Chapter 1

It started with a day I still remember, though the edges have softened. I was standing at the edge of a field, the grass yellow and brittle under a sky that seemed too wide. The air smelled of dust and something sweet, like overripe fruit. I don’t know how I got there, or who brought me, but I remember the feeling of my bare feet on the warm ground, the way the wind pressed against my back as if urging me forward. And then I saw it: a single tree, its branches twisted like old hands, and carved into the bark, the same strange phrase. "Grok ir grok sinsttos dskna bet ji perdsug trapi." I traced the letters with my fingers, not understanding, but knowing somehow that they mattered.

That’s what I see first when I picture that place: the tree, the letters, the light falling through the leaves in patterns that looked like broken code. My grandmother used to say that the world was full of messages we weren’t meant to read, but I was never good at leaving things alone. I wanted to know what it meant, that phrase, even though no one could tell me. Not my grandmother, not the man who sometimes came to fix the fence, not even Juokas.

Juokas was the only other person I remember from that time. He was older than me by a few years, with dark hair that fell into his eyes and a laugh that sounded like a rusty gate. "Juokas a dk sysm tarsi liokos," my grandmother would say when she saw him coming, and I never knew if it was a greeting or a warning. He was the one who found me by the tree that first time. He didn’t say anything. He just stood beside me, looking at the carved letters, and then he smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was the smile of someone who knows a secret you’ve just stumbled onto.

We didn’t talk about the tree after that. But we went back to it, day after day, through that long, hot summer. The field became our world, the tree our center. We’d lie on our backs in the grass and watch clouds reshape themselves, and Juokas would sometimes hum a tune that sounded like the words I’d heard in the kitchen. "Hrono.? trauka .cripto 40%," he would whisper, not to me but to the sky. I asked him once what it meant. He just shook his head and said, "It’s what’s left."

I didn’t understand then. I still don’t, not fully. But I remember the way the light changed as the summer wore on, how the grass turned from gold to brown, how the tree’s bark seemed to darken as if it were absorbing the sun. And I remember the day everything shifted. Juokas came to the field with a look I’d never seen on his face—something between excitement and fear. He held out his hand, and in his palm was a small piece of paper, folded into a tight square. He unfolded it slowly, and there, in ink that was almost black, was the phrase again: "Grok ir grok sinsttos dskna bet ji perdsug trapi." But this time, there was more. Below it, in smaller letters, someone had written: "Undone to make."

I asked him where he got it. He said he found it in his mother’s drawer, hidden beneath a stack of old photographs. He didn’t know what it meant either, but he was afraid. He said his mother had been acting strange, talking about leaving, about going back to a place she called "the beginning." He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay here, in the field, by the tree. But the paper felt like a sign, like something was already set in motion.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my grandmother’s spare room, listening to the crickets and the distant sound of a train, and I kept turning the phrase over in my mind. "Undone to make." What was undone? What was being made? I thought about the tree, about the letters carved into its skin. I thought about Juokas’s mother, about the photographs she kept hidden. And I thought about my own mother, who I barely remembered, who had left when I was too young to hold onto her face.

The next morning, I went back to the field alone. The tree was still there, but something was different. The ground around it was disturbed, as if someone had been digging. And the carved letters—they were gone. The bark was smooth, unmarked, as if they had never been there. I knelt down and ran my hands over the trunk, searching for any trace, but there was nothing. The message had been erased.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at that empty bark. Eventually, I heard footsteps behind me. It was Juokas. He looked tired, his eyes red-rimmed. He didn’t say anything. He just handed me another piece of paper. This one had only three words: "Hrono.? trauka .cripto 40%."

"My mother is gone," he said. "She left this for me."

I looked at the paper, then at the tree, then at Juokas. The air felt heavy, charged with something I couldn’t name. I wanted to ask him a hundred questions, but the only one that came out was, "What now?"

He looked at the tree, then back at me. "Now we find out what was undone," he said. "And what we’re supposed to make."

I didn’t know it then, but that day was the beginning of something I still don’t fully understand. The phrase followed me through the years, appearing in dreams, in old books, in the static of a radio. It was a riddle without an answer, a door that only opened inward. And every time I thought I had figured it out, it changed, just enough to keep me searching.

But that summer, standing by that empty tree, I felt the first real stirring of something that would never leave me: the sense that the world is full of hidden threads, and that some of them are meant to be pulled. I didn’t know where they would lead. I only knew that I had to follow.

Juokas folded the paper and put it in his pocket. Then he turned and walked away, toward the road that led out of the field. I watched him go, his silhouette growing smaller against the wide sky. He didn’t look back. And I didn’t call after him. I just stood there, under the tree that no longer held any marks, and let the wind carry the dust and the heat and the silence.

That was the last time I saw Juokas for many years. But the words stayed with me, a ghost in my memory, waiting to be understood. And sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the world feels thin, I can still hear his voice, humming that tune, and I know that the story is not finished. Something was undone to make way for this. And one day, I will find out what.