AI The first thing Rory noticed was the sound.
Richmond Park never went quiet, not really . There was always a far-off thrum of traffic, a fox yipping somewhere, bits of city life leaking round the edges. Out here though, under the trees and off the path, the air felt packed with muffled cotton. Her boots crushed dead leaves. That came out loud. Too loud. Each step hit her ears like she walked an empty stairwell instead of open ground.
"This is stupid."
Her breath steamed in the cold. It floated away and dissolved between the trunks. No echo . Only that thick hush and the faint chime of her keys against the Heartstone pendant.
The gem knocked her sternum as she pushed through tall fern. Warm metal rubbed bare skin under the zip of her jacket. Warm when the air bit. That had dragged her out here. That and the message.
A number with no name, three words.
Richmond. Midnight. Grove.
The pendant had flared under her shirt when she read it in the bar office upstairs. Not hot enough to burn. Enough to change her mind after the first eye-roll.
She brushed a wet branch out of her way.
"Yu-Fei's right. I am a gobshite."
Mud clung thick to the soles of her trainers. Each step grew heavier as she left the last of the park lights behind. No moon tonight. The sky looked like someone painted over it. Clouds pressed so low the oaks hunched.
She checked her phone. 00:12. Signal bars dwindled into one, then none. The tiny Wi-Fi icon blinked once, then vanished.
"Lovely."
Her voice slid off the bark around her and died.
She pocketed the phone and let her fingers rest against the pendant under her jacket. The stone pulsed against her skin, tiny measured thuds that didn't match her heart.
Closer.
Her imagination picked out the whisper in those beats, the pull. The same as earlier, in the flat above Silas' bar when it warmed by itself while she folded takeaway menus into piles. Same as the night she first received it in the post, no return address, just her name and the single line: Keep it on.
She pushed between two hawthorn shrubs. Thorns snagged the hem of her jeans and scratched her ankle. Damp soil smell rose up, rich and old. There, ahead—between a pair of ancient oaks—space opened.
The Grove showed itself the way Eva once described it after a drunken wander, before Rory cut her off with a laugh and a "Sure, and next you'll tell me the foxes pay rent."
Standing stones waited in the clearing. Not carved granite, not henge stuff. Living oaks, twisted into pillars, trunks dark and smooth where old bark had fused. Their branches arced overhead and laced together so tight no sky got through. The ring of them wrapped a circle of grass and flowers.
Wildflowers in February.
Rory stopped dead at the tree line.
"Okay," her breath hitched once , "that's not weird at all."
The blossoms crowded the clearing; bluebells, foxgloves, clover, buttercups, all sharing the same few square metres as if someone had poured a seed packet out at once. Their colours held too bright for night. Each petal, every leaf, sharp in her vision despite the gloom .
The air above them shimmered faintly, like heat over tarmac. No wind moved. Grass blades didn't bend. Leaves notched against each other and froze. The only thing that moved sat against her skin.
The Heartstone burned.
She tugged the pendant out. The little crimson gem glowed through her fingers. Light swam inside it with slow turns, as if something under the surface stretched after a long sleep.
"Hel portal, is it?"
The words scraped her throat on the way out. Yu-Fei, with her matter-of-fact talk of Hel like it was another borough, would swagger straight into that circle with a smirk and a spare talisman between her teeth. Rory sank her tongue against the roof of her mouth and looked at the oaks again.
Between two trunks on the far side, in the deepest part of the ring, darkness gathered. Not simple shadow. A hollow, a pocket, a patch where her eyes slid and skated away.
The grass under her boots itched to pull her and that pendant closer.
"You got me here," she muttered toward the stone , "now what?"
The pendant pulsed in answer. Slight. Insistent.
She stepped forward.
Her trainer hit the line where wildflowers met leaf-litter. The moment she crossed, sound dropped out.
Not some big cinematic cut. Just a strange absence. The city hum behind the park dissolved. The rustle of branches died. Her own breathing dulled like cotton wrapped her head.
She swallowed. The click of her throat came out flat.
"Anyone here?"
Her voice failed to carry. It pushed a short distance then folded, like someone cupped a hand over her mouth. The trees ringed her with the same blank attention they gave everything.
Something moved by her ankle.
A tuft of white clover brushed her skin. Only that clump bent. Every other stem stayed stiff. The petals nudged, then turned, their little heads swivelling towards her trainer.
