AI Aurora Carter kept her hand on the silver chain because it felt like a promise she could hold. The pendant rested against the fabric of her coat, a small, warm weight at the base of her throat. The note had been simple — midnight, the Grove, bring it — and, true to form, she had argued with herself until she could no longer name the argument. Curiosity had always been stubborn in her. So had the flatter, quieter part of her that wanted answers from whoever had given her this deep-crimson shard and slipped it into her palm with no explanation.
Richmond Park did not look like a place that made bargains. At night its lawns were anonymous black oceans of grass; a streetlamp here and there made islands. The entrance to the Grove sat where the path softened into roots, where three ancient oaks stood like doors. They had the smell of old rain and sap, and they were bigger than any trees she could remember. Aurora hesitated at the threshold and counted the familiar rules aloud like a litany: stay aware, keep one route back, do not touch unknown things. She hear d her own breath sound slightly wrong — a dry, clipped rhythm — and blamed the walker who had passed her on the lane, the late buses, the city that hummed just out of the grove's reach.
Inside the ring of oaks the world folded tighter. The night was closer, almost physically; the air touched the back of her throat like a cool hand. The wildflowers were everywhere—tiny blue cornflowers, pale foxgloves, star-shaped blossoms she had no name for—petals improbably fresh as if someone had dusted them just now. They leaned toward her as she passed, not in the careless way of roadside plants but with an attention that made her skin prick. No insects moved among them. No small mammals crossed her path. The absence felt orchestrated, as if someone had sealed the place to hear exactly what she would do next.
Her phone offered the ladder of light you expect in a pocket, but she left it dark. The pendant pulsed against her sternum, a slow living hear tbeat. Each pulse was faint warmth. It had done that sometimes in the past month — an almost conscious throb when she walked beneath certain bridges or past certain alleyways that felt like thresholds — but this was new. It answered the Grove, a response so quiet it might have been imagination, and that possibility made Aurora both alert and wildly exposed.
She walked on a path of leaf-mulch that smelled faintly of cinnamon and crushed earth. The standing stones were not stones at all but the incurving roots of the oldest oaks, bark worn smooth with time into the shape the storybooks called gates. Moonlight threaded through the branches in fine threads. It should have been cold in a way she could measure, but temperature was slippery here; the air had its own rules. Aurora's cheeks felt hot; her fingers, the ones not knuckling the chain, were numb.
There had been a shape beneath the largest oak, a figure hunched low as if speaking to the ground. For a breath—short, stupid, enough for her to turn and make a liar of her caution—she thought she saw a person. She moved toward it without thinking because meetings were what the note had promised, because the pendant had pulsed a little quicker. Her own name, the one she had not used since she left Cardiff, felt like someone else’s in her mouth.
"Hello?" she called, and the word split thin in the stillness.
No answer. The figure was not a person. It was a mound of darker shadow against the darker bark, a patch of earth depressurized by roots or a fallen branch. When she let herself examine it, the lump did what small animals do when they are aware of a predator: it did not make itself smaller. The wildflowers along the path turned as if following her movement, tiny faces tracking.
The wrong sounds started then, like sediment lifting from an old pond. Somewhere deeper in the Grove a twig snapped, but it snapped with a rhythm that matched her hear t. Another snap, then another—too precise to be random. The steps were all wrong; she hear d them from the northeast when she had turned west, from the left when her body had been aligning right. The space between sound and source widened until it felt as if the Grove were an instrument to be plucked, and she was the string.
Aurora's training in near-silent observation—learned, in part, from routes for deliveries and late nights threading between tables at the Golden Empress—kept her anchored to the basics: listen , watch for escape, avoid pinning yourself in. She shifted her weight , testing what ground would not hold her. Her eyes kept drifting to the pendant, to the way the crimson shimmered like a throat lit from within. It warmed more distinctly when she moved toward the circle at the center of the clearing. The stones—roots; the roots—formed a ring, and in the center, the soil was disturbingly pristine , as if cleared for a ceremony.
Time in the Grove was a dishonest currency. Her watch said twelve-oh-three, but when she pressed her lips together and listen ed, the world sat on a hinge. The wildflowers' petals fluttered in millimeters and yet the sound of breath moved across her, not her own but the kind you hear on the other side of a closed door. It made her throat pinch.
A voice threaded out of that air, improbable and small and shaped like a child's whisper. "Laila," it said.
She flinched as if struck. The name was one she had used privately when everything in her life had shrunk to one room and one name—Laila was a fantasy identity she'd given to herself once, a name for when she could not bear the weight of Aurora. She had not told anyone. How did the Grove—
The pendant thrummed so hard it made the chain warm and taut between her fingers. It pulsed once and the warmth crept up her throat, then spread outward like a liquid tide. The sound of distant laughing, thin and layered, came from around the ring. Her skin crawled.
Aurora spoke to the dark because language felt safer than silence. "Who's there?"
