AI The gate to Richmond Park was a black iron skeleton against a bruised twilight sky. Aurora pushed through, the latch groaning in protest. Beyond the manicured entrance, the park dissolved into a wilderness of shadow and suggestion. A chill wind, smelling of damp earth and distant rain, hunted through the bracken, whispering against her jacket. She pulled the collar tighter around her neck and walked on, her boots making soft thuds on the packed-dirt path.
Deeper in, London’s perpetual hum faded to nothing, swallowed by the press of ancient trees. The moon, a sliver of bone-white, did little to pierce the dense canopy. She navigated by memory, her steps sure even as the darkness thickened. Soon, the path vanished entirely, and she was pushing through knee-high ferns, the fronds cold and wet against her jeans.
She found them just where she remembered: a circle of immense, gnarled oaks that predated the city itself. They were the sentinels, the guardians of the threshold. Between them, the air shimmered , a faint distortion like heat-haze on a summer road. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, her hand rising to the small, crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. Then she took a breath and stepped through.
The change was immediate. The wind died. A profound , absolute silence descended, so complete it felt like a pressure against her eardrums. Here, in the Grove, the moonlight was brighter, pouring down like a liquid, silvering the petals of wildflowers that bloomed in impossible defiance of the season. Foxgloves and bluebells and campion crowded together in a riotous, silent display. The air was still and cold and carried the sweet, cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine.
It was beautiful. It was wrong.
The Grove was never this quiet. There should have been the rustle of unseen creatures, the hum of insects, the faint, otherworldly music that always bled through from the other side. This was the quiet of a held breath. The quiet of a tomb.
Aurora scanned the clearing, her gaze sweeping from one colossal standing stone to the next. The bark of the oaks was a filigree of shadow and pale light, their branches a tangled latticework against the star-dusted sky. Nothing moved. She walked towards the centre of the grove, her footsteps unnaturally loud on the springy turf. The Heartstone Pendant, tucked beneath her shirt, lay inert against her skin, offering no warmth , no pulse of recognition. That, too, was wrong.
A twig snapped behind her.
She spun around, her body tensed. The sound was sharp, definitive. An intrusion into the suffocating stillness. She waited, listening, her eyes straining to pierce the shadows pooling at the base of the oak circle. Nothing. A fox, maybe. A badger. She let out a slow breath, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. It was just the unsettling quiet, putting her on edge.
She turned back towards the centre of the clearing. And then she heard it.
A whisper , so faint it was more a feeling than a sound, a vibration at the very edge of her hearing. It slithered through the air from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was a formless, sibilant thing, and woven within it, she almost heard a name. *Laila *. The sound was stretched thin, distorted, as if spoken from a great distance down a long, dark tunnel. She shook her head, trying to clear it. No one had called her that in years.
“Who’s there?” Her voice came out a croak, flimsy and useless in the vast silence that followed.
The only answer was the thrumming in her own blood. She began a slow, deliberate circle of the clearing. Her eyes darted from shadow to shadow, searching for a shape, a hint of movement. A gust of wind, appearing from nowhere in the windless grove, stirred the heads of the foxgloves. Their bell-shaped flowers swayed in a frantic, silent dance . But the air on her skin remained perfectly still. Her breath hitched.
At the edge of her vision, a shadow detached itself from the base of an oak and melted into the deeper darkness between the trees.
Aurora’s head snapped towards the movement. There was nothing. Just the deep, impenetrable blackness of the woods that bordered the Grove. Her mind was playing tricks on her. It had to be. The strange temporality of this place, the unnatural quiet. It was getting to her.
She reached into her pocket for her phone, for the comfort of its mundane, artificial light. Her fingers closed around the cool metal and glass. She pressed the side button. Nothing. She pressed it again, harder. The screen remained blank, a dead black mirror.
A new sound joined the night. A soft, dragging scrape.
It was rhythmic , heavy. The sound of a water-logged sack of grain being pulled over wet leaves and stone. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. Pause. It came from the direction the shadow had gone, from the deep darkness between the oaks. Every instinct screamed at her to run, to bolt back through the shimmering threshold into the familiar night of the park. But her feet were roots, anchored to the spot.
The Crimson Heartstone against her chest, her only guide in places like this, turned cold. Not a gentle coolness, but a biting, glacial chill that seeped through her shirt and into her skin, a dead weight on a silver chain. It had never done that before. It pulsed with warmth near portals to Hel, a beacon . This was its opposite. A warning. An omen of something utterly alien.
The scraping stopped.
The silence that rushed back in was worse than the sound it replaced. It was a conscious, listening silence . The Grove was no longer empty. It was occupied. A presence filled the space, ancient and vast, its attention fixed solely on her. She could feel its gaze like a physical weight , a pressure on her skull, a cold spider-trail down her spine .
Slowly, deliberately, she forced her head to turn. She scanned the ring of oaks, one by one, her heart hammering a brutal rhythm against her bones. Her eyes settled on the space between two of the largest trees. The darkness there was absolute, a wound in the night, a patch of shadow so profound it seemed to drink the moonlight around it. It was from there that the sound had come. It was from there that she felt the stare.
A tune began to hum from that perfect blackness.
It was a simple, gentle melody. A lullaby. Her blood went to ice. She knew the song. A Welsh lullaby, *Suo Gân *, that her mother used to sing to her when she was a child, a melody of comfort and safety, of warm beds and a nightlight glowing in the hall.
But this rendition was a perversion. The notes were correct, but the pitch was too low, a guttural, resonant hum that vibrated in her bones. Beneath the melody, a discordant undertone soured the air, a grating frequency that set her teeth on edge. It was a song of home sung by something that had never known one.
Aurora took a step back, her boot catching on a root. She stumbled, catching her balance on the damp earth. Her eyes remained locked on that void between the trees. The humming continued, unwavering , a dreadful, intimate invitation into the dark. It knew her. And it was waiting .