Lena and Michal uncover a hidden staircase beneath the old town and descend into a buried labyrinth that seems to be waiting for them.
Rain hammered the roofs of the old town and turned the narrow streets into black ribbons of shining stone. Lena and Michal ran through the storm with their coats half-buttoned and their breath burning in the cold air. They should have left the ruined tenement hours ago. Instead, they were still chasing what Lena had found under the collapsed basement wall: a sealed trapdoor hidden beneath rubble, old timber, and a layer of dust no one had touched in years.
"It has to be here," Lena said, crouching beside the opening. Her voice was low, but excitement sharpened every word.
Michal lifted the torch and angled the beam across the broken floor. The metal lid was half-buried, warped with age, and marked by a ring of rusted iron. He brushed away the grit, then gave Lena a quick look. The stories about tunnels beneath the city had always sounded like tavern nonsense, the kind of legend people repeated to entertain themselves. Yet the trapdoor was real, and it was cold under her fingers when she forced it open.
A breath of air rose from below, stale and damp, carrying the smell of wet stone and something older. A staircase dropped into the dark, narrow steps slick with age. Lena went first, one hand on the wall, while Michal followed with the torch. The beam trembled across the stone and caught on carvings that ran along the passage in a long, broken line of symbols.
Michal stopped so abruptly that Lena almost collided with him. He knelt, running his fingers just above the etched marks. "These aren't random," he murmured. "They're old Slavic runes."
The corridor narrowed as they went deeper. Their footsteps sounded wrong down there, too loud and too lonely, as if the labyrinth were listening back. At the first junction, they found two paths: one vanished into complete darkness, the other glowed with a dull red light that pulsed faintly against the walls.
Lena held up a hand. Somewhere in the black passage came a whisper, soft enough to doubt it at first. Then it came again, closer this time, dragging along the stone like a voice spoken through a closed mouth.
Michal turned toward her, and the torch flickered once, twice, then died. The red light at the far end of the corridor deepened, and from the darkness ahead, a figure in a black cloak stepped slowly into view.