AI Aurora tasted iron and kept her hand clamped over the Heartstone as if the pendant might try to run. The silver chain cut a white line across her knuckles. She had crouched between two ancient oak standing stones and felt a warmth crawl up her wrist, the small crescent scar at the base of her palm suddenly prickling as if something old remembered her.
She had come here because the pendant had hummed in Taunton Road three nights ago, because it had pulsed so insistently against her ribcage on a delivery run that she nearly crashed the bicycle into a bollard. Someone, somewhere, had put Dymas’ work into her hands for a reason. The Grove, they said in half-words and full warnings, kept things that belonged elsewhere. It kept time odd. It kept bargains unpaid. Aurora had not expected the sound to be wrong the moment she stepped over the low mossy lip that marked the boundary. She had expected quiet, and she had expected trees. Not the small, precise wrongness that made her look twice at the shadows.
A laugh threaded through the oaks, bright and thin, the wrong pitch and wrong place for human lungs. It came from the east and from the west at once, the same sound folded and stacked like poorly bound paper. Leaves did not rustle in agreement, but the wildflowers along the clearing's edge trembled as if they could hear. The pendant pulsed, a deeper beat. Warmth spread into her palm and up her arm like an invitation, like a tide.
She forced herself to breathe around it. Work first, curiosity later. She checked her phone. The lock screen read a time that had to be wrong, digits sliding like a cheap slot machine, one minute ahead, then three hours behind. When she looked up, the trees seemed fractionally closer, their trunks rearranged, a path that had not been there when she passed through the stones now peeled off into gloom .
"Not tonight," she whispered, because even her cool head obeyed ritual. She pressed the pendant against the crescent scar, as if the metal would steady her. The scar said nothing. It felt private, an old bartered thing. The Grove doled out replies slow and precise. Aurora counted small rules. Keep still when something watches. Don't name what you fear. If you must move, move like you have a purpose. She had a purpose: find a portal marker, learn what the pendant wanted, and leave.
Footsteps answered her purpose, thin pat-pat that sounded like someone walking on pine cones . They came from behind a stand of bluebells, but the ground around the stems was untrodden. She turned and saw a rabbit, too many rabbits. At the edge of her vision a pair of eyes blinked; when she focused, the eyes belonged to bark, to a knot in an oak, to a fox huddled and asleep. Each blink came a breath late or early. Her pulse stepped into the pendant's rhythm.
She moved on. Each step had to be deliberate, each footfall on moss considered. The stones ringed the clearing, older than the city, they tilted just enough to look like a crowd leaning in. Small petals, pale and thick with scent, dropped around her, spattered with dew that smelled faintly of copper, not quite blood, not quite coin, some metallic tang that tugged at memories she did not want . Copper stung her nose. The memory of a different scream lurched at the corner of her mind and she shoved it down like a heavy lid.
Something that could not quite be called wind sharpened its teeth and moved the wildflowers as though it were reading them aloud . A voice layered itself under the sound, a chorus of syllables too clean and too old. It did not speak her name at first. It hummed distances and directions, things like "north" said in a hundred ways. Then it settled on a single sound, a syllable curled inward. "Laila."
Her skin went cold. The name had not been hers in years. It clung to the underside of childhood bedrooms, to nights she had rewritten. The pendant, small as it was, pressed heavier in her fist.
"Not mine," she said. Her voice stayed small. She had cultivated a voice that measured and accounted. Saying things aloud in a place like this felt like handing a thief your wallet .
The voice laughed, a sound like ice settling on a tin roof. It laughed with the patience of something that had watched centuries pass without blinking. "Malphora," it corrected, the word a silk knot . "Or will you keep each name like a receipt until you empty your pockets?"
Aurora swallowed. She had avoided the old names for a reason. Names carried history, and history could be pulled like a thread through the Grove until you unravelled. She let the pendant go, let it rest on the moss, and drew back as if she had laid a live coal on the ground. The Heartstone pulsed faster, brightening inside its crimson like a heartbeat that wanted to be heard.
"Who are you?" she asked, and the question carried more diplomacy than fear . She sounded like herself, not a hunted thing . That steadiness had always been the part of her that kept her alive.
A shadow moved at the edge of the stones, not quite matching the space it occupied . It shifted left and then, with no logical motion, took a breath and became a woman, a woman shaped from bark and shadow and lichen, hair a tangle of tiny white flowers. Her eyes were not black or brown, they were the colour of old coins left in a river. She tilted her head, and the motion was both invitation and threat.
"You have it," she observed. Her words scattered like seeds. "You hold the wrong heart."
Aurora kept her hands where she could see them. "It found me. I have no idea who left it."
"You are always honest when the moon does not question you," the woman said. "But the Grove remembers debt. The Grove remembers hands." She stepped closer and the ground around her did not darken, it brightened, as if the flora drank the light and exhaled something older.
