AI Rory parked the scooter by the Richmond Park gate and left the helmet hanging from the handlebar like a warning sign. The air carried that damp London bite, the kind that slid through seams and sat on your skin. No traffic noise followed her in. No distant sirens. Even the city’s usual hum seemed to stop at the railings.
She checked her phone. One bar. The screen’s blue glow washed her fingers ghost-pale.
“Course,” she muttered, and slid it into her jacket pocket.
The Heartstone pendant rested against her sternum under her shirt. It had felt warm for hours, like it had sat in a pocket next to a lighter. It had pulsed on the last delivery run, right as she crossed the river, then kept on, steady as a slow heartbeat. Now, under the park’s trees, the warmth thickened, as if it pressed outwards.
Rory walked the path with her hands tucked into her jacket, head angled down, eyes up. The gravel crunched beneath her boots. Each footstep sounded too loud, like she had walked in an empty house at midnight.
She pulled the pendant free. The deep crimson gem caught what little light the night offered and returned something darker. The silver chain bit her neck where the cold metal sat against skin.
“Alright,” she breathed at it . “Show me.”
The pendant answered with a stronger throb of heat. Not painful. Insistent.
She left the main path and cut through the trees where the undergrowth thinned. Richmond Park’s normal sprawl had always held pockets of quiet, but this quiet held shape. It formed a wall around her. Her own breath bounced back too quick.
A fox barked somewhere to her left—sharp, human-like.
Rory stopped, shoulders lifted.
“Don’t start that.” Her words steamed in front of her mouth.
The fox bark came again, closer. Then it warped, stretched, as if someone had pulled the sound through a narrow gap. It ended in a thin click.
Rory held still until her pulse slowed. The pendant continued to warm, patient as a hand on the small of her back. She moved again, slower now, and kept one thumb hooked beneath the chain like she might need to yank it off.
The trees opened without warning.
The Grove sat where she expected it only because she’d stumbled into it once before, chasing a shortcut that had not existed on any map. A hidden clearing in the park, ringed by ancient oak standing stones that looked too heavy for any human to have dragged into place. Wildflowers carpeted the ground even in winter, their colours bright under the night sky, like someone had painted the earth and forgot to let it dry.
Rory stepped over the first line of flowers and felt the air change. Not colder. Not warmer. Different, like she had walked into a room where someone had blown out a candle an hour ago and the scent still hung there.
The pendant pressed heat into her palm when she cupped it.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. I’m here.”
Her voice sank into the clearing and did not return as an echo . It just… stopped. Like the Grove had taken it.
She walked the boundary, the standing stones unevenly spaced, each one an oak-dark slab with pale striations that looked like old scars . She lifted her phone again. No signal. The clock read 02:17.
“Brilliant.”
She tapped the screen, then tried Eva’s number anyway. The call failed without ringing.
Rory lowered the phone and listened.
Somewhere above, a branch creaked. That meant wind. Yet nothing brushed her cheeks. The wildflowers held still. The leaves on the surrounding trees looked cut from paper.
She glanced back at the path she’d entered through. The trees there sat too close together. A black seam. It hadn’t looked like that a moment ago.
Rory’s throat tightened. She pulled a breath in through her nose, slow, and tasted sweet rot. Like bruised apples left in a bag.
“Right. In and out.” She turned her words into a job, something deliverable. “Find what you’re meant to find, then leave. Easy.”
The pendant pulsed .
Rory walked towards the middle of the clearing. The grass shifted under her boots, damp and springy. The wildflowers brushed her laces. Their petals looked too perfect , their colours too saturated for moonlight.
A sound drifted through the Grove: a low, thin tone, like someone had run a wet finger around the rim of a glass. It held, then faded.
Rory stopped again.
“No.”
The tone came again, closer this time, and it threaded through another sound—soft, rhythmic , like bare feet on soil.
Rory turned her head. Her eyes cut left, then right. The standing stones didn’t move. The trees didn’t sway. Nothing broke the clearing’s open bowl.
“Who’s there?”
Her voice came out sharper than she planned. It disappeared into the flowers.
The footsteps stopped.
Rory’s grip tightened on the pendant until the chain pulled at her neck.
“Not funny,” she added, and hated how small it sounded.
She moved again, circling, looking for something specific without knowing what. The pendant’s heat guided her, swelling when she angled towards a slab near the far side of the ring. That stone leaned inward, as if it listened.
Rory approached it and lifted her free hand, palm hovering over the oak-dark surface. She expected roughness, grit, lichen.
The stone’s face looked smooth in patches, like it had been polished by countless hands. Faint grooves ran through it—marks that might have been writing if she stared long enough. Her eyes tried to make shapes from them and found none that held.
The glass-tone sounded again, right beside her ear.
Rory jerked away and spun.
The clearing sat empty.
Her breath turned ragged.
“Alright.” She forced the word out as if it mattered. “Alright, I’m leaving.”
She took two steps towards the seam of trees she’d entered from.
