Fifteen-year-old Lena and Maja find a tower adults swear does not exist. Inside, an ancient mirror wakes to their touch and speaks from another world.
Lena traced the town map with one impatient finger until she found the tiny mark near the edge of the paper: old tower. The adults acted as if it were nothing more than a joke, but the place kept turning up in half-remembered warnings and stories no one would say twice. That was enough for Lena.
She was fifteen, which meant she was too old to be fobbed off with excuses and too curious to leave a mystery alone.
By late afternoon, she and Maja had pushed through tangled gardens and narrow paths swallowed by moss. Mist clung to the trees in pale threads, and then the tower rose out of it all, higher and stranger than Lena had expected. Its stones held a faint emerald shimmer, as if light had sunk into them and never quite escaped.
Maja stopped beside her. “Tell me I’m not imagining that.”
A door slid open in the tower wall without a sound.
Lena and Maja stared at it, then at each other, and the silence between them felt charged, almost alive. At last Lena took a breath and stepped inside.
The air changed at once. It was cool, damp, and smelled of old paper, wet stone, and something sharp she could not name. Pale lines of light drifted across the walls like living handwriting, twisting into symbols that vanished the moment she tried to focus on them. Somewhere above them, words seemed to whisper down the stairwell, just out of reach.
They climbed.
At the top, they found a round chamber with a single mirror standing in the centre. It was taller than Lena, framed in black wood veined with silver, and the silver flashed now and then like trapped lightning. The glass was not still. Shadows moved beneath it, slow and restless, as if something on the other side had noticed them first.
Lena took one step closer. Before she could stop herself, her hand touched the mirror.
Green light burst across the room.
Then a voice rose from inside the glass, low and clear and disturbingly close. “Do you dare to cross to the other side?”
Lena froze. Beside her, Maja went white.
And in the mirror, something began to move toward them.