AI The pendant burned against her sternum like a small, honest coal, warm enough to make Aurora swallow and quicken her step between the oak standing stones. She kept her hand on it, fingers hooked around the thin silver chain, and let the pull of the warmth guide her deeper into the clearing.
She had not come for thrills. She had come because the Heartstone had pulsed at the kitchen window three nights ago, sharp as a cough, and she had felt Evan's absence like a hollowed tooth. Whoever had slipped the pendant into her palm outside Silas' bar had left no note, only the insistence that certain doors opened when they pleased. The pendant pulsed faintly when it registered a Hel portal. Tonight it pulsed like a living thing chasing its pulse .
Wildflowers leaned into her legs as she passed, colours that should not have held in the cool dark, brushing silk against her calves. The petals smelled like cloves and old paper, a scent that bit at memory. Aurora paused, listening. The Grove made sounds that did not belong to any one creature, a choir of unclaimed noises, and she catalogued them by habit.
Leaves rubbing, too slow for wind, like someone counting the minutes on their knuckles.
A skitter beyond the stones, rhythm like a shoe on gravel but no echo .
A high thin laugh, then the muffled thump of something heavy, rolling without weight .
She forced her shoulders down. The Grove took at least three forms of wrongness: the obvious, the sly, and the cruel. The obvious — eyes where no eyes should be — would have made her run months ago. The sly dug at a seam in her resolve . The cruel waited for that seam to open.
"Hello," she said, voice small but steady. She let the word hang, watched it move the air between the trees. It returned nothing, then returned everything at once, a muted echo made by different mouths.
A child's voice, a woman humming from a distance, a man clearing his throat. Each voice spoke her name in the same breath.
"Aurora." The voices did not match, they overlapped like a recording played on too many machines. Each version coloured the name differently, as if the grove had auditioned itself.
Her fingers tightened on the pendant. The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled under the fabric of her sleeve, a sharp-neat memory of a kitchen knife and a careless laugh. She drew her sleeve back and traced it, a tiny moon beneath the skin. The pendant thrummed warmer. She had learned to trust small things.
Time here folded thin, a rule she kept like a talisman. An hour inside could be minutes outside, days could be the length of a cigarette. She moved forward with the rules in mind, measuring steps like a surveyor. The standing stones receded behind her, carved oak faces smoothed by weather and touch, arranged in a ring that tasted like an invitation and a warning .
Something moved at the edge of her vision. Not a thing with limbs and breath, at first only a shadow that did not fall with the rest. It shifted like somebody passing behind a curtain. She blinked and the shadow was gone , but the smell remained, metallic and green, as if something wet had been tucked into earth.
Aurora scanned the clearing. The grass held the moonless kind of blackness that absorbed light and hope. Flowers clustered around a pool she had not seen at the edge of the stones, a bad-placed mirror in the middle of carpet. The pendant thrummed louder still, a heartbeat under her tongue. When she lowered herself to the water's brink, the surface offered up no reflection, only a smear like oil.
She knelt. Her fingers hovered above the pool, the silver chain biting into her palm. The Heartstone pulsed like a tiny heart. A low vibration ran up her arm, first warmth , then cool, then warmth again. The motion was hypnotic. She wanted to laugh at herself and the smallness of a pebble pulling at her like a lover.
"Aurora Carter." The voice this time was closer, shaped like her own name by someone who knew its weight . It sounded friendly and intimate, a dangerous pair to keep together.
"Who are you?" she asked.
You breathe, and the leaves do the same. The answer had no shape until the water made one.
The surface stuttered, and for a blink nothing moved. Then an image rose through the water, an outline like someone made the shape of a person out of shadow and wet glass. It matched her roughly, the slope of her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the way she held herself when she expected trouble. It smiled without warmth .
"You found it," the shape said, voice stitched from the other voices . "You found your way through the stones."
Aurora's hands left the pendant, reached for her phone out of reflex, but the screen stayed dark when she tapped it. The Grove cared nothing for batteries. The Heartstone pulsed so hard now she could feel it against her collarbone. A tiny red light seemed to flicker under its surface.
She kept her voice level, measured . Panic would be loud here. "This isn't a place for games."
"Games?" The silhouette tilted its head, a motion too smooth to be human. "You played a long time ago."
The smear of glass answered her with an image, not a memory but a suggestion . A younger Aurora, laughter leaked from her mouth, a face framed by stray hair. A man in the edge of the shot, arms reaching out like vines. The pendant flared hot enough to sting. She knew then the Grove did not respect the fences of story. It enjoyed edits.
"A name," she said. "Who reached me? Who gave me the pendant?"
Silence, then the rustle of the wildflowers, as if they shifted to listen. The silhouette knocked at the surface of the pool with something like curiosity and the water answered with a whisper .
"A benefactor leaves coins," it said. "A benefactor leaves bones. But you took the thing that hums."
"You call gifts a favour," she said. "Why me?"
