Three teenagers follow an old map into the forest and uncover a hidden stone beneath a giant oak that opens a passage to somewhere impossible.
Julka, Maks, and Lena knew the forest behind the school as well as they knew the routes between their classrooms and the canteen. Or so they thought. That afternoon, with an old map borrowed from the library and a faded gold star circled in pencil, they pushed past the familiar paths and deeper under the trees. Nine oaks were drawn in a rough ring around the marked spot, and that was enough to make them keep going.
The sun still filtered warmly through the branches, but the forest grew quieter the farther they walked. Moss softened the ground beneath their shoes. Pine needles clung to their laces. Maks kept stopping to compare the map with the trees around them, muttering about the age of the paper and the strange lines that crossed it. Lena, who never trusted old objects without a reason, watched the shadows between the trunks instead.
After more than an hour, they came to a clearing that looked too deliberate to be natural. Nine massive oaks stood around the edge like guards. In the centre rose one tree larger than the rest, its trunk split by deep ridges and its roots bulging out of the earth like knuckles. Lena crouched and brushed away a mat of damp moss. Beneath one root was a flat stone, smooth at the edges and covered in symbols none of them recognised.
"It looks like some kind of runic alphabet," Maks whispered, though his voice had gone thin with excitement.
Julka knelt beside him. The carvings were cold, but the air above them felt oddly warm, almost charged. When all three of them pressed their hands to the stone at once, the clearing shuddered. The ground gave a low, trembling pulse. From deep inside the trunk came a sound like a voice speaking through water, and violet light spilled out between the roots, twisting into a bright spiral.
Julka drew back too late. The light caught her wrist, then her elbow, as if the tree had found her first. Heat flashed through her palm. The stone opened with a sudden, violent pull, and the world dropped away beneath their feet. They fell through a storm of colour, through blue and gold and something sharp as lightning, until the spinning stopped and the air turned cold.
They landed hard on soft, unfamiliar ground. Julka pushed herself up first, blinking. The sky above them was not blue but a deep wash of purple and green, as if dusk had been poured across it. Around them stood trees with silver leaves that whispered without any wind. For one stunned second, nobody spoke.
Then Lena grabbed Julka's shoulder.
"Do you see that?"
A figure was moving between the trees in the distance, tall and slow, its face hidden behind a mask that looked carved from wood. The ground beneath the three of them began to glow in thin veins of light, as if it recognised them. Somewhere close by, and then everywhere at once, a thousand whispering voices rose from the dark, warning them of something coming.