AI The air in Richmond Park tasted different after dusk. It wasn’t just the cool dampness settling over the grass, or the distant, muted sounds of the city. It was a thickness, a stillness that felt older than the trees. Rory pulled her jacket tighter, the leather creaking in the quiet. She’d memorized the directions from the crumpled note in her pocket, the one left on the sill of her flat window, unsigned. *The oak with the twin trunks, south of the pond. Wait for the mist. Follow the foxfire.* It sounded like madness . But the Heartstone pendant resting against her sternum had grown steadily warmer all day, a persistent, low-grade fever that had driven her out of her flat and onto the last Tube.
Now, standing at the edge of a thicket of holly, she felt the pendant give a distinct, rhythmic throb . Like a second heartbeat. She pressed her fingers to it through her shirt. The deep crimson gem seemed to drink the moonlight, holding a faint, inner glow that hadn’t been there in her kitchen.
A thin, milky mist was beginning to coil around the roots of the great twin-trunked oak ahead. It didn’t behave like normal fog; it moved with purpose, threading between the ferns and pooling in the hollows. And there, just beyond the tree, were the standing stones. They weren’t the rough-hewn monoliths she’d half-expected from picture books. These were oaks themselves, impossibly ancient and massive, their bark silvered by time, arranged in a rough circle. They weren’t dead—vivid green ivy clung to their sides, and their branches were thick with leaves—but they held a vertical silence that felt ceremonial. The air within the circle shimmered , a heat-haze distortion in the cool night.
The foxfire appeared as promised: pale, will-o’-the-wisp lights, no bigger than fireflies, drifting lazily from between two of the stone-oaks. They bobbed, waiting.
This was the Fae Grove. The codex in the library had mentioned it, a footnote in a book of local folklore Eva had dug up. A pocket between worlds. Time moved funny here, it said. Rory glanced at her watch . The digital face was dark, dead. A cold finger traced her spine. She thought of her father, Brendan, and his love of logical argument. *Never enter a venue without knowing the exits, Rory.* Too late for that.
She stepped between the stone-oaks.
The change was immediate and profound . The sounds of the park—the distant hum of traffic, the faint cry of a waterbird—vanished, replaced by a deep, living quiet. The scent changed from damp earth and grass to something richer, headier: loam, night-blooming jasmine, and the sweet, almost cloying perfume of wildflowers. All around the clearing, flowers bloomed in riotous color under the moon, violets and foxgloves and blossoms she couldn’t name, a tapestry that should have been beautiful. But it was too perfect . Too still. No insect buzzed. No petal trembled .
She had come because the note promised answers. Answers about the pendant, about the strange gaps in her memory that had started after she left Cardiff, about the nightmares of a dark place with chains and a laughing voice that wasn’t Evan’s. The warmth of the stone was a lure she couldn’t ignore.
For a few minutes, there was only the oppressive silence and the watchful trees. Then the wrongness began.
It started with the sound of breathing that wasn’t her own. A soft, wet inhalation from somewhere to her left, near a cluster of tall, bell-shaped flowers. She froze, turning her head slowly . Nothing. The flowers hung, motionless. She let out her own breath, chalked it up to nerves, the blood pounding in her ears.
A twig snapped behind her. Sharp. Deliberate.
She spun. The clearing was empty. The stone-oaks stood sentinel , their shadows long and reaching. The foxfire lights had disappeared.
“Hello?” Her voice was swallowed by the grove, leaving no echo . It fell dead on the carpet of moss.
Something moved at the extreme edge of her vision, a swift, liquid dart between two far-off trees. Not an animal. The shape was too tall, too upright, but it moved with a terrible, jointless grace. When she snapped her gaze toward it, there was nothing but a faint ripple in the mist clinging to the tree roots, as if something had just settled there.
The pendant pulsed again, hotter this time. A warning.
The flowers, she realized then, were all facing her. Every blossom in the clearing had turned its face toward the center where she stood. The violets, the foxgloves, the unknown blooms with velvety black petals—they were all oriented on her like sunflowers to a sickly sun. They hadn’t been that way when she entered. A slow, vegetative attention that was more horrifying than any direct stare.
A whisper then, so faint it might have been the wind through leaves, but there was no wind. It came from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn’t words, not quite. It was the cadence of speech, the sibilant suggestion of a sentence, just below the threshold of understanding. It sounded like her name. Not “Rory.” Not “Aurora.” It was the other one, the name from the darkest part of her dreams, the one that made her left wrist ache where the small, crescent-shaped scar lay pale against her skin.
She backed toward the stone-oak entrance, her heart hammering against the warm stone on her chest. The exit was still there, a gap between the silvered trunks. But the mist had thickened, forming a opaque wall of shifting grey.
From the corner of her right eye, she saw a figure. It stood perfectly still among the trees, just outside the circle. Tall, slender, draped in shadows that clung to it like a tattered cloak. It had no face she could discern, just a deeper darkness where features should be. It was watching her.
She jerked her head to look at it directly.
It was gone .
