AI The air in Richmond Park after sunset held a different kind of cold. It wasn’t just the autumn chill ; it was a thin, sharp stillness that seeped through Rory’s jacket. She stood at the edge of the tree line, her breath a pale ghost in the moonlight, and looked at the instructions Eva had scrawled on a napkin from the Golden Empress. *Find the big twisted oak west of Pen Ponds. Walk north from its shadow for two hundred paces. You’ll feel it before you see it.*
Eva, typically, had been cryptic, frantic. She’d pressed the napkin into Rory’s hand after her shift, her eyes wide. “He says it’s important, Rory. He says you have to go tonight. It’s about the pendant.”
*He.* Dymas. The name was just a whisper , a shape in the dark of her new London life. He was the one who’d left the Heartstone for her at the bar, its silver chain coiled like a sleeping serpent on the polished wood. She hadn’t asked for it. She wore it now, a secret weight against her sternum, the deep crimson stone cool and inert beneath her shirt.
She found the oak, a gnarled sentinel with branches that clawed at the star-pricked sky. Two hundred paces north. The counting was a mantra that kept the creeping unease at bay. One ninety-eight, one ninety-nine, two hundred.
She stopped. Nothing looked different. Same bracken, same skeletal trees. But the air *did * change. It grew thicker, sweeter, carrying a scent of damp earth and blooming jasmine that had no business existing in October. A subtle pressure built in her ears, like descending in an aeroplane. She took another step forward.
And the world shifted.
It wasn’t a visual tearing, more a softening of reality’s edges. The trees ahead seemed to step back, creating a clearing she was certain hadn’t been there a moment before. Moonlight, which had been weak and diffuse, now fell in a concentrated silver column, illuminating a circle of ancient, moss-clad standing stones. They weren’t granite or slate, but living, petrified oak, their surfaces whorled with patterns that seemed to move if she didn’t look directly at them . The Fae Grove.
Eva’s words echoed : *He’ll meet you there.*
Rory crossed the threshold between the stones. The silence was absolute, a velvet blanket smothering the distant hum of London. The wildflowers were wrong. Foxgloves as tall as her waist, their bell-shaped heads a poisonous purple, trembled without any wind. White blossoms glowed with their own inner light, casting shifting, phantom shadows across the grass. It was beautiful. It was utterly wrong.
She walked to the centre of the clearing, the soft moss silencing her footsteps . The reason she’d come—answers, a meeting, a way to understand the weight around her neck—felt flimsy now, a child’s excuse in a place that respected no mortal logic. She touched the pendant through her shirt. It was cold.
A sound. Not from the Grove, but from the woods beyond the stones she’d entered through . A rustle. Too heavy for a fox, too deliberate for the wind. Rory went very still, her cool-headed intelligence switching to a high, sharp alert. She turned slowly, scanning the dark lattice of trees.
Nothing.
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Her mind, trained for quick out-of-the-box thinking, offered rationalizations. A deer. A park warden. Her own nerves, frayed by Eva’s urgency and the unnatural beauty of the place.
Then, a whisper . It didn’t come from a direction; it seemed to coalesce in the air around her, a sibilant sigh that threaded through the flower-scents. *“…alone…”*
Her hand flew to the pendant. It was warm. A faint, rhythmic pulse beat against her palm, like a tiny, captured heart. The glow from the stone seeped through the fabric of her shirt, a faint crimson smudge in the moonlight.
“Hello?” Her voice was small, swallowed by the Grove. “Dymas?”
No answer. But the rustle came again, closer now, from her left. She spun. A shadow detached itself from the deeper shadow of an oak stone, flitting between two foxgloves. It was low to the ground, a skittering shape the size of a large dog, but it moved with a horrible, jointless fluidity. It was there, and then it was gone , lost in the mosaic of light and dark.
The pulse of the Heartstone quickened . It wasn’t a guide; it was an alarm.
Another whisper , this one from her right. *“…pretty chain…”* The voice was multi-layered , a chorus of dry leaves and breaking stems. It was fascinated. Hungry.
Rory took a step back towards the entrance. The standing stones seemed to have closed ranks. The gap she’d come through was still there, but the path beyond looked longer, the woods beyond impossibly distant, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. The time distortion Eva had mumbled about—*an hour inside can be minutes or days outside *. Panic, cold and slick, began to uncoil in her gut. She fought it down. Think. Observe.
The flowers were watching her. Not metaphorically. The glowing white blossoms had slowly turned on their stems, their luminous faces now oriented towards her. The foxgloves leaned in, their speckled throats gaping like mouths.
A soft, wet crunching sound came from directly behind her. She didn’t want to turn. She had to. She pivoted, every muscle tense.
At the base of the largest oak stone, a mushroom ring she hadn’t noticed before was… melting. The red-capped fungi were sinking into a patch of black, iridescent soil that bubbled softly . From the centre of the ring, something was pushing upwards. Not a plant. It was long and pale and thin, like a finger bone stripped of flesh. It twitched, probing the air.
The Heartstone was hot now, a brand against her skin. Its inner glow was no longer faint; it cast a bloody little spotlight on her collarbones.
The thing in the shadows scurried again, a blur of movement at the extreme edge of her vision. When she jerked her head towards it, she saw only a trembling foxglove. But she heard the whisper , right beside her ear this time, the scent of decay suddenly overwhelming the jasmine. *“…stay… feed the Grove…”*
She ran. Not with blind terror, but with a focused, desperate speed, her delivery-job legs pumping . She aimed for the stone entrance, the world narrowing to that slice of ordinary dark. The moss clung to her boots, trying to trip her. Vines she hadn’t seen snaked across her path, thorns catching on her jeans. The air thickened to syrup, resisting her.
From the bubbling patch, more bone-white fingers clawed free of the earth, grasping. The skittering shadow kept pace with her, just behind the tree line, a syncopated rhythm to her frantic footsteps . *Tap-tap-scritch. Tap-tap-scritch.*
The whispers became a drone, a swarm of invisible insects filling her head. *Alone alone alone pretty thing fresh blood stay stay stay…*
The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, the old childhood mark, began to itch furiously, as if reacting to the wrongness of the place .
The entrance was twenty paces away. Ten. The space between the stones seemed to narrow, the oak edges leaning inward. She threw herself forward, a gasp tearing from her throat.
As she passed between the standing stones, the world snapped back into focus with a tangible *pop *. The sweet, heavy air vanished, replaced by the familiar , damp chill of the park. The silence shattered into the rustle of normal leaves, the distant cry of a waterbird. She stumbled, fell to her knees on the cold, hard ground, gulping in breaths that tasted of car exhaust and dirt.
She was back in Richmond Park. The moon was in the same position. Only minutes had passed.
Shaking, she pulled the Heartstone pendant from under her shirt. It was already cooling, its fierce glow dimming to a mere ember deep within the crimson. It was just a stone again. But she knew. The Grove wasn’t just a meeting place. It was alive. And it was hungry. And something within it had seen her. Had wanted her.
She looked back. There was no clearing, no standing stones, just dense, ordinary woodland. But for a second, she thought she saw a pair of pinprick lights, like distant embers, watching her from the absolute black between the trees. Then they winked out.
Clutching the pendant so tightly the silver chain bit into her palm, Aurora Carter got to her feet and started walking, then running, not stopping until the lights of the road were bright and real and blessedly mundane before her.