AI She stepped through the last ring of roots and the world shifted, not with a thunderclap but with the hair-raising hush of something pulling its breath in. Her boots crunched on leaf litter that shouldn't have been there, brittle like last autumn's, though the wildflowers at the Grove's edge were in ridiculous bloom, white and gold and unseasonally fresh. Aurora Carter stopped, hand already going to the small crescent scar on her left wrist as if it could steady her pulse .
The pendant warmed against her palm, faint and certain, a thumb-sized ember under a silver chain. She had followed a note folded into her takeout bag, a scrawl that had said two words and an address.
Meet me, Isolde's grove.
She had told herself it was neither trap nor tryst. She had told herself she was here for answers. The Heartstone's inner glow had grown an octave as she crossed the ancient oak standing stones, as if the jewel recognised the boundary and approved. Inside, time moved in odd intervals; she had read that somewhere between Earth and the Fae things did not keep hours. That fact should have been academic. It felt much less tidy now.
"Hello?" she called softly, because silence at the Grove felt like an accusation . Her voice snagged on the air and came back thin. The trees didn't send back her sound, they returned something like it, shifted at the edges where leaves rubbed and made a slow ripple. It was not wind.
The first wrongness was small: a bird call out of tune, a thrush that rolled its notes into a slow, hesitant question. Aurora tracked the sound to a gnarled hawthorn and saw nothing but a flash of feathers. The second wrongness came as a smell, sharp and metallic beneath the earth-sweet of moss. Copper, like coins. Not blood, she thought first, which was a thought she disposed of quickly , discipline like a tool. It was something older, the tang of offerings and hearth fires and funerals.
The pendant pulsed, a heartbeat against her palm. She didn't normally trust feelings. She trusted patterns and facts. The Heartstone pulsed when near Hel portals, she knew that much . The note said nothing of portals. It had an ink blot and a smudge of perfume she could not place.
She moved on, because motion felt saner than standing still. The clearing opened up, wildflowers folding like faces turned away, and in the centre the grass lay trampled into a ring. Standing stones ringed the circle, their faces carved by hands that had not been human in a very long time. Lichen had grown into the grooves, making the runes look like sleeping mouths.
Aurora crouched, knuckle scraping a mossy stone, and the stone hummed at a frequency she felt in her teeth. She frowned, fingertip picking at a symbol. It was a spiral, but wrong. Spirals whispered inward. She had studied seal forms once, for an elective course that had never been useful until tonight. The spiral here was a pupil, not a path, closed tight.
A sound came from the tree line, not animal and not wind, a soft wet scraping like someone dragging fingernails through velvet . She straightened, muscles taut. Her shadow fell in long, lean columns across the grass. At the edge of vision something moved, a deeper stillness as if the dark itself inhaled.
"Aurora?" The single name came without movement. No shape walked toward her, but the syllable hung, precise. It was not the same as the voice she knew. It felt older, layered with other voices beneath it, like a choir whose parts were out of tune.
She answered because staying silent felt like inviting a lie . "Who is it?"
No one stepped forward. The standing stones did not creak. Yet the wildflowers turned, just that little, as if a hand had brushed their stems. The sound of her own breath startled her. She told herself she had come prepared—her knife in her boot, her thermal torch cold in her pocket, contact numbers uploaded into a phone she kept face-down. Practical preparations for impractical problems. Those were all she had when she had left the flat above Silas' bar tonight, carrying a Chinese takeaway parcel she had pretended was for someone else's dinner.
The pendant tugged at the chain when she walked, as if it wanted to be nearer the ground. She lifted it, thumb tracing the cool rim of the gemstone. The glow thinned and then flared like a throat clearing. It was a foreign sensation, hope with claws.
A laugh, close and wrong, flitted through the trees, like children mimicking a grown-up laugh but getting the inflections wrong. It was bright and hungry and immediately made her skin prickle. "You shouldn't be here," the laughter said after a moment, and if it hadn't been laughter the words would have been the same.
"I said I'm here," she replied. The sentence landed with more sharpness than she intended. Her voice did not tremble. She didn't let it.
Something brushed her elbow. She turned and saw, for a sliver of breath, a white hand disappearing between two trunks. It had too many joints.
