In the Bialowieza Forest, animals start vanishing without a trace. When Grom's sister disappears, he follows a strange trail that leads him toward something inhuman in the dark.
In the Bialowieza Forest, autumn usually arrived like a whisper: damp leaves, low mist, and light slipping through the canopy in thin gold threads. But this year the forest had gone wrong. Small animals vanished first. Then hares. Then a young deer that should have been easy to find and impossible to lose.
Grom knew these woods as well as his own paws. He was young, but he had already earned a reputation for being the one who noticed things other wolves missed. Last night, his sister Luna had not come back. She was quieter than he was, skittish around sudden noise, but she never stayed away this long.
By dawn, Grom was already at the clearing where she had last been seen. The grass was pressed flat in places, and the tracks around the edge of the clearing had been smeared so badly they looked erased. Not trampled. Erased.
The silence made his fur prickle. Even the birds seemed to be holding their breath. An old badger sat half-hidden near a fallen log, eyes wide and wet with fear. When Grom asked what had happened, the badger only muttered about a shadow that moved without sound and left nothing behind. From above, a magpie snapped a warning from the branches, sharp and nervous, as if it wanted to chase him away before he heard too much.
Grom was about to turn back when he saw the other tracks.
They were stretched and narrow, nothing like the paw marks of any creature he knew. The mud had dried around them in hard ridges, and they carried a bitter scent that reminded him of iron, smoke, and something cold he could not name. Whatever had made them had not wandered here by accident.
He followed them anyway.
The forest thickened as he went, the light fading beneath the tangled branches until the trees seemed to close around him. Then, somewhere behind him, a twig cracked.
Grom froze.
Another step. Then another.
And out of the shadows between the trunks, a shape began to take form...