Instead, it stared through him.
Leon slowed. The deer did not move. Its ears twitched once, and then it made a strange, harsh cry - too sharp, too broken, nothing like the soft sound he expected. For a second, something flickered in its eyes, a glint that looked almost like fear. Then it turned and vanished between the trees.
That night Leon waited until his parents were asleep. He pulled on his sweatshirt, grabbed his torch, and climbed out through his bedroom window. The grass was cold and wet against his hands as he dropped into the garden. Every sound seemed louder than it should have been: the click of a branch, the rush of his own breathing, the faint throb coming from the forest ahead.
He kept going.
The pulse led him deeper between the trunks until he reached an old fallen oak, split open down the middle and covered in pale fungus. There, in the torchlight, stood a ring of animals. Foxes. Hedgehogs. Two roe deer. Even a woodpecker perched low on a branch as if it had forgotten it could fly.
All of them were staring into the centre of the circle.
Leon took one careful step closer. The animals turned at once, every head swinging toward him.
From somewhere beyond them, deep in the forest, came a crackling sound. Then a blinding flash tore through the darkness.