She stepped toward the hand, the logic precise in her head: look , identify threat, remove. The pendant thudded against her sternum like a second heart. The air tasted of mint and iron and dust. When she pushed into the tree line the light shifted. Shapes of branches arranged themselves like ribs overhead. Moss clung to her fingers and left a green smear she could not wash away.
An animal—no, a reflection—moved underfoot. The ground shimmered for a second and showed a scene that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago: a narrow cobbled lane lined with low-slung houses, rain-slick stones reflecting gaslight. She blinked and the lane folded back into damp earth. The passage of images made her stomach dip; the Grove folded scenes from elsewhere into its skin.
She told herself these were tricks. The Fae told tales that pulled on human weaknesses: nostalgia, longing, greed, the need to answer. Isolde's grove wanted something from all who entered. People who stayed were mended in stories or broken entirely. That was what old maps and prying academics said. Academics were safe. This was not.
"I came because someone left a note," she said aloud, because speaking created a record. "Because someone asked me to come."
A figure stepped from between the stones then, slow and unhurried. At first she thought it might be an old woman, the kind of pale-fleshed thing that stories always used for warnings, but it was neither. It wore a coat that seemed stitched from shadow and leaf, and where its face should have been there was a patchwork of eyes, human and avian and something that glinted too bright to be right . The ensemble tilted its head with a curiosity that felt like a test .
"You have the stone," it said, voice a chorus of chimes.
"It's mine," Aurora said. "It was given to me."
"Given is a small word," the thing said. "Given binds."
The pendant burned against her skin. That one word, bound, made the hair at the back of her neck stand up. She flexed her wrist, the scar whispering under the fabric of her sleeve. The peripheral world jittered; the standing stones threw slim, moving shadows that were not aligned with any moon.
"Who left the note?" she asked.
"Names are thin here," the creature said. "They don't hold. What matters is the thirst, and you answered."
There was movement behind it, subtle, like the ripple of a rope thrown through a ring. The wildflowers leaned further, their faces turned inward. The air thickened, as if the Grove had folded a second layer over her, muffling the rest of the park. Somewhere far away, a car alarm barked, and the sound was swallowed whole.
Aurora's training in law smelled absurdly academic then. She was a person who could parse contracts and spot inconsistencies in witness statements. She picked at the logic.
"Why me?"
The thing's eyes narrowed , the human pair focusing until they looked almost cruel. "You carry the trace. A silver chain and a deep crimson heart like a thumbnail," it said. "Dymas craft, small, warm. It answers the hollow."
Her throat tightened. She had not told anyone about the Heartstone. She had woken one morning to find it in a pocket of last season's jacket, wrapped in a scrap of newspaper. No note, no name. An unfamiliar hand had placed it into her life as if setting a domino .
"Who are you?" she asked again, sharper .
"Am I a who?" it mused. "Names make good riddles, Aurora Carter. Do you like riddles, or would you prefer the obvious end?"
The choice was a trap dressed up as courtesy. Aurora circled, keeping the pendant between them like a compass needle. Her mind catalogued, rapid-fire: light sources, exits, weapons, the way the ring of stone had small notches carved into the base at ground level, perhaps for binding. The Grove liked ritual. The Grove liked circles.
"What do you bind?" she asked.
The creature's grin unfolded where a mouth might have been, a curve of lichen and light. "Not what, who. People call it a portal, but that is clumsy. A closing on our side. You carry the warmth of a Hel seam, an answer sewn into your chest. We require a door to lean against. We require a listener."
Aurora felt the pendant strain against the words, hot as a fever. She took a breath and let numbers speak for her.
"How do I close it?"
A ripple of laughter, like pebbles being rolled in a small dish. "Close? You are a bold sort to assume closure is in your hands."
She drew the knife from her boot without thinking, a mechanical habit born of deliveries down dark alleys. The metal flashed dull under the orchard of leaves. The creature's eyes lost their cordiality. The air shivered.
"You have a scar," it said suddenly . "Left wrist. Crescent. A moon stolen in childhood. You keep your past in small indentations."
She looked at her wrist, as if to prove the scar was there, and the memory came like a pane of glass: a scraped fence, a summer day, blood sweet and sharp. It should have been small, a thing to laugh at now. The Grove had picked at it like an old stitch.