"Then remind the Grove," Aurora replied, because protesting silence felt like hospitality . "I just want to know what's here."
The woman's smile did not reach her coin-coloured eyes. "You do not come for knowledge. You come for repair." Her voice folded around the word, made it smaller, less telling. "A mending. A binding. You hold something that seeks its door." She nodded at the pendant. "And we keep doors."
The Heartstone thudded, and for the first time since she arrived Aurora felt the pendant tug, like an animal on a leash. The silver chain whispered over moss; she let it. She watched blades of grass part as if by invisible fingers. In the clearing the flowers reoriented, their faces all tilting toward the pendant like an audience waiting for a performer.
"Tell me what you want me to do," Aurora said. She tested the words like a key in a lock. Her voice did not tremble. Her palms were steady.
"You can place it," the woman said. "You can hand it to us. You can open it after binding, and it will offer you a path out." The woman gestured at the standing stones. "Or you can bury it under the old root and leave, and everything will go back to the mannered silence you preferred."
The choice felt simple on the surface, reductive. But the pendant pulsed with warmth that reached her chest. It felt like a heart asking permission . She imagined pockets and doors, the invisible make-and-break of things that should not be opened.
"Why me?" she asked. "Why now?"
The woman leaned on a thornless branch as if on a walking stick. "Because someone paid the price of forgetting," she said. "Because someone across the sea tied a loose end with fine thread and the end came to your palm like a wrapped gift. Because you have a wrist with a scar that fits the groove of a binding."
Aurora twisted her wrist as if she could make the scar smaller. The crescent held sunlight the way old coins held stories.
"Then see if the binding still fits," the woman said, and there was no malice in it, only the neutral cruelty of things that do not belong to human rule. "We will accept if the price pleases."
She stepped forward. The pendant pulsed so hard Aurora felt the warmth climb up her throat. She could place it onto the exposed root that coiled like a sleeping fist in the clearing's centre. She could hand it to this woman. She could leave the Grove and call Silas tomorrow and pretend none of it had happened. Instead she reached, because curiosity and fear and duty braided tight in her chest.
Her fingers brushed the silver. For a moment the world was only the press of metal, the throb of the gem like something alive under skin. Then, like a sound recorded and replayed too fast, the clearing deepened. The woman's face rewound into something else: younger, older, a child with lichen under its nails, a man whose beard was braided with ivy. The shift made Aurora's vision swim.
Something moved behind her, sudden and sure. A shadow slid across the small of her back but did not belong to the woman in front. She turned, the motion tight and quick, and a second figure stepped from between the stones, all wrong-length limbs and wrong-angled shoulders. It wore a coat sewn from night and river muck; where its face should have been there was a mask of half-formed bone. Its mouth opened and closed, but sound came from where it did not move, a soft, urgent rustle like leaves rubbing together.
Aurora's hand left the pendant. The Heartstone flashed, then flared, so bright she had to blink. The warmth became a burn, searing down her arm. She had not felt that kind of heat since a kitchen flame had licked her fingers in a flat above Silas' bar and left a line scar along a knuckle. Her breath came fast now, not with terror, but with the sharp, precise clarity that comes when a test replaces a question.
"You are not alone," the bone-masked thing said, voice low and layered with the sound of running water and distant footsteps .
"I know," Aurora answered. She did not reach for the pendant again. She had a trick for things that wanted her to hand over what she carried: move the object into a place where it could be watched, not touched.
She placed the pendant on the root and stepped back two paces. The Heartstone kept pulsing, but its pace became measured , like someone checking a calf's leg. The woman, the many-faced keeper of the Grove, watched Aurora with a look that might have been approval if one stretched the word thin.
"Rules," Aurora said. "Your rules. I will not open it. I will not hand it. I will ask questions and walk away."
"Questions are currency," the woman said. "They pay for answers or they pay for teeth. Choose."
Aurora set her jaw. She knew how to barter. She had taken on legal training before running, had learned to fold words into agreements that held. Now in a clearing that kept its own time, those lessons felt both useful and useless. She met the woman's coin eyes and said, "Who left it?"
There was a pause that felt like someone turning the page of an old book. The woman smiled without humour. "A hand that has since learned to forget. A mouth that cannot keep silence . Dymas keeps quiet, but he cannot stop the stone from seeking its doorway. Someone in the old city sealed a grief with a gem."
"Who?" Aurora pressed.
The air tightened like a drawn bow. The rabbit-eyed shadows multiplied until she saw them moving as a tide. The woman lowered her voice to something silky and sharp. "A name you would prefer never to name," she said. "He lives in a place of boards and light, speaks with soft promises. He keeps his hands like you once kept yours. He is called Evan."
Evan. The syllable landed like a dropped coin. Aurora's jaw clenched . Past and present folded. The Grove leaned.
"Why would he—"
"Because debts vary," the woman interrupted, "and some debts are paid in absence. He paid the wrong thing." Her face softened, a careful pity. "You may have left him. He did not leave you."
