AI The iron gate to Richmond Park was locked, but Rory knew the gap in the fence near the Pembroke Lodge car park. She slipped through, the ragged edge of metal catching on her jacket with a sound like a nail on slate. The night was clear and cold, the moon a bone-white sliver offering little light. She clicked on her torch, the beam cutting a shaky path through the inky black. The pendant, tucked beneath her sweater, was already warm against her skin.
It had been pulsing for three days now, a slow, insistent throb of heat that had started as a faint warmth and grown into something that felt like a second heartbeat . The unknown benefactor—a figure who had slipped the silver chain into her coat pocket outside Silas’ bar a month ago with only a note reading *‘For when the walls grow thin’*—had not provided an instruction manual. After a week of fruitless research in the British Library, chasing down obscure folklore texts and feeling like a character in one of Eva’s fantasy novels, the only lead she had was this place. The Fae Grove. Isolde’s Grove. A place mentioned in whispers in a crumbling Victorian journal, a clearing marked by stones where time bled.
She found the first standing stone just as the journal described: an ancient oak, but petrified, its bark turned to grey stone veined with silver. It stood sentinel at the head of a narrow path not on any map. The air changed as she stepped past it, the chill lifting, replaced by a damp, earthy warmth that smelled of loam and night-blooming jasmine. Her torch beam faltered, the light dimming and swelling as if breathing . She smacked it against her palm, and when that did nothing, she switched it off. To her surprise, she could see. The Grove was bathed in a soft, sourceless luminescence. Wildflowers carpeted the ground, violets and foxgloves and primroses, all in full, impossible bloom. Their colours were too vivid, the blues too deep, the reds too bloody.
*Time moves differently here *, she remembered. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She checked her phone. The screen was black, unresponsive. A cold trickle, separate from the pendant’s warmth , traced down her spine .
Rory was not prone to panic. Cool-headed, Eva called her. A problem-solver. She took a steadying breath, the air tasting faintly of ozone and honey, and focused on the facts. She was in the Grove. The pendant was warm, meaning it was near… something. A Hel portal, according to the scant notes she’d found. She didn’t know what ‘Hel’ was, but the word carried a weight that settled in her stomach like a stone. She needed to observe, to understand, and then get out.
The clearing was circular, about thirty yards across, ringed by a dozen of the petrified oak stones. At its centre stood a single, larger stone, dark and slick as obsidian. The wrongness began as a subtle pressure, a feeling that the geometry of the place was just slightly off. The stones seemed to lean in when she wasn’t looking directly at them. The flower stems trembled , though there was no wind.
A sound, then. Not from the park beyond, but from within the Grove itself . A whisper , so faint it could have been the rustle of leaves, except the leaves here were stone. It came from her left. She turned, her straight black hair brushing her cheek. Nothing but flowers and shadow.
“Hello?” Her voice was swallowed by the dense air, leaving no echo .
The whisper came again, this time from her right. A sibilant thread of sound, words just below comprehension. She clenched her left hand, her thumb finding the small, crescent-shaped scar on her wrist—a relic of a fall from a tree in her grandmother’s garden in Cardiff, a lifetime ago. The familiar ridge of tissue was a anchor.
*Think, Rory. You’re just spooking yourself.*
She took a step towards the central stone. The pendant’s warmth intensified, pulsing in a slow, rhythmic beat. *Thump-thump. Thump-thump.* It matched her own heart, then slowly diverged, beating a half-second behind, creating a disorienting syncopation in her chest. She pulled the chain from under her sweater. The deep crimson gemstone, the size of her thumbnail, glowed with a faint inner light. It cast a bloody tint on her fingers.
A shadow detached itself from the base of a standing stone and flitted across the edge of her vision. Tall, impossibly slender, a suggestion of elongated limbs. She snapped her head towards it. Empty space. Her breath hitched.
“I know you’re there,” she said, forcing authority into her tone, the way her barrister father had taught her to address a hostile witness. It sounded hollow here.
