While staying with their grandfather, Tosia and Bartek find a strange compass that points into the misty forest. The deeper they go, the more the woods seem to know their names.
Tosia sat on the wooden porch of their grandparents' house and watched the morning mist drift between the tall pines. Summer holidays had brought her and Bartek out of the city and into the quiet countryside, where everything smelled of resin, cut grass, and rain-soaked earth. Most of all, it had brought them to their grandfather, who was usually full of jokes and stories. That morning, though, he kept glancing toward the trees as if he expected them to move.
Tosia found the compass behind an old bench in the garden. It was small, heavy, and cold in her palm, with a scratched brass lid and a cracked glass face. When she opened it, the needle did not point north. It shivered once, then settled stubbornly toward the thick green wall of the Valley of the Misty Pines.
"Bartek! Come here," she called.
He sprinted across the lawn and crouched beside her. "Where did you get that?"
"Under the bench. Look at it."
Bartek peered closer, his eyebrows rising. "That's not normal."
Before Tosia could answer, their grandfather's voice drifted from the open kitchen window. He was on the phone, and he sounded tense in a way Tosia had never heard before.
"Yes," he said sharply. "It has appeared again. No, I don't know how, but the compass is pointing to the path. Deep into the forest."
Tosia and Bartek froze.
Their grandfather lowered his voice, but one sentence still reached them clearly: "If they find the map, it could start all over again."
Bartek looked at Tosia. Tosia looked at the compass.
Neither of them spoke. They only knew that whatever their grandfather was hiding, it had something to do with the forest. So they slipped through the gate and followed the needle into the mist.
The trees closed around them, tall and dark and silent. Then, from somewhere ahead, a voice whispered through the pines:
"Turn back before the valley wakes up."
Tosia stopped so suddenly that Bartek nearly collided with her. At their feet lay an old map, half-hidden in the grass, its corners damp and curled, strange symbols drawn across its surface in fading ink. The compass jerked wildly in her hand, spinning so fast it seemed to hum.
And then, from deep inside the mist, something answered.