Where the Paths Don't Hold

The Adriatic sun, a merciless disc of white gold, hammered the ancient limestone of the Dalmatian coast. For Luka, returning to the village of Mošćeni after two decades felt like stepping into a photograph that had been left to fade in a drawer. The identical sun-bleached stone houses clung to the hillside, the same sapphire sea whispered against the pebbled shore, and the same scent of pine resin, wild rosemary, and salt hung heavy in the air. It was a place of stunning, immutable beauty, and for Luka, it was a gilded cage whose door he had fought desperately to escape.

He had left for Zagreb, then Berlin, trading the relentless clarity of the sea for the anonymous grey of cities, the slow, measured rhythms of village life for the frantic pulse of modernity. He'd become a man who built things: sleek apps, digital infrastructures, networks that existed in the cloud. He'd thought he'd built a new life, too, until a single phone call from his estranged father, Antun, had dismantled it all.

"The woods, Luka," the old man's voice, gravelly and strained, had crackled down the line. "They are… confused. The old path to the stan… It's not where it should be. The pines by the ridge, they've… moved."

Luka had dismissed it as the ramblings of a lonely old man, a ploy for attention. But the calls persisted, each more agitated than the last, speaking of shadows that lengthened at noon and a silence that was too deep, too complete. Guilt, that most ancient of Croatian inheritances, had finally pricked him. So he'd come back, a successful son in a rented Fiat, to placate his father and prove to himself that the past held no power over him.

Antun's house was as Luka remembered: a stubborn, thick-walled structure of stone, its green shutters peeling, overlooking the dense forest that carpeted the hills behind the village. His father was smaller, a wiry figure eroded by time and solitude, his face a roadmap of deep crevices. But his eyes, the colour of the sea before a storm, were sharp and full of a fear Luka had never seen in him before.

"You came," Antun said, not as a greeting, but as an accusation.

"You said the woods were confused," Luka replied, setting down his leather weekend bag on the stone floor. It looked absurdly out of place.

Antun grunted, pouring two glasses of viciously clear rakija. "They are. It started after the last big storm, the one in April. The one that tore the roof off the Jurić's barn. It's like the wind… rearranged things. Not the trees themselves, but the… the space between them."

Luka sipped the plum brandy, its fire a familiar comfort. "Father, paths get overgrown. Memory plays tricks."

"My memory doesn't play tricks!" Antun snapped, his knuckles white around his glass. "I've walked those woods for seventy years. I know every stone, every root. Now, the landmarks are wrong. The big oak with the lightning scar—it's now fifty paces west of where it should be. The dry stream bed… it has water in it, Luka. Water that hasn't flowed since before you were born."

He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. "And there are no sounds. No birds. No insects. Just the wind, and sometimes… a sound like breathing."

Luka spent the next day trying to reconnect with the village, but he felt like a ghost. The friends of his youth were gone, or had become middle-aged men with sun-leathered skin and resigned eyes, their conversations revolving around the dwindling fishing hauls and the unpredictable tourist season. They spoke of his father with a cautious pity. "Antun spends too much time alone up there," the bartender at the Konoba told him, tapping his temple. "The woods can get into a man's head."

On the second day, to prove a point—to himself more than to his father—Luka decided to hike to the stan, the old shepherd's hut deep in the woods where he'd spent summers as a boy. It was a place of fond, hazy memories: the smell of woodsmoke and cheese, the boundless freedom of childhood.

The familiar trailhead was precisely where he remembered it. He strode in confidently, the crunch of dry pine needles under his city sneakers a forgotten melody. The air was cooler under the canopy, dappled sunlight painting shifting patterns on the forest floor. For the first twenty minutes, everything was normal. Then, the melody began to falter.

The path, once clear and well-trodden, began to peter out into a confusion of undergrowth. He pushed on, relying on his internal compass. That's when he saw it: the lightning-scarred oak. It was majestic, ancient, the scar a pale, jagged line down its trunk. But his father was right. According to his memory, the path should swing sharply left here, skirting a rocky outcrop. The outcrop was there, but the path now led directly towards it, ending in a wall of thorny brambles.

Puzzled, he checked his phone. No signal. Of course. He backtracked, trying to find another way, but the geometry of the place felt subtly wrong. The slopes were steeper, the valleys deeper. He came across the streambed. Antun had said it had water. It did. A trickle, clear and cold, ran over stones that should have been bone-dry. The sound of it was unnaturally loud in the pervasive silence. He realised with a start that Antun was right about that, too. There were no birds. No buzzing flies. Nothing. Just the sigh of the wind in the pines—a sound that now felt less like a sigh and more like a long, drawn-out exhalation.

A prickle of unease, cold and sharp, ran down his spine. This wasn't right. He was a rational man. This was just disorientation, a classic case of getting lost in woods that had regrown. He decided to climb a ridge to get his bearings.

The climb was more challenging than he remembered. The ridge seemed higher, the handholds less confident. When he finally pulled himself up, sweating and breathing heavily, the view was not what he had expected. Instead of seeing the red rooftops of the village and the glittering sea beyond, he saw only more forest, rolling endlessly into a blue-hazed distance. The sea was gone. Panic, cold and absolute, began to set in. He was lost. Truly, profoundly lost.

He stumbled down the other side of the ridge, his heart hammering against his ribs. The light was beginning to fade, painting the woods in long, menacing shadows. That's when he heard it. Not the wind. A low, guttural sound, like stone grinding against stone, coming from a dense thicket of juniper. He froze. The sound came again, closer this time, accompanied by the snapping of a branch.

