AI Aurora’s boot scraped against the nearest oak standing stone and sent a dry shiver through the ground.
“Brilliant,” she muttered, and steadied herself with a palm on the rough, ancient surface.
The silver chain of the Heartstone Pendant tugged against her throat as the gem warmed, a slow pulse that matched her heartbeat for three beats, then didn’t. It fell out of rhythm, like a clock that refused to agree on the hour.
She lifted her hand from the stone. Grit clung to her skin, and under it a fine slickness, like sap. The scent hit after, sweet and green and wrong, as if someone had boiled wildflowers down to syrup and left it to rot in a closed jar.
The boundary waited. The old oak stones formed a broken ring around a clearing that the rest of Richmond Park pretended not to see. Aurora had walked past it before with a delivery bag on her back, a thermal pouch full of dumplings and soup, thinking it was nothing more than a private patch of trees. She had even made a joke to Eva once, something about druids and middle-class dog walkers.
Tonight, nobody walked dogs. Nobody ran. Nobody lingered.
Her phone had shown signal at the park gate. It showed nothing now. The screen stayed lit for an extra second when she locked it, as if it wanted her to keep looking.
Aurora slipped it into her pocket and checked the small crescent scar on her left wrist, the old one, the childhood accident, a pale shape that never tanned. The skin around it prickled, the same way it had done in the dentist’s chair when she’d gripped the armrest too hard.
She had come for a reason. Not curiosity. Not a dare. Not some late-night fantasy of London turning magical if you stared at it long enough.
The Heartstone had started pulsing on her shift, halfway through a run of deliveries from Golden Empress, wedged between a greasy paper bag and her ribs. At first she thought the chain had snagged and it was just friction. Then it warmed through fabric, through skin, and stayed warm. When she glanced down, the crimson gemstone held a faint inner glow, a glow that didn’t flicker with the streetlights.
And warmth near a Hel portal, that was what the note had said.
She hadn’t liked the note. She hadn’t liked that it arrived with the pendant in the first place, no return address, no name, just a clean strip of paper in careful black ink, as if someone had practised the letters until they lost all personality.
When near a Hel portal, it warms. Don’t let it choose for you.
That last line had sat in her pocket like a live coal all day. Don’t let it choose for you. As if it had a will. As if she didn’t.
Aurora drew in a breath. The air tasted different inside the ring, sharper, like bruised leaves. She stepped over the invisible line between stones.
Her foot landed on grass that felt too soft, the ground giving like a mattress. The wildflowers looked painted at first glance, bright colours that didn’t belong in any season she knew, and they turned their heads in unison as she moved, not towards her face, but towards her throat .
The Heartstone grew warmer.
“All right,” she said, quiet but firm, as if speaking to an aggressive dog . “No games.”
The clearing stayed silent.
Not peaceful silence . Not the sort that settled on a church after the last hymn. This silence held itself taut, like a wire ready to sing if someone plucked it.
Aurora took three steps deeper. The wildflowers brushed her jeans, their petals cool as damp paper. She kept her arms close to her sides to avoid snagging on anything, and because the open space around her felt staged, like a room that waited for an audience.
Behind her, beyond the stones, Richmond Park existed. She could picture it without looking, the paths, the fence, the city pressing at the edges. She turned her head anyway.
The stones stood where they should. The trees beyond them formed a wall of dark trunks.
But the gap between the stones did not show the path she had come from. It showed more trees. More flowers. Another ring of stone in the distance, as if the grove had copied itself.
Aurora’s stomach tightened. She didn’t let her feet move back. She hated the instinct to retreat. It felt like admitting the grove had teeth.
“Fine,” she said. “Forward, then.”
She walked. The pendant warmed in steady pulses. Each time it surged, the inner glow in the gem thickened, like blood filling a glass.
At the edge of her vision something shifted, low to the ground. She snapped her gaze towards it.
A rabbit, she told herself. A fox. A cat. A trick of darkness. She had lived above Silas’ bar long enough to know what darkness did to you after a long shift, how it made bins into crouching men and lampposts into hanging bodies.
Nothing sat there. Only flowers, their stems pressed down as if something had crawled through them.
Aurora slowed. Her shoes made no sound on the grass, and that bothered her more than it should have. Even in a park, even on damp ground, there should have been something, a scuff, a crunch. The absence made her feel like she floated.
She focused on what she could control. Breathe. Count steps. Check landmarks.
The grove had no landmarks. The stones behind her had blurred into the trees. She turned in a slow circle, keeping her shoulders loose. No breeze stirred the flowers. The air sat heavy and still, and yet she smelled movement, that green-sweet rot shifting around her like someone carrying a bouquet past her nose.
A sound came from far away, light as a coin dropped into a well.
Tick.
Aurora froze.
It came again.
Tick. Tick.
Not a watch. Not a clock. Too slow, too deliberate. Like someone tapping a fingernail against stone and waiting for her to notice.
She followed it, step by careful step. The grove thickened as she walked, the flowers rising higher, reaching her knees, then her thighs. Their colours deepened, reds and blues and whites that looked too clean, too saturated, like they had never known dirt.
The Heartstone pulled warmer, and the chain bit into the back of her neck.
