In an abandoned observatory, Simon, Olga, and Leos find a shimmering portal that does not behave like anything in their world. Something on the other side is already noticing them.
Simon always hated the old observatory on the hill after dark. By day it looked like a forgotten relic; at night it seemed to lean closer, as if it were listening. Still, on a warm June evening, he stood at its gates with Olga and Leos, three backpacks slung over their shoulders, stuffed with biscuits, notebooks, and torches. It was supposed to be one of those holiday dares that sounded brave until you were actually there: break into a ruin, take pictures, invent a few creepy stories, and pretend your nerves were part of the fun.
The observatory was larger than Simon remembered. Its stone walls rose out of the weeds like the shell of some dead machine, and the dome above them was split by a rusted seam. Inside, the air was cold enough to raise goosebumps on his arms. Dust veiled the floor, cobwebs hung in the corners, and every sound - their breathing, their footsteps, the whisper of their clothes - came back to them from the dark.
They crossed the main hall in a loose cluster, torches moving over cracked stone and fallen plaster. Then Leos stopped so abruptly that Simon almost walked into him.
“There,” he said.
In the far corner stood a circular slab taller than Simon, set upright in a frame of blackened metal. At first glance it looked like a mirror. Then it moved. Not much - just a tremor beneath the surface, a faint ripple, like moonlight disturbed by a hand. The thing shone from within, holding the blue-black of a night sky that did not belong in any room.
Olga lowered her torch. “That is not normal.”
“No kidding,” Leos muttered, already reaching for his phone.
Simon should have backed away. Instead he stepped closer, drawn by the strange stillness at the slab’s centre. His reflection stared back at him for one heartbeat, pale and distorted. Then it vanished.
He touched the surface.
Ice shot through his fingers and up his arm. He jerked his hand back, gasping, but not before the slab flashed with a sudden, violent clarity. For a split second he saw a city burning with a thousand white lights, towers rising into a violet sky, and people moving between them in long, unfamiliar shapes. It was gone almost before his mind could name it.
Leos snapped a photo. The screen filled with static and shattered colours. He frowned and tried again. The image twisted into a blur, as if something on the other side refused to be seen.
Olga knelt beside the frame. Tiny numbers were scratched into the metal near the base.
“Five-one-one,” she said. “Why would someone number it?”
Simon looked up. Under the broken dome, scraps of paper clung to the beams overhead, yellowed and curled with age. One had slipped loose and was hanging by a single nail. He climbed onto a table, reached for it, and brought it down carefully.
The note was written in English, in a sharp hand that looked too deliberate to be old:
Only the brave see both sides.
Only the chosen walk the bridge.
A low hum ran through the room.
Their torches flickered. Leos’s phone lit up by itself. Olga stepped back as the air thickened, pressing against Simon’s skin like a storm about to break. The slab’s surface deepened from silver to blue, then to a blinding, liquid glow.
The shadows at the edge of the hall began to move.
Simon opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came. From the centre of the shining surface, a figure started to form - tall, human in shape, yet utterly wrong, as if someone had drawn a person and forgotten the face.
And it was reaching toward them.