Lena and her friends break into an abandoned villa and find a mirror that opens onto a world no one was meant to enter.
I’ve always been drawn to abandoned places, but that evening even I felt the villa pushing back.
We sat on the splintered porch of Villa Pod Platanami with the others, Michal, Zuza, and Igor, listening to the wind worry at the dead branches overhead. The house looked asleep from a distance. Up close, it felt like it was holding its breath. Moonlight slipped through broken boards and lay in pale strips across the floor.
"Imagine if there’s something hidden in here," Igor said, raising his torch. His voice sounded too loud, as if the house disliked being disturbed.
We split up without really agreeing to it, each of us trying to look braver than we felt. I drifted into the living room and stopped in front of a tall, ornate mirror. Someone had pinned an old photograph to its frame. The image had faded almost to dust, but one face caught me anyway: a girl standing among strangers, with my eyes, my mouth, my expression, as if the picture had been taken years before I was born.
Then I noticed the reflection.
The room behind me was still, but something moved inside the glass: a thin silver mist curling and tightening like breath on winter air. I stepped closer. The surface gave off a faint chill. When I lifted my hand, the mirror rippled under my fingers like water.
I froze.
"Michal! Zuza! Igor!" My voice cracked through the room. They came fast, footsteps thudding over the warped boards.
Michal reached my side first, then stopped dead. The glow had spread across the mirror, brightening from deep inside it, as if a second room were waking on the other side. Zuza grabbed my arm. Igor swore under his breath.
We didn’t have time to move.
The glass burst outward in a flash of cold light, and the floor vanished beneath us. We fell through a rushing blur of silver and shadow, and when it stopped, we were lying in grass that shone like metal under a sky full of hanging crystal.
Trees with glass leaves towered around us. The air hummed with voices we couldn’t quite hear. On a ridge ahead stood a figure wrapped in pale light, watching us as if it had been expecting us all along.
It turned slowly toward us, and when it spoke, the words opened inside my head rather than in the air.
You are in Elsewhere.
Only one of you can return.