Rory lifted her foot, heart jolting.
The clover strained after her, stretched as if it meant to climb past the laces. Its stems extended without growing, skin thinning, pale veins showing.
Her hand closed round the pendant.
"Stop."
The command cut clear, clipped, her courtroom father's voice for a heartbeat. The clover froze. Veins shivered. Then all at once they snapped back to ordinary plant length. The patch sagged and drooped like overwatered leaves.
She exhaled through her nose.
"Right. Plants flirting. Tick that off the list."
Her attempt at wry came out hoarse.
She edged further in. Blossoms brushed her jeans. Most stayed normal—if glowing a touch too bright—but every now and then a head tipped no matter which way she moved, always angling toward her wrist. Toward the faint white crescent scar there, barely visible in this light.
A stray childhood swing-set chain had done that. Broken skin, her mother’s tight face, her dad’s hands fumbling a plaster. She hadn't thought about it in years.
"Don't think about them," she told the circle. "They're asleep in Cardiff, and I'm in a weed fairy ring in bloody Richmond."
The pendant flared, a sharp spike of heat.
She looked up.
The hollow between the far oaks deepened, the dark there rich as ink. Edges of it quivered . Something from inside pushed against it, not visible, only pressure. Like a balloon skin stretched near bursting.
Her chest matched it, beat for beat.
Runner's instinct told her to back out. Turn round. Follow her own boot prints through the mud and leave this for Yu-Fei or Silas or anyone else mad enough to grab hold of the edges of worlds.
Instead she checked her phone again. The screen lit her face in pale blue.
00:12.
Hadn't it already read that outside?
Battery at 64%. Same as in the bar.
"You messing with my signal, is that it?"
She waved the phone toward the hollow. The screen flickered . Signal bars ghosted in, then twisted into symbols she didn't recognise. Not letters. Weirder. Curves and hooks that made her eyes water.
"Yeah, we're done with that."
She locked the screen and stuffed it away.
Behind her, in the trees beyond the ring, a twig snapped.
Rory didn't move.
It might have been a fox. A deer. Some drunk teenager with worse judgement than hers. Normal things.
"Richmond closes at night, genius," she whispered. "You're the idiot in the locked park."
Another crack. Heavier. Closer. Footstep weight .
The pendant went near blistering.
A breath lifted the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Don't," she told it. "No horror film nonsense. I'm not turning round and doing the whole—"
"Rory."
Her own voice spoke behind her.
It carried the exact South Welsh edge she heard on recordings. The same pitch, same small drop she made when she lied.
This isn't safe.
Her shoulders pulled tight. Fingernails dug into the stone in her fist.
"Brilliant."
She forced her boots to stay planted.
"If you're me, you know I'm not playing. You want something, you walk round where I can see you."
Leaves whispered. Grass hissed.
Something approached, but the sound moved wrong. It didn't crunch through undergrowth. It slid, like fabric dragged over stone. It stopped at the boundary where wildflowers met mud.
"Rory."
Her own voice again, a fraction thinner, like heard through a wall.
"You left your keys on the bar."
Her free hand patted her jacket pocket without her asking it to. Metal pressed her fingers.
"No, I didn't."
"You left Eva too."
Her lungs seized. For a moment, the heart in her chest lost the beat and picked up the rhythm of the gem.
She turned.
The trees outside the ring waited, trunks black, bark slick in the half-light. Gaps between them opened onto more black, layers behind layers. Nothing stood there.
Yet the wrongness hung heavy.
Rory swallowed.
"Use a better angle," she told the dark. "That one's cheap."
In answer, the trunk of the nearest oak shivered. Bark bulged. A knot of wood pushed outward, heavy, slow. Lines formed. An outline of a mouth. No lips. Just splitting bark that gaped where no gap ought to be.
It opened.
"You came," the tree said in her voice.
Rory's legs nearly buckled. She forced them to lock.
"Trees with opinions. Grand."
The mouth moved without creak or groan. It shaped her words with clean precision.
"You ran. Again."
"I'm walking."
"You ran from Evan. Ran from Cardiff. Ran from law school. Ran from him when he hit you in the kitchen and you pretended you slipped on the tiles."
Her fists closed. Blood left her fingers.
"Get your facts straight," she told the wooden version of her. "I didn't pretend. I told him he'd have one chance, and then I ran."
