AI The air inside the Fae Grove tasted wrong. It was too sweet, cloying like overripe bruised fruit left in the sun, masking the underlying scent of damp earth and decaying oak that should have dominated a November night in Richmond Park. Aurora Carter adjusted the strap of her delivery bag, the familiar weight of insulated canvas against her shoulder doing little to ground her. She wasn't here for an order. There were no Golden Empress dumplings destined for this pocket of reality, no hungry customers waiting in a London flat above Silas' bar. She was here because the pendant around her neck had begun to burn.
The Heartstone hung heavy against her sternum, the deep crimson gemstone pulsing with a rhythm that felt less like a heartbeat and more like a countdown. Through the thin fabric of her jacket, the warmth radiating from it was intense, a feverish heat that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up. She pushed through the boundary of ancient oak standing stones, the wood rough and cold under her palm as she brushed past them. The transition was seamless, one moment the chill wind of the park whipping her straight, shoulder-length black hair across her face, and the next, a suffocating stillness.
Time here was a liar. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside, a fact that usually fascinated her legal mind, but tonight it only tightened the knot in her stomach. She needed to know what the stone was leading her to. The unknown benefactor who had slipped it into her pocket weeks ago had offered no instructions, only silence. Now, the silence was breaking .
Rory stepped onto the soft moss, her boots sinking slightly . Wildflowers bloomed around her, vibrant splashes of color that defied the season. In the daylight, Isolde's grove was a sanctuary , a hidden clearing where the rules of Earth bent but did not break. Tonight, the flowers seemed to watch her. Their petals were turned toward her, tracking her movement with a slow, hydraulic grace that no plant possessed. She stopped, her bright blue eyes scanning the perimeter. The standing stones formed a perfect circle, blocking out the view of the mundane world beyond. There was no moon, yet the grove was illuminated by a sourceless, grey light that cast no shadows.
"You're imagining it," she whispered, her voice sounding flat and dead in the thick air. "It's just the heat from the stone playing tricks."
She touched the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a habitual gesture when anxiety spiked. The skin was smooth, a reminder of a childhood accident, something real and grounded in a world that suddenly felt fluid. But the feeling of being watched didn't fade. It intensified. It started as a prickling at the base of her neck, the primal instinct that told a prey animal a predator was nearby. Then came the sounds.
At first, it was just the rustle of leaves, a gentle sway that suggested a breeze. But there was no wind. The air was stagnant, heavy as water. Then the rustling became a shuffle, a dragging sound coming from behind the nearest oak stone. Rory spun around, her hand instinctively going to the pocket where she kept her phone, though she knew the signal would be dead here. Nothing was there. Just the wildflowers, their colors seeming darker now, the whites turning to a sickly grey.
She took a step back, her heel catching on a root that hadn't been there a moment before. She stumbled, catching herself on a low branch. The bark felt wet, slippery like skin. She jerked her hand away, wiping it on her jeans. The Heartstone pulsed harder, a sharp throb of heat that made her gasp. It wasn't just warm anymore; it was vibrating .
"Is someone there?" she called out, hating the tremor in her voice. "Show yourself."
The response was not a voice, but a mimicry. From the darkness between two towering oaks, a sound emerged that was almost her own voice. *"Show yourself,"* it echo ed, but the cadence was off, stretched and distorted, as if played backward and then forward again. It lacked the breath, the humanity. It was a recording scraped from the air itself.
Rory's heart hammered against her ribs. She was intelligent, a woman who solved problems by thinking outside the box, who had fled an abusive past and built a new life in London through sheer force of will. But logic had no foothold here. The geometry of the grove seemed to be shifting. The distance between the stones appeared to lengthen the longer she looked at them. The path she had walked in was gone , replaced by a dense thicket of brambles that seemed to writhe slowly , like sleeping snakes waking up.
She began to walk, keeping her eyes fixed on the center of the clearing, trying to maintain a straight line. Every step felt heavier than the last, as if the gravity in the grove was increasing. The edges of her vision blurred. Movement flickered there, quick and jerky. When she snapped her head to look, there was nothing but the swaying flowers. But when she looked away, the motion returned, closer this time. Something was circling her, staying just outside her focal point, exploiting the limitations of her human sight.
