AI Rory had to climb the gate.
Richmond Park's wrought iron spikes were slick with condensation, gleaming faintly in the orange wash of a distant streetlamp. Her palms stung by the time she swung a leg over and dropped down into the colder dark on the other side. The city sounds—traffic, some drunk laughter, the low rumble of a bus—thudded dully against the park's edges, then thinned out as she landed.
She paused, listening.
It was late enough that the silhouettes of the trees were black cut-outs against a clouded sky. No dogs, no joggers, no couples necking on benches. Just the long hush of an enormous, sleeping space.
Her breath smoked in front of her. “Brilliant idea, Carter,” she muttered, rubbing her hands together. “Midnight breaking and entering for a text from an unknown number. Nothing suspicious about that at all.”
The Heartstone pendant lay cool against her skin, nested under her scarf, the tiny crimson gem resting in the dip between her collarbones. She could feel the weight of it more than usual, a thumbprint of presence. The text had mentioned it by name.
Come alone. Bring the pendant. Midnight. I'll explain every thing about where it came from.
No number, just “Unknown.” Every part of her that had survived Evan and the messy flight from Cardiff to London had screamed scam. Or trap. But the pendant had been a puzzle since the day it appeared in her post, no return address, no note beyond her name on the envelope.
And when puzzles itched at her, she scratched.
Rory shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, hood up more against the feel of the place than the cold, and started down the nearest path. Narrow tarmac, slick leaves, the sweet rot of autumn heavy in the air. Somewhere, a fox barked, sharp and furious. She followed the directions from the text: North from the Pembroke Lodge side. Past the old oak. Into the trees when she saw the fallen trunk like a bridge.
The phone in her pocket was a comforting rectangular weight . Signal had dipped as soon as she'd crossed into the park, but the map app had still shown a blue dot stubbornly inching along. Now, as she walked farther, the bars vanished completely . The little 4G icon blinked out.
Of course.
She tried not to think about horror films that started exactly like this.
The path narrowed as the trees thickened, their branches knitting overhead to blot out most of the sky. The soil grew softer underfoot, giving just enough to make her steps sound too loud. Her ears strained for any other noise—a branch snapping, the crunch of someone else's boots—but heard only the whisper of the wind dragging through the high leaves.
After a while, she realized that, too, had gone quiet.
Rory stopped. No wind. No rustle. The leaves overhead hung motionless, a frozen fractal lace against the faint light leaking through the clouds. The air tasted still, as if someone had closed a door on the world and no one had thought to open a window.
The hairs rose along the back of her neck.
“Richmond freaking Park,” she said, just to put a human sound in the muffled dark. Her voice fell flat and soft, as if swallowed before it could properly carry. Not even an echo .
She checked her phone. Midnight precisely , according to the lock screen. 00:00, like something out of a film. No signal. Her own face stared back in the black reflection at the top of the screen, pale in the low light, dark hair escaping from under her hood.
Was it colder? A little. The air slid under her jacket, finding the spot of exposed skin just above her waistband with uncanny precision.
“Okay.” She tucked the phone away and resumed walking.
The fallen tree lay where the text had said it would: a massive, ancient thing, its trunk sloping down into a dip like a natural bridge between two banks. Thick moss furred its bark, surprisingly green considering the season. Wildflowers—forget-me-nots, blue and stubborn—clustered around its base.
That wasn’t normal. She knew enough about British weather and plants to know that. Late October wasn’t bluebell month.
She crouched, brushing fingers over one of the unreal little blooms. Its petals were delicate, veins clear even in the low light. Cold, of course. Real. Not plastic, not painted.
Her pendant warmed.
A small pulse of heat kissed the underside of her sternum, subtle as the shift from one breath to the next. Rory straightened sharply , hand flying to the chain. The Heartstone was no longer indifferent metal and stone; it held the faint throb of a living thing, like cupping a tiny animal against her skin.
“That’s new,” she whispered.
The first time it had warmed was outside Silas’ bar, three weeks ago. A blare of cold air, the press of Soho streets, a drunk spilling out at her feet—and the sudden flare of warmth against her chest, then, as she’d looked up, a smear of wrongness in the air across the road. A heat shimmer, she’d told herself. Bus exhaust. Her imagination.
Now, in the dark of Richmond Park, there were no buses. No fumes. Just a fallen tree and out-of-season flowers.
She swung her legs over the trunk, careful of her footing, and followed the text's final instruction: Through the grove of oaks. You'll know it when you see it.
It wasn't far. Five minutes, maybe ten—time was harder to track when the usual markers had gone missing. No car horns, no buzz of distant planes, no music leaking from someone’s Bluetooth speaker. Just her own breathing, the muted thump of her boots, and the oddly thick silence pressing close.
The grove announced itself the way a roomful of people would: with a sensation of stepping over a threshold into a space that had already decided what it was.