A low chuckle vibrated through the clearing, not through the air, but through the ground itself, coming up through the soles of her boots. The wildflowers trembled in unison.
*Think, Rory. Out of the box.* Panic was a luxury. She forced a breath, her mind clicking over despite the primal fear. The codex said this was a place between. The rules were different. Time was different. The pendant reacted to… portals. To Hel. This wasn’t Hel, but it was adjacent. A threshold.
The thing was herding her. The whispers, the figure at the edge of sight, the sealed exit—it was applying pressure, trying to spook her into running deeper into the grove. Why? What was in the center?
She stopped retreating. She stood still, forcing her breathing to steady. She focused on the tangible : the feel of the damp air on her face, the cool metal of the pendant’s chain against her neck, the solid, unmoving earth beneath her feet. She did not look for the figure. She did not follow the movement in the periphery.
Instead, she looked up.
The moon, which had been a crisp sliver in the park, was now full and bloated, hanging heavy in a sky that seemed both too close and infinitely far. And tangled in the high branches of the stone-oaks, she saw them. Dozens of them. Silken, grey bundles, like cocoons, hanging motionless. They were subtle, woven into the canopy. Some were small. Some were the size of a person. They swayed gently , though there was no breeze.
The whispering stopped. The feeling of being watched intensified, but now it came from above.
A single drop of moisture landed on her cheek. It was warm, and sticky. She slowly raised a hand and touched it, bringing her fingers in front of her eyes. In the moonlight, the liquid was dark, almost black. It smelled of copper and spoiled honey.
Another drop. Then another. A soft, steady rain of warmth began to patter on the leaves around her, on her jacket, her hair.
Her cool-headedness shattered . A choked sound escaped her throat. She broke into a run, not toward the mist-choked exit, but parallel to it, skirting the edge of the clearing, keeping the stone-oaks on her right. The pendant was burning hot now, a brand against her skin. The warm drizzle followed her, speckling the perfect petals of the watching flowers.
The figure appeared again, this time directly in her path. It was closer. She could see the way the shadows around it writhed, how the moonlight avoided its form. It didn’t move to block her; it simply stood, and its head—that faceless darkness—tilted as if in curiosity.
Rory veered left, plunging between two of the giant trees, out of the flower-filled clearing and into a narrower, darker path within the grove. The air grew cold. The perfume vanished, replaced by the smell of damp stone and old, dry rot. She didn’t look back. She could hear it behind her, not footsteps , but a soft, slithering rustle, like a heavy robe being dragged over fallen leaves.
The path ended at a small, still pool. The water was black as ink, reflecting nothing. On the far side, the twin-trunked oak of the mortal world was visible, its outline wavering as if seen through heat. The way out.
But standing between her and the pool was the thing from the shadows.
It had solidified. It was man-shaped, but elongated, its limbs too long and thin. The tattered shadows now resembled a formal, antique coat, frayed at the edges. Where its face should have been was a smooth, pale oval, featureless save for a slow, viscous drip of that same dark fluid from where a mouth might be. It reached out a hand. The fingers were slender, too many joints, and ended not in nails, but in sharp, thorn-like points .
It spoke. The voice was a dry rustle, the sound of pages turning in a long-sealed book. It did not use her names. It used the one that made her soul feel cold.
“You are late,” it whispered.
The pendant flared. A surge of heat, not painful but blindingly intense, erupted from the crimson stone . A pulse of pure, crimson light shot out, not a beam, but a wave . It passed through her, harmless, and struck the faceless thing.
The creature let out a sound—a papery shriek of surprise and pain. It recoiled, its form blurring, the shadows that composed it unraveling at the edges. For a second, she saw not a monster, but something else: a glimpse of elegant, pointed ears, eyes like chips of icy glass, a face twisted in aristocratic fury. Then it was just the shadow-thing again, folding in on itself, dissolving into the deeper darkness beneath the trees.
The warm drizzle stopped. The whispering ceased.
Rory didn’t wait. She sprinted around the pool, her lungs burning, and threw herself at the wavering image of the twin oak. She passed through a curtain of icy cold, and then she was stumbling on the ordinary, damp grass of Richmond Park. The sounds of the city rushed back into her ears, a shocking, welcome cacophony . Her watch beeped once, the screen flashing to life. Only twenty minutes had passed.
She collapsed to her knees, gasping. The Heartstone pendant was cool against her skin again, inert. She clutched it, her fingers finding the familiar shape. It had saved her. Or had it led her there? The unanswered questions were now more terrifying, more numerous.
She looked back at the holly thicket. The mist was gone . The stones were just ancient trees in the moonlight. A normal part of the park.
But on her cheek, the sticky, warm drop had not evaporated. And on the sleeve of her leather jacket, a single, perfect violet blossom was pinned , its stem twisted tight around the zipper. It hadn’t been there before. It faced her, its deep purple head tilted up toward her pale, stricken face.
With a trembling hand, she plucked it off and crushed it in her fist. When she opened her hand, there was nothing but a faint, sweet-smelling stain. No answers. Only a warning, and a debt she didn’t understand come due.