AI The air in Richmond Park after sunset held a damp, earthy chill that seeped through Aurora’s jacket. She walked with purposeful steps, the beam of her phone’s flashlight cutting a narrow path through the dark. The usual night sounds—the distant hum of London, the rustle of foxes in the undergrowth—felt muffled, swallowed by a thick, listening silence . She’d come because the pendant had grown warm against her chest, a persistent, pulsing heat that began the moment she’d stepped off the bus. A lodestone pulling her toward its north.
She found the standing stones not by sight, but by a sudden drop in temperature . One moment she was in the park, the next she was passing between two massive, lichen-crusted oaks that shouldn’t have been there, their trunks twisted into shapes that hurt the eyes to follow for too long. The Fae Grove. Isolde’s place.
Inside the boundary, her phone light flickered and died. Not a battery death—a full, silent extinguishing. Rory swallowed, pocketing the useless device. The darkness wasn’t absolute. A soft, sourceless luminescence, like trapped moonlight, clung to the curling fronds of ferns and the petals of the wildflowers that bloomed defiantly in the dark. Year-round blooms, the codex had said. She saw them now: foxgloves with bells too deep a purple, night-blooming jasmine that smelled cloyingly sweet, and white wood anemones that seemed to turn, slowly , to follow her passage.
She came here for answers. The pendant, a deep crimson tear against her grey jumper, was a mystery shoved into her life. Dymas. An unknown benefactor. A key, or a beacon ? She needed to understand why it had chosen her, a runaway law student turned dumpling delivery girl. She’d hoped the Grove, a place between worlds, might offer clarity. Isolde was rarely here, Eva had said. It was a quiet place to think.
Only now, it wasn’t quiet.
It was the silence that was wrong first. The complete absence of insect chirp, owl hoot, or scuttling creature. Then came the sounds that replaced it. Not loud, but *misplaced *. A faint, rhythmic *scritch-scritch-scritch *, like a bone needle dragging across dry bark, coming from no direction and every direction. The soft, wet crunch of a footstep on loam, directly behind her. She spun, heart hammering against the warm stone at her sternum, but there was nothing, only the gently swaying anemones.
“Hello?” Her voice, usually cool and measured , sounded small, swallowed by the dense air.
The *scritching * stopped. In its place, a low, whispered sigh filtered through the leaves overhead, forming words that were almost English. *“…stay…”*
Rory’s hand went to the pendant. It was hot now, not just warm. A comforting heat, but also a warning. She began to walk backward, toward where she thought the stone gateway stood. Her heel caught on a root and she stumbled, throwing out a hand to steady herself against an oak trunk. The bark was wrong. It was smooth and slightly damp, like skin cool with sweat. She snatched her hand back, wiping it furiously on her jeans.
At the edge of her vision, between a thicket of hawthorn, something shifted. Not an animal. It was a suggestion of a shape, tall and too thin, limbs jointed at impossible angles. It was the grey of dead bark and stood so still it might have been a tree, except that Rory was certain it hadn’t been there a second before. She froze, her breath a white plume in the unnatural chill . Don’t run, she told herself. Running is for prey. Her father’s courtroom calm, her mother’s pragmatic Welsh sensibility—both useless here. This required a different kind of thinking. Out-of-the-box. Survive first, analyze later.
She forced herself to look away, to scan the grove slowly . Direct attention was a trigger, Eva had once mumbled after too much wine. Don’t look at them full-on. See them sideways.
Sideways, the grove was a nightmare of subtle movement. Shadows between trees deepened and swam. Flowers closed their blooms with a sound like tiny sighs. The whispering returned, layered now, a chorus of faint, hungry voices.
*“…lost…”*
*“…pretty chain…”*
*“…warm blood…”*
The pendant throbbed in time with her heartbeat. A crimson pulse lit the hollow at her throat, casting a tiny, bloody light on the ground before her. In its glow, she saw her own footprints. And beside them, another set. Long, narrow, with toes that were too many and too pointed. They hadn’t been there when she walked in.
They were between her and the gateway.
A panic, cold and sharp, lanced through her gut. It was the feeling of a door locking, of a trap closing. The feeling she’d had in Evan’s flat, realizing the charming smile had vanished, leaving only cold calculation. But this was worse. Evan was human. This… this was other.
The thin grey figure by the hawthorn was gone . Rory’s eyes darted, her mind working furiously. The rules. Every place like this had rules. The codex said time moved differently. An hour could be a minute. A minute could be a day. How long had she been here? The sky through the canopy showed no moon, no stars, just a velvety, oppressive black.
*Scritch-scritch-scritch.*
Closer.