"I know who I am," she said. The statement was less confident than she'd intended. "I know what I do."
"Do you?" it echoed . "You deliver food, you escape men who would strike you, you read the law. But do you hold a stone that hums when the world bends? Do you answer doors no one else can see?"
The sound behind the trees rose, at once a chorus and a single voice. Footfalls, soft and too many. Something pressed against the inside of the ring, outside and in. The standing stones leaned in ever so slightly , as if listening more carefully .
Aurora stepped back, the knife an inadequate answer. Practicality was slender here. The pendant pulsed hard, as if tugging toward the ring of stones . Her fingers curled involuntarily. She felt the world tilt just that little, like the first squeal of a cartwheel coming loose.
"Tell me what you want," she said.
"Not want," the creature corrected, voice now a susurration braided with the rustle of cloth. "Need. The grove needs. Once, we gave; now, we collect. The portal remembers warmth . Your stone remembers its seam. We will not ask twice."
There was a scent like smoke and lavender and some old musty book all at once. The shadows at the edge of the clearing stretched and rewrote themselves into thinner shapes, limbs longer than they should have been, faces glimpsed only in blink-like flashes. Aurora saw a child's sock, a pair of spectacles, an old leather boot, each suspended in the air for a heartbeat and then folded back into nothing.
She took one step toward the centre of the ring, despite everything telling her to run. Up close, the stones' runes hissed like a throat clearing and the ground vibrated against her soles. The pendant flared so bright that for a second she saw, not the circle of stones, but a slit of sky filled with falling stars and a hand reaching up as if to catch them.
"Stand back," she said, because she had to do something. Law or fence or habit demanded orders when the world felt like it was unspooling .
The creature spread what might have been its arms. "Do you think you order the sea?" it asked. "The seam on Hel's side is wet with our breath. You cannot simply stitch it shut without thread."
"Then teach me."
A pause, long enough for the wildflowers to inhale. "Teach you," it repeated. "A bargain is a tidy thing, Aurora Carter. You will give something, and we will give something."
"What do you want?"
"What you carry," it said. "Not the metal and stone, but the part that answers. A whisper . A favourite memory. A name held dear. A small bright thing inside you that will make a seam in our side less sharp."
The Grove narrowed in the way of jaws closing. Aurora's fingers tightened on the pendant. Her mind flashed a dozen escape plans and discarded them all, because negotiation felt safer than brute force and also because, deep down, something in her wanted to be useful for once. To be the one who closed, not the one who ran.
"What's the cost?" she asked.
"Names are thin," it said again, but this time there was hunger threaded through the phrase. "Give a whisper and open a door. Keep your name and leave with a patch of cold at your chest. Choose."
She thought of Brendan and Jennifer, of Eva's easy laugh, of Evan's shadow that had once stretched across her life. She imagined a fraction snipped out of memory, a warmth gone soft. The pendant pressed to her sternum like a second pulse demanding answer.
The standing stones creaked, a deep ancient noise, and from the ring's centre the grass parted as something moved up from below. It was not a foot or a hand at first; it was a smell, sharp and old. Then a shape, pale and slick, like old silk found in a drawer, slid between two stones and onto the earth, and the creature with the patchwork face turned toward it and smiled with too many teeth.
Aurora glanced down at the pendant, the jewel alive as a living thing. The air around the thing's smile vibrated . "Choose," it said again, patient and inevitable.
She inhaled, and for the first time since she stepped over the roots she felt the rawness beneath blue eyes and black hair and a small crescent scar: the part of her that had run from one man and not another, the part she kept tidy and boxed because it mattered less than survival. She thought of doors, of seams, of stitches.
She lifted her chin.
"Not by bargaining," she said, voice calm as steel . "We make our own doors."
The pod of shapes at the stones' base shivered like a chorus of old instruments coming to life. The ground beneath her hand was suddenly cold as every winter she had never had, and the pendant screamed.
Something big and unseen began to push up through the ring, slow and patient as tide. Aurora's knife slipped from her fingers and clanged against a stone. The creature's many eyes widened with a delight that was like knives turning in wool.
"Then show me how," it said, and the voice folded with a hundred others, and the Grove leaned in to listen when the world began to tilt .