Heat in her chest made Aurora's vision ring. The Grove's time shimmered and she saw, for a blink, a thread from the pendant that led across city streets and over roofs, ending in the shape of a hand that boxed the word Evan with neat angry curves.
"Is he here?" she asked, even though she already knew. The wrongness had been growing from the second she arrived; it had been tracing the shape of his restraint.
"Parts of him," the woman said. "Parts of him wish to be more. We like pieces that wish." She looked over at the bone-masked figure, and its masked mouth moved in a dry, satisfied sound. "He sent what fit in a pocket. He thought it would find you at the other end, and it did. But the Grove keeps its share."
Aurora's knuckles whitened around her own wrist. The Heartstone pulsed so hard it felt like a second heartbeat . She had, at every stage of her life, tried to tidy consequences into neat piles. Tonight consequences kept stepping out of the dark.
Something shifted in the trees, a collective intake of breath. The flowers held their faces like a congregation witnessing a small, terrible law. The bone-masked thing knelt, the motion simple, and reached out a hand toward the pendant.
Aurora moved before she could think, not a run or a flight but a cut, a professional motion trained to unbalance . She shoved the root aside and spat the pendant into the hollow it had concealed beneath. Soil swallowed light. The Heartstone's pulse stuttered, then dimmed, distant as a trapped ember.
The woman sighed in a way that sounded like the closing of a book . "You will not find it by calling," she said. "The Grove keeps what it is offered."
"Then give me a way out," Aurora said. She had come here for a reason, and the reason had not been to trade whispers for riddles. "Who protects the doorway? If Evan sent it, what guards the place where it wants to go?"
The woman smiled again, the expression a slow unwinding. "You are curious," she observed. "Good. Curiosity feeds both the small and the vast. But take care. The more you ask, the more you will need to answer."
Aurora did not like the choice that implied at the edges. Choices like that hollowed people, left them lessons and scars. She heard her own voice, low and steady. "Then tell me where he will try next."
Wind or memory or something else carried a sound like a bell chiming under water. "He will try where bones are thin," the woman said. "Where promises are quick and unanchored. Where a heart can open like a door."
Aurora's mouth tasted of metal. The Grove's answer did not satisfy her the way she wished. It did not give a map or a time or a guarantee. It gave a rule. It gave an omen.
"One more," she said, because she had learned that payment bought clarity at a price.
"Ask."
"Will the Heartstone lead him back to me if I take it?"
The woman leaned so close Aurora saw thousands of tiny lichen freckles on her skin. "If you return it to the path, he will follow the light it casts," she said. "If you bury it, you bury the calling. If you give it to us, we will deal only in exchange."
Aurora's head pulsed with a sudden frustration. All options walked away from what she wanted, which was the simplest one: to be finished with the past. She had thought delivering meals at Golden Empress would let her live between familiar things, but she had traded one kind of hunger for another.
A twig snapped behind her, sharp and deliberate. The bone-masked thing shifted, and the hollow where the pendant had gone glowed faintly, a breath of red like a heart seen through skin. The ground at Aurora's feet bucked, small tremor that felt like a drumbeat calling names .
The woman's face folded into something like hunger . "Decide," she said.
Before Aurora could answer, the trees answered for her. A shadow uncoiled itself from the underbrush and moved as if the Grove had cleared a corridor. It held form better than the rest, a human outline that walked on two feet, and when it stepped into the clearing the moonless light threw its features into sharp, terrible relief. It smiled, and its smile fit a mouth she knew far too well.
"Evan," she said, and the name cut like a reported wound.
He did not look like the Evan who had once pressed his palm to her throat. He looked like an arrangement of memories, like a sculpture put together from photographs. He had Evan's hands, the tilt of his jaw, and something grafted over his face that was wrong. The Grove had repaired him in pieces.
Aurora's fingers brushed the scar on her wrist, feeling the crescent as if it might be a key. The pendant below thudded once, like something waking.
"Rory," Evan said, voice smooth and small-town civil, as if he had stopped by to borrow sugar. "You really shouldn't leave without settling accounts."
The bone-masked figure bared its half-formed teeth and the woman behind it laughed, a sound like doors opening.
Aurora's next move came without a thought. She dug the heel of her hand into the ground where the Heartstone had last dimmed, and the dirt gave, soft and warm, as if something beneath had been waiting for heat to wake. The pendant answered with a bright, insistent ache. Roots shivered. The standing stones hummed.
The Grove closed in, and the figures stepped forward. The wrongness grew teeth.
Aurora rose with the pendant in her fist and felt the world tilt under the old rules: keep a purpose, move with intent. She had come here to see, and she had found more. She had come for a reason, and now the reason had stood up and smiled.
The clearing held its breath as the pendant's crimson light spread like a heartbeat visible through the dark, and something that was not entirely human smiled as if it had always known the cost of the coin in her palm.