AI The taxi’s taillights vanished past the trees like a pair of closing eyes, leaving Aurora with the crunch of gravel under her boots and a sky that pressed low and grey over Richmond Park. The driver had refused to pull further in.
“Path’ll get you there,” he had waved, not meeting her gaze, meter already reset. “You’ll hear the road from where you are. Can’t miss it.”
Now the road hum had already thinned behind her, eaten by open dark and a slow, wet wind that smelled of mud and wet bark.
Aurora adjusted the strap of her canvas bag and touched the pendant under her jacket. The Heartstone rested against her collarbone, a small, reassuring weight . Warm, as usual, like a pebble held too long in a fist.
“Right,” she breathed, more to the trees than to herself. “In and out. Half an hour.”
Grass whispered as she left the gravel track, following the faint trail she’d memorised in daylight weeks ago. The park at night loomed as a different creature. During the day, dog walkers and joggers had filled the paths, deer dotted the fields, traffic hissed from the nearby road. Now her boots sank into damp earth, and the dark between the trunks thickened ahead like a river of ink she needed to cross.
The note in her pocket rasped when she moved. She had folded it in half, then half again, trying to make the words shrink.
Bring the stone to the Grove. Midnight. Come alone.
No sender. No explanation. No threats, no pleas. Just that, shoved under her flat door sometime between morning deliveries and her shift at the bar.
She passed under a line of hornbeams, their tangled branches knitted above her like fingers laced in prayer. The noise of the city faded in layers. First the low rumble of traffic, then the distant sirens, then the last flicker of human sound. In its place came the thick buzz of insects and the rustle of something small moving through bramble.
“Midnight in a park,” she muttered. “If I end up on a missing poster, Eva’s never letting this go.”
Her voice came out too loud. The trees swallowed it. No echo , no carry, just sound that went in and never came back out.
She paused. Listened.
Wind moved the higher branches. Leaves scraped against each other, dry as old paper. A fox barked somewhere far off. The steady hum of cars dropped even lower, as if a hand turned down a dial.
She checked her phone. 23:47. Signal: one bar, then none, then one again. The screen’s glow painted her fingers a washed-out blue. Somewhere under her jacket the Heartstone grew hotter, the warmth leaking through the cotton of her shirt.
“Alright. Nearly there.”
The Grove lay beyond the open field, tucked behind a scatter of ancient oaks she’d found once by accident with a wrong turn and a stubborn refusal to follow the signposted paths. She remembered the first glimpse of it: a ring of standing stones made of oak trunks turned petrified, wildflowers blooming thick and bright even in late October, the air holding a sharpness that made each breath feel both too much and not enough.
Now, as she stepped into the open stretch of grass, the world seemed to thin. The sky overhead cleared without a gradual change. One moment heavy cloud, the next a spill of stars she didn’t recognise, sharp and cold and far too many of them.
Aurora stopped dead.
She lifted her face. The Plough, Orion, Cassiopeia—none of them sat where they belonged. A ragged band of pale light cut across the heavens instead, like milk poured through black glass.
Her grip tightened on the strap of her bag.
“Park lights must be playing tricks,” she said, although there were no park lights this deep in. “That or I’ve finally fried my brain.”
No answer came. The fox barked again, closer now, a short harsh sound. Grass brushed her calves with each step. Dampness climbed her jeans.
Somewhere behind her, footsteps crunched.
Just one or two, close to where she had just walked. Boot on ground, weight on dry twig. Then nothing.
She didn’t turn at once. Her muscles locked. Every old instinct from every bad night in Cardiff and London twitched at the base of her skull.
She swallowed.
“Who’s there?”
The field listened. Wind hissed past her ears. No response. No repeat of the sound.
She turned slow, jaw clenched .
The space behind her lay empty. The path, the darker strip of trampled grass she had followed, ran back towards the trees. Shadows stacked between the trunks. The night watched her with a thousand blind eyes.
Aurora pushed air out of her lungs, a sharp exhale through her nose.
“Fox,” she told herself . “Branch. Deer. Not every noise is—”
The Heartstone pulsed against her skin.
Heat shot through the pendant, a strong beat against her sternum, like someone had just flicked a match there. She flinched and grabbed it through her jacket. The gem throbbed again. Once. Twice. Each beat lined up with something heavy that rolled through the air under her feet. A distant boom, like thunder layered under the earth.
She drew the necklace out.
The crimson stone glowed from within, faint but unmistakable, as if lit by a coal pushed deep into its core. The light painted her fingers in blood-coloured shadows.
“Okay,” she breathed. “You’ve got opinions. Great.”
The warmth steadied into a low, steady hum. Not painful. Not comforting . Just… present. A second heart she wore outside her body.
At the far edge of the field, the oaks waited. Massive, gnarled, older than any building she’d lived in. Their trunks twisted, branches bent down and up again, shapes like frozen waves. Between them, dark columns stood in a rough circle: the standing stones of the Grove, wood turned to something harder and darker, each one carved with rough grooves that looked almost like script.
She moved towards them. Her boots sank deeper into the ground. The air thickened, as if the space between atoms had grown crowded. The scent of flowers floated in on the wind—jasmine, honeysuckle, bluebells—all of it wrong for the season, wrong for February, wrong for the hours before midnight in a London park.
“Smells like Mum’s garden,” she murmured. “In June. That’s not creepy at all.”
The closer she walked, the less she heard the wind. It faded like the traffic had, drawn off to some other layer of the world. In its place: a thin, high sound, almost too quiet to pick apart. Not quite music. Not quite an insect whine. Something in between, its pitch wavering just out of reach.
Her teeth ached with it.
