AI Aurora shoved her shoulder between two ancient oak standing stones and the world pinched tight around her ribs.
The silver chain bit into the back of her neck as the Heartstone pendant swung forward. It struck her sternum with a dull tap, then pulsed warm, warm, warmer, like it had found the artery it had spent days sniffing for. She planted her trainer on the soft earth inside the boundary and pulled the rest of herself through, palm flat against the nearest stone.
The surface moved under her touch. Not with any obvious shift, no wobble like a loose gravestone, but with the slow, live give of cartilage . She snatched her hand back and the crescent scar on her left wrist flashed pale against the dark.
“No.” Her voice came out clipped . “You don’t get to be soft.”
The stone stayed stone. Her skin still remembered the give.
She stood in the clearing and listened.
Wildflowers filled the space where grass should have grown. Their colours held a stubborn richness, as if paint had never dried on them, and their perfume pressed into the back of her throat. Sweet at first, then metallic. The smell didn’t belong to plants. It carried the sting of a coin held too long between teeth.
Rory pulled her phone from her jacket pocket and checked the screen. No signal, of course. Richmond Park played dead out here on a good day, and this place made a habit of swallowing anything that tried to speak to the wider world.
She pocketed the phone, then reached for the Heartstone. The deep crimson gem glowed with a faint inner light, a small, steady ember. The warmth spread into her fingertips.
“So you’re certain,” she muttered. “You’re not just being dramatic.”
The pendant answered with another pulse . It didn’t heat like metal near a radiator. It warmed like blood.
Rory took two steps forward. The flowers parted around her shins with the precision of a crowd making space for someone important. The movement stayed too coordinated for a breeze. She watched the stems bend and recover, bend and recover, all in the same beat.
She lifted her foot and set it down again, slower this time. The flowers matched her pace. They did not brush her calves. They avoided contact.
Her delivery bag hung empty at her hip, habit more than purpose. A part of her still expected a hot paper sack to leak grease through the bottom, to smell like chilli oil and garlic from Golden Empress. That part of her belonged in a lit street with buses and people who complained about missing cutlery. She didn’t let it lead.
The note had told her to come alone. Folded once, tucked beneath the Heartstone chain in her drawer, as if it had always belonged there.
Bring it to the Grove. Step through when the pendant warms. No witnesses.
No signature. No threat. That bothered her more than threats. Threats meant a human mind on the other side, and human minds made the same old mistakes.
Rory moved deeper into the clearing. The standing stones formed a rough boundary behind her, their edges now hard again, their silhouettes pressed against darker darkness. The path she used to enter had vanished. She could still see the gap, the idea of it, but the stones now stood shoulder to shoulder.
“All right,” she said. “You can stop showing off.”
Silence answered, thick and attentive.
She started a slow circuit, feet careful, eyes level. She kept her breathing quiet, not out of fear, but to keep her senses clean . Her father’s voice, crisp in her memory, laid down rules the way he laid down arguments.
Don’t give them your rhythm. Make them work for it.
A sound flicked across the air.
Not a twig snapping. Not an animal scuffling. A single, wet click, like a tongue against teeth.
Rory stopped.
The flowers froze too, stems held in a mid-bend as if someone had paused a film.
She waited, and the moment stretched. Her phone felt like a dead weight against her thigh. The Heartstone pressed warmth into her palm.
The click came again, closer, answered by another click from elsewhere in the grove, and another, an uneven chain that refused to settle into a pattern. Tick-tock belonged to clocks. This noise belonged to a mouth.
Rory pivoted slowly , scanning the ring of colour around her. Every blossom faced inward. Not towards the sky, not towards any sun that might have existed outside this pocket. Towards her.
She forced her shoulders down and loosened her fingers.
“Show yourself,” she said.
No one stepped forward. No voice broke the silence .
Instead, something moved at the edge of her vision. A dark line slid between two clusters of flowers. Too tall for a fox. Too smooth for a deer. It moved with the glide of fabric pulled from a drawer.
Rory snapped her gaze towards it.
Nothing waited there. Only flowers, their petals cupped, their stems obedient.
She exhaled through her nose and crouched. Her fingers hovered over the soil, then pressed down.
The ground held dampness like a sponge. Not mud, not grit, something finer, packed tight, cool against her skin. She rubbed it between her thumb and finger. It left a faint sheen, like powdered glass. When she brought her fingers closer to her face, the metallic scent sharpened.
Blood sat close under that sweetness.
Rory stood and wiped her hand on her trousers.
The Heartstone pulsed again, stronger. Heat spread along the silver chain, up to the back of her neck. Her scalp prickled.
“Portal,” she said, not as a guess. The pendant didn’t warm for fun. It warmed near a Hel portal, that was the one clear thing she knew about it. Whoever had given her this artefact had made sure she learned at least that much.
She followed the heat like a compass needle, turning until the warmth steadied. The flowers parted before her again. The click-click-click noise stopped.
That silence , sudden and complete, pressed harder than sound.
Rory moved towards the centre of the grove, where the wildflowers thinned and the earth showed through in a dark oval. A single stone sat there, not one of the standing stones, but a low, flat slab half sunk into the ground, its surface scratched with lines that caught the Heartstone’s light.
Not letters. Not runes. Marks made by someone who didn’t write so much as cut.
