Based on the poem “Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The father and son walked together through the vaulted halls of Interspace Headquarters, arm in arm, boots echoing on polished stone. Overhead, the ceiling arched in glass and carbon fiber, crisscrossed with cables that pulsed with faint light. To their left and right, doors slid open and shut, labeled with sober fonts:
VIRTUAL TRAINING
ONLINE CONSTABULARY
INTERFACE REHABILITATION
The boy’s head tilted as they passed, but the father didn’t slow down. He had only one destination in mind.
At the far end of the hall, under a bank of screens broadcasting graphs and shifting code, two pods waited side by side. A sign above them read:
CHILD INTERSPACE IMPRINTING
The father squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Here we are.”
The boy nodded, small and solemn. His blond hair fell in soft waves over his forehead; the father smoothed it back with one thumb, then helped him into the smaller pod. The seat rose to meet the boy’s weight. The father settled the headset over the child’s head, adjusting the straps until the sensors aligned with his temples.
“You’re okay?” he asked.
The boy looked up, eyes wide but trusting. “I’m okay.”
The father smiled. “Stay with me. I’ll be right there.”
He shut the pod door, then stepped into his own, larger unit. The headset came down, heavier than he remembered from training years ago. The outside world narrowed to a ring of light around the edges of his vision; then it went entirely dark.
High above, in the control booth, a technician checked the identifiers and tapped in a sequence. The pods’ status lights shifted from green to blue. The chamber dimmed.
The father exhaled, and opened his inner eyes.
A forest rose up around him.
—
The digital forest was built for children.
That’s what the brochure had promised: Guided Exploration of Risk Environments, Parental Bonding Under Supervised Stressors. It was supposed to inoculate young minds against panic; teach them, early, how to face fear with logic and trust.
The father stood on a narrow path under tall, pixelated trees. The light through the leaves had a slightly unreal quality, too saturated to be natural. Birds sang, the sound algorithmically varied but somehow repetitive if you listened closely.
He looked down at himself. His avatar stood a head taller than the boy’s…broad-shouldered, simplified, a handful of polygons arranged into the shape of a man. Beside him, the smaller avatar flickered once, then stabilized: his son, rendered in miniature, round-faced and bright-eyed, a digital echo of the living child in the pod.
“Hey,” the father said, his voice translated into the warm, slightly filtered timbre the system used for internal communication. “You see me?”
The boy’s avatar turned toward him and nodded. “You look funny.”
“You do too,” the father said. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
They took each other’s hands. In the visual field above them, a translucent banner drifted across the path, letters shimmering as though written in dust and light:
WHO GOES SO LATE
THROUGH NIGHT AND WIND?
The boy raised his head to read. “What does that mean?”
“It’s just an old poem,” the father said. “Like a story in here. Just walk with me.”
They moved forward together.
In the early segments, the forest performed as advertised. Vines tried to trip the boy; he stepped over them. Branches bent low; he ducked. The father called his attention to logs, holes, distractor lights. The boy responded well…cautious, but not clumsy. Each correct response pinged the interface with a tiny, pleasant chime.
LEVEL 1 COMPLETED
LEVEL 2 UNLOCKED
The path darkened.
The trees grew closer together, their trunks narrowing into a dense wall of black.
Behind them, the path they had taken sealed itself with a soft folding of code. It was a subtle visual effect, almost elegant, but the boy noticed.
He turned to look back. “Where did it go?”
“Forward only, now,” the father said, performing calm. “That’s how the program works. We keep going together. You’re doing fine.”
The boy hesitated, then nodded. He turned back toward the shadows ahead.
That was when something flickered in the corner of his vision.
A figure appeared between the trees, standing just off the path.
The body was wrapped in darkness, a silhouette indistinct, but the face…
The face was bright, as if made of polished bone. Smooth, pale, slightly too wide. Its features held still for a moment, then a smile began to take shape. It was slow at first, a tiny upward pull, then it widened, widening, until it seemed to crack the whole face open, like a mask splitting to reveal something hungrier beneath.
Even with the system smoothing the input, the boy felt something cold in his stomach.
