Ada and Janek slip into a forgotten garden and find a living portal beneath an ancient oak. Beyond it waits a glittering unknown world, and something in the shadows is already moving toward them.
Ada and Janek had heard the rumours for years: an abandoned garden on the edge of town, sealed off by a rusted gate and tangled in vines thick enough to hide a building. On that raw afternoon, after a week of lectures, deadlines, and the kind of exhaustion that made every decision feel heavier than it should, they finally stepped through.
The air inside was cool and wet, carrying the scent of rot, moss, and old soil. Ferns rose around them in sharp green waves, and the broken paths disappeared almost at once beneath roots and weeds. Ada moved first, drawn forward by the same restless curiosity that had kept her reading long after midnight as a child. Janek followed more cautiously, pretending he was only humoring her, though his gaze kept catching on every strange detail.
They found the oak at the centre of the garden.
It was enormous, older than anything around it, its trunk split by time and weather. Yet the bark did not look natural. Fine lines ran across it in a pattern too deliberate to be random, as if someone had carved symbols into the wood and then left them to glow from within. At the base of the roots, half-hidden in shadow, a pale blue circle shone through the dark earth. It pulsed softly, once, twice, like a heartbeat trying to remember itself.
Ada crouched before it before Janek could stop her.
Her fingertip brushed the surface.
The circle chilled instantly, and the whisper came at the same moment - faint, intimate, almost recognisable, as though someone had spoken her name from the other side of a wall. The light shuddered. Leaves lifted around them despite the still air, turning in a slow, deliberate spiral. Janek caught Ada’s wrist and pulled her back, but neither of them looked away.
The circle widened.
Blue gave way to depth, and depth became a passage, a trembling opening into something impossibly far from home. On the other side, a city hung in the distance, all glass towers and silver bridges, its edges blurred like a memory seen through water. Shapes moved above it - not birds, not quite machines - drifting through the air as if gravity were only a suggestion there.
Ada forgot to breathe. Janek’s grip tightened on her arm.
Then a branch snapped somewhere behind them.
The sound was small, but in the sudden silence it landed like a warning. Ada and Janek froze. From the ferns at the edge of the clearing, something shifted - a figure, or the hint of one - and the whisper in the portal rose, sharper now, as if it had noticed them at last.