Three friends slip into the tunnels beneath an old town and uncover powers that should not exist. In the dark below the Town Hall, something is already waiting for them.
When the clock in Old Town struck midnight, the silvery mist rising from the sealed gate beneath the Town Hall went unnoticed. Above ground, the streets were empty. Below, Sophie, Igor, and Lena were moving carefully through the narrow passageways, following a legend they had spent months pretending not to believe.
The underground opened into a maze of brick corridors, damp stone, and old pipes that trembled softly in the walls. Their footsteps came back to them from every direction. Somewhere in the dark, something scratched and went still.
Sophie stopped at a section of wall covered in carved symbols. The markings were too precise to be random, too deep to have been made recently. Lena lifted her phone and aimed the light at them. The runes answered with a faint shimmer, like embers waking under ash.
Igor reached out before either of the girls could stop him. The moment his fingers touched the stone, a sharp pulse ran up his arm. He jerked back with a hiss, but the strange heat had already spread through the three of them. The air seemed to thicken. Every sound sharpened. The tunnel, the pipes, even the dust drifting in the beam of Lena’s phone light felt suddenly close enough to touch.
"Do you feel that?" Lena whispered.
Sophie looked down at her hands and went cold. Pale lines were appearing beneath her skin, glowing in the same pattern as the symbols on the wall. She turned toward the corridor and saw farther than she should have been able to, through layers of brick and shadow, into a chamber they had not yet reached. Igor gasped as his boots lifted a few centimetres from the floor, as if the stone had forgotten how to hold him.
Then the tunnel went silent.
No dripping water. No scratching. No breath.
From around the bend came the slow drag of a footstep, and the lights in Lena’s phone flickered once, twice, then dimmed to a trembling blue. A figure stood at the edge of the dark, tall and motionless, as if it had been there the whole time.
A voice came out of the shadows, calm and certain.
"I have been waiting for you..."