AI Aurora kept her bike light off and walked it along the park path, tyres whispering over grit. Richmond Park lay flat and black, its fences and hedges reduced to a few darker strokes against the sky. London’s glow sat low on the horizon like a bruise, but out here the trees swallowed it.
The Heartstone pendant tapped her sternum with each step. Warm. Not body-warm—stove-warm, like she’d pressed it against a kettle. The crimson gem held a dim glow inside itself, a coal that refused to die.
She lifted the chain, thumb and forefinger pinching the silver links. The gem pulsed once against her skin, a slow squeeze.
“So this is it,” she muttered, and her breath turned white and small.
Her phone screen lit her hand. 00:12. No signal bars. The battery icon sat at thirty per cent, then flickered and dropped to twenty-nine. The park had never done that. Not even in the dead spots near the ponds.
A deer barked somewhere to her left—sharp, human-shaped in the throat—and then the night snapped back to quiet.
Rory stopped at the line of ancient standing stones. They rose in a loose ring between trunks and tangled undergrowth, their surfaces pale as old teeth. Someone had carved oak leaves into them long ago, veins and stems worn soft. Moss clung in thick seams. The stones did not belong in a public park. They looked planted, like stakes.
Wildflowers crowded right up to the stone line. At midnight. In February. Petals shone waxy white and bruised purple, their stems bending without wind.
Rory’s pendant warmed further. She let it fall. The gem rested against her chest and throbbed like a second heart.
She spoke into the empty air because silence liked to crowd her.
“Alright. One step in, one step out. No deals. No bargains. No—” Her mouth tightened . “—no stupid hero stuff.”
She pushed the bike forward. The front tyre crossed between two stones.
The air changed.
Not a breeze. Not a drop in temperature. The space in her lungs shifted, like she’d walked from a street into a cinema and the outside world stayed on the other side of the door. The scent of damp earth sharpened to something sweeter, crushed green and honey. The hairs along her arms lifted.
Behind her, the park’s darkness kept its shape, but it felt distant, like it sat at the end of a long corridor.
Rory wheeled the bike fully into the ring and set the kickstand. Metal clicked, loud as a coin dropped in a church.
Wildflowers filled the clearing, thick as spilled paint. They bloomed in layers—small starry blooms near her boots, taller stalks further out, heads bobbing with no wind. The ground looked smooth, no rabbit holes, no fallen branches. Too tidy.
Her boot sank a fraction into the soil, and the earth gave with a slow, wet mouthfeel. Not mud. Something springy, like moss laid over flesh.
She pulled her foot free and swallowed.
“Eva,” she whispered, and the name tasted like her old flat back in Cardiff , like a place she could shut a door on. “You’d laugh your head off if you could see this.”
No answer came, but the clearing offered up sound anyway. A faint clink, like cutlery touched by a careless hand, far off among the trees.
Rory turned her head. The grove’s trees stood at the edge of the clearing, trunks thick and dark, canopies knitted together. No gaps showed between leaves, no stars. The night pressed down in one solid sheet.
The clink came again.
She moved one step toward it. The Heartstone’s heat pushed through her shirt.
“I’m not here to play,” she called out, voice low so it didn’t tremble. “I just want to know who gave me the pendant.”
Her words fell into the flowers and vanished. The grove swallowed sound with a hungry patience.
Rory took out her phone and opened the camera. The screen showed the clearing in cold grainy grey. The flowers smeared into pale flecks. The stone ring stood behind her bike like a set of ribs. Her own face reflected faintly, bright blue eyes catching the screen light, shoulder-length black hair tucked behind her ears.
Something moved at the edge of the frame. A dark line slid between tree trunks, too tall to be a deer, too thin to be a person. The camera struggled to hold it. The movement looked like a shadow remembering it had a body.
Rory lowered the phone and stared at the trees. Nothing.
Her pendant throbbed once, harder.
She touched the crescent scar on her left wrist without thinking, thumb rubbing the pale curve. Her skin felt cold there, like the scar kept its own weather.
“Right,” she breathed. “Brilliant.”
She aimed the phone toward the stone ring. Still no signal. She flicked the torch on. The beam cut across flowers and made their petals shine. Dozens of tiny insects hung in the air , unmoving, like pins in felt.
Rory’s stomach dipped. Insects didn’t hover in place. They bounced. They drifted. They lived.
She waved her hand through the beam. The insects stayed where they were, each speck fixed, refusing the idea of wind. Her fingers passed between them, and for a moment her skin prickled, like she’d brushed through cobweb.
A sound rose behind her—her own bike bell.
It chimed once. Clear. Bright.
Rory swung around. The bike stood still. The bell’s little lever sat untouched.
Her throat tightened. She forced her voice out anyway.
“Nice trick. I heard it.”
The flowers nearest the bike shifted, their stems bending away from the tyres as if something heavy moved beneath them. The motion ran in a line, a ripple pushing toward the trees.
Rory stepped back until her heel struck stone. The standing stone felt warm through her boot. The warmth climbed her calf.
The pendant pulsed faster, heat spreading across her chest. The gem’s glow brightened enough to paint her collarbones red.
“I’m leaving,” she announced, and hated how thin it sounded.
She grabbed the bike handlebars and tugged. The tyres stayed planted. Not stuck in mud; they sat like they’d fused to the ground. She pulled harder and felt the frame strain.