Laughter answered her. High, clear, and utterly without warmth . It was the laugh of a child, but it echoed with a timbre that was ancient and cruel. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing off the stones in a way that defied physics. The wildflowers at her feet suddenly wilted, their vibrant colours leaching to grey in a wave that spread out from her boots. Then, as quickly, they bloomed again, more fiercely than before.
The temperature dropped sharply . The pendant flared, so hot it seared her skin through her sweater. She gasped, fumbling to lift it away from her chest. In its crimson glow, she saw them.
Not with her direct gaze, but in the periphery . Figures moving between the stones. Tall, wraith-like, their forms shifting and unstable. They had the general shape of people, but the proportions were wrong—too many joints, heads that tilted at severe angles. They made no sound as they moved, but the air around them hummed with a low, dissonant frequency that vibrated in her teeth.
*They’re herding you *, a calm, detached part of her mind observed. *Towards the centre stone.*
She turned, trying to keep all the stones in view, but there were too many. Every time she focused on one area, movement flickered in another. A shape would solidify for a second—a crown of antlers etched against the gloom , a pair of eyes like smouldering embers—then dissolve into the dark.
“What do you want?” Her voice was a whisper now.
The child’s laugh came again, closer. Then a new voice, a man’s voice, smooth and familiar in the worst way. “Rory. Stay.”
It was Evan’s voice. The cadence, the slight nasal tone he got when he was pretending to be reasonable. Her ex’s voice, here, in this impossible place. A bolt of pure, animal fear shot through her. It wasn’t him, it couldn’t be. This was a trick. A mimicry. But her body didn’t care. Her palms slicked with sweat.
“You don’t belong here, Aurora.” The voice came from right behind her ear. She spun, swinging her torch like a club. It passed through empty, cold air.
The central stone was now only ten feet away. It was no longer slick and black. In the light of her throbbing pendant, she could see it was translucent, a window into a deeper darkness. Shapes moved within it, slow and massive. The stone itself seemed to be a portal, a threshold. And the pendant was the key, burning hotter with every step she was forced to take towards it.
She tried to run, to break for the gap between two stones that she thought was her entrance point. The flowers there erupted into thick, thorny brambles, weaving themselves into an impenetrable wall in seconds. She tried another path. Same result. The circle was closing. The whispering was a constant susurrus now, a chorus of unintelligible voices. The peripheral figures were closer, their humming vibration making the air thick as syrup.
She was five feet from the central stone. The heat from the pendant was unbearable. She wanted to tear it off, but some instinct deeper than fear warned her not to. To lose it might be worse. The gem’s inner glow was a beacon , painting the clearing in pulses of lurid red.
From the corner of her left eye, she saw one of the figures step fully into view. It did not walk; it unfolded. Seven feet tall, skin the colour of weathered ash, crowned with a rack of thorny antlers. It turned its head towards her. Its eyes were not embers; they were voids, pits that swallowed the faint light. It smiled, and its mouth had too many teeth.
It was not looking at her face. It was looking at the pendant.
The Evan-voice whispered again, this time from the thing’s general direction. “Give it to us. It’s why you were brought here. You’re just the delivery person.”
The insult, the horrible echo of her mundane life delivering for Yu-Fei, cut through the terror with a spike of anger. She was not just a delivery person. She was Aurora Carter, who had left a monster in Cardiff and built a life in London. Who solved problems.
But the problem here was insurmountable. The thing took a step towards her. The others, their forms still shifting at the edges, closed in. The central stone yawned before her, the darkness within it stirring, reaching.
Rory’s mind raced , out-of-box, desperate. The pendant was hot near a Hel portal. This stone was a portal. The thing wanted it. What if… what if it wasn’t a key, but a seal? What if her unknown benefactor hadn’t given her a tool, but a responsibility? *‘For when the walls grow thin.’*
The walls were very thin here.
As the antlered creature reached for her with long, twig-like fingers, Rory did the only thing she could think of. She didn’t throw the pendant. She didn’t scream. She closed her fist around the burning gem, feeling the silver chain bite into her neck, and she took one deliberate, final step forward.
Not away.
Into the black surface of the waiting stone.