Rationality fled. A primal fear, older than memory, took hold. He turned and ran, crashing through the undergrowth, not caring about direction, only driven by the need to get away. Branches clawed at his arms and face. His breath sawed in his lungs. The grinding sound seemed to follow him, keeping pace, just out of sight.

He burst into a small clearing and tripped, falling hard onto the rocky ground. He scrambled backwards, expecting some horror to emerge from the trees. But nothing came. The sound had stopped. The only thing in the clearing was a standing stone, about the height of a man, moss-covered and ancient, that he had never seen before. It was carved with swirling, intricate patterns that seemed to swim in the fading light—patterns he recognised from the pre-Roman Illyrian artefacts in the Zagreb museum. A stećak. A medieval tombstone. But it was in the middle of nowhere, in woods he thought he knew.

Trembling, he got to his feet. The world had tilted on its axis. This was no longer a simple case of being lost. Something was deeply wrong with this place. As dusk bled into night, the temperature plummeted. He was shivering, disoriented, and terrified. He huddled at the base of the strange stone, its cold seeping into his bones. He thought of his father's frightened eyes, his desperate words. He had dismissed it as dementia, as loneliness. But Antun hadn't been confused. He had been trying to describe the indescribable.

The night was absolute, a blackness so complete it felt solid. The silence was a pressure on his eardrums. Then, the whispers started. Not voices, exactly, but a sense of communication, of ancient, slow thoughts brushing against his own. They spoke of deep time, of stone and root, of a boundary wearing thin. They spoke of a debt.

Luka didn't sleep. He sat paralysed by a fear so profound it was akin to awe. When the first grey light of dawn filtered through the trees, it revealed a mist clinging to the forest floor, coiling around the roots of the trees like serpents. The world was new-made and utterly alien.

He had to get back. He had to find his father. A clarity born of sheer desperation settled over him. He stopped trying to navigate by memory or logic. Instead, he thought only of his father. He pictured Antun's face, the stubborn set of his jaw, the love for this land that was as deep and weathered as its roots. He let go of his city-sense, his need to control and map and understand. He simply started walking, not with direction, but with intention. Home.

He walked for hours, his body aching, his throat parched. The woods seemed to shift around him, paths appearing and disappearing. But he didn't fight it. He kept the image of his father fixed in his mind. And then, he saw it. A red plastic ribbon tied to a branch—the kind hunters used. His father's marker. A few paces later, another. Antun, in his fear, had been trying to mark a world that would not hold still.

Luka followed the ribbons. They didn't lead in a straight line; they zigzagged crazily, sometimes doubling back, as if the person who placed them was as disoriented as he was. But they were a thread in the labyrinth.

He found his father at the edge of a gully that hadn't been there the day before. Antun was on his hands and knees, clutching his chest, his face ashen. He looked up as Luka crashed through the brush, and in his eyes, the fear was replaced by a flicker of overwhelming relief.

"Luka…" he gasped. "I… I had to find you. The woods… they took you…"

Luka fell to his knees beside him, clutching his father's frail shoulders. "I'm here, tata. I'm here. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I didn't believe you."

He helped his father to his feet, supporting his weight. Together, they followed the trail of ribbons, a slow, painful procession. Luka no longer saw the forest as a collection of trees, but as a living, breathing entity —ancient, powerful, and momentarily pacified. They had paid a kind of debt—the debt of a son's return, of belief finally given, of respect acknowledged.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the confusion came to an end. The path straightened. The sound of a distant tractor echoed through the trees. A dog barked. The normal sounds of the world rushed back in. Through a break in the pines, Luka saw the glittering blue expanse of the sea.

He stopped, breathing heavily, and looked at his father. Antun's eyes were closed, his head bowed, tears cutting clean paths through the grime on his cheeks.

"We're out of the woods," Luka whispered, the phrase taking on a weight and meaning he had never imagined it could hold. It wasn't just a physical statement. It was a spiritual reprieve.

Antun nodded slowly, opening his eyes. They were clear now, the storm in them having passed. "For now," he said quietly. "They are old, these woods. Older than us. They remember things we have forgotten. Sometimes, they just… remind us that they are here."

They walked the last hundred meters in silence, emerging from the treeline to see the village below, postcard-perfect and blissfully normal. The ordeal felt like a fever dream already dissolving in the bright Mediterranean sun.

Back in the stone house, over strong, sweet coffee, they didn't speak of moving trees or grinding stones. They didn't need to. The understanding sat between them, a solid, unshakeable thing. Luka cancelled his return ticket to Berlin. The digital world he had built seemed frivolous, a castle made of sand next to the ancient, enduring stone of his home.

Weeks turned into months. Luka stopped trying to change the place and started to listen to it. He helped his father repair the old stone walls, learning the names of the herbs that grew between the rocks. He woke at dawn to the sound of bells from the sheep pasture, not the blare of an alarm clock.

One evening, as they sat on the terrace watching the sunset paint the sea in shades of fire and violet, Antun spoke. "You know, the old stories… the ones my nono told… they speak of the woods being alive, of them being a border to older worlds. We stopped listening to the stories. We called them superstition."

"Maybe we stopped listening to a lot of things," Luka said, sipping his wine.

He still walked in the woods, but now he did so with a reverent caution. He never again saw the Illyrian stone or heard the unnatural silence. The forest was just a forest. But he knew what lay beneath the surface. He had felt the ancient fabric of the world stretch thin, and he knew that the line between the known and the unknown was as fragile as a path through the trees after a storm.

He was out of the woods. But he had also, finally, come to understand that you never truly leave them. They remain inside you, a deep and quiet magic, a reminder of the world's enduring mystery, and of the roots that, once acknowledged, will always lead you home.