The temperature dropped abruptly. Her breath plumed in front of her, white and thick. The sweet smell of rot grew overpowering, making her eyes water. The Heartstone was now hot enough to be painful, searing the skin beneath her shirt. It glowed with a faint inner light, casting a bloody red reflection on the moss below her feet.
Then she saw it. Not a shadow, but an absence. A patch of the grey light simply vanished, a hole in the world that was darker than the space between the stars. It stood near the eastern stone, roughly human-sized but too tall, too thin. It didn't move, yet it seemed to be advancing. The wildflowers around it wilted instantly, turning to black dust that scattered on a wind that still did not blow.
Rory froze. Her mind raced, searching for an explanation, a loophole, a legal precedent for surviving a supernatural ambush. There was none. The entity didn't have a face, but she felt its attention fixate on her with the weight of a physical blow. It was hungry, not for food, but for something else. For time, perhaps. Or memory.
A whisper brushed against her ear, so close she could feel the chill of it. *"Rory."*
It wasn't the distorted echo from before. It was Evan's voice. Her ex. The man she had fled, the man whose violence had driven her from Cardiff to London. The voice was calm, reasonable, the way he sounded before he hit her. *"You can't run forever, Laila. You think changing your name changes what you are?"*
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head violently. "No. You're not real. He's not here."
*"Look at me,"* the voice commanded, shifting now to her mother's tone, gentle and disappointed. *"Why did you leave us, Aurora? Why are you always running?"*
The psychological assault was worse than any physical threat. It picked at the fractures in her armor, the guilt she carried for leaving her family, the fear that she was still the victim. The entity was using her own history as a weapon. She could feel the presence closing in, the air pressure dropping until her ears popped. The wrongness of the place had coalesced into a singular intent: to unmake her.
Rory opened her eyes. The dark void was inches away. She could see the individual petals of the dying flowers turning to ash as the entity passed. The Heartstone screamed against her skin, a silent vibration that rattled her teeth. It wasn't just a beacon ; it was a key, or maybe a shield. She didn't know which, and she didn't have time to deduce it.
She reached up, her fingers trembling, and gripped the crimson gem. It burned her palm, blistering the skin, but she held on. She thought of Silas' bar, the smell of stale beer and polished wood. She thought of Eva's laugh, the sound of rain on the roof of her flat, the mundane, beautiful boredom of a safe life. She anchored herself to those memories, to the reality of Earth, rejecting the sweet rot of the Fae Grove.
"I am not yours," she said, her voice steady despite the terror clawing at her throat. "And I am not alone."
She didn't know if it was true. The grove was empty of friends, of allies. But the statement felt like a spell in itself. The entity paused. The dark void seemed to ripple, uncertain. The whispering stopped. For a heartbeat, the only sound was her own ragged breathing and the furious pulsing of the stone.
Then, the ground beneath her lurched . The standing stones groaned, a deep, tectonic sound that vibrated through the soles of her boots. The grey light fractured , splintering into shards of darkness. The entity didn't attack; it dissolved, unraveling into the shadows like smoke in a gale. The wildflowers snapped back to life, vibrant and aggressive, their stems lengthening rapidly, reaching for her ankles.
Rory didn't wait. She turned and ran, blindly charging toward where she remembered the entrance being. The brambles tore at her legs, the air thick with the sound of laughing whispers that sounded like a hundred different people she had ever known. She didn't look back. She focused on the heat in her hand, on the pain, on the reality of the scar on her wrist. She ran until her lungs burned and the sweet smell of rot was replaced by the clean, cold stench of London rain.
She burst through the oak stones and collapsed onto the wet grass of Richmond Park, the city lights of London shimmering in the distance, distant and indifferent. The Heartstone cooled instantly, the crimson glow fading to a dull, dormant red. Rory lay there, gasping, staring up at the smoggy sky, waiting for the morning, knowing that the isolation of the grove had ended, but the feeling of being watched might never truly go away.