Seventeen-year-old Irmina starts uncovering the secret beneath Vergania’s morning fog when a stranger with a glowing stone calls her by name.
Vergania had lived under fog for so long that people treated daylight like a story told to children. By dawn, the streets were already blurred into silver and grey, the church spire vanished first, then the roofs, then the end of the lane. Only Irmina ever seemed to notice how the mist moved, as if it were thinking.
Her grandfather called it weather, but he never sounded convinced. He spent his days among pots of crushed leaves and hanging herbs, and when Irmina was younger he would mutter the same warning whenever the fog pressed hard against the windows: the mist protects, but it also tempts.
She had asked what that meant. He had only told her to keep her shoes dry and her questions to herself.
That evening, while the town was shuttering itself away from the cold, Irmina slipped out the back door with her sketchbook tucked under one arm and a rucksack over her shoulder. She had meant to go home before dark. She always meant to. But the drawings inside the bag had started to feel less like studies and more like evidence: the strange shapes she had seen at the edge of the square, the outlines that appeared for a breath and vanished, the figures her mind insisted were real.
The market was empty except for the faint clink of a sign swinging somewhere in the fog. Lantern light bled weakly through the white air. Irmina crossed the square and stopped beneath the old clock tower, where the mist lay thickest, almost solid.
Someone was standing there.
A boy, about her age, dressed in dark clothes that swallowed what little light reached him. He held a stone in his palm, smooth and black until it caught the lantern glow and flashed with a cold blue sheen. He did not look surprised to see her. He looked as if he had been waiting a long time.
"You came," he said.
His voice had an accent she could not place, sharp at the edges, unlike anything she had ever heard in Vergania.
Irmina tightened her grip on the strap of her bag. "Who are you?"
The boy glanced past her, toward the streets closing in under the fog, then back to her face.
"Someone who knows what this city is hiding," he said. "If you want the truth about the mist, you have to come with me. And if you do, you won't be going home tonight. Maybe not for a very long time."
The words hit harder than they should have. Irmina thought of her grandfather, of his warnings, of the sketches packed against her ribs like a second heartbeat. Then the stone pulsed once in the boy's hand, bright enough to paint the cobbles blue.
The fog surged.
A deep sound rolled through it, low and impossible, as if something vast had just turned in its sleep beneath the square. Irmina stared at the boy, and before she could decide whether to run or reach for him, the mist closed over them both.