AI Rory pushed aside the low-hanging branch, its damp leaves brushing a cold kiss against her cheek. The air here held a peculiar stillness, a vacuum that swallowed the distant drone of London traffic. Even the usual nocturnal chirps and rustles of a park were absent, replaced by a silence so profound it hummed in her ears. She checked the reading on her phone again, though the display seemed muddied in the gloom . The GPS confirmed she was within the perimeter of Richmond Park, but the path – if one could call this faint indentation through overgrown bracken a path – had long since vanished.
She’d followed the satnav’s last instruction, a nebulous command to proceed towards a specific cluster of coordinates, then trust her instincts. Her instincts, usually sharp as a honed blade, felt blunted, sluggish. The pendant, nestled beneath her shirt, offered a faint, steady warmth against her sternum. It had warmed like this before, a subtle hum when she’d strayed too close to a derelict area near the docks last month, a place the locals whispered about, a place that felt … wrong. This felt different, a deep, ancient wrongness that settled in her gut like cold lead.
Her flashlight beam, a thin spear in the oppressive darkness, danced over gnarled roots that coiled like petrified serpents. She was looking for the standing stones, the gateway. Isolde's grove. The name itself sounded like an echo from a forgotten dream. Her benefactor, a ghost in a crisp suit who’d paid her an absurd sum for a single, cryptic delivery months ago, had mentioned it as a place to “find clarity.” Clarity. Right now, clarity seemed as distant as the stars, hidden behind a thick, black canopy.
The trees pressed in, their lower branches skeletal fingers reaching. She reached up, steadying herself against a rough bark surface. Oak. Old. Extremely old. The air grew colder, a sharp bite despite the mild autumn evening she'd left behind. A scent, cloying and sweet like overripe magnolias mixed with damp earth, tickled her nostrils. It wasn’t unpleasant, not exactly, but it felt wrong, out of place, a perfume worn by something that didn’t belong in the natural order of things.
She stopped, listening. Nothing. Just the blood pounding in her own head. She took a step forward, and the faintest crunch sounded beneath her boots. Not a twig, not leaves. Something brittle, like dried petals. She swept her light down. The ground here was carpeted not with fallen foliage, but with a riot of wildflowers . Crimson poppies, vibrant bluebells, and a species she couldn’t identify, a luminescence to their petals that suggested they belonged under moonlight, not in the deep dark of a closing park. They bloomed in impossible abundance, jostling for space, their colours vivid even in the faint spill from her torch. They should be dead, wilted, faded. Yet here they were, impossibly alive.
A prickle crawled up the back of her neck. She’d dismissed the legends of this place as local folklore, charming stories for tourists. A pocket between worlds. Time dancing . But standing here, the silence pressing