AI The path into Richmond Park should have been familiar by now—packed earth, the occasional puddle holding a skim of moonlight, the smell of wet leaves. Even at night it was still just London: distant road-hiss, a far siren, the city’s breath carried in cold air.
But the closer Aurora Carter got to the old oak standing stones, the more the park seemed to forget it belonged to anyone.
Her phone had dropped to one bar halfway from the gate. Now the screen showed NO SERVICE with a stubborn little blankness, as if she’d walked off the map. The torch beam from her phone looked thin and embarrassed against the dark. It caught tree trunks and bracken and the pale flashes of foxglove that shouldn’t have been out in February.
Wildflowers, Rory thought, and tried to make it sound like a joke in her own head. Year-round, Eva had said, as if it were a charming pub fact. As if that wasn’t the first warning.
Her breath smoked. She pushed a strand of straight black hair behind her ear and felt, with the movement, the chain at her throat shift. The pendant rested under her jumper—small, roughly the size of her thumbnail—and it had been heavy ever since it arrived in a plain envelope with no return address. Heartstone, the note had called it, as if she was supposed to know what that meant.
She’d laughed at first. Some kind of prank. A sentimental gift from someone who knew her name but not her life. Then it had warmed in her palm the first time she’d walked past a patch of council grass behind the Golden Empress, as if something below the ground had exhaled.
Tonight she’d brought it here to confirm what she already suspected: that the warmth wasn’t random. That it had a direction.
And because the note had included a line in tight, careful handwriting: Richmond Park. Oak stones. When the moon is thin.
Now the moon was a clipped nail above the trees. Thin enough.
The stones waited ahead, darker than the dark around them, their surfaces catching faint silver like old teeth. Someone had arranged them in an arc long before anyone thought to name a city here. Ancient oak standing stones, Eva had called them, and Rory had corrected her automatically—oak was wood, stone was stone—and Eva had shrugged, grinning, and said, “They’re oak in the way they feel , darling. Just go. You’ll see.”
Rory slowed. Her boots scuffed softly . The wrongness had been with her since she stepped off the lit path: not a jolt, not a scream, just a steady sense of being slightly misaligned. Like wearing someone else’s coat.
The pendant warmed against her skin.
Not just warm. It pulsed. Faintly, in time with her heartbeat until she couldn’t tell which rhythm belonged to her. The chain was silver, cool on her neck except where the crimson gemstone pressed her sternum and hummed like a living thing.
She stopped a few steps from the boundary. The air around the stones looked thicker, the way heat warps a road in summer. Her torch beam crossed it and seemed to dull, as if swallowed by fog she couldn’t see. The wildflowers clustered there—white and violet and a bright, rude yellow—upright and perfect, their petals not moving with the breeze.
There was a breeze. She felt it on her cheeks, cold and persistent, but the flowers didn’t sway. The trees beyond didn’t whisper.
Rory flexed her left hand, a small habit when she was thinking . The crescent-shaped scar on her wrist flashed pale under the torch for a moment. She could still remember the sting of that childhood accident, the way her father had pressed a folded towel to her skin and told her, voice too calm, that she was going to be all right. Calm could be a lie you told with your whole body. She’d learned that early.
She looked back over her shoulder.
The park behind her was a dark spread of trunks and paths. Nothing moved. No dog-walker’s torch. No lovers murmuring. No night cyclist. It was late, but Richmond Park was never this empty.
“Fine,” she said softly , the word lost almost as soon as it left her lips. “Fine. I’m here.”
Her voice didn’t echo . It didn’t even carry. It felt like the air caught it and folded it away.
The pendant answered with a warm throb .
She stepped between the stones.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Not the damp rot of leaves, not the city’s exhaust, but something sweeter and older—green sap, crushed stems, and the faintest metallic tang beneath it, like coin on tongue. Her torch beam swung and widened as if the darkness had stepped back. The clearing opened in front of her without transition, a bowl of soft grass and wildflowers under a sky that looked too deep for London. The stars were sharper here, too numerous, too close together.
Time moves differently, Eva had said, half teasing, half serious. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside.
Rory swallowed. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming tonight. Not Eva. Not Yu-Fei. Not Silas downstairs whose bar she lived above, who always looked at her like he was counting her bruises even when there weren’t any. She’d told herself that was sensible. No reason to worry anyone.
Now it felt like she’d done it for a different reason: so no one could tell her she was being stupid.
The clearing was silent in a way that made her ears strain. Even her breathing sounded intrusive, too loud. She took a few steps forward, boots sinking slightly into springy ground that should have been frozen .
The pendant pulsed, warmer still.