Rory crouched beside it. The air above the slab held a faint shimmer, like heat above asphalt, except cold rolled off it. The cold carried a smell too, not rot, not damp, but old smoke ground into cloth .
Her pendant glowed brighter. The crimson light bled into her fingers, turning her skin the colour of a bruise.
She reached out and held the gem over the slab.
The shimmer thickened into a skin. It flexed upwards as if it breathed. The click returned, right beside her ear, close enough that she felt it in the tiny hairs at her temple.
Rory did not jerk away. She turned her head in one smooth motion.
A face hovered in the flowers at her shoulder height, half-hidden by stems. No eyes. No mouth. Just an oval plane of pale skin, stretched tight. Its outline trembled , as if it struggled to keep itself inside one shape.
The clicking did not come from a mouth. It came from inside the face, from something tapping against the skin from within.
Rory rose, quick and controlled, and put the slab between her and the thing.
“All right,” she said. “That’s new.”
The faceless head tilted. The flowers around it bent away, giving it room.
Rory backed up one step. The standing stones stayed far behind her. Too far. The grove had grown. She knew the size of that clearing from the first time she had blundered into it, breathless, half-laughing, thinking she’d found a secret picnic spot. The boundary had sat close then, comforting in its nearness.
Now, the stones had retreated like they had grown bored of being landmarks.
Rory tightened her grip on the Heartstone. The gem’s warmth climbed to a burn. She hissed through her teeth and let it burn anyway. Pain gave clean information.
A thread of sound rose from the slab. Not a voice. A low hum, like a fridge motor held under water.
The faceless thing glided forward. It did not crush the flowers beneath it. They folded aside, reverent. It stopped at the slab’s edge and leaned down. The pale skin of its face rippled. Something underneath pressed outward, a long shape, sliding, searching.
Rory moved around the slab, keeping it between them. She saw her reflection in the stone’s surface for a second, warped and dim, her bright eyes reduced to pale coins. She didn’t like that view of herself. It looked too much like the thing’s blank face, too close to featureless.
She spoke again, sharper.
“Who sent the note?”
The clicking sped up. The hum rose in pitch. The shimmer above the slab thickened into a glossy membrane, and the air around Rory tasted of pennies and burnt paper.
The Heartstone flared. The gem’s glow pushed through her fingers, crimson light spilling onto the stone slab, painting the carved marks into stark relief.
The marks shifted.
They did not crawl like worms or ripple like ink. They re-arranged with a deliberate scrape, each line sliding into a new alignment. The sound came through her teeth, vibrating her jaw.
Rory swallowed once and forced her gaze to the new pattern. Shapes. A sequence. Her mind, trained to find structure in arguments and loopholes, grabbed at it.
A door. A hinge. A keyhole.
The air above the slab bulged upward, then split, as if someone had cut it with an unseen blade. A vertical seam opened, thin at first, then wider.
Darkness lay behind it. Not the absence of light, but a depth with texture, like velvet soaked in oil . The cold rushed out, strong enough to sting her eyes.
The faceless figure leaned in. Its skin stretched. The shape under it pressed harder, as if it wanted to be out, wanted to touch this opening first.
Rory stepped back, the Heartstone held high like a warning.
The pendant jerked in her hand. Not her own movement. The gem pulled towards the seam, yanking her wrist forward. The chain snapped tight at her neck.
“No,” Rory said, and planted her feet.
The pull strengthened. Her shoulder rolled as she resisted. The Heartstone throbbed with heat, each pulse a command.
The faceless thing turned its blank head towards her. The clicking stopped.
A voice spoke from inside that smooth skin, muffled, as if the words had to force their way through flesh.
“Aurora Carter.”
Her name landed heavy in the clearing. The flowers shivered in response. The standing stones in the distance answered with a low grind, like teeth.
Rory’s throat tightened, but she kept her voice even.
“Don’t use my full name. We’re not in court.”
The faceless thing lifted one pale hand from the flowers. It held its palm out, fingers long, joints wrong. The seam in the air widened another inch.
The Heartstone ripped free of Rory’s grip.
The silver chain sliced across the back of her neck as the pendant flew towards the opening. Rory lunged, caught the chain with her left hand, and the crescent scar on her wrist flashed as the links bit into it. Pain spiked, clean and bright.
The pendant kept pulling. Rory gritted her teeth and hauled back, arm shaking.
The faceless hand closed around the Heartstone in midair.
The gem’s crimson glow bled through its fingers, turning the pale skin red. The thing tightened its grip, and the Heartstone’s light stuttered, as if something had swallowed the flame.
Rory drove forward and grabbed the thing’s wrist. Cold slammed into her palm, so intense it burned like heat. Her skin stuck for a second, then tore free with a tacky pull.
The faceless head leaned close, inches from her.
Its skin dimpled. A mouth pushed out from beneath, forcing its way into shape. Not lips, not teeth, just a seam that split open.
Inside, darkness waited, the same velvet depth as the portal, and a second clicking started within it, louder, eager.
The standing stones ground again, and this time they moved. The boundary ring began to close, stones sliding together with the certainty of a trap.
Rory yanked the chain with both hands, braced her foot against the slab, and the portal answered with a sudden surge, the seam snapping wider as something on the other side shoved through.