AI The damp chill of the Richmond Park night vanished the moment Aurora stepped between the two massive, scarred oaks. These were not ordinary trees; they stood like petrified sentinels , ancient standing stones carved from wood rather than rock, marking a boundary most of London never saw. Behind her, the distant drone of the traffic was pinched off mid-roar, replaced by an absolute, suffocating stillness.
Rory paused. She brushed a damp lock of straight, shoulder-length black hair from her face and took a slow breath. The air here tasted wrong. It lacked the smog and wet asphalt tang of the city. Instead, it was thick with the cloying, oversweet perfume of blooming wildflowers. She looked down. Even in the gloom, she could see them carpeting the forest floor, a vibrant sea of petals thriving in the dead of near-winter. The grove.
She had not wanted to come here. After finishing her final delivery for the Golden Empress, she had planned to retreat to her flat above Silas' bar, lock the door, and sleep. But the pendant had not allowed it.
Beneath the collar of her jacket, resting against her collarbone, the Dymas artifact burned.
Rory reached up, her fingers grazing the silver chain before settling on the thumbnail-sized stone. The gemstone was usually a deep crimson, possessing a faint inner glow that she had grown accustomed to. Tonight, however, it pulsed with a feverish, rhythmic heat. It felt like a secondary heartbeat pressed against her skin. This kind of heat only meant one thing. A Hel portal.
She released the stone and rubbed the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, an old childhood accident acting up, a nervous twitch she had never managed to unlearn. Logic dictated she turn around, step back between the oak standing stones, and retrieve her delivery moped. Retreat was the smart play.
Yet her intellect, the same out-of-the-box thinking that once made her a formidable Pre-Law student back in Cardiff, nagged at her. If a Hel portal was opening here, in a pocket dimension squeezed between Earth and the Fae realm, it threatened the boundary. It threatened her sanctuary . She needed to know exactly where the tear was, just enough to report it. Just a quick look.
Rory stepped deeper into the clearing.
The wildflowers squelched softly beneath her boots. It was the only sound. Too quiet, she realized. The Fae Grove was isolated , operating on its own twisted mechanics of time. An hour spent wandering these oaks could equate to minutes back in the city, or it could rob her of days. Usually, this place hummed with a strange, feral energy, insects, the rustle of unseen wildlife. Tonight, the silence was heavy, absolute, and unnatural. It felt less like peace and more like a held breath.
The wrongness did not announce itself with a jump or a scream. It seeped into the grove like cold water rising in a locked room.
Rory stopped walking. Her bright blue eyes darted across the tree line. The shadows between the broad oak trunks seemed impossibly dense, pooling like spilled ink. She told herself to breathe. She was cool-headed. She had survived worse than bad lighting. She had survived Evan, his explosive tempers, his suffocating control. She knew how to read the tension in a room before violence erupted. The air in the grove felt exactly like the hallway of her old flat right before a door splintered open.
A sound broke the quiet.
It was wet and heavy, coming from the far side of the clearing.
Not a twig snapping. Not the light, evasive rustle of a badger or a fox. It sounded like something dragging a massive, sodden weight across the bed of wildflowers. Slither. Pause. Squelch.
Rory froze. The heat from her pendant spiked, biting into her skin.
She lowered her center of gravity, dropping into a half-crouch beside a sprawling blackberry bush. The thorns caught the sleeve of her jacket, but she remained perfectly still. Her mind raced , processing variables . Distance was roughly thirty yards. Visibility was extremely poor. The only ambient light was the weak, silvery glow of a moon that seemed pinned to the sky, frozen by the grove's bizarre time dilation .
Slither. Pause. Squelch.
It was moving along the perimeter, pacing the boundary line of the ancient oaks.
Rory squinted into the dark. At the edge of her vision, the inky shadows shifted. A shape detached itself from the gloom of the trees. It was tall, too tall to be anything born of the human world, but its proportions were entirely wrong. It did not walk. It leaned, and then pulled itself forward, dragging its lower half.
Her breath hitched in her throat. She clamped her lips shut, forcing herself to inhale slowly through her nose. Panic would get her killed. She needed a distraction, an exit vector.
The thing paused.
The utter stillness returned, but this time it was pregnant with malice. Rory felt a sudden, horrifying pressure against her eardrums, a physical weight pushing against her skull. The temperature in the grove plummeted. The wildflowers around her boots began to wither, their brightly colored petals curling inward, turning black, and crumbling into ash.
