Kasia and Michal enter a forest that should not exist and find a strange signal waiting for them.
Kasia and her younger brother Michal had ridden their bikes to the old forest behind town so many times that they knew every bend in the path and every root that tried to trip them. That morning, they expected nothing more than mud on their tires and the usual arguments about who could coast downhill fastest.
Then they reached the top of the hill and stopped so suddenly that both bikes skidded in the dust.
The forest below was wrong.
The trees still stood in the same place, but their trunks shimmered with a blue glow that pulsed like a heartbeat. Their branches looked thin and metallic, as if someone had twisted them out of silver wire and hung leaves of light from the ends. Scattered across the ground were bright, polished acorns. When Michal crouched to touch one, it hopped once in his palm with a soft click.
Michal snatched his hand back. "That is not normal," he whispered.
"No kidding," Kasia said, though she was already leaning forward, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The air itself seemed to hum, and the deeper she looked between the trunks, the more the forest seemed to shift, as if it were half a second out of step with the rest of the world.
Then a sound floated out from the trees.
It was small, sharp, and electronic, like a signal trying to find its way through static.
Michal fumbled for his phone. The battery had been dead all morning, yet the screen flickered to life in his hand, glowing with a row of symbols neither of them recognised.
"Kasia..." His voice trembled. "My phone shouldn't be doing this."
Before she could answer, something moved above them.
Tiny mechanical butterflies drifted down through the blue light. Their wings flashed with tiny colours, bright as stained glass, and when one settled lightly on Kasia's shoulder, she froze. Its body was warm. Its wings trembled. Then, in a voice so soft it almost sounded like the wind speaking, it whispered:
"Help us... Something big is coming... The forest needs you..."
The butterfly vanished into sparks.
The ground shuddered beneath their shoes. Deep in the forest, a strange white light flared between the glowing trees, growing larger with every second, and from the darkness beyond it came the sound of something enormous beginning to move.