Until that day, I had never woken up with a premonition. Nothing had happened—nothing that I could point to—yet I woke up. Exactly at 5:30. The clock was right there in front of my eyes.
And I didn’t just wake up. I knew something was about to happen.
I had to get up. Going back to sleep felt impossible.
I sat up, swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Then stood. Just stood there for a moment, looking around. The feeling was bizarre: part of me wanted to run somewhere—anywhere—and part of me wanted to crawl back under the blanket and hide.
I went to the window.
Everything looked normal. Our gorge. The mountains on both sides—green, spring-green. A thin mist rising off the river. Familiar. Ordinary. Exactly the way it always was.
And yet… something was wrong.
In the gap between the mountains—where the sky was especially blue—and in the mist below, there was something off. And inside me, something went cold. Not because of anything specific. Just… fear. Fear isn’t usually logical.
My mornings were usually simple: coffee, shower, clothes, a light breakfast, then work. But that day I just stood at the window, and one thought kept repeating itself:
You need to leave. Now. Get out of the house as fast as you can.
I didn’t want coffee. I wanted—outside.
I dressed quickly, almost feverishly, and went out. When I opened the door, I inhaled air that felt cold and… blue, somehow, mixed with morning fog. And suddenly I felt—how good it was to be alive.
Just to be alive.
I closed the door, stuffed my keys into my pocket, and started walking. I didn’t know where. Fear was leading me. Not fear of something—just fear as a state, as a pressure inside my chest. There was nowhere to hide from it. There was only one thing left to do.
Run.
So I ran.
I ran, gasping, not understanding why or where. The village street fell behind and turned into a tourist trail. It led downhill, almost to the river, then curved sharply and climbed up toward the road—the one that went to the center, to the cafés and little shops.
I ran downhill. And the fear started to ease.
Suddenly. Fast.
By the time I reached the bend in the trail, it was gone completely.
I stopped.
In front of me, the mountains opened into a V-shaped cut. Outside the V, everything was a saturated green. Inside it, the sky was a hard, brilliant blue. To the left, the river; above it, ragged strips of white mist. The sun was somewhere behind the mountain, but its light was already spilling over the peaks.
I stood there thinking about the sun. For some reason, only the sun.
And then it started.
The world distorted.
It was like an old television set. The horizon split vertically, and the left half began to slide into the right. It swallowed almost half the gap between the mountains—and part of the right slope, too.
There was a sound. Not a hum. Not a crash. Not a sigh. Something in between. Something enormous had been pulled tight. But there isn’t a word for that sound.
There was no fear anymore. None at all.
I stood there, watching, breathing. My heart was beating—I could feel it—but everything else had gone still.
Time stretched. Every second lasted forever. And all at once it seemed to me that I understood what death was.
As if I had already died.
Then the two halves of the world began to slide back into place. Slowly. Calmly. And between them—about a hundred meters from me—a half-circle took shape.
A Gate.
I knew it immediately. The familiar gray haze was there at its center. At first the Gate was small. Then it widened, almost as if it were overtaking the edges of the horizon as they moved back into alignment. And while the horizon returned to normal, the Gate grew to its full, ordinary size.
Now it rose in front of me in all its magnitude.
A new Gate.
The ninth.
You’d think that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t.
A second shift came—this time not in the world, but in me. I didn’t hear it with my ears. I heard it with my whole body:
UWE-E-E-OOO!!!
It wasn’t a sound. It was a sensation. Not outside—inside my skull, in my chest, in my stomach. A wave of violent dizziness rolled through me. Nausea surged.
My legs buckled. I fell.
And then came the third thing.
Something like a shriek.
A torrent of information—too much, too fast. As if my brain had been pumped full until it burst.
Then—silence. Darkness. I blacked out.
When consciousness returned, it returned at once. Not painfully. Lightly. Joyfully.
I was lying on my back in grass, staring up at a bright blue sky. The sun was shining. The air was warm. The grass smelled fresh. Everything was good.
Not because of anything. Without thoughts. Without reasons.
Just… good.
I stood up, looked forward—and saw the Gate.
What I saw nearly took my legs out from under me again. I recoiled, but stayed upright.
The Gate had changed.
The gray haze was gone. Inside the Gate there was sky, mountains, forest. Everything was blurred, shimmering with a kind of ripple, but there was no doubt: it was a mountain landscape.
And yet, the sense of a wall hadn’t disappeared. The Gate still had a surface. It wasn’t empty space. It was more like a vertical sheet of water—transparent, alive, with waves and ripples running across it. You could see through it, clearly enough to recognize what lay beyond, but never sharply, never fully in focus.
The outline of the horizon was similar to the V-shape the Gate was blocking now—but it was still slightly different.
Everything inside the Gate was almost like ours.
But not ours.
And looking at the Gate no longer felt unpleasant, the way it always had before. Still, I made myself look away.
My first impulse was to go in. Step through. Find out what was there. I almost took a step.
Almost.
But I stopped.
That’s probably how people die—throwing themselves into the unknown. The Gate was here. New. Yes. But nothing else would change in the next minute. For some reason, I knew that. So there was no need to rush.
I turned and walked away.
Home.
I walked, staring at the rocky road. It angled left and up, around the mountain. I glanced back.
The Gate—new in every sense of the word—was still there.
I saw the first Creature emerge. It looked like a turtle shell, green, sliding in a zigzag motion. Then a second. A third.
And then one of them seemed to me like…
A human.
A young man in a reddish-brown jacket, dark pants, and high boots. Light hair to his shoulders. He stepped out after one of the Creatures, looked around—
and saw me.
I spun and ran.
Almost immediately I disappeared around the mountain, and I felt that moment physically—like the Gate and whatever was happening behind me had been cut off by rock. I slowed to a walk. A fast walk.
I headed home.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to be inside my house.
I remember the rest of the way poorly. I only remember seeing my bed, collapsing face-down onto it—and falling asleep.
When I woke up, sunlight was blazing outside the window.
The clock read 10:30.