AI
The pendant burned against her collarbone.
Not the familiar low pulse Rory had grown accustomed to, that faint heartbeat rhythm she could dismiss as body heat and imagination. This seared. A thumbnail-sized coal pressed to skin, insistent and alive, dragging her attention south-west through Richmond Park's ancient treeline like a dowsing rod scenting water.
She adjusted the delivery bag slung over one shoulder, a reflex. She'd come straight from her shift at the Golden Empress, still smelling of sesame oil and Yu-Fei's house-special chilli paste. The last order of the night had taken her to a terraced house near the park's Sheen Gate entrance, and the pendant had flared the moment she'd stepped off her bike. That was forty minutes ago. She'd locked the bike to a railing and told herself she'd only walk for ten.
The standing stones appeared between the oaks like teeth pushing through gums.
Rory stopped. She'd read about the grove online, amateur folklore sites and a single academic paper from the seventies that treated it as a minor curiosity, a probable Victorian folly. The stones didn't look Victorian. They didn't look like stones at all, not up close. The grain ran vertical, fibrous, organic. Petrified oak. Each one shoulder-height and tapered to a blunt point, arranged in a rough circle around a clearing no larger than a pub garden. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them, which made no sense in November. Bluebells, foxglove, something white and star-shaped she couldn't name. All in full bloom. All perfectly still despite the breeze that moved the canopy overhead.
She stepped between two of the standing stones and the wind stopped.
Not died down. Stopped. The way a television cuts to silence when someone yanks the plug. One moment the oaks creaked and whispered above her, and the next, nothing. The trees still moved, branches swaying against the overcast London sky, but no sound reached her ears. Her own breathing filled the vacuum, too loud, too close, as if the grove had cupped its hands around her and leaned in to listen.
The pendant cooled. Went dead against her skin like a spent match.
"Brilliant."
Her voice landed flat. No echo , no carry. The word hit the air and dropped.
Rory turned in a slow circle. The park beyond the stones looked wrong. Not different, not transformed, just tilted half a degree from correct. The distant amber wash of London's light pollution, which should have painted the clouds a familiar chemical orange, had shifted. Greener, somehow. The colour of old copper left in rain.
She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. No signal. The time read 11:47, the same time it had read when she'd locked her bike. The seconds counter sat frozen. She watched it for a ten count, a twenty count. The colon between the hours and minutes didn't blink.
Something moved at the far edge of the clearing.
Not in the clearing. Between the stones on the opposite side, in that narrow gap where the grove met the park, a shape occupied space it hadn't occupied before. Rory's eyes couldn't fix on it. The harder she looked, the further it slid toward her periphery, a dark absence that behaved less like a figure and more like a hole cut in the scene. Person-shaped. Person-sized. Motionless.
"Hello?"
The word fell dead again. Rory took a step back and her heel caught a root, or what she'd assumed was a root. She glanced down. A vine had curled across the ground behind her, snaking between two of the standing stones to bridge the gap she'd entered through. It hadn't been there thirty seconds ago. The leaves on it were black, not dark green, black, and they pulsed with a faint peristaltic rhythm, opening and closing like small wet mouths.
She looked up. The shape between the far stones had moved closer.
No, it hadn't moved. The gap had shrunk. The standing stones on that side of the circle leaned inward by a fraction, narrowing the spaces between them, and the shape now occupied more of her vision because there was simply less grove to put between them. Rory's pulse kicked against her throat. She could feel it in her temples. In her wrists. In the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, which ached for the first time in years, a cold bright pain like pressing a coin fresh from a freezer to bare skin.
Another vine slithered across the entrance behind her. Then another. She heard them this time, a sound like someone dragging wet rope across stone.
"Right."
Rory reached for the pendant. Her fingers found the silver chain and followed it down to the crimson gemstone, which sat cold and inert against her chest. She wrapped her fist around it and squeezed. Nothing. No warmth , no glow, no sense of connection. The thing that had guided her here with such urgency had fallen silent the moment she'd crossed the threshold, and the realisation settled in her stomach like swallowed glass.
She hadn't been guided . She'd been lured .
