Lena keeps dreaming the same blue-lit city, until one night she and Maks wake inside it and find a door, a masked hall, and a clock turning backwards.
For weeks, Lena had been waking with the taste of rain on her tongue and the image of a city still clinging to her eyes. In her dreams she moved through narrow streets lit by pale blue lanterns, past damp cobblestones and windows that shone like watchful pupils. Every night, no matter which path she took, she ended beneath the same tower, staring up at a clock that pointed to an hour no one should ever have seen.
Daylight made the dream feel even stranger. School. Homework. Boring corridors. Nothing in Lena’s ordinary life had room for midnight streets that seemed to breathe. Only Maks noticed that something was off. He watched her drift through lessons as if half her mind had already gone somewhere else.
"You look like you spend your nights travelling," he said one afternoon, bumping her shoulder as they crossed the hallway.
Lena gave him a thin smile. He wouldn’t have believed her if she had tried to explain. She barely believed it herself. But part of her had begun to want the impossible: to stand in that city for real, to feel the wet stone under her shoes, to hear that clock strike at last.
They were both bent over a biology book late one evening when exhaustion caught them at the same time. Lena’s head sank onto the desk. Maks muttered something she didn’t catch, and then the room vanished.
They woke standing in the middle of the dream city.
The air was cold and sharp, smelling faintly of metal and lightning. Rain-dark streets stretched away in every direction, quiet except for the soft hum running beneath them, like the whole place was holding its breath. Maks turned in a slow circle, staring at the blue lanterns, the warped windows, the impossible tower rising through the mist.
"This is not happening," he whispered.
Lena should have agreed. Instead, she knew exactly where to go.
They followed the route she had walked a hundred times in sleep, though it felt different now, as if the city were watching them back. A girl sat on a wall ahead of them, pale and motionless, with thin silver wings folded tight against her shoulders. She met Lena’s eyes, gave a single sharp nod, and pointed down a side alley before her body dissolved into a drift of mist.
At the end of the alley stood a plain wooden door with a brass knocker polished bright by invisible hands.
Lena reached for Maks, and together they crossed the threshold.
The city was gone.
They were in a vast hall full of people wearing animal masks, all of them silent, all of them turned toward the two of them as if they had been expected. In the centre of the room lay an open book bound in dark leather. Beside it stood the same clock from the tower, its hands spinning backward so fast Lena could barely track them.
Then the first mask cracked.
A sound like splintering ice ran through the hall, and every head turned at once. Shadows slipped under the broken faces, swallowing the eyes beneath. Maks grabbed Lena’s arm. The clock gave a deep, thunderous chime, and somewhere behind them, in the dark, something began to open.