She lifted it. The pendant lay in her palm, small, deep crimson, glowing from within. It warmed her skin as if it had been held near a radiator.
“Where are you?” Aurora asked it.
The tick answered, closer now.
She moved towards the sound. The darkness between tree trunks looked layered, not just shadow but depth, like the space held a second room behind it .
Her foot caught on something hard. She stumbled, caught herself, and looked down.
A ring of stones sat half-buried under flowers. Not the big oak standing stones at the boundary, but smaller ones, knee-high, set in a circle . Their surfaces held carved marks, faint grooves that spiralled in patterns that made her eyes want to slide away.
The tick came from inside the ring.
Aurora crouched at the edge. The ground inside the circle looked different, the grass thinner, the soil darker. Not mud, not earth, something like ash ground fine . The smell here shifted too, the sweet rot losing its edge, replaced by something cold and mineral, like iron left in rainwater.
She extended her hand over the centre of the ring.
The Heartstone flared hot. Not a gentle warmth now, but a burn that made her jerk her hand back. The gem’s glow thickened, and for an instant, something moved inside it, a thread of darker red that coiled like a worm.
Aurora stood fast, teeth clenched, and forced her breathing steady.
“Hel portal,” she said, and the words sounded wrong in this place, too blunt, too human .
The tick stopped.
Silence poured in, heavy enough to press on her ears. She could hear her own blood, a soft roar, and beneath it a second sound, faint, distant, the hush-hush of something sliding over stone.
Something moved behind her.
Not a rustle. Not a footstep. A shift of weight , as if the grove itself leaned in to see her.
Aurora didn’t turn. She held the pendant tight in her palm until the chain cut a thin line into her fingers.
“Show yourself,” she said.
Her voice carried, then dropped dead, as if the air swallowed it.
A whisper brushed her ear, close enough that she felt it as much as she heard it.
“Laila.”
Aurora turned, fast.
No one stood there. Trees, flowers, darkness between trunks.
The whisper came again, this time from the opposite side of the ring.
“Rory.”
Her skin tightened across her arms. That one had her name, the one only friends used, the one that sat like a hand on her shoulder. The grove had no right to it.
“You don’t get to call me that,” she said.
The flowers nearest her bent, not with wind, but as if something passed between them . A narrow path opened, stems parting with soft wet sounds.
Aurora’s mouth went dry. She did not follow the path. She stepped back from it, keeping the stone ring between herself and whatever had made it.
Her heel hit the edge of the circle. A tremor ran through the stones, tiny but real, and the carved grooves caught the pendant’s red light for a blink, then faded.
The whisper stopped. In its place came a faint sound like distant laughter, too high to be adult, too slow to be a child. It looped, repeating the same three notes, like a music box catching on a broken tooth.
Aurora swallowed. She forced herself to look down again at the centre of the ring.
The soil rippled.
Not like wind over grass. Like skin over a muscle.
She stepped away, slow, careful, as if sudden movement would invite pursuit. Her gaze flicked to the boundary stones, to any sign of the way she had come, to anything that wasn’t this circle. Trees filled every direction. Flowers leaned in, watching.
The pendant pulsed , and she felt a tug , not on the chain but on her attention, like a hand pulling her chin back towards the ring.
“Don’t let it choose for you,” she said, spitting the line out like a curse.
The laughter stopped.
A voice answered, clearer now, low and smooth, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
“Then choose.”
Aurora stiffened. She kept her face still, her expression flat, the way she had learned to do with Evan in Cardiff, when his temper rose and he watched her for flinches he could use. She refused to give the grove that satisfaction.
“Open,” she said, and hated herself for speaking into the dark like she expected it to obey.
The soil inside the ring sank by a fraction. The air above it distorted, as if someone held a sheet of glass at an angle. The mineral smell sharpened, and beneath it came another scent, clean and cold, like deep underground, like stone that had never seen light.
The Heartstone burned her palm. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from dropping it.
In the warped air above the circle, a shape formed, not a doorway yet, but an outline, a suggestion of edges . Darkness gathered there, thick as ink.
Aurora took another step back.
Her foot met resistance, not stone, not root, something soft but firm .
A hand closed around her ankle.
She looked down and saw fingers, pale as candlewax, emerging from the flowers. Too long. Too many knuckles. The nails looked like polished bone .
Aurora yanked her leg up. The grip tightened. The hand pulled, and her balance tipped.
She slammed her free foot down on the wrist of the thing holding her, hard.
The hand didn’t flinch. It flexed, as if testing her weight .
Another hand broke through the flowers at her other side, reaching for her left wrist.
The scar there tingled, then burned, as if the old injury woke and remembered pain.
Aurora snapped her arm back, but the fingers brushed her skin, and cold spread up her veins in a fast line.
The voice returned, closer now, and it sounded amused.
“Malphora.”
The name hit like a slap, intimate and filthy, a name she had never given anyone.
Aurora’s grip on the Heartstone tightened until her knuckles whitened. The gem flared, crimson light spilling across the stone ring, and the warped air above it tore open with a sound like cloth ripping.
Darkness yawned wide.
And something on the other side inhaled.