A hidden map in an attic pulls Lena, Michal, and Patrick toward a forgotten town and a legend that should have stayed buried behind the Wall of Wind.
Lena, Michal, and Patrick were killing time in their grandfather's attic, a hot, dusty room where old trunks sagged under the weight of forgotten winters. Sunlight leaked through a narrow window and turned the dust into drifting gold. They had been digging through books with cracked spines and boxes tied with fraying string when Patrick shoved a heavy crate aside.
Something squeaked beneath it.
"Look," Michal said, crouching near the floorboards. A strip of yellowed paper had slipped through a gap between the planks.
Lena reached for it first. The paper was brittle, folded so many times it had almost learned the shape of a square. When she opened it, all three of them went still.
It was a map. Not a proper one, not the kind printed in school atlases, but a hand-drawn route through dark forest and along the edge of a huge lake, ending at a jagged wall split by a bolt of lightning. Beneath the sketch, in sharp cursive, someone had written: Behind the Wall of Wind waits one who is not afraid of the truth.
They did not speak for a moment.
By evening they were in the kitchen, heads bent over the map while the house settled around them with its usual creaks and sighs. The village outside was quiet, the sort of quiet that made every distant sound seem important. Yet the paper on the table seemed to carry another place inside it, a place colder and older than their grandfather's house.
The next morning they packed fast. Water, torches, a knife, rope, and enough food to pretend they were being sensible. The route led them through dense forest, over a narrow bridge above a fast river, and then farther than any of them had gone alone.
By noon the trees thinned, and the road opened onto an abandoned town swallowed by mist. Empty windows stared from broken houses. Grass had split the paving stones in the square. Beneath the old clock tower, they found a slab of stone marked with the same lightning symbol from the map.
Then a murmur moved through the fog.
It sounded like a voice. Like someone saying one of their names.
Lena turned first. The mist was shifting now, drawing apart in slow pale folds, and from the centre of it a figure was beginning to take shape, tall and motionless and far too familiar...