The trees changed. Up until then, they'd been a mix of species—birch, beech, the occasional yew—branching out in rough competition. Here, the oaks rose in a near-circle, evenly spaced, their massive trunks straight as pillars. Their bark was silvered , ancient, the ridges deep and knotted. Between them, the ground opened into a clearing carpeted with wildflowers.
All sorts. Buttercups, violets, more forget-me-nots, pale things she couldn't name. A scatter of colour as if someone had upended a painter's box. No brambles. No nettles. No fallen branches or twig clutter. It looked tended, somehow, and that was almost the strangest thing.
Ancient oak standing stones, the rumor blogs had called them. A faerie circle masquerading as woodland. She’d laughed when she’d read it.
The pendant throb bed again, a slow, warm beat.
She stepped between two of the oaks. The air changed.
Colder, yes, but more than that. Her ears popped, a faint pressure shifting, as if she'd walked into higher altitude. The smell altered from leaf mould and damp earth to…other. Something sharper, green and metallic, the way air tasted before lightning.
Rory paused dead.
Behind her, the city was gone .
Not literally—no sudden medieval forest or alien sky. Moonlight still smudged through the cloud cover. The shapes of trees still crowded beyond the ring of oaks. But the faint, ever-present hum of London, that low-frequency buzz she'd grown so used to she only noticed it in the rare places it vanished…wasn't here.
She held her breath, straining to hear some remnant. A helicopter, a siren, the faint roar of traffic.
Nothing.
Just the whisper of something moving through the flowers at her feet.
Her head snapped down. The blooms swayed very slightly , a ripple moving away from her boots as if a small body had just passed between the stems. No insect buzz, no visible disturbance. Just that subtle, wrong little wave.
“Fox,” she murmured, though there was nowhere for a fox to hide that close to her. “Rabbit. Stoat. Not ghost. Definitely not ghost.”
Her joke landed badly in her own ears.
The text had said: Meet me in the Fae Grove. It will be safe there.
“Reassuring,” she muttered. “Very reassuring.”
She stepped fully into the clearing, the wildflowers muffling any sound her boots might have made. The pendant was warm now, heat soaked through fabric, a steady pulse like a tiny second heart ticking under her own.
“Hello?” she called.
The word went out and didn’t quite come back. The oaks caught it and swallowed it, the way her mother’s old thick curtains had eaten sound in the front room back in Cardiff. No echo . No response.
She checked her phone again.
Midnight.
Still.
She frowned, thumb darting to her messages. No new texts. The old one glared up at her, unnervingly simple.
Rory turned slowly , scanning the tree line beyond the ring. Nothing but trunk shadows and darker smears of branch. No appreciable movement. No glint of eyes.
You chose this, she reminded herself. You came to a supposedly haunted bit of park, at night, on the word of an anonymous message, because your curiosity is terminal.
“Story of my life,” she said under her breath. “At least Evan’s not here to tell me how bloody stupid I am.”
A branch broke behind her.
Not a delicate twig-snapping sort of noise. A crack, thick and sudden, like someone had put their weight on an old bit of wood. Close. Just beyond the circle of oaks.
She spun, heart cramming itself up into her throat.
Nothing. Just the nearest pair of trunks, their bark pale in the moon-pale light. Beyond them, the black tangle of the rest of the wood, layered so dense it could have hidden anything.
“Fox,” she said again, softer, under her breath.
Her fingers found the Heartstone automatically, pressing the gem through the fabric. It pulsed harder against her touch, hot enough to sting. She snatched her hand back.
The silence returned, heavier now, as if offended.
“Okay,” she said into it. “Enough. If this is some dickhead from Reddit doing a live-action creepypasta, I’m leaving. Congratulations, you win the internet, I nearly peed myself, etcetera, bye.”
No one laughed. The clearing waited.
When she stepped back toward the gap she'd come through, something inside her insisted it was the right one. The two oaks stood just so, the patch of flattened flowers where her boots had crushed them obvious on the ground.
She walked toward them.
She passed between them into more flowers, the sense of threshold tugging over her skin like spiderweb. The trunks on either side of her looked identical to the ones she'd just left. The earth underfoot stayed springy. The air didn't change.
She turned around.
The same ring of oaks enclosed a clearing full of flowers.
Her stomach dropped .
Slowly, very slowly , she pivoted full circle. Oak, oak, oak, evenly spaced. No visible gate, no obvious way where the trunks stood wider or closer. Every gap between them looked the same.
“Right,” she whispered. “That’s…new.”
Panic scratched at the back of her throat, kunckled and eager. She’d been lost in places before, bloody remote bits of Snowdonia where the weather could close in on you like a fist, but trees were trees. Paths were paths. You could always retrace your steps if you’d been paying attention.
She’d been paying attention.
She walked to the next gap, choosing it at random. The pendant pounded, its heat see ping into her bones. Another crossing, another dry pop in her ears…and another near-identical clearing.
The flowers, she noticed, were different.
The first patch she’d stepped through had been mostly blue and gold. This one skewed white: star-shaped blossoms, pale as milk teeth, crowded tight. They shivered faintly in no wind.
