Three teenagers find a strange mirror hidden in the school basement and step through it into a place that should not exist.
Victor had a habit of noticing the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and that was usually when trouble started. When the school nurse sent him, Lena, and Kacper down to the basement with a stack of battered cardboard boxes, none of them expected anything worth looking at. The basement was meant to stay forgotten: damp air, sagging pipes, dust thick enough to blur the edges of the shelves.
Victor was halfway to the stairs when something behind the oldest bookcase caught his eye.
It was a mirror.
Not a small cracked one from a classroom cupboard, but a tall, round mirror in a heavy metal frame, its rim carved with symbols so fine they looked almost alive. It did not belong there. It looked too clean, too deliberate, too expensive, like someone had dragged a relic into the basement and hidden it behind the rotting desks.
Lena stopped beside him and followed his stare. "That is not normal," she said at once.
"Obviously," Kacper muttered, already moving closer.
Victor caught his arm. "Maybe don’t touch it."
But Kacper had that look he got when he decided a warning was only a challenge. He stepped up to the glass and pressed his palm to it.
Nothing happened for a heartbeat.
Then his expression changed.
"It’s warm," he whispered.
Victor leaned in before he could stop himself. The surface was not glass at all. It shifted under Kacper’s hand like skin over water, pulsing once, then again, as if something on the other side had noticed them. The symbols around the frame lit with a dim silver glow.
Lena took a sharp breath. "Kacper, move."
Too late.
The mirror rippled wider, and Victor saw a corridor where the reflection should have been. Stone walls. Hanging vines that shimmered with blue light. A pale path stretching into darkness.
Kacper stumbled forward, and the mirror swallowed his arm.
Victor grabbed for him. Lena grabbed for Victor. For one impossible second, all three of them were caught in the shining surface, dragged toward the corridor that waited inside it. Then the basement vanished.
They landed hard on smooth stone, their boxes forgotten somewhere behind them.
The air smelled of citrus and smoke. Above them, glowing vines twisted through a vaulted ceiling cut straight from rock. At the far end of the corridor, a blue light flickered like a distant signal.
Victor pushed himself up, his heart hammering.
Then a sound came from the darkness ahead: a slow rustle of fabric, the tap of something hard against stone.
A cloaked figure stepped into the light, torch in hand. Her face was hidden, but when she spoke, her voice was calm, low, and unsettlingly familiar.
"We have been waiting for you."
Victor looked at Lena and Kacper, and for the first time since they entered the basement, none of them had anything to say.