The Forest

Half a year ago, by a mix of chance and his own arrogance, a trainee from a space courier service, Nick Sobolev, ended up on a planet—Terzius—carefully hidden by someone. Since then, Nick has already made friends and learned the local language well enough. And it seems Terzius is so much like his home Earth, but something important—something that determines the fate of its people—still slips from the alien’s understanding.

Take, for example, the very same Exodus, a biological apocalypse of the local nature: once every ten years the Forest erupts from its depths swarms of animal mutants that destroy everything alive in their path.

Nick hopes to uncover the explanation for the strange behavior of the local biota, and at the same time find a way back home, in the Old City—long ago swallowed by a paranormal anomaly that stubbornly expands, taking more and more territory with the Forest. For various reasons, Nick’s new friends also need to get into the City.

The path of this motley company is repeatedly blocked by bizarre thickets, bodies of water, and their dangerous inhabitants. Now life in the travelers’ hands is effectively governed by the Forest. And Nick sees fewer and fewer accidents in the behavior of this living system.

Day by day, avoiding death and learning to resist the mysterious intelligence, people reveal unexpected qualities, and some turn out to be nothing like what they claim to be. For a human from Earth, the Forest is preparing special trials.

But somewhere in the ravine-like part of Dominia’s forest, teeming with creatures and carefully wrapped in a greenish light from the local moon, are hidden the very traces of the past that Nick needs to solve the mystery of Terzius: structures and… people—alive and dead.