The afternoon always promised to be fun, as the lessons in the middle classes were already ending. But there was bad luck, the rain prevented the brother and sister from going home. Therefore, they were waiting for their parents at the door.
"Do you know what resin is?"
Suddenly, a girl sitting next to the guy asked, and he didn't want to answer, to be honest. Because he was busy playing on his phone. He barely looked up from his phone.
"Yeah... kind of like the sticky stuff from the trees?"
"Well, yes ... but you know, it also smells of the forest, and when it dries, you can cut it..." – Gerda smiled, as if discussing a secret recipe, not rustic resin. "Sometimes it seems to me that ordinary things have their own little secrets."
Kai squinted, pushing the phone away slightly.
"Are you coming up with something again?"
They were both sitting on the steps at the entrance to the school.
"No... just wondering if someone needs to finish their homework," Gerda squinted at him. "Sometimes I feel like the world is much bigger than it seems."
Kai laughed, trying to hide the fact that he was a little hooked by her oddities.
"You're starting to sound like the heroine of some fantasy story."
"Maybe..." – whispered Gerda, leaning slightly towards him. "But sometimes these are the kinds of stories that happen to ordinary people."
Drops fell with a thud onto the canopy above the entrance, trickled down the rusty edge and broke down, breaking on the concrete. The air was heavy, smelling of wet asphalt and cold earth. The schoolyard, which had been noisy until recently, was empty. Only a few silhouettes of teachers flashed past the cloudy windows.
Kai put the phone in his pocket. The screen went blank, and the game disappeared with it, as if it didn't want to exist here anymore. He leaned back against the cold wall and looked ahead to where a small park began behind the fence.
The trees there were darker than usual, their branches swaying too slowly, as if resisting the wind.Gerda was looking there too.
"Listen..." she said softly, not looking away. "Don't you think everything is... weird today?"
"Like rain? So it's autumn," Kai shrugged his shoulders.
"No. It's like the world has become... deeper. As if there was something else behind it."
She squeezed the strap of her briefcase thoughtfully.
The brother and sister were so lost in thought that they didn't see a teacher with dark short hair and a work-worn look come out of the back of the school. She closed the door and looked at the children sitting next to her.
"Gerda and Kai, haven't you gone home yet?" – She adjusted her glasses and hurriedly searched for something in her green embroidered handbag.
They both jumped, not expecting to hear a voice behind them. It was as if someone had abruptly pulled the thread that held their thoughtful silence.
Kai turned around first. The woman looked more tired than usual: there were shadows under her eyes, her shoulders were slumped, and her fingers were nervously fingering the strap of her bag. The rain had left dark spots on her coat, and she smelled of coffee and a damp cloth.
"Parents haven't arrived yet." – they replied, surprised at how muffled their voice sounded.
The teacher nodded, as if she had expected exactly this answer. She looked into her bag again, took out a bunch of keys to her old car and went ahead.
"Then don't stay here too long."
She said and looked at the park beyond the fence. She's gaze lingered there a little longer than it should have. There was really nothing mystical about it, all the children and teachers were constantly looking there, they were attracted by the attention.
"Kids, today... the weather is not good."
Gerda frowned and looked at the back of the teacher, who had goosebumps on her back. This was a lot of thoughts in her head and the mood of the weather.
"It's just raining." – Gerda said softly, more to herself than to anyone else.
Kai wanted to laugh it off, but the words stuck. At the same moment, it seemed to him that a strange sound came from the park, as if someone had run a violin clef over the violin and was playing a melody from time to time.
"Gerda, you heard it too. Who plays the violin in the rain?"
A shadow with a top hat flashed from the depths of the park between the trees, and quickly disappeared into the shadows and the noise of the rain.
The forest greeted them with a silence that was more oppressive than any noise. The rain was left behind, as if it had not dared to cross an invisible boundary. The wet earth bounced underfoot, the leaves stuck to the soles, and the air was thick and rich with the smell of damp wood and rot.