The bark-mouth twisted, as close to a smile as it could manage.
"You ran here."
A shift in the air drew her attention sideways.
On the opposite side of the ring, another oak swelled. A second knot pushed out. This one formed not her mouth but a nose . A familiar shape. Too familiar . Broad bridge. Slight angle from an old break. Her father's profile, without eyes.
"Bollocks."
Her chest burned. The pendant throbbed at the same point, like something inside tapped to be let out.
"Rory," the nose-tree spoke, but the voice this time carried Brendan Carter's courtroom weight . Measured, iron-lined, patient to breaking point. "You have responsibilities."
She stepped backwards, deeper into the flowers. Petals brushed her ankles, her shins, clung with damp and chill .
"My responsibilities are not to arboreal hallucinations."
"You took an oath," another voice murmured.
A third tree bulged. A chin crafted itself from layered knots. Jennifer Ellis' gentle diction slipped from that half-formed mouth.
"To tell the truth, Aurora."
No one used her full name any more.
Her grip tightened round the Heartstone until its edges dug hard lines into her palm. Heat bit.
"This isn't truth," Rory told the grove. "It's cheap parlor tricks pulling my file."
Windless air pressed round her ears. Breathing grew effortful.
The bark-mouth version of her answer smoothed its tone into something closer to her internal voice.
"You came because you trusted the stone."
"I came because staying put got me hurt," she snapped.
The sound bounced inside the circle and then... didn't fade. It stayed. Hung in the space to her left, her voice preserved like an echo trapped in glass.
"I came because staying put got me hurt," the air to her left repeated. Then the same words rose behind her. In front of her. Sharpened, flattened, cut up.
"I came—staying—hurt."
Fragments of her own speech circled, shards that gradually lost shape and dropped into nonsense syllables. They fluttered over the flowers and sank into the soil.
Rory's neck prickled.
"Alright," she raised her chin, eyes on the dark hollow between the two largest oaks now. "You've had your fun. You dragged me from my warm bed—"
"Flat above a bar owned by a sorcerer," murmured a tree.
"—from my warm flat, my unfortunate job, my perfectly nice plan of not dying, and for what? You want me to open your little doorway? Say so. I'm not standing here while you do amateur psych."
The hollow pulsed .
Not a metaphor. The dark thickened, then thinned, as if it breathed. Warmth rolled out in waves that didn't touch her skin but slid along something under it.
The pendant blazed against her palm. Pain shot through her hand. She hissed and almost dropped it.
A faint glow bled from its cracks, matching the swell of the darkness.
"This is between you and whatever hellmouth you're glued to, yeah? I'm just the idiot with the jewellery."
Her voice came thin now. Dry.
The grass under her feet shifted.
Blades didn't bend. They rearranged. Roots unknotted from the ground and retied themselves in spirals. The whole clearing turned into one vast coiled thing, tightening with each breath the hollow took. It wrapped round her trainers, her ankles.
She yanked one foot up. It came free, but with effort. Hairline roots popped like the snap of pulling tape.
"Don't you dare."
Flowers leaned in. Their petals brushed the crescent scar on her wrist. A dozen cool kisses. Each touch left a numb spot behind, like a limb after sleep.
The oak with her father's nose thrust new growth. Wood cracked. A full face bulged out, jawline pushing through, cheeks forming ridges.
"Truth," it repeated. "Responsibility."
Her chest stuttered.
"I didn't come here for you."
She raised the Heartstone toward the hollow.
The light inside the gem lurched . For a second, it stopped following the dark’s rhythm. It beat against her hand faster, panicked.
"Then why?"
Her own bark-mouth moved without a hint of compassion. It stared at her without eyes, an empty knot above the crack.
Rory wet her lips.
"Because someone called."
"Who?" the grove asked in a chorus of her family, herself, strangers she'd argued with in seminars, Evan's low Cardiff mutter. Voices layered until sound blurred.
She opened her mouth.
The air between her and the hollow thickened, a pane of cold glass slotted into place. Her jaw worked. No sound came. Breath fogged that invisible barrier and traced lines over it.
A shape pressed against the other side of the dark. Taller than her. Thin. No detail, only outline. Its head tilted, as if curious.
The grass tightened its coil round her calves. The pendant hammered her palm. Heat seared up her wrist toward her elbow.
Rory drew her arm back, hand clenched around the stone.