“All right,” she murmured, and her voice came back to her from somewhere too close, as if the air had thrown it at her. Not an echo . A mimicry.
She froze, eyes wide. Her bright blue gaze cut across the clearing, trying to find the trick of it—some hollow, some stone face, some reason sound would bounce wrong. Her torch found nothing but flowers and grass, and at the far edge, shadowed trees crowding in like an audience.
She made herself breathe slower. Cool-headed, she reminded herself. Intelligent. Out-of-the-box thinking. Words she’d heard enough times to believe they could protect her.
The pendant’s warmth was a steady insistence now, and with it came an awareness she hadn’t had outside the stones: a pressure behind her eyes, like the beginning of a headache, and a faint sense of… attention. Not a gaze exactly. A focus.
She walked toward the center of the clearing. The wildflowers brushed her jeans, leaving damp against denim. They were too tall. Too vigorous. They should have bent away, but they seemed to lean into her path, petals turning.
She told herself it was her imagination.
Something clicked behind her.
Not a twig snapping underfoot—too precise. Like a fingernail on glass. Like a small stone tapping another stone, patient and testing.
Rory stopped without turning. Her shoulders tightened. The pendant gave a quick, sharper throb , almost like a flinch.
“Hello?” she called, immediately regretting it. The word came back to her again, not from the clearing but from behind her left ear.
Hello.
Same tone. Same breath. Her own voice, placed wrong.
Rory turned fast, torch cutting a bright slice through darkness.
Nothing.
The standing stones were still there, half-hidden by the curve of the clearing. Beyond them: deeper shadow. She couldn’t see the park path anymore, though she knew the direction. It was as if the grove had turned its back on London.
Her throat tightened. She held the phone higher, the beam wobbling just a bit.
“Someone’s there,” she said, more firmly. “If this is some kind of joke—”
The sentence died. Not because she stopped speaking, but because the air took it. The sound didn’t travel. It simply vanished.
Rory stared at her own mouth in the torchlight, as if she could see the words leaving and being smothered .
Her pulse began to hurry. The pendant matched it. Warm. Warmer. Too warm, like a coal tucked under cloth.
She forced her feet to move again, slower now, careful as if she might step on something fragile. The center of the grove looked slightly lower, the grass bending toward a shallow dip that could have been a natural hollow. The air above it shimmered faintly, not with heat but with a distortion that made her eyes want to slide off it.
Her chest tightened with the certainty of it: this was why the pendant had been given to her. Not to protect her. To lead her.
The warmth became almost painful. She pulled the chain out from under her jumper. The gemstone hung there, deep crimson with a faint inner glow, like a drop of blood holding its shape. It pulsed as she watched, light blooming and retreating in the stone’s depths.
She should leave.
The thought arrived clean and simple. The thought she’d been avoiding all evening.
Rory took one step back.
The grass under her heel didn’t compress. It held.
She shifted her weight , frowning. Tried again. The ground gave a little, then seemed to push back—not forcefully, not like a trap, but like the surface of a taut drum. Her boot slid forward a fraction on springy resistance.
Her stomach dropped . She lifted her foot and set it down carefully . The grass looked normal. Felt wrong.
A sound rose from the trees, too soft at first to name. Not wind. Not leaves. A thin, dry whisper like paper rubbed together. It gathered, a shiver moving around the clearing in a slow circle.
Rory turned, tracking it with the torch. The beam caught the edge of something between two trunks—a pale sliver, then gone. Her eyes snapped back, trying to hold it.
Nothing.
Her breathing was loud now, the only honest sound she could trust. She tasted metal.
She started to ward the stones, toward the place she’d come in. The pendant flared warm enough that she hissed and let it fall back against her jumper. The chain bit her neck.
The whispering in the trees swelled, and threaded through it—so faint she almost missed it—came her name.
Not spoken in her voice. Not in any voice, really . More like the grove itself shaping the sound from the hiss of air.
Rory.
The syllables made her skin prickle. She moved faster. The grass resisted again, a subtle drag at her boots, as if the ground had grown tacky.
The torch beam flickered once.
“Don’t,” she said, and this time the word did make it out into the clearing. It didn’t echo back. It didn’t vanish. It simply hung there, heavy.
The pendant pulsed, pulse, pulse, as if answering some signal she couldn’t hear.
She broke into a jog. The stones looked farther away than they should. The clearing felt larger, the trees stepping back to make space. Her torchlight caught wildflowers she hadn’t seen—clusters of red blooms like small open mouths, their centers dark.
She ran harder, lungs burning.
The standing stones did not get closer.
Panic rose, hot and fast. She stopped, skidding slightly on the springy ground, and spun in a tight circle, trying to orient herself. The grove looked the same no matter where she turned—flowers, grass, the ring of trees, the sky too deep and star-heavy.