The oak stones towered ahead now, each one the width of a doorway, pale scars of old lightning strikes marring the bark before it sank into petrified sheen. Wildflowers crowded their bases. White, yellow, violet, electric blue, a riot of colour that shouldn’t grow this thick in winter. Their petals glowed in the strange starlight.
Aurora stepped between two of the stones.
The world blinked.
Cold hit in a sheet. The field behind her dimmed, colour leached from the grass. Ahead, the ring of stones encircled an open space about the size of a tennis court, grass cropped short, flowers woven through like scattered paint. The air vibrated . Each breath felt like she drank water that had never touched pipes or sky.
She checked her phone again.
00:02.
The lock screen photo of Eva and Silas outside the bar looked fuzzed, as if someone had smeared a thumb over their faces. No signal now. The battery icon dropped from 78% to 46% while she watched.
“You lot are very funny,” she muttered, sliding the phone back into her pocket. “Proper amateur hour haunted forest stuff.”
The high, wavering sound deepened for a heartbeat, as if her words had brushed against it. Then it slid back to the edge of hearing.
The pendant burned hotter.
She walked to the centre of the Grove because there was nowhere else to go. The grass sprang under her boots, soft as moss. No mud clung to her soles here. Each step felt both heavy and light, like walking on the memory of ground.
“Alright,” she called, turning a slow circle. “You dragged me out here. I showed up. What now?”
The stones did not answer. The flowers did not sway. Nothing moved.
Then, at the very edge of her hearing, something laughed.
It came like the chime of glass, bright, quick, then gone. Childlike but not a child’s, too deep under the surface of the sound. She couldn’t point to where it came from. Above? Behind one of the stones? Under her feet?
Her throat tightened.
She turned again, faster, the pendant throwing weak red flickers across the ring of trunks.
“Not in the mood for games.”
Another laugh, closer this time, like it had stepped three paces towards her without crossing any ground.
Her fingers curled around the Heartstone so hard her knuckles blanched.
“Show yourself.”
Grass rustled behind her. Light as a hand dragged through leaves.
She spun.
Nothing.
The standing stone in front of her loomed , its surface ridged. In the faint glow from the pendant she caught marks on it she hadn’t seen in the day. Not natural grooves. Lines crossed and curled, sharp turns and long sweeps, shapes that hurt to look at too long. The patterns crawled up the height of the stone. At the top, something bulged from the bark—an oval, smooth and pale, like a knot.
It blinked.
Aurora jerked back, boot heel skidding. The oval vanished. Just bark again. Her breath hitched.
“Nope.”
She backed away until a different stone met her shoulder. Its surface felt colder than the air, hard enough to bruise through her jacket.
The high sound in the air rose, needling, sharpening until it almost broke into a note. Her ears rang with it. The flowers quivered , then stilled.
“You wanted the stone,” she called, the words scraping her throat . “Here. Look.”
She yanked the pendant free of her fingers and held it out.
The glow inside it flared.
Light spilled across the Grove, not bright, not enough to banish the dark, but enough to draw shapes out of it . The inner faces of the stones warped. For a moment every trunk bore those pale ovals. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one round, lidless, too wide, too still. They watched her the way CCTV watched a shop floor, unblinking, without malice, without care.
Her stomach lurched .
The light dimmed as fast as it had grown. The eyes, if that’s what they were, dissolved back into bark.
“Okay,” she whispered. “You’re curious. Congratulations. We’ve all got hobbies.”
Something moved in the space between two stones.
Not the rustle of fox or deer. Not the sway of a branch. A vertical slice of darkness, thicker than the night around it, like someone had cut the world and left a gap. It wavered as if underwater. Static crawled over her skin.
The Heartstone jumped in her hand, heat spiking through her palm. It tugged forward. Not strong enough to drag her, but enough to pull at the muscles in her wrist .
“Portal,” she muttered. “Has to be.”
Her own voice sounded thin now, like it had to cross a long distance to reach her own ears.
From the cut in the air, the laughter came again. Closer. Clearer. It carried words this time, or something shaped like words, syllables that almost made sense in her own language before tilting away at the last second.
Her name slipped through.
“Aurora.”
Her legs locked. The sound of it came from behind her left ear, hot breath that smelled of damp earth and crushed flowers.
Her whole body flinched. She spun, arm swinging wide, fist still wrapped round the pendant.
No one stood there. Nothing blocked her, no figure, no outline. Just grass, stones, wildflowers, the wrong stars overhead.
The high noise in the air swelled again. The grass at her boots bent towards her, as if drawn. Flower heads turned. Petals faced her like a field of tiny, blank faces.
Her pulse crashed in her throat.
She swallowed hard and forced her shoulders to square.
“You know my name,” she said. “Good for you. You’re still going to have to do better than party tricks if you want—”
Something stroked the back of her neck.
Light. Gentle. The exact pressure of fingertips tracing the line of her spine from hairline to collar. Her skin blistered with gooseflesh. The touch left a trail of numbness behind it, as if those fingers had stolen the sensation while they passed.
Her voice broke in the middle of the next word.
“—anything.”
The touch withdrew. The numbness stayed. She reached back with a shaking hand and found only her own skin, her own hair, damp with sweat.
The pendant jerked again.
She hadn’t moved her arm. The stone dragged her wrist towards the dark slit between the stones with a will that didn’t belong to her. The chain bit into the back of her neck.
“No.”
Aurora dug her heels into the springy grass. Muscles bunched in her forearm. She held the stone against her chest with both hands, arms a rigid bar.
The cut in the air bulged.
Edges bowed outwards, like a membrane pressed from the other side. Space buckled. The air around it rippled, bending the line of the far stones.
From deep inside that dark, something whispered in a voice that carried three layers at once: a child’s sing-song, a deeper echo , and under both a dry rustling, like pages turned in a book no one had opened in decades.
“Aurora Carter. Come through.”