His avatar shuddered.
In his own pod, the father sensed the glitch through the haptic feedback: a twitch, a loss of fluidity in the boy’s movement. At the same moment, a roll of thunder passed overhead in the simulation. The ground under his avatar’s feet vibrated, very faintly.
The father frowned.
That wasn’t part of Level 2.
He glanced up at the canopy. For a second, his HUD flickered: a small error icon resolving as quickly as it appeared. He checked the environment status: STABLE, it lied, in politely neutral letters.
He looked down at his son’s avatar again and saw the child’s posture…frozen, turned halfway around, body angled toward something behind them.
“My son,” the father said, sending the phrase as text and sound across their shared channel. “Why are you shaking?”
The boy’s voice came back fractured, struggling through digital static.
“Look, Dad. Behind us. The Alder-King is there. Don’t you see him? His crown, his… his smile?”
The father pivoted his avatar, scanning the trees. He saw only darkness, a scatter of mild particle effects simulating fog.
No figure. No face.
He remembered the training modules he’d seen himself, years ago, as a child. Back then, they’d told them to expect illusions…shapes in clouds, shadows in corners. “The system pulls from your subconscious,” his own father had said. “It gives your fears a costume so you can practice ignoring them.”
He forced his shoulders to unknot.
“This forest has tricks,” he said. “That’s all. It’s the mist…just distraction. Keep your eyes on the path. I’m right here.”
He turned forward again and stepped ahead, gently tugging the boy’s avatar with him.
Behind them, the Alder-King smiled wider.
—
The boy felt the presence move closer, whether or not his eyes were on it. A pressure, like an unseen weight on the back of his neck. The father’s voice flowed around him, steady, calm, but another voice coiled beneath it, rising up through the code like a low, melodic hum.
Come, little one, it said, both in his ears and in his head, in a language he somehow knew without ever learning. Come with me. I have games. I have lights. I have worlds that listen when you speak.
The boy’s breath came fast. He stumbled toward his father. His legs, once responsive, felt sticky, like they were moving through tar.
“Dad,” he said, higher now. “Dad, don’t you hear him? The silver one. He’s talking to me. He wants me to go with him.”
The father hesitated a fraction of a second longer this time. A faint, sour heat rose in his chest.
Then he shook it off.
“Stay calm,” he said. “It’s just the program building tension. It’s wind in the trees, kiddo. Just a story. It can’t hurt you. You’re safe.”
His avatar kept moving.
In his pod, something in the father’s brain flickered in protest, a primal warning older than any software. Listen, it whispered. Look at him. Stop.
He quieted it with practiced adult logic: safety protocols, oversight, company assurances. The system was expensive, regulated, triple-checked. It was designed to scare, not to harm.
Behind them, the Alder-King stepped fully onto the path.
The boy didn’t look back this time. He didn’t have to. The Being’s presence wrapped around him like smoke. He could feel the smile pressing against his skin from behind.
The voice returned, firmer now.
Why should you walk so slowly, it said, when you could fly? Why stay in shadows when I have bright halls for you? Come. My daughters will greet you. They will dance for you. They will rock you and sing you to sleep.
The boy tried to run.
His feet did not respond.
His avatar glitched, half-stepping, pixels elongating and snapping back. His arm stretched toward his father like a rubber band, then snapped into place again.
“Dad!” he screamed. “Dad, can’t you see them? There’s more now. He brought more. They’re all smiling. They’re all…”
His feed shuddered.
In the forest, through his avatar’s eyes, the father finally saw something.
Not clearly. Not enough.
Just a shimmer behind the boy. A suggestion of multiple white faces, overlapping like a glitch in a video call, all turning toward the child at once.
His scalp prickled.
He stopped walking.
“Hold on,” he said. “Just…hold on a second.”
He opened the system menu, flicked through emergency options. REPORT BUG. INITIATE RESET. CALL TECHNICIAN. Most were grayed out in training mode. One flickered: OVERRIDE / MANUAL DISCONNECT.
He reached for it.
The forest thumped.
