AI The engine of the moped ticked as it cooled, the only sound disrupting the oppressive silence of the car park at the edge of Richmond Park. Aurora Carter unbuckled her helmet, the rush of cold London air hitting her damp skin with a bite that made her shiver. She ran a hand through her shoulder-length black hair, trying to shake out the helmet hair and the nerves in one motion. It was a foolish time to come here. Late, dark, and utterly alone.
But logic had little place in her life lately. Since the pendant had arrived—since everything had shifted—the need to understand the boundaries of this new reality had gnawed at her. She wasn't the type to let things lie. She was the girl who argued points of law with her father just to see if the argument held water. She needed to know if the Grove was dangerous, or if her last visit had been a fluke of perception.
She zipped up her leather jacket, her fingers brushing the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. It was a grounding habit, a tactile reminder of cause and effect. She locked the bike, though who would be stealing a rusted delivery scooter at two in the morning was a question for another day.
The park gates loomed like skeletal fingers interlaced against the bruised purple of the city sky. Beyond the iron threshold, the manicured reality of the London boroughs ended, and something older began.
Aurora stepped onto the grass. The ground was soft, sodden with recent rain, sucking at the soles of her boots with a wet, rhythmic squelch. The light pollution of the city cast a sickly amber haze over the treetops, but beneath the canopy, the shadows were absolute.
She walked with purpose, forcing her breathing to remain even. Her internal map was good. She had spent enough time navigating confusing council estates with cooling takeaway food to trust her sense of direction. The path to the standing stones wasn't marked on any tourist map, but the pull was there, a magnetic tug in the center of her chest.
Under her shirt, against her sternum, the Heartstone pendant grew warm. It wasn't the comforting heat of a hot water bottle; it was the prickly, warning heat of a fever.
Ten minutes in, the ambient noise of the city—the distant hum of the M25, the occasional siren—dropped away abruptly. It didn't fade; it was severed . One step, she could hear the ghostly roar of civilization; the next, nothing but the blood rushing in her ears.
Aurora stopped. The silence wasn't empty. It was heavy, pressurized, like the air in a room moments before a thunderclap. She peered into the gloom, her bright blue eyes straining to separate tree trunks from lurking shapes.
"Just trees, Rory," she whispered. Her voice sounded flat, instantly swallowed by the moss and damp bark. "Just trees and deer."
But there were no deer. Usually, Richmond Park was teeming with them, their reflective eyes catching in the darkness, the sound of their hooves shifting in the bracken. Tonight, the woods were sterile.
She pressed on, the pendant’s heat intensifying to a dull throb . Ahead, the gloom parted. The ancient oak standing stones appeared, jagged silhouettes that looked less like monuments and more like broken teeth jutting from the earth. They marked the boundary.
Aurora paused at the threshold. This was it. The pocket between.
Taking a breath that tasted of ozone and rotting leaves, she stepped between the oaks.
The transition was instant and visceral, a wave of vertigo that made her knees buckle. The amber haze of London vanished, replaced by a clarity of darkness that felt suffocating. And then came the smell—not the damp mulch of the outer park, but something cloying and sweet.
Wildflowers. Thousands of them.
In the faint, sourceless luminescence of the Grove, she could see them carpeting the clearing. Foxgloves, bluebells, poppies—blooming impossibly out of season, their petals vibrant even in the monochrome night. It should have been beautiful.
It wasn't.
The beauty was aggressive. The flowers stood too tall, their heads unmoving despite the sudden chill draft that swept across Aurora’s neck. They looked like a stage set, too perfect, frozen in a tableau of artificial spring.
Aurora walked deeper into the clearing, her boots making no sound now. The turf here was strangely spongy, like walking on lung tissue. She pulled the pendant from beneath her shirt. The crimson gemstone was pulsing , a slow, rhythmic beat that didn't match her own frantic heart rate. The faint inner glow cast long, distorted shadows against the grass.
*Something is wrong,* her mind whispered. The lawyer’s daughter in her analyzed the evidence. No wind, yet the air moved. No insects, yet the smell of pollen was choking . No sound, yet the sensation of noise—a high-frequency static—pressed against her temples.
She turned in a slow circle, scanning the perimeter. The trees encircling the Grove seemed closer than she remembered. Their branches were tangled , weaving together to form a cage rather than a canopy.
A snap.
It came from her left, sharp and deliberate.
Aurora froze. Her hand went to her pocket, gripping her keys, threading the metal stems through her knuckles. A pathetic weapon against the unknown, but it was better than nothing.
"Hello?" she called out. She winced at the trembling in her voice. "I know this is private property... sort of."
Silence answered her. But not the stillness of before. This was a listening silence.
She took a step back toward the standing stones.
Another snap. Closer. To her right this time.
She whipped her head around. Just the dense wall of brambles and the pale, nodding heads of the foxgloves. But in the periphery of her vision, the shadows seemed to liquefy. When she looked directly at them, they were still. When she looked away, they poured like oil, inching closer to the ring of flowers.
The temperature plummeted. Her breath plumed in front of her face, the mist lingering too long, shivering in the air as if suspended by wires.
*Time moves differently,* she reminded herself, reciting the lore she had learned. *An hour inside can be minutes outside.*
But what if time stopped altogether? What if it flowed backward?
She glanced at her wristwatch. The second hand was vibrating , twitching back and forth between the twelve and the one, struggling against a magnetic current.