Her phone screen dimmed and brightened, searching for a signal like a hand scrabbling at a wall.
“Think,” she whispered, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead. Her mind reached for the practical. Time moves differently. A pocket. A boundary. Boundaries have rules.
The pendant throb bed, and she looked down at it. The gem’s glow was brighter now, a steady ember. Warmth radiated from it, spreading across her chest.
When near a Hel portal, she thought, and the word Hel came with a coldness that didn’t belong to her. A wrong spelling of hell, or something else entirely. A place. A door.
She lifted the pendant in her fist and held it out in front of her like a compass. The chain trembled . The gemstone brightened.
It pointed, not with direction but with intensity. The glow strengthened when she faced the shallow dip in the center of the clearing. Dimmed when she turned away.
Rory stared at the dip, her mouth dry. The shimmer over it was clearer now, like a film of oil on water. The air above it had a subtle vertical ripple, as if something there was trying to rise through.
The whispering in the trees softened, almost expectant.
She forced herself to take one step toward the dip.
The grass gave easily now, welcoming. Her boot sank into soft earth with a damp sound. Another step. The pendant warmed, the gemstone’s glow deepening into a richer crimson that seemed to stain her fingers.
Her heartbeat hammered. She kept her breathing measured by sheer will, as if she could out-stubborn fear. She thought of her flat above Silas’ bar, of the muffled music through the floorboards, of Yu-Fei’s kitchen heat and the weight of takeaway bags on her wrists. Normal textures. Anchors.
Another step.
The air changed. It cooled sharply , as if she’d opened a freezer. Her breath came out in thicker clouds. The smell of sap and green sweetness fell away and was replaced by the metallic tang, stronger now, like old blood on iron.
The shimmer above the dip coalesced, and for a moment Rory’s vision did something it had never done before: it tried to interpret something that didn’t fit inside it. The space in front of her looked deeper than it should, like a hallway folded into the grass. The stars above seemed to tilt, peering.
From within the shimmer came a sound so quiet she felt it more than heard it: a low, patient thrum that matched the pendant’s pulse exactly.
Rory’s fingers tightened around the chain until it hurt. Her scarred wrist stung under the pressure, a small sharp pain that grounded her.
“Who sent this?” she demanded, voice shaking despite her effort. “What do you want from me?”
Her words did not vanish. They slipped into the shimmer as if swallowed. For a beat there was nothing.
Then her own voice answered from inside the dip, soft and intimate, as if someone were speaking directly against her ear.
What do you want?
Rory’s stomach turned. She took a stumbling step back, nearly falling as the ground tugged at her heel. She yanked free and retreated, eyes locked on the shimmer.
In it, something moved. Not a hand, not a face—something like the suggestion of a figure behind frosted glass. Tall. Too still. The outline wavered , sharpening and blurring as if deciding on a shape.
The pendant flared hot enough that Rory cried out and dropped it. It swung wildly on the chain and slapped against her chest, its heat blooming through fabric. The crimson glow lit her throat and jaw from below, turning her skin the colour of bruised rose.
The whispering rose again, all around now. Not words. A dry, brittle sound like pages turning too fast.
She backed away, toward where she thought the stones should be, torch beam shaking. The clearing seemed to rearrange itself with each step, subtle shifts—trees closer, flowers thicker, the sky pressing down.
“Leave me alone,” she said, and this time the grove gave her the courtesy of letting the sound exist. It felt mocked by its own presence.
At the edge of her vision, between two trunks, she saw movement again—pale, quick. She snapped the torch toward it.
The beam caught a face for half a second. Not fully a face. The idea of one: smooth and too long, with dark hollows where eyes should be, as if someone had scooped them out and forgotten to stop.
The torch flickered and the image was gone .
Rory’s throat closed. She turned and ran without caring where, boots thudding dully, breath tearing. The pendant burned against her chest like a brand. The trees seemed to lean, their branches knitting a canopy that swallowed starlight.
Her phone screen went black.
In the dark, she could still see the pendant’s glow, a small deep crimson light bobbing with her movement. It made her feel like a lure in her own hand.
The whispering chased her, circling, never quite behind or ahead. It came from the grass, from the flowers, from the space between her thoughts. Her name surfaced again and again, stretched thin.
Rory.
Rory.
She ran until her lungs screamed and her legs trembled , and still the grove did not end. The air grew colder with each step, and with the cold came a certainty, heavy and calm as a verdict:
She had been brought here on purpose.
The pendant pulsed, steady as a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.
Somewhere ahead, in the dark she couldn’t pierce, the shimmer’s low thrum deepened, like a door unlatching.