Because you step through, the Grove replied without words, a thought folded into the cool of the stones. You break the circle. You remember names.
Aurora brushed soil from her palm, the dirt feeling like ash. The Heartstone's pulse stuttered. She had expected riddles. She had not expected the Grove to press questions like a surgeon, blade precise, merciless.
Movement at the edge of the clearing caught her eye, a rhythm irregular, two figures passing through the trees then doubling back, always staying just out of the circle's edge. The Grove shifted its attention, a predatory narrowing, and with its attention came the subtle tightening in her gut. She was not alone in the way that mattered.
Her breath fogged in the clearing with each small exhale, a line she watched as if it might make a map. The silhouette watched her move, mirrored and slow. It stepped from the water in pieces, not whole like you would expect, instead a knee, then an arm, disjointed as a marionette. When it finally took shape, the figure was almost Aurora, wrong like a picture flipped in a mirror.
"You shouldn't bring your past here," it said.
"I came for answers," she said. "If you know what happened to Evan, tell me."
The mirror paused, an expression she recognised nowhere. The voice shifted, slurring names together, a chorus lifting and falling. "Names open doors. Names feed. Names close over mouths. He left the clay warm."
Heat crawled up her spine. Evan was a dark place in her life, a bruise that had not healed. She had left him. He had liked power and small violences. If Evan had crossed a threshold, it would explain the ache the pendant had matched in her chest.
"Did he go through here?" Her words were nailed down, precise.
The silhouette's smile widened, ridiculous and far too patient. "Many people think Hel is a doorway. A hole. A thing you walk through. It is more honest to call it a reflection. You look into it, and it looks back, and sometimes it takes a look of someone you know and keeps them as a souvenir."
Aurora's jaw worked. She pictured Evan, hands angry, his promises like small knives. She pictured the last night, the final scream swallowed by the flat plaster of their flat. She pictured the pendant pulsing at the kitchen window and a map of routes in her head, the Grove as a node.
"Souvenirs aren't people," she said.
"Souvenirs learn to speak." The figure mimicked her, elastic and wrong. "Souvenirs keep telling themselves they are what they once were. The world is full of things pretending."
A twig snapped behind her, deliberate. She turned and caught a glimpse of movement, a patch of dark where form should have been. She did not see faces, only the suggestion of shoulders and the glint of teeth like light in wet fur. The pendant screamed coldly against her skin, a reversed heart.
"You're not alone," something whispered by her ear, voice thin as linen.
Aurora spun. The ring of stones had rearranged, the path she had taken now folded into itself. The standing stones that marked the boundary had small notches carved into them that had not been there earlier, runic scratches that shuddered like teeth. Her exit had closed like an eyelid.
She swallowed hard. The Grove tightened, delighted. The wildflowers bowed toward the silence at the centre, as if they were listening for applause. The silhouette stepped forward, and the water at its feet sang.
"You should have left at the stones," it said, each word a calm blade. "You should have left when you heard your own name in a child's laugh."
"I left him," Aurora said, her voice thin with a new, determined edge. "If you have him, I'll take him back."
A laugh that was both pity and hunger dropped into the clearing. The silhouette raised a hand, and where its fingers brushed the surface of the pool the water deepened, black and accepting. The air around her thickened, as if someone had poured honey into the world and then been stingy with the spoons.
"You think you take things back," the Grove murmured, soft as moth wings. "You can't put a story back into a book after it's been read."
The Heartstone pulsed faster, so rapidly her teeth clicked. It flared, a small crimson heartbeat bare against the fabric of her blouse. For a second Aurora saw not the mirror figure but a dozen faces pressed under glass, mouths moving like drowned people, each calling a name she almost knew.
Her fingers closed on the pendant without intention. The silver chain yawned taut, then snapped, not in metal but in sense , and the pendant slipped between two fingers of the silhouette's hand, which was nearly her own but not. It took the jewel as easily as someone lifting a coin from a tabletop. The sudden absence of heat left a hollow cold at Aurora's chest.
"No," she said, and the word had weight . She lunged forward, instincts old as teeth. Her fingers closed on damp willow-skin, the texture wrong and living, and the silhouette laughed, a sound like wind through a grave .
Aurora felt the pull then, not of the stones but of the pool, like someone tightening a noose that was invisible until it cut. Roots, or hands, or the memory of roots, wound around her ankles. The world narrowed to the press of earth and the slick of water and the taste of iron where the pendant had been.
She did not have the chance to think of running. The Grove moved in a tide, pushing her toward the pool. She dug her nails into the grass, heard flesh tear, felt the soil pull at the skin. The silhouette held the pendant high, the red gem a steady pulse against the dark, a heartbeat she had lost and could no longer chart.
"Stay," it said, soft as a blessing, and its mouth was all teeth.
The water rose like a breath. The wildflowers bent their stalks to make a crown for the sky. The standing stones exhaled, and the clearing closed in.