Something moved at the edge of her vision.
A slender figure between two oaks, there and gone. White, like fog caught in the fork of a tree, but taller than a person. No sound. Just the impression of height, of long, long limbs.
Rory’s body reacted before her brain could. She flinched, heart whacking against her ribs, turning toward the movement with every muscle set to either run or throw a punch.
Nothing there. Just an oak, its trunk broad and patient, its roots gripping the earth.
“Seeing things,” she told herself. “You’re stressed, you’re sleep-deprived, you’re standing in a magically-weird grove in the middle of the night, of course your brain’s deciding to have a little play.”
The pendant’s warmth climbed into pain. Each pulse was a small, scalding thud, perfectly syncopated with her own racing heartbeat.
She pulled it free of her collar, fumbling at the chain with clumsy fingers, and let the gem fall against her gloved palm. It glowed.
Not bright. Not enough to cast light around her. Just a faint inner ember, as if someone had trapped a coal at the centre of the crimson stone. The colour clung to the gem, refusing to spill.
“Brilliant,” she breathed. “Now you’re doing special effects as well. Cheers, Unknown.”
A whisper brushed her left ear.
“Laila.”
Her entire body locked.
The name was one she hadn’t heard in years. Childhood only. A softening of “Laila Aurora,” her mother’s pet compromise between Welsh and Irish grandmothers. No one in London knew it. Evan hadn’t known it. She hadn’t written it down anywhere since she was twelve.
The voice that said it was neither her mother’s nor anyone else she could place. It was the sound of a breeze shaping itself almost to words. Almost.
She turned, very slowly .
The clearing was unchanged . Flowers. Oaks. Moon-smeared sky overhead. No figure. No shape. Yet the skin over her spine crawled, anticipatory, as if the air just behind her had thickened.
“Who’s there?” Her voice came out tighter than she’d intended. “If you’re trying to scare me, congratulations, you’ve succeeded. Now come out where I can see you or I’m leaving.”
Leaving where, exactly, her idiot brain added, given the grove see med to fold back on itself like an Escher print.
The pendant flared again, heat lancing up nerves, bright enough that spots of crimson danced at the edge of her vision. For a heartbeat—two—she thought she heard something under its pulse.
Another beat.
Not hers. Not the Heartstone's. A slower, deeper thud, resonant as something buried a long way down.
The flowers to her right trembled . The tremor travelled outward in concentric ripples, stems bowing, petals twitching. It stopped at the nearest oak as if the trunk were a wall.
Rory took a step back. The soles of her boots found something that wasn’t soft earth or plant.
Stone. Smooth, chill. She glanced down.
A sliver of rock showed between the flowers, a curve of pale surface. She used her toe to nudge the stems aside. A circle of worked stone lay half-buried, maybe a metre across, etched with lines that intersected in a pattern she didn’t recognise. The grooves were dark, not with dirt. With shadow.
She hadn’t see n it before. She was sure she would have noticed a stone disc underfoot.
“Portal,” she said, the word scraping out of some lizard part of her brain that catalogued stories about standing stones and doors that weren’t there by day. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
The deep beat came again, this time undeniable. It reverberated through the soles of her boots, up her legs. A subterranean heartbeat.
The Heartstone matched it, locking into the same slow cadence. Her own pulse stuttered, trying to find its place between.
Somewhere beyond the ring of oaks, something scraped bark. A long, low drag, like a hand—or something like a hand—trailing along a trunk as it walked past. Nearer, nearer, each small sound horribly distinct in the swallowing quiet.
Rory’s mouth had gone dry. Her mind, so good at running scenarios and contingency plans in exams and arguments and in the cramped kitchen of her flat over Silas’s bar, skittered like a trapped fly.
There was a way she could shout. She could ramp her voice up to that piercing note that carried down a street, bring a ranger, the police, anyone. Except the park gates were locked , she was half a mile at least from the nearest road, and the grove…was not obeying normal rules.
She slipped the Heartstone back under her collar, fingers shaking. It burned against her skin, but she left it there, as if covering it might somehow hide her from whatever it called.
The scraping stopped directly behind her.
Cold brushed the back of her neck, deeper than the night air. It felt like standing too close to an open freezer. Her breath snagged. Every instinct she’d honed surviving Evan’s quieter rages—don’t flinch, don’t move, don’t give him that—fought with the urge to run.
She did not turn around.
Instead, very quietly, she said, “You’re not the one who texted me.”
The silence held. Then, very slowly , something exhaled. The air against her skin shifted, tasting of metal and wet earth and something older, like stone that had never see n the sun.
The Heartstone’s pulse climbed into her own throat, filling her mouth with heat. Under it, the deep, buried heartbeat continued, patient and inexorable, as if something had finally woken up and found her standing on its front step.
She closed her eyes. “Right,” she whispered to the dark. “Next time I get a mystery message, I’m blocking the number.”
The thing behind her took a step closer.