When Lena finds a forgotten building in the forest, she and Maks step into a place where imagination begins to materialise around them.
On a rain-heavy Wednesday, Lena was digging through her rucksack for a torch when the forest seemed to draw a curtain around her. Mist pressed between the trees, turning the spruces and ferns into grey-green shadows. What had started as a quick walk with the dog had already gone wrong in the usual, irritating way. Then, at the end of the path where there should have been nothing but roots and wet leaves, she saw a building.
It stood half-hidden among the trees, its brick walls dark with rain, as if it had been waiting there for years and no one had bothered to notice. Upstairs, the empty window frames stared back at her.
Lena slowed. She should have turned around. Instead, she took another step, and then another, drawn toward the place by a feeling she could not name.
The front door gave under her hand with a long creak.
Inside, the air smelled of dust and damp stone. The corridor was lined with mosaics that caught the light and threw it back in silver and blue. Along the walls, strange drawings climbed over one another: dragons with curling tails, stars caught in spirals, trees with purple leaves bending toward a sky that did not exist anywhere outside this building.
"Lena!"
Maks came jogging round the corner a second later, breathless and annoyed, his mobile phone raised like a torch. "You can't just disappear into a forest."
"I'm here," Lena said, and her voice echoed too loudly down the corridor.
Maks stopped beside her. For a moment neither of them moved. The building felt wrong in a way Lena could not explain, as if it was listening.
Then she saw it.
At the far end of the corridor, where there had been only blank wall a moment before, another door now stood half in shadow. It was taller than the others, covered in thin, shifting drawings that seemed to change when she blinked.
Maks lowered his phone. "Was that there before?"
Lena did not answer. She was already walking toward it.
Her fingers closed around the handle. The metal was cold enough to sting. She pulled, and the door opened soundlessly onto a room that should not have been possible at all - a room full of ...