The voice answered with a chorus of syllables that should not have fit together: a laugh like water on stones, the sigh of someone clearing their throat, the scrape of a chair being dragged over a wooden floor. "Do not be afraid, Laila."
There were no eyes she could find. When she blinked, nothing held the gaze she could have met. Yet she felt watch ed, and worse: known. For a painful instant she felt as if something in the Grove had unfolded the paper of her life and was reading the sentences she had kept folded in the pocket of her coat—the neat, private facts no one else touched. She saw, absurdly, the small crescent scar on her left wrist as if it were being illuminated from inside. Some part of her mind offered it as a signifier: the cut from a child's fall, a shape of shame and survival. The voice used it like a key.
"You don't belong to him," it said then, softer. "You don't belong to them." The pronouns were wrong and right. Aurora's fingers tightened on the chain until her knuckles blanched. She did not know what "him" the voice meant. The guilty, useful, present ache named Evan lurked in the back of her mind. She had fled him. She had thought she could measure the margin that separated them by the number of nights she had slept without watch ing the door. The voice in the Grove collapsed that margin until Evan was as near as breath.
"Who are you?" she said. The question sounded legal in her mouth—familiar—and she used its bluntness like a battering ram.
A slow breeze moved through the clearing, but it did not disturb the lower skirts of the wildflowers. The leaves at the top of the oaks whispered against each other, not in the language of wind but like pages shuffling. The pendant pulsed a steady, impatient drum. The warmth in her chest turned hot and then a sharp, flaring ache, as if the Heartstone wanted out of her body and into the dark.
"It is not a safe night," the voice said. "It is not the sort of night for bargains."
The Grove meant other bargains. Aurora had read about places like this, the whispered corners of law she had never taken seriously when studying for exams: places between things where promises stuck. But she had gone alone because she did not know where else to put the impulse. She had come because curiosity, and because the pendant was a fact that required an owner.
"Why did you give this to me?" Her words were steadier than she felt. "Who sent it?"
The chorus answered by unraveling into smaller noises—an intake, a pair of pulses like someone clapping once in a room the size of a fist. A cold sensation moved over her foot; the path seemed to shift. When she stepped forward, the ground where she would have placed her foot was not where her step landed. Her body misjudged the space as if the Grove had subtly moved on the map.
She thought about retreat. She thought about the thin beam of light from Silas' bar above her head, about the warm smell of cooking from the Golden Empress’ alleyways she'd left behind; about Eva's voice telling her she didn't have to face things alone. But the pendant kept pulling toward the ring. It was not just an item; it was a compass that spun away from everything she'd prepared.
"You are a boundary," said the voice—not quite a single voice—and Aurora felt, as if from the other side of a glass that had been left in the sun too long, the meaning wash over her. "You cross, and songs try to follow."
She laughed once, sharp and too loud. "What song? I don't sing."
"You sing anyway," said the Grove. "You sing with the things you keep."
A movement at the edge of her vision, and she knew the presence had taken a shape she could not quite resolve—a man maybe, maybe not; a thing with the length of a shadow, limned in silver; something that moved with the wrong joints. It kept itself at the periphery, as if whatever wanted her to find it respected some cultivated, patient terror: don't look fully. When she blinked it was gone . When she looked again it had shifted closer, around a tree or made of more than the tree's bark.
The pendant's pulse accelerated until Aurora's teeth ached. Its warmth became a pinched, metallic insistence. It was telling her something the voices were not: there was a hole here, and it wanted to open.
She thought of the narrowest escape plan—if she ran to the east gate and kept to the path, she could break the ring and the thing would lose interest. She began to move, slow and measured. The path ahead looked straight; the path behind was as she had come. Then the clearing widened like a yawn and the ring of oaks closed in. The trees seated themselves in a manner that did not respect the geometry she'd assumed a moment earlier. The air tightened and smelled faintly of iron and of something sweetly rotted, a scent she could not place.
"Do you want me to leave?" she asked because not speaking felt like a surrender.
The answering laugh was a line of wind over glass. "We do not want you to leave," said the voices. "We want you to remember."
Memories rose as if from the soil, not hers but stitched from her life—the damp apartment in Cardiff, the taste of instant coffee during revision nights, a man's hand on her wrist, the crescent scar. The pendant burned like a branding iron and in that heat she saw a flash of another face: not a benefactor but a ledger, a small, curt signature on paper she had never signed.
She had the brief, horrible clarity that this Grove did not ask permission and did not bargain in the terms she knew. It opened with tender cruelty and measured its take in words and weight and the small scales of shame. Someone, or something, wanted her to lay down the facts she kept in her pockets and then accept their weighing.
Aurora clenched her jaw and drew the pendant out. The chain felt like a blade between her fingers; its warmth was almost unbearable. She had wanted answers, and now that the world leaned in to give them she saw how cost was a brace of hands she did not want to meet.