She backed toward a large standing stone, putting the solid, ancient rock at her back. The wrongness intensified. The air grew thicker, harder to breathe, tasting of ozone and decaying petals. From the corner of her left eye, she saw a flicker of movement high up. She tilted her head, just a fraction.
It was in the trees. Not one, but several . They clung to the branches like enormous, spidery lichen, limbs wrapped around boughs, heads cocked at sharp angles. They had no faces, only smooth, bark-like skin where features should be. But she could feel them watching. The weight of their attention was a physical pressure on her skin.
The Heartstone’s glow brightened, casting a wider circle of crimson light around her feet. The things in the trees recoiled, just slightly , a unison rustle of displeasure. The pendant didn’t like them. It was a piece of another world, too. Dymas. Was it Fae? Or something that opposed whatever these creatures were?
“Okay,” Rory whispered to herself, her voice a thread of sound. “Think. They don’t like the light. But it’s not driving them away.”
The whispering coalesced into a single voice, dry as fallen leaves. “The stone is not yours, little thief. It calls. It hungers. Give it.”
The words slithered into her ears, carrying with them an image: her own hands, lifting the silver chain over her head, offering the pulsing gem into the waiting darkness. A deep, aching loneliness and a yawning, eternal hunger accompanied the image. It was a compulsion, woven into the words themselves.
Rory clenched her jaw , her fingers tightening around the pendant until the silver edges bit into her palm. The pain was clean, sharp, anchoring. She focused on it. On the small crescent scar on her left wrist, a childhood trophy from a fall. A real memory. A human memory. Cardiff. Her mother’s worried face. The smell of antiseptic.
“No,” she said, the word leaving her lips as a puff of defiance .
A hiss, sibilant and angry, rippled through the grove. The *scritching * became a frenzied scraping. The long-toed footprints in the moss began to multiply, circling her, getting closer with each phantom step.
They were trying to herd her. Away from the stones, deeper into the Grove. Where time might stretch and thin, and she could be lost for a hundred years.
Her back against the standing stone, she had a moment of perfect , terrified clarity. They feared the Heartstone’s light, but were not repelled by it. They wanted it. They couldn’t take it; she had to give it. And they were using the Grove itself against her, bending the silence and the shadows into weapons.
The only way out was the way in. But the gateway was behind a wall of invisible, whispering menace.
Rory did the only thing she could think of. She stopped trying to see them sideways. She looked down at the pendant in her fist, its light bleeding through her fingers. She focused all her will, all her fear, all her stubborn Carter refusal to be bullied, into a single, silent command at the artifact: *Brighter.*
For a second, nothing. Then, a wave of heat, not burning but intense, flowed up her arm . The deep crimson light erupted, not as a beam, but as a shockwave . It burst from between her fingers in a silent, expanding ring of bloody illumination.
For a fleeting second, the Grove was frozen in its stark glare. She saw them clearly—three, four, five of the bark-skinned figures, not just in the trees but standing amongst the flowers, their elongated forms now crisp and real. They had no eyes, but she felt their shock. The light wasn’t just light; it was a sound, a high, pure note that vibrated in her teeth and made the very air shiver.
The creatures recoiled, shrieking with that dry, leaf-rustle sound. They didn’t vanish, but they blurred, retreating into the deeper shadows between the worlds.
The path to the standing stone gateway was clear.
Rory didn’t hesitate. She ran, the pendant blazing like a tiny star against her chest, lighting her way. The wildflowers whipped at her ankles, trying to tangle her. The whispers rose to a furious, buzzing roar in her mind. *THIEF! LOST! STAY!*
She hit the space between the two great oaks at a sprint. The cold snap was like plunging into a winter river. Sound rushed back—a distant plane, a dog barking, the wind in normal trees. Her phone, in her pocket, buzzed to life with a backlog of notifications.
She stumbled onto the ordinary grass of Richmond Park, gasping, the adrenaline making her knees weak. She turned back. Just trees. Dark, ordinary trees. No unnatural glow, no whispering.
But around her neck, the Heartstone pendant still pulsed with a gentle, residual warmth . And when she looked at her palm, four small, perfect crescents were etched into her skin by the silver chain, mirroring the old scar on her wrist. A new mark. A receipt.
She had come for answers. All she’d gotten was a confirmation: she was not alone, and the thing she carried was a key that unlocked more than doors. It attracted the locksmiths. And some of them were hungry. She walked quickly toward the distant park gate, the normal night air feeling fragile as glass, knowing with a cold certainty that the things in the Grove didn’t need footprints to follow. They had her scent now. And the pendant’s light.