A twig snapped behind her.
Rory froze with one foot lifted, then set it down with care, slow as placing a glass on a table.
“No,” she said, voice tight . “No, no, no.”
She turned her head in increments. The sound had come from the grass near the centre, where the wildflowers thickened, and there—something shifted.
Not a body. Not a shape she could name. Just a slight ripple through the flowers, like a cat weaving between stems. The petals bobbed, then stilled.
Rory watched the spot until her eyes burned.
“Fox?” she tried, and the word felt wrong the second it left her mouth .
Nothing answered.
The pendant pulsed like a second heart.
Rory lifted it, the crimson gem glowing faint within itself now, a coal held under ash. The warmth crept along her fingers.
“Hel portal.” Her own voice came out on a breath, an old fragment she’d heard once from someone who had refused to explain further.
She forced a laugh out of her throat and didn’t recognise it.
“Sure,” she told the empty clearing. “Because my life needed that.”
She turned fully and walked again, this time straight towards the centre. If something waited there, she refused to let it herd her like prey.
The flowers brushed her boots. Their scent rose, sweeter now, thick enough to coat the back of her tongue. The air pressed at her ears.
The centre of the Grove held a shallow dip, a bowl in the earth. The grass there looked darker, as if it had been watered . Rory stepped into it and felt the ground give slightly under her weight , like packed soil over something hollow.
Her stomach clenched.
She crouched, fingers hovering over the grass.
“Don’t be stupid,” she muttered at herself, and still parted the blades.
The earth beneath looked normal at first glance—dark soil, small stones. Then her eyes caught a thin line, a seam running across the dirt in a curve, too clean to be a root break. Another line crossed it. Then another.
A pattern. Like a door drawn in the ground.
Rory straightened, the pendant hot enough now that she had to shift it from palm to palm. The gem’s glow strengthened. Not bright. Not enough to light the clearing. Enough to let her see her own knuckles.
A sound rose from under the soil.
Not a voice. Not words. A long exhale that didn’t belong to her. It carried through the ground and into her feet.
Rory stumbled back a step.
“Nope.”
She turned to leave and stopped.
The seam of trees had moved. The gap she’d entered through had closed like a mouth. Standing stones framed nothing but dense trunks and shadow.
Rory walked towards it anyway, boots sinking slightly into the grass.
“Open,” she told it, and hated herself for speaking to trees. She jabbed a finger between two trunks where she thought the path had been. Her fingertip met something that pushed back.
Not bark. Not wood.
A surface like stretched fabric, tight and cold. It gave beneath her finger, then returned to place.
Rory recoiled and wiped her hand on her jeans.
“Okay.” Her lips pulled back from her teeth. “Okay, that’s new.”
The pendant throbbed so hard it felt alive.
Behind her, those soft footsteps started again. Slow, deliberate, like someone walked in circles and measured the space.
Rory didn’t turn.
“You don’t get to do that,” she called into the clearing, voice shaking despite her grip on it. “You don’t get to trap me in here.”
The footsteps stopped.
Something brushed the back of her hair, light as a spiderweb.
Rory spun and backed away, heart slamming against the pendant. The crimson gem flashed brighter in her hand, and for a split second the wildflowers threw sharp shadows across the grass.
In that brief hard light, she saw a shape between two standing stones—tall, thin, and wrong in the joints, like it had borrowed a person’s outline and held it without knowing how to wear it.
The light faded back to moon-dim, and the shape vanished with it.
Rory’s mouth dried. She swallowed and tasted metal.
“Not real,” she told the dark, and the words came out flat. “That wasn’t real.”
A whisper came from the stone beside her, close enough to feel against her ear.
“Not real.”
Rory flinched so hard her shoulder hit the standing stone. The impact jarred up her arm. The stone felt warmer than it should have, like skin under a sleeve.
She pressed her palm to it and pushed away, stumbling back into the clearing. Her eyes flicked across the ring of stones, searching for movement, for edges, for anything she could name.
The whisper came again, not from one place but from everywhere at once, layered and thin.
“Not real.”
Rory’s throat tightened until breathing hurt. She yanked the chain over her head. The pendant dropped into her palm and burned like a handwarmer left too long against skin.
“Fine,” she snapped at it, at the Grove, at whatever listened. “You want this? You want me to use it? Tell me how.”
The ground beneath her boots gave another slow exhale.
Rory stared at the dip in the centre, at the faint door-lines in the soil. The pendant’s glow licked at the edges of the pattern, tracing it.
She stepped towards it and forced her voice out steady.
“Alright. We do this my way.”
She crouched again and lowered the Heartstone until it hovered inches above the seam in the earth. The warmth in her palm surged, and the soil beneath the pendant darkened, as if it absorbed light.
From the corner of her eye, the wildflowers leaned towards her, each stem bowing as if drawn by a magnet.
Rory held the pendant closer. Her wrist turned, and the crescent scar on her left wrist caught the faint glow, pale against her skin.
The seam in the ground shivered.