A whisper brushed the scar on her wrist as if a moth had passed. The air said her name again with the intimacy of a liar. The pendant's light shifted from a steady inner glow to a thin thread of red that crawled up the silver chain toward the clasp. Time bent; the oaks held their breath. She thought of Evan, of what a human could do when given a chance to keep hold of the thing it wanted, and she thought of the things that could never be bargained with.
She did not run.
Instead, Aurora stepped into the center of the ring, the wildflowers closing around her ankles like a hem of blue. She held the Heartstone raised between thumb and forefinger. The crimson glowed and the warmth became a conversation.
"If you are taking something, take that," she said. "Take questions. Take the names I don't want to say out loud."
The Grove made no offer to be reasonable. The voices shifted, tasting her words. For a moment she had the stupid, human hope that this was some softening by mystery. The pendant jumped, then stilled. The air pressed. The ground felt like the skin of a drum beneath her feet.
"Place it," said a single voice now, clear enough. Not unkind, but unbending. "Let us see the hear t."
She placed the pendant on the soil. The warmth leapt into the earth as if it had found an old friend. The red stone sank a fraction into the dirt and then rested, and for an instant there was an absence that had the shape of a second's peace.
Then the Grove inhaled.
Aurora's name unspooled into the clearing—no voices this time, but images: rooms, small mercies she'd tried to save, the smell of a bar upstairs when morning light angled through dust; Eva calling, Silas wiping a glass. The world outside the Grove flashed like a postcard she had loved and then turned away. The pendant pulsed once more, violently, and the soil under it trembled as if something under the ground had lifted its head.
She took a step back. The thing at the edge of the ring moved closer without making a sound. It stopped at a distance where she could not see its face and yet knew it had watch ed everything she had ever done. The voice that had once been many folded into one sentence. "Remembering is not the same as keeping, Laila. To remember is to change what the Grove knows."
Aurora's jaw went tight. Her hand brushed the crescent scar involuntarily, an old reflex—like checking a seam for stitching that will hold. The pendant continued to pulse in the earth, a hear tbeat now matched by her own.
"Then I remember on my terms," she said. "I pick what I keep."
The thing laughed, and the sound was both triumph and guffaw. "You have not yet learned the rules of the Grove." The laughter became a wind that moved through the ring and the wildflowers bowed as if a conductor had brushed their stems.
The time-dilation that the grove used like a slow knife knifed at the edges of her circumstance. Outside, minutes might have rolled by, or a week; inside, everything waited. Aurora felt the choice like a line of cold along her vertebrae: leave now while the chain was whole and the pendant in the earth still pulsed faintly, or stay and barter, hand over the parts of herself they asked for and walk away filled with a catalog of truths.
She reached for the chain but it was a reflex bereft of plan. Her fingers closed on metal that had sunk into the soil as if rooted. The pendant tugged, and the chain slid through her hand like a ribbon. For an instant she felt the thing's attention like a weight on one shoulder, as if the Grove had put its hand there to test what she would do.
Aurora drew in a breath that tasted of cold metal and crushed petals. "I am not yours," she said.
The next sound was not a shout or a strike but a quiet, like a library closing. The pendant's light flared and slammed to a soft, steady glow again. The presence shifted back toward the trees, as if deciding the night had been entertaining enough.
"You will remember," said the voices, softer now, almost tender. "We will keep the shape of what you leave. We will teach the space between forgetting and remembering."
She stumbled back toward the ring's edge, every muscle keyed for motion. The oaks at the boundary—grand, patient—seemed to allow that passage , as if the old things that stood at doors recognized those who had something to carry away. The pendant stayed warm in the soil behind her like a sleeping hear t.
She did not stay to bargain the minute details. She left with a step that felt like theft and a body that felt split into the parts of what she took and what she left. Behind her the wildflowers seemed to sigh, and the Grove folded, quietly, around its own secrets.
Outside the ring, the city air tasted of exhaust and late-night chips. The streetlamp made a small pool of ordinary light. Aurora looked down at her wrist, at the small crescent scar she'd touched so often in the clearing, and the skin there felt different: the scar lay where it had, but it hummed faintly under her fingers, an echo of the warmth she'd felt when the pendant had thrummed.
She did not know then whether she had come away with answers or debts. The pendulum swing of the Grove's rules had touched her, rearranged some inner accounting. Behind her, in the pocket between Earth and Fae, something waited: a hole, perhaps, or a promise. The pendant had not left the soil; it had not been taken , but it was not wholly unclaimed either.
Aurora's steps toward the busier paths were steady because she had to make them steady. She had purpose again: to measure what she had kept and what the Grove had kept from her. She did not look back. Her name—Aurora, Laila, Rory—moved through her like an inventory of choices. The Grove had spoken; it had not bound her, but it had not released her either.
When the city swallowed her silhouette and the night resumed its ordinary conspiracies, the memory of the Grove clung like dew. The wildflowers' faces were still in her mind, their attention a ledger. The pendant pulsed faintly in the distance, obedient to something neither of them yet understood. The wrongness did not leave her. It waited, patient and patient as a root, for the moment when memory and want would have to meet again.