AI The black wrought-iron fence surrounding Richmond Park was cold under Rory's gloved fingers. She’d parked her delivery scooter by the main gate hours ago, when dusk was still clinging to the sky. Now, true night held the world in a thick, starless silence . Her breath plumed white in the beam of her torch. The Heartstone pendant, tucked beneath her layers, was a persistent warmth against her sternum—not the comforting kind, but a low, rhythmic pulse, like a slow heartbeat that wasn't her own.
She’d come because of the note. Slipped between the pages of a takeout menu, the handwriting spidery and unfamiliar: *The Grove remembers. Midnight. The third stone from the western path.* No signature, but the pendant had throbbed the moment she’d unfolded the paper. A summons, or a trap. After weeks of chasing echoes of Hel portals and half-glimpsed figures in the London fog, ignoring it wasn’t an option.
The western footpath was a tunnel of deeper black between skeletal trees. Her trainers crunched on frozen gravel, the sound absurdly loud. The torch beam sliced through the dark, catching the frosted webs of spiders, the startled gleam of a fox’s eyes before it vanished. Normal night things. But the silence here was wrong. No rustle of mice in the undergrowth, no distant hum of the city. Just a vast, listening quiet.
She found the standing stones. Three ancient oaks, their trunks twisted into unnatural, spiral forms, forming a rough triangle in a small clearing. The third stone, the one closest to a thicket of holly, was the largest. Its bark looked slick in the torchlight, not like wood, but like dark, petrified flesh . The air was several degrees colder here. Her breath didn’t mist; it seemed to be swallowed by the dark.
Rory switched off the torch. The dark rushed in, absolute. She waited for her eyes to adjust. Slowly, the clearing resolved into shades of grey. The stones stood like sentinels . The wildflowers Isolde had tended—fae-touched blooms that defied season—were just darker smudges against the frosted grass. She leaned against the cold trunk of the third oak, the Heartstone’s pulse synchronizing with a low, sub-audible thrum she could feel in her teeth.
A twig snapped to her left.
She froze, heart hammering against her ribs. Not an animal. The sound was too deliberate, too close. She held her breath, straining her ears. Nothing. Just that immense, watchful silence .
Then, a soft, wet *shhhlick * sound, like something dragging through damp leaves. It came from her right this time, from the direction of the holly thicket. Rory turned her head slowly . The thicket was a wall of shadow. Nothing moved.
*You’re being watched.*
The thought didn’t feel like her own. It landed in her mind, cold and certain. She pushed off from the tree, taking a careful step backward toward the path. The gravel under her foot didn’t crunch. She looked down. A patch of moss, vivid green despite the frost, had spread over the path where she’d just been standing. It hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Another *shhhlick *, closer. From the thicket again. She caught a movement at the very edge of her vision—a sinuous shift in the darkness, like a coil of rope unspooling. When she looked directly, there was only the holly.
The air grew colder still. The warmth of the pendant intensified, becoming almost uncomfortably hot. Its faint inner glow, usually invisible, now cast a tiny crimson penumbra on the front of her jacket. A warning light.
A whisper brushed against her ear, no more substantial than a cobweb. It wasn’t a voice, not exactly. It was the memory of a voice, the echo of a sigh, carrying a single word she felt more than heard: *Stay.*
Rory’s mouth went dry. “Who’s there?” Her own voice sounded thin and reedy, swallowed by the grove.
No answer. But something *stirred * in the clearing. Not a thing she could see, but a pressure, a presence that displaced the air. The wildflowers around the base of the stones began to wilt. Not a slow drooping, but a rapid, violent withering . Petles turned black and crumbled to dust in the space of a heartbeat. The frosted grass yellowed and died in a spreading circle, radiating out from the stones towards her.
The wrongness was a physical weight now, pressing on her chest. The rational part of her mind screamed to run, but her feet felt rooted, sunk into the suddenly soft earth. She looked down. The moss was spreading , creeping over the toes of her trainers, velvety and cold. It pulsed faintly, in time with the pendant.
From the holly thicket came a new sound. A low, guttural rasp, like stone grinding against stone. It was followed by a series of clicks, methodical , probing. *Click-click-click.* Pause. *Click-click.*
It was learning the shape of the silence .
Her paralysis broke. She wrenched her foot free of the moss with a sickening slurp and stumbled back onto the gravel path. She fumbled for the torch, her fingers numb. The beam flared to life, a blinding sword cutting through the dark. She swept it across the clearing, across the thicket.
For a fraction of a second, the light caught something.
It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t anything with a name. It was a tangle of shadows and angles that hurt to look at, slumped against the base of a holly bush. A long, limb-like appendature, slick and black, was retracting into the deeper darkness. Where the light touched it, the thing seemed to *smoke *, and a hiss, full of malice and pain, sliced through the air. The rasping, grinding sound escalated into a shriek of pure rage.
Rory didn’t wait. She ran.
Gravel skidded under her feet. The torch beam bounced wildly, turning the path into a strobe-light nightmare of fleeing tree trunks. She didn’t look back. The thing behind her didn’t make the sound of pursuit. There were no footfalls. Instead, the very environment turned against her. Branches, bare and bony, lashed down at her face from trees she’d already passed. Roots erupted from the frozen earth to snag her ankles. The path itself seemed to lengthen, the distant glow of the park gate receding further with every pounding step.
The pendant was a brand against her skin, its glow now a steady, angry red leaking through her clothing. The heat was a guide. She realised with a jolt of cold terror that it wasn’t pulling her toward safety. It was pulling her *deeper *, off the path, to the left, into the densest part of the woods.
She skidded to a halt, chest heaving. The gate was a faint promise of light far behind. Ahead, the woods were a solid wall of black. To her left, where the pendant tugged, a narrow deer trail wound into the undergrowth. From that direction, she heard it. Not the rasp or the clicks. Music. Faint, discordant, and achingly sad. A single, out-of-tune violin, playing a melody that made her think of forgotten graves and empty houses.
It was a lure. She knew it. A beautiful, terrible lure.
A cold, damp touch brushed the back of her neck.
She whirled, torch raised.
Nothing. Just the empty, malevolent dark of the path behind her.
But on the ground, illuminated in the circle of her light, was a single, perfect wildflower. A midnight-blue bloom she’d last seen in Isolde’s grove, unharmed, blossoming from a crack in the frozen earth. It hadn’t been there a second ago. As she watched, a drop of something dark and viscous rolled off one petal and soaked into the ground.
The music from the deer trail swelled, wrapping around her, muffling the pounding of her heart. It promised answers. It promised an end to the running. The pendant’s heat was an insistent, painful pressure.
From the direction of the clearing, far behind her now, came the wet, dragging *shhhlick * sound again. Closer than it had any right to be.
Rory looked at the flower. She looked at the impossible, receding gate. She looked down the dark throat of the deer trail, where the sad music played.
She took a shaky breath, her exhale trembling in the cold air. Her fingers closed around the Heartstone pendant through her jacket, its pulse now a frantic drumbeat against her palm.
She turned her back on the gate and its false promise of the world she knew.