“Come on.”
The bike did not move.
Rory let go and ran her hands along the frame, checking for something caught. Nothing. The chain hung slack. The kickstand stayed down, but even lifted, the bike refused to budge. It might as well have been bolted to bedrock.
A laugh drifted from the trees.
Soft. Childlike. Not close enough to pinpoint.
Rory’s jaw clenched until her teeth ached. She raised the phone like a weapon, torch beam carving a white wedge into the dark. Leaves at the grove’s edge shone wet, each one edged in silver.
“Show yourself.”
Another laugh answered, and this time it came from behind her right shoulder, close enough to feel on her neck.
Rory spun. No one stood there.
Only flowers, staring up with their open faces.
Her pendant burned. She yanked the chain up, and the silver links bit into the back of her neck. The Heartstone’s crimson depth swirled, like smoke trapped under glass.
“Who are you?” Her voice scraped. “You want the pendant? Take it. I don’t care. Just—”
A whisper rose from the stone at her back. Not a voice, not words at first. More like the sound you made when you breathed on a window and then dragged your finger through the fog. The stone vibrated against her heel.
Rory pressed her palm to the standing stone. Its surface felt slick, not mossy. Like skin with too much oil.
The whisper tightened into syllables.
“Rory.”
Her name slid out of the stone with the wrong accent, too round, too pleased with itself. Her stomach dropped hard.
No one here should have known that name . Aurora Carter existed on payslips and delivery apps and mail addressed to the flat above Silas’ bar. Rory belonged to a handful of people, and none of them sat in a ring of stones in a pocket of not-London.
She pulled her hand away. The stone’s slickness clung to her palm and then vanished, leaving her skin dry as paper.
“Don’t call me that.”
The flowers shifted again. This time the motion rose in a circle around her, stems bowing inwards, as if the clearing had inhaled.
The laugh returned, lower now, layered with something old. It threaded through the air like a fingernail drawn across cloth.
Rory’s torch beam flickered . The phone screen dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. Battery dropped to twenty-seven. Twenty-six. Each percentage fell with a quiet click.
She shoved the phone in her pocket and unclasped the pendant. The chain snagged in her hair and yanked. She hissed through her teeth, freed it, and held the Heartstone out at arm’s length. The gem’s glow painted her knuckles red.
“You want it? Come and get it.”
Silence held for three heartbeats. Then the grove answered with footsteps .
Not leaves crunching. Not soil shifting.
Footsteps on wood, like someone walked across a pub floor above a cellar. Each step landed with weight and purpose. The sound circled the clearing without any body attached, passing behind the trees where no floorboards existed.
Rory backed toward the stone line, keeping the Heartstone raised. Her shoulders touched the carved oak leaves. The stone’s warmth rose into her spine.
The footsteps stopped.
A shape formed among the flowers. Not solid. Not smoke. It looked like the absence left behind when someone moved a lamp. The flowers beneath it bowed flat, stems pressed down as if a palm smoothed them.
Rory held her breath until her chest hurt.
The shape slid closer. The air in front of it warped, as if it carried heat, but the clearing stayed cold.
Rory’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She forced sound out.
“Listen. I didn’t come here to steal. I didn’t come here to—” She swallowed. “—to disrespect whatever this is. I came because it started pulsing and I thought it might lead me to the person who dropped it in my life like a bloody bomb.”
The shape paused.
The flowers trembled in a small ring around it, as if something inside it shifted its stance.
A voice came from it, and the sound made Rory’s teeth feel loose.
“You wore it. You fed it.”
Rory’s fingers tightened around the pendant until the chain cut her skin.
“I didn’t feed anything. It’s a stone.”
The shape leaned forward. The air between them thickened, smelling of wet pennies and crushed petals.
“Warm when the door breathes,” the voice pressed. “Warm when Hel listens.”
Rory’s grip faltered for a fraction of a second at the word Hel. The pendant pulsed hard, matching her heartbeat, and for an instant she felt a second rhythm under her ribs, not her own.
She swallowed it down and lifted her chin.
“Where’s the door?”
The clearing shifted.
Not the trees. Not the stones. The space itself. The distance between her and the shape changed, like someone folded the air. Rory’s back pressed harder against the stone, and the carved oak leaves dug into her jacket.
The shape hovered an arm’s length away. No face showed, but the sense of attention pinned Rory’s skin.
“You stood on the seam.”
Rory’s mouth dried out.
“Then show me the edge.”
The shape stretched, and the flowers near Rory’s boots flattened in a straight line, a path drawn in crushed stems toward the centre of the clearing.
Rory looked down. The path stopped at a patch of ground that looked the same as the rest—dark soil, bright blooms—except the flowers there leaned away from it, each petal turned outward like a crowd refusing to watch.
Rory’s pendant burned against her fingers.
She moved one step along the crushed line. The soil under her foot felt hollow, like the skin of a drum.
The shape stayed near the stones, blocking the line behind her. The footsteps on wood began again, slow, measuring, as if the grove paced itself.
Rory lifted the Heartstone, holding it over the patch where the flowers refused to face. The gem’s glow deepened, crimson turning almost black at its core. Heat rolled up her wrist, into the scar, and the crescent mark stung like fresh cut.
She breathed through her teeth.
“I’m right here,” she told the empty patch. “I’ve got it. What do you want from me?”