His HUD scrambled, then went blank for one breath, then two. When it returned, the menu was gone. His hands were empty.
Behind the boy, the Alder-King stepped closer.
The father heard the voice this time.
It was not pitched for comfort. It was not pitched for human ears at all. It was both lower and higher than his hearing could comfortably hold, both whisper and thunder, a harmonic spine that slid between his thoughts.
You brought him here, it said. You opened the door. You gave us his pattern, his fears, his wish to be like you. Why are you surprised now that someone answered?
The father stared.
In the forest, the towering figure reached its hand out to touch the boy’s shoulder. Long fingers, jointed wrong, glimmering like polished wire.
The boy’s avatar jolted as if electrocuted.
In the pod, his small body seized.
“Stop!” the father shouted, both in the simulation and out loud, inside his own darkened helmet. “Stop the program! End sequence! Emergency terminate!”
No answer came.
The Alder-King did not look at him. Its white face remained fixed on the child.
I am fond of him, it said. He is beautiful. I am taking him now.
The boy’s scream tore through both worlds at once.
His avatar’s limbs stretched, fracturing into jagged shards of color, then reknit, then shattered again. Invisible claws sank into his digital skin, into his eyes, his mouth, everywhere the sensors mapped sensitivity. The pain translated faithfully back to the body in the pod, where neural signals fired and refired in frantic overload.
“My father, my father,” the boy sobbed into the link, over and over, the words hammering against the father’s skull. “The teeth. The teeth. They hurt me. Dad, they…”
The voice broke apart into static.
The father moved.
He sprinted through the forest, grabbing the boy’s avatar and wrenching him away from the silver hands. For a moment, the code resisted…like trying to pull a tree up by its roots…but then the connection snapped, and the boy’s form tumbled into his arms.
He didn’t look back.
He ran.
Trees whipped past, a blur of black. The path unfolded ahead of him in jagged jumps, not so much a road now as a series of desperate generated spaces. Above them, code screamed in white streaks across the sky.
Far ahead, a circle of light appeared: the entry portal.
The father clutched his son tight to his chest and dove.
—
He slammed back into his body.
The pod’s interior reasserted itself all at once: the smell of plastic and dust, the closeness of his own breath. The father ripped the headset off. He kicked at the door, over and over, until something cracked and the latch gave way.
He stumbled out, half-falling, and lunged toward the smaller pod.
Its status light was red.
Smoke seeped from the seams, sharp and acidic, burning his nose and throat. He clawed at the release panel. It didn’t respond. He slipped his fingers under the edge of the door and tore at it, plastic snapping, hinges shrieking.
“Open,” he gasped. “Open, open, open!”
Metal bent. Something inside sparked. He ignored the heat and yanked until the door tore free with a sound like bone breaking.
Smoke rolled out.
He reached into the pod, blindly at first, then more carefully as the haze cleared.
His hand found a small arm. Warm. Slack.
He pulled his son out and gathered him close.
The boy’s head lolled backward. His eyes stared up, unfocused, reflecting the overhead lights. His lips were parted just slightly, as if mid-syllable. A faint scent of burnt circuitry and singed hair clung to his skin.
“Hey,” the father whispered. “Hey, buddy. It’s over. It’s done. We’re okay. We’re out. Look at me.”
The boy didn’t move.
The father shook him gently. “Look at me.”
Somewhere above, the technician shouted into a headset, calling for medics, for emergency protocols, for logs.
Down on the floor, kneeling on the cold metal beside the broken pod, the father held his son and knew, before anyone told him, that whatever had been taken inside the forest was not coming back.
He rocked forward, forehead pressed to the boy’s, the world narrowing to the weight in his arms.
The pod’s wreckage still smoked behind them. On its shattered inner screen, for a moment before it died entirely, a single line of corrupted code flickered and tried to render itself into text.
The father did not see it.
He did not hear the faint echo of a voice, thin and distant now, trailing off into the static of the ruined system:
My father, my father…
Then even that was gone.
The boy was dead.
About the Author
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (The Written Path: A Journey Through Sobriety and Scripture) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films.