The shape between the far stones split. Divided down its centre like a cell, and now two shapes flanked the narrowing gap, two absences, two person-sized holes in the world. They didn't move. They didn't need to. The grove was doing the moving for them. The standing stones groaned, a low geological sound, and tilted another fraction inward. The clearing contracted.
Rory catalogued her options. The delivery bag held nothing useful: a portable charger, a rain jacket, two fortune cookies she'd forgotten to include with the last order. Her phone was dead. The entrance behind her was half-choked with those black vines, and more of them crept from the root systems of the petrified oaks, sliding across the wildflowers with that same hideous rope-on-stone whisper .
She knelt. Pressed her palm flat to the ground between the bluebells and foxglove.
Warm. The earth pulsed with the same rhythm as the black leaves, slow and deliberate, the heartbeat of something vast buried beneath the clearing. The wildflowers swayed to it now, bending toward her hand like iron filings drawn to a magnet. She felt it in her knees, her shins, her bones. A vibration too low for proper hearing, the kind that lived in the body rather than the ears. The kind that said, in a language older than words, *stay *.
Rory stood. Brushed soil from her palm.
Three shapes now. The third had appeared between two stones to her left, filling a gap she could have sworn was empty a moment ago. Same quality of absence. Same impossible refusal to resolve into detail when she looked directly at it. But this one was closer than the others. Close enough that she caught something at its edges, a texture, a suggestion of form. Long. Thin. Angled in a way that might have been limbs if limbs bent in the right direction.
They didn't.
"I can see you."
The words came out steadier than she felt. The shapes didn't react. But the grove did. The wildflowers at her feet turned their faces away from her in unison, a garden of small white stars rotating on their stems like satellite dishes reorienting. The bluebells hung lower. The foxglove hoods yawned wider, revealing dark throats that went deeper than any flower should.
A sound.
The first real sound since she'd entered the clearing, apart from her own voice and the slither of vines. This came from below. From the warm, pulsing ground. A voice, or the memory of a voice, or the shape a voice would make if it had been buried alive and still had breath left to call out.
It said her name.
Not Rory. Not Aurora. Something older and heavier. A name she'd never spoken aloud, never seen written, but recognised the way she recognised her own reflection, with an animal certainty that bypassed thought entirely. *Malphora *. The sound of it rose through the soil and entered her through the soles of her boots, climbed the bones of her legs, settled at the base of her skull like fingers finding a familiar handhold.
The pendant blazed.
Crimson light poured between her fingers, so bright it threw her shadow across the clearing in three directions, one for each of the watching shapes. For a split second the grove lit up in its true colours: the standing stones were not stone, not petrified wood, but bone, great curved ribs jutting from the earth like the carcass of something cathedral-sized. The wildflowers were not flowers. The vines were not vines. And the shapes between the stones, caught in that brief wash of red light, had faces.
The light died.
Rory ran for the entrance. The vines across it reared as she approached, thick as wrists, tipped with something that caught the dim green light and glistened. She ripped the rain jacket from her bag, wrapped it around her forearm, and drove through them. They caught her shoulders, her hair, her ankles. One coiled around her left wrist and squeezed the scar and the cold pain detonated up her arm into her jaw.
She tore free.
The park swallowed her. Wind hit her face, sound returned in a roar, London's orange sky pressed down from above like a ceiling she'd never been so glad to see. She sprinted between the oaks, branches catching her jacket, roots snatching at her feet. Behind her the grove exhaled, a sound like a cathedral door closing, and something that was not wind brushed the back of her neck with fingers that counted her vertebrae one by one.
She didn't stop until she reached the railing where her bike was locked. Her hands shook so hard the combination took four attempts. The pendant had gone cold again, dead weight on its silver chain.
Rory threw her leg over the seat and pedalled north toward Sheen Road, toward streetlights and traffic and the sacred banality of a London still awake and indifferent.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She didn't check it until she'd cleared the park, standing under a halogen lamp outside a shuttered newsagent, sweat cooling on her neck. The lock screen showed 3:12 AM. She'd entered the grove at 11:47. Over three hours, swallowed whole, compressed into what had felt like minutes .
One notification. A text from a number with no caller ID.
*You left before we finished, Malphora .*
Something clicked against the pavement behind her, the sound of a single footstep on a surface that shouldn't echo . Rory turned.
The streetlight above her head popped and went dark.