In a Slavic valley at midsummer, Igor and Lena meet a strange wanderer who sends them toward a riddle hidden in the old forest.
Mist lay over the Valley of Twilight Shadows like a second skin, and the lowering sun burned red behind the crowns of the oaks. Igor and Lena moved along the forest path in silence at first, then in low voices, as if the trees themselves might listen. They had both grown up here, where the old stories sat close to the earth and never quite vanished. People still crossed themselves when they passed the black pond. Children were told not to linger near the spruces after dusk. Even now, on the night of the summer solstice, the valley felt less like a place than a boundary.
Igor tried to laugh off the unease pressing at the back of his neck, but the sound never came. The woods were too alert. Branches whispered to one another overhead. Something pale flickered between the trunks and vanished before Lena could point it out. Then, without warning, a figure stood on the path ahead of them, as though the mist had shaped him there.
He was old, but not frail. A dark cloak hung from his shoulders in heavy folds, and around his neck swayed a string of boar's teeth polished to a dull shine. His face was lined like weathered bark, his eyes bright and cold with an almost animal intelligence.
“You're searching for answers you may not survive,” he said, his voice rough as gravel dragged over stone. He lifted one thin hand and pointed deeper into the forest, where the path split and disappeared among the pines. “Beyond that border, truth stops being gentle. There is a lich among you. Find it before it finds you.”
Lena glanced at Igor. He saw the same thing in her face that he felt in his own chest: not fear exactly, but the sense that something had already begun, and they had simply arrived too late to stop it.
An owl cried somewhere above them. A greenish flare skimmed over the path and died at the edge of the trees. When Igor looked back, the old man was no longer standing there. The forest had closed around the empty space as if it had never been disturbed.
Then, from somewhere beyond the first line of pines, came a sound like a branch snapping under a careful foot.