Four friends on holiday in the Bieszczady Mountains follow strange tracks into a forest that seems to shift around them, until they uncover something impossible hidden among the trees.
It was the first week of July, and the Bieszczady evenings were warm enough to blur the line between earth and sky. The air around Lenka's grandfather's cottage smelled of wet grass, pine resin and the cold stream that ran behind the house. Lena, Kuba, Antek and Veronika had finally managed to meet there at the same time, after months of messages and promises that had never quite lined up. Now the mountains stretched around them in every direction, wild and green, with mist clinging to the grey ridges like torn fabric.
The storm had broken late the night before. By morning, the world looked washed clean. Lena stepped out onto the porch barefoot, still half asleep, and noticed the grass beyond the path glittering with drops of rain. Then she saw the marks.
They were too precise to be random, too deliberate to be animal tracks. Something had pressed through the dew in a line of small, shiny impressions, as if a hand had dragged along the tops of the blades. Antek was already kneeling by the mint patch, his expression sharpened by curiosity.
"Those aren't deer," he said quietly. "Look at the spacing."
Veronika bent over the prints, brushing damp hair from her face. "Then what are they?"
Nobody answered. The footprints led straight into the forest, toward the thickest part of the trees, where the trunks crowded together so tightly that the light seemed to break apart before it reached the ground.
Lena looked once at the others, then started after them.
Kuba muttered something under his breath, but he followed. So did the others. Ten minutes later, the trail became stranger. The prints were still there, but now they were mixed with pieces of torn packaging - glossy wrappers with unfamiliar logos, the kind they had only seen in foreign ads online. Kuba picked one up and turned it over, frowning.
"This shouldn't be here," he said.
"Neither should the rest of this," Veronika replied.
The deeper they went, the more the forest felt wrong. The path narrowed without warning. Branches leaned overhead like they were closing ranks. Even the birds had gone silent. Every few steps, the ground dipped under moss and roots, and the air grew cooler, as if they had crossed into another season.
Then Lena stopped so abruptly that Antek nearly ran into her.
Ahead of them, in the middle of a small clearing, stood an iron gate.
It had no business being there. Not in that place, not half-buried in fern and shadow, not with a stone path running beyond it and vanishing into the trees as if it had always been waiting for someone to find it. On the ground beside the gate lay an open rucksack. A notebook had slipped halfway out, along with an old brass compass, its needle twitching even though Lena's hands were perfectly still.
Antek stepped closer, lowering himself beside the bag. The notebook's cover was worn smooth, the pages filled edge to edge with cramped writing in a language that looked almost like Latin until you stared too long and realised the letters bent in on themselves, wrong in a way that made her skin prickle.
"Who leaves this in the middle of nowhere?" he whispered.
Before anyone could answer, something moved behind them in the trees.
A branch snapped. Then another.
The notebook pages lifted in a sudden gust of wind, fluttering open as all four friends turned at once toward the sound growing in the dark between the trunks.