AI The pendant burned against her chest.
Rory's fingers found the chain before conscious thought caught up. The Heartstone pulsed hot through her shirt, that strange crimson glow bleeding through the fabric like a slow wound. She'd learned to read it over the past three weeks, ever since the thing appeared in her flat wrapped in nothing but brown paper and her own name written in handwriting she didn't recognise. Warm meant something nearby. Hot meant close. This?
This was searing .
She ducked beneath a low-hanging branch and pushed deeper into Richmond Park. The trees here grew differently, she'd noticed that much on her last two visits. Twisted in on themselves, bark spiralling wrong ways, roots breaking through the soil at angles that defied gravity. The standing oaks marked the boundary, ancient and patient, and she'd walked past them an hour ago.
Should have reached the clearing by now.
Her phone showed 11:47 PM. The battery had been full when she'd left her flat above Silas' bar. Now it blinked red at twelve percent, the screen flickering each time she checked.
"Come on." She tapped the glass . The maps app had frozen on a loading screen ten minutes back.
The delivery had been simple enough. Mrs. Chen at number forty-seven, regular customer, always tipped well. But number forty-seven didn't exist on any street in Richmond. The address had led her here instead, to the edge of the park, and then the GPS had died entirely.
Rory stopped walking.
The silence pressed in. London never went quiet, not really . Sirens, traffic, the distant rumble of the Underground, someone's bass-heavy music bleeding through closed windows. You learned to tune it out, to let it become white noise. But this wasn't London's muffled background hum.
This was nothing.
She turned in a slow circle. Trees surrounded her, their branches skeletal against the sky. No stars. No moon. Just that strange amber glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, like the air itself had learned to shine.
"Hello?"
Her voice didn't echo . The word fell flat, swallowed by the dark.
The pendant's heat intensified. Rory winced and pulled the chain over her head. The gemstone dangled in the air, that deep crimson colour shifting, swirling, like something lived inside it. The glow strengthened, and she could see it now, a faint thread of light stretching ahead of her through the trees.
A path.
She hadn't come this way before. The last two visits, the grove had been easy to find, a natural clearing that opened up between the oaks like a secret the park had been keeping. Wildflowers in impossible colours, soft grass that smelled like honey, and that strange sense of peace that settled over everything inside the boundary.
But the thread didn't lead toward where the grove should be.
It led deeper.
Rory followed it anyway.
The trees changed first. Oak gave way to something older, darker, bark that looked almost like scales in the amber half-light. The branches curved overhead, interlocking, forming a tunnel that blocked out even that strange ambient glow. Only the pendant's thread remained, that thin line of crimson cutting through the black.
She counted her steps. Habit, partly. Her father had taught her that, back when she'd still thought she might follow him into law. Always know your exit. Always have your count. Thirty-seven steps since the tunnel began.
Forty-one.
The ground softened beneath her boots. Not mud, something else. Spongy. Wrong. She looked down and wished she hadn't.
Wildflowers.
They carpeted the forest floor, but these weren't the bright blooms from the grove's heart. These were pallid, almost colourless, their petals thin as paper. They bent beneath her feet but didn't break, springing back up the moment she passed.
Fifty-three steps.
A sound. Small. Behind her.
Rory stopped walking. The pendant swung on its chain, casting shifting shadows across the scaled bark.
"Is someone there?"
Nothing answered. The silence had returned, heavier than before.
She counted to ten. Then turned around.
The tunnel stretched back the way she'd come, empty and dark. No movement. No figure. Just the interlocking branches and that faint amber glow bleeding through the gaps.
Her shoulders loosened. Just paranoia. Just the dark playing tricks.
She turned back around.
And froze.
The woman stood twenty feet ahead, half-hidden by a tree's curved trunk. Dark hair. Darker eyes. A face that might have been beautiful once, before something had torn it open.
Rory's hand moved to the pendant without thinking. The gemstone blazed, crimson light flooding the tunnel, and in that flash she saw it clearly.
The woman wasn't standing .
She was pinned to the tree. Branches had grown through her, erupting from her chest, her shoulders, the soft flesh of her throat. Her mouth hung open, but no sound came out. Her eyes moved, fixed on Rory, and something in them begged.
Then the light faded, and darkness rushed back in.
Rory ran.
The tunnel twisted. She'd counted fifty-three steps on the way in, but she'd run twice that now and still the branches overhead didn't break. The pendant swung wildly against her chest, burning hot, and she clutched it without thinking, focusing on that heat instead of the cold that pressed against her back.
Not alone. She wasn't alone.
A branch snagged her hair. She ripped free, felt strands tear loose, kept moving. The ground sloped downward. Her boot caught on something, and she stumbled, one hand shooting out to catch herself against the nearest tree.
Her palm sank into the bark.
It gave beneath her fingers like wet flesh. Warm. Pulsing.
She wrenched her hand back and kept running.
The tunnel ended without warning. One moment, darkness and branches and that suffocating closeness. The next, open air and that familiar amber glow and the wildflowers beneath her feet, bright and honey-scented and utterly wrong after what she'd seen.
Rory collapsed to her knees. Her lungs burned. Her heart hammered against her ribs. The pendant had cooled, that strange heat fading to something almost pleasant, but she couldn't make herself let go of it.
The grove spread out before her. She recognised the clearing, the circle of standing stones at its edge, the way the light seemed to pool in the centre like something liquid. But something was different.
The stones had moved.
She remembered them clearly from her last visit, a loose circle, gaps between each one where she'd entered and exited. Now they stood closer together, gaps narrowed, and that amber light poured from between them like water through a cracked dam.
And in the centre of the clearing, where before there had been nothing but soft grass and impossible flowers, now there was a door.
It stood on its own, no walls, no frame, just a door of dark wood set into nothing at all. A silver handle caught the light. Iron hinges. A keyhole that seemed to swallow the glow rather than reflect it .
Rory climbed to her feet.
Every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to find the tunnel, to count her steps in reverse and get out of this place before the wrongness swallowed her whole. But the pendant pulled forward, that subtle weight on its chain, and she found herself walking toward the door anyway.
The wildflowers brushed against her ankles. Their scent had changed, honey giving way to something copper-sharp. She didn't look down.
Twenty feet from the door, she stopped.
A figure stood beside it. Not the pinned woman, not the thing she'd seen in the tunnel. Something else. Taller. Wrapped in shadow that moved independent of the light, like it breathed on its own.
It turned toward her.
Rory's hand found the pendant again. The gemstone pulsed , that warmth building, and she realised with sudden clarity that the figure wasn't approaching her.
It was waiting .
"Who are you?"
The question came out steadier than she expected. Three weeks with this strange pendant, two visits to a grove that shouldn't exist, and somehow she'd learned that fear didn't help. Thinking did.
The figure didn't answer. Instead, it raised one hand and pointed at the door.
Understanding settled over her like cold water. She was supposed to open it. That's why the pendant had led her here, why the tunnel had shown her that woman, why everything had been building toward this moment.
The grove wanted her to walk through.
Rory took another step forward. Then another. The pendant's glow brightened with each movement, casting her shadow long and strange across the wildflowers.
She reached for the handle.
The door swung open before she could touch it.
Darkness waited on the other side, deeper than the tunnel, darker than the sky above. But in that darkness, something moved. Many things. The sound of them filled the air, a chorus of whispers that shouldn't have been audible, that crawled into her ears and settled behind her eyes.
The pendant burned one final time, and the whispers resolved into words.
*"Welcome home, Malphora."*