Aurora backed up, her boots catching on a root. She stumbled, catching herself on one hand. The ground was warm. Disturbingly warm. Like flesh. She jerked her hand back, wiping the damp earth on her jeans, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
"Okay," she muttered. "Okay, experiment over. We're leaving."
She turned fully toward the exit, toward the gap between the ancient oaks.
The gap was gone .
Aurora blinked, convinced it was a trick of the low light. She stepped forward, the pendant swinging like a pendulum from her neck, its red light washing over the tree line.
There were no standing stones. The wall of oak and briar was seamless, a continuous barricade of wood and thorn.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in her gut. She rushed the tree line, indifferent to the noise she was creating now. She reached out to verify what she was seeing , shoving her hand against the rough bark of a massive oak.
It didn't feel like bark. It felt slick, oily. And under her palm, she felt a vibration. A low, subterranean thrumming.
The trees were purring .
She recoiled, stumbling back into the sea of wildflowers. The sweet scent was overpowering now, smelling less like a garden and more like funeral lilies masking the scent of decay.
From the darkest corner of the grove, where the shadows pooled thickest, a sound emerged. It wasn't a growl or a scream. It was a mimicry.
*...Rory...*
It was her father's voice. Brendon Carter’s distinct Irish lilt. But it was wrong. It sounded like a recording played on a warped tape—stretched, garbled, the pitch sliding up and down violently.
*...Ro...ry... wait...*
Aurora spun toward the sound, her fists clenched . "Who is that? Show yourself."
The foliage rustled, not from wind, but from movement within. Something tall was unfolding itself from the crouch of the bushes. It was merely a silhouette, darker than the surrounding night, human-shaped but with proportions that defied anatomy—limbs too long, movements too fluid, lacking the rigidity of bone.
The Heartstone pendant burned against her chest, searing the skin. It wasn't just reacting to a portal anymore; it was reacting to a threat.
The figure stepped onto the grass. It had no face, just a smooth expanse of gray where features should be. Yet, Aurora felt the weight of its gaze. It tilted its head, mimicking the way she had tilted hers moments ago.
*...Show... your... self...* it wheezed, repeating her words back to her, tasting them, testing the shape of the vowels.
Aurora didn't think. Instinct, sharpened by adrenaline, took the wheel. The "cool-headed" law student vanished, replaced by the survivor who had fled a turbulent life in Cardiff.
She ran.
Not toward the closed wall of trees, but across the clearing, banking on the logic that the Grove was a pocket dimension, that geometry here was subjective. If the entrance was closed , she had to find a seam.
The wildflowers whipped at her legs, their stems feeling like wire lashings. The ground seemed to tilt, trying to throw her off balance. Behind her, the wet, rhythmic sounds of pursuit began—not footsteps , but the slap of wet meat against earth, closing the distance terrifyingly fast.
She spotted a cluster of rocks near the center of the grove, ancient gray stones half-buried in the soil. She scrambled up onto the highest one, desperate for height, desperate to see a way out.
From her vantage point, the horror of the Grove clarified. The flowers weren't growing randomly. They were arranged in spirals, tightening toward the center where she now stood. And the trees... the trees were slowly moving inward, the boundary shrinking, the noose tightening.
The faceless figure was ten yards away. It stopped as she climbed the rock. It raised a hand—long, multi-jointed fingers stretching out in a mocking gesture of invitation.
*...Caaaaarter...* it hissed.
Aurora gripped the Heartstone. It was the only uncontrolled variable she had. It was from Dymas. It wasn't of this world, and perhaps it wasn't of this nightmare either.
"Get back," she snarled, channeling every ounce of her will into the stone, visualizing the red light expanding, burning, repelling.
The vivid crimson gem flared. It didn't cast a beam; it emitted a shockwave of heat and light. The pulse rippled outward, washing over the gray figure.
The creature shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—and recoiled, its form shivering like a disturbed reflection in water.
For a second, the illusion of the Grove flickered . The wall of trees wavered , revealing the ghostly outline of the real Richmond Park oaks behind them. A gap. A way out.
Aurora didn't wait to see if the creature recovered. She launched herself from the rock, hitting the ground hard and rolling. She sprinted toward the flicker in reality, her breath tearing at her throat.
The flowers seemed to grab at her ankles now, tangible fingers trying to drag her down into the earth. She kicked free, stumbling, lungs burning. The gap was closing. The Fae reality was stitching itself back together, covering the hole.
She threw herself forward, diving between the two phantom oaks just as the air solidified.
Silence.
Not the heavy, listening silence of the Grove. But the dull, wet silence of a London park.
Aurora hit the mud—cold, glorious, filthy mud. She lay there for a moment, gasping, her cheek pressed against the wet grass. The air smelled of exhaust and rain.
She rolled onto her back. Above her, the standing stones were just stones. Inert. Lifeless.
She sat up, checking her wrist. The crescent scar was white against her flushed skin. She grabbed the pendant. It was cold, the crimson light extinguished, looking like nothing more than a piece of jewelry.
But when she looked down at her boots, terror seized her chest one last time.
Wrapped around her left ankle, severed cleanly as if by a knife when the portal closed, was a long, pale vine. It was white, leafless, and pulsed faintly, leaking a dark, viscous fluid onto the Richmond grass.
Aurora scrambled backward, kicking the thing away, scrambling until her back hit her moped. She didn't stop shaking until she was halfway back to the garage, the city lights blazing around her, drowning out the memory of the faceless gray and the smell of waiting flowers.