The further they went, the darker it became. The trees grew denser, their crowns intertwined, almost blocking out the light. The forest seemed to be watching their every move.
And then the children saw that man, he was standing among the trees, a little way off. It was as if he had deliberately chosen a place from which it was impossible to immediately notice him.
Tall, too tall for an ordinary man, in a black suit that looked alien among the damp greenery. His wide-brimmed hat was pulled down so low that it hid his eyes.
There was no rain around him. Drops fell nearby, dripped down the leaves, and broke on the ground. But a few steps away from the stranger, the air remained dry, as if surrounded by an invisible warm shell. The sight sent a chill down Kai's spine.
They stopped almost simultaneously.
"Do you see it too?" – Gerda whispered, barely moving her lips.
Kai nodded. Speaking louder seemed wrong, almost dangerous. The stranger stood motionless. His arms were at his sides, his head slightly tilted, as if he was listening not to the forest, but to something much more distant.
There was something unsettling about this stillness. The children decided to watch from afar, hiding behind a thick trunk. Kai held his breath. His heart was beating too loudly, and it seemed to him that the stranger was about to turn around because of this sound. Gerda stood next to him, clutching the strap of her briefcase so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
And then it happened. Gerda took a step back in fear. The dry twig under her foot snapped too loudly.
The sound echoed through the forest, sharp and out of place, like a gunshot. The stranger froze, and then he slowly turned around.
They couldn't see his eyes, his hat was still hiding them in the shadows. But the lips stretched into a wide, wrong smile. The man in the hat was waiting for this exact moment.
Kai found it difficult to breathe. He saw a satisfied smile that started walking towards them. The stranger was confidently closing the distance between them.
"Kai..." – Gerda whispered, and for the first time there was real fear in her voice.
The stranger was approaching. And the rain still didn't dare touch him. Slowly, almost lazily, he raised his hand, and a violin appeared in his palm as if out of thin air. It was dark, covered with thin cracks, and made not of wood, but of frozen shadow.
His other hand gripped a treble clef that looked more like a tool than a musical object. He ran the key over the strings.
*WII*
It was a screech, as if someone was tearing metal from the inside. The air in front of him trembled, darkened, and from the very vibration of the sound, a black blade made of distorted energy burst out. It cut through space.
The blade crashed into a pine tree next to the children. There was a thud, and in the next instant the crown fell down, breaking branches, showering the ground with wet leaves. The trunk was cut off so smoothly, as if a giant knife had passed through it.
Gerda screamed first from an incredible misunderstanding of what was going on in this place. Kai grabbed her hand and they started running. The forest no longer seemed familiar.
The trees stretched out, the distances distorted, the path they had come along disappeared. No matter how much they ran, there was still the same long, endless forest ahead, the same and alien.
"Get back! We need to find a way back to school right away." – Kai shouted, turning around.
But there was no familiar school behind them. Only the darkness between the trunks and the feeling that the forest does not want to let them go.
Something flared up under their feet.
Thin silver lines appeared through the dirt and foliage, intertwined like veins under the skin of the earth. They pulsed with a faint light, trembling as if alive.
"Kai, watch your step carefully!" — Gerda stumbled. And in a panic, they stepped right on one of the lines.
The silver flashed blindingly bright, as if the earth had opened up. My head started ringing, my body became weightless, and then too heavy. Kai felt the air rushing out of his lungs. At the same moment, someone else's hands closed behind him and a devilish voice said.
"Three, two, one, the kids are mine now!"
Long fingers clutched at their collars with frightening ease, as if they weighed nothing. Kai managed to see his face very close, that devilish smile, everything was going exactly as he had planned.
The world has disappeared. All that remained was darkness and the feeling of falling, stretching to infinity. And then an ancient voice rang in their heads.
[Attention.]
[New participants have been identified.]
[Grimm exam: numbers 100 and 101 have been confirmed.]