It was feeding on the grove's life force. The Hel portal had not just opened, it had let a parasite through.
The creature's head snapped in her direction.
It had no eyes that she could see from this distance, just a pale, smooth expanse of matter where a face should be. But Rory felt its gaze. It was a physical sensation, like a cold needle scraping down the alignment of her spine. It knew she was there.
The creature did not charge. It did not roar. It simply began to move toward her, slowly , deliberately . Slither. Pause. Squelch.
The dragging sound grew louder. The sickly sweet smell of the wildflowers twisted into something foul, copper and rotting meat.
Rory pressed her back against the thick, gnarled wood of the nearest oak. Her thumb traced the crescent scar on her wrist over and over. Think, she commanded herself. She was Rory Carter. She did not freeze. She solved problems.
The oak standing stones. They were the threshold. The creature was heavy, sluggish, and it seemed anchored to the decay it was spreading . She just had to outpace it to the stones. But if she ran, it might drop the slow, dragging facade . She had seen predators do this before. They ambushed. They waited for the prey to break cover.
The pendant rested against her chest, a burning coal.
Rory looked down at the silver chain. The crimson stone was vibrating , casting a faint red halo against the fabric of her coat. The artifact reacted to Hel energy. What if it did more than detect it?
The squelching sound was ten yards away now. The smell of rot was so intense her eyes watered. She could hear a low, wet whistling under the sound of the drag, the creature breathing.
She gripped the Heartstone in her right fist. The metal of the setting seared her palm, but she welcomed the pain. It grounded her, burning away the paralyzing terror.
Seven yards. Six.
The shadow loomed over her hiding spot, blocking out the stalled moon. The air grew so cold her exhales plumed into thick white fog. A long, multi-jointed appendage reached over the withered blackberry bush. It was the color of drowned flesh, ending in jagged, obsidian-like spurs.
Rory ripped the pendant from beneath her shirt, holding it out at arm's length, the silver chain wrapping tight around her knuckles.
The faint inner glow flared. As the creature's spur descended toward her face, the artifact erupted in a blinding, crimson brilliance. The light did not merely illuminate, it struck the creature like a physical blow. The air cracked like a whip.
The thing recoiled, emitting a sound that was less a scream and more the grating screech of metal shearing apart. It thrashed backward, its immense weight crushing the dead flowers into the mud as the deep red light washed over its pale, faceless mass, burning it into the shadows.
Rory did not wait to see if it would recover.
She spun on her heel and sprinted. She abandoned stealth entirely, her boots slamming against the earth as she bolted toward the dual silhouette of the boundary oaks. The grove's warped geometry tried to disorient her. The trees seemed to stretch and thin, the space between them widening, trying to keep her trapped in the dilated timeframe.
Behind her, the shrieking stopped, replaced immediately by the furious, wet slapping of something massive moving at incredible speed. The dragging was gone . It was running .
Rory kept her eyes locked on the space between the standing stones. Her lungs burned. Her legs felt heavy, pulling against the strange gravity of the pocket dimension. The copper stench of the thing washed over her back. It was right behind her. She could feel the ambient cold of its proximity biting through her jacket, freezing the sweat on her neck.
Ten feet to the boundary. Five feet.
She threw herself forward just as a jarring, physical cold snatched at the heel of her boot.
She tumbled between the massive trunks of the standing stones, hitting the hard, damp pavement of Richmond Park. The momentum sent her rolling across the wet grass, scraping her palms and violently knocking the wind from her lungs.
She lay there for a second, gasping, staring up at the cloudy London sky. The distant, continuous drone of the traffic filled her ears like a symphony . The damp chill of the city felt like salvation .
Rory scrambled backward, pushing herself up against the wet metal of her parked moped. She stared breathlessly at the gap between the two ancient oaks.
Nothing but dark, quiet woods. The flowers were gone . The smell of rot was gone . Time had resumed its normal, relentless march.
She looked down at her right hand. Her palm was blistered , and the Heartstone pendant lay quiet against her skin, returned to its dull, deep crimson. It was cool to the touch.
Rory swallowed hard, her bright blue eyes fixed on the shadows between the trees. She knew the creature had not vanished. It was still in there, pacing the edge of the realm, waiting in the silence . She gripped the cold silver chain, swung her leg over the moped, and started the engine. For tonight, she had survived, but she knew the barrier separating her world from the nightmare was nothing more than a few steps through the trees.