Chapter 1
The forest rose before me like a wall—thick, unbroken, and humming with the kind of silence that presses on your skin. Evening sunlight filtered between the pines, falling in long, wary streaks across the clearing where the excavation tents stood. From here, the land stretched in all directions, wild and unbothered, the way Polissia always had been, even when I was a child.
I had forgotten how grounding this place felt. How small. How watched.
The others were still somewhere behind me, packing up equipment and arguing about topsoil layers, but I needed a moment alone. Fieldwork had its own rhythm, but today everything felt a little too heavy, as if the ground itself waited to exhale.
I took a slow breath and stepped toward the old mound—its curved silhouette quiet beneath the sinking sun. The air was cooler here, almost chilly, brushing against my arms like a whispered warning. Maybe it was just nerves. Or maybe it was the way the shadows seemed to stretch toward me, reaching with long, thin fingers.
“Daryna! You’re going to vanish if you wander off like that.”
I turned. Taras, my colleague and friend of many years, walked toward me with that familiar half-smile—the one he used whenever he was worried and pretending not to be.
“I’m just looking,” I said. “The stratigraphy is different here. You felt it too.”
“Sure,” he said, but he glanced at the mound as if it might sit up and greet us. “Just don’t go digging alone. Even you can’t charm the dead into behaving.”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Yet.”
He nudged me lightly with his elbow, and I felt the knot in my chest loosen. He’d always had that effect—steady, constant, a touch of humor carrying us through long days and longer nights cataloguing artifacts.
“Let me check one last thing,” I said. “Then we can head back.”
He sighed. “Five minutes.”
He stayed behind this time, giving me space, letting me wander to the furthest point of the mound, where the soil had shifted earlier—just slightly, just enough to bother me.
I knelt and brushed my fingers along the ground. Soft. Too soft.
Something had been buried here. And recently disturbed.
I reached into the soil and felt it—the edge of wood, smooth beneath the dirt. My pulse kicked. Carefully, almost reverently, I pulled it free.
An amulet.
A protective charm—though the word protective suddenly felt too simple.
It was carved from dark oak, heavy for its size, with the swirling mark of Veles etched deep into its center. I’d seen plenty of Slavic symbols in museums, but this one… this one felt alive. Warm, almost pulsing in my palm.
I straightened slowly, the wind shifting around me. The trees whispered—or maybe rustled—an indistinct sound that felt strangely like a question.
When I turned back, Taras was watching me, his expression tight.
“What did you find?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to answer—and the ground lurched.
Not violently. Not loudly. But in a way that made every instinct scream. The air thickened. The shadows lengthened. The symbol on the amulet glowed faintly, like an ember waking.
“Daryna, drop it.”
His voice cut through the stillness, sharper than I’d ever heard it.
But my fingers wouldn’t move. The charm pulsed again—once, twice—and the world blurred at the edges.
Then a voice I had never heard before, deep and impossible, whispered from somewhere behind my heartbeat: “You called.”
The forest folded inward—and the world vanished.
