A school walk in the woods turns strange when I wander off and find a hidden stone passage that shouldn’t be there.
It was supposed to be an ordinary school trip: a walk through the woods, a few facts about trees, and then back to the bus before lunch.
Instead, I got lost.
It happened in the space of a single breath. I stopped to tie my shoelace, looked up, and the line of children had vanished between the trunks. No class. No teacher. No shouting. Just the hush of leaves shifting overhead.
"Hello?" I called, trying not to sound scared. "Is anyone there?"
The woods answered with silence.
I turned in a slow circle. The path looked familiar at first, but the trees seemed to have moved while I wasn't looking. Every branch looked the same. Every shadow felt deeper than it should have.
Then I saw something that made me stop dead.
Just beyond a curtain of ivy, where there had been nothing a moment ago, stood an old stone archway. It was half buried in roots and moss, as if the forest had spent years trying to hide it. Pale carvings ran across the stones, and at the centre was a line of writing I couldn't read.
I stepped closer.
The air around the archway felt different somehow, cooler and charged, like the moments before a storm. My fingers brushed the stone, and the carvings shimmered.
A warm golden light flared beneath my hand.
The wind rushed through the trees without warning, whipping the leaves around me. Somewhere in the dark opening, a voice spoke my name.
"You shouldn't have found this," it whispered. "But now that you have..."
The stone arch groaned, and something moved in the shadows beyond it.