In the depths of the Lyska Forest, ethnology student Adrian follows old legends that villagers still refuse to name aloud. When he meets a strange old woman, the forest begins to feel far less like folklore.
The Lyska Forest ran for miles, black and tangled beneath a roof of spruce so thick that even moonlight had to force its way through. Adrian walked beneath it with a rucksack on his back, a notebook in one pocket, and a dictaphone in the other. He had spent months preparing for this expedition. The stories he had heard would not leave him alone.
In the villages around the forest, people went quiet whenever he mentioned Bor. Some looked toward the window. Some crossed themselves. They spoke, in fragments and half-finished sentences, of old beings that had never quite vanished: the Leshy, the rusalka, the whisperers who drew sickness out of the body with spring water and left something else behind in its place. Adrian had come for fieldwork. He told himself that. Yet the more he listened, the less the legends sounded like legend.
The path narrowed until it became little more than a scar through the undergrowth. Adrian raised his torch and caught the movement of branches ahead. Then he stopped.
An old woman had stepped out of the bushes as if she had been waiting there all along. She was small and quick, with pale hair braided tight against her head and a long grey kaftan hanging from her thin shoulders. A wicker basket rested in one hand. In the other, she held a worn shawl. Her eyes, sharp and dark, pinned him in place.
'You're not from here,' she said softly. Her voice sounded like dry leaves shifting underfoot. 'Why have you come, boy?'
Adrian swallowed and gave her the answer he had rehearsed for strangers in the villages, though it suddenly sounded foolish in his mouth. An ethnography paper. Old beliefs. Oral history. The old woman listened without moving, then stepped closer and drew the shawl around her shoulders.
'And if I showed you what other people are too afraid to see?' she asked. 'Would you still call it a story?'
A cold wind slid out from between the trees. Somewhere in the thicket, something answered it with a soft rustle. The stars vanished behind a bank of cloud. The woman tilted her head, as if listening to a sound Adrian could not hear.
'Bor does not like strangers,' she murmured.
She lifted one crooked finger and beckoned him toward the dark between the trunks. Adrian hesitated, every nerve in him tightening at once. Then, from behind the nearest tree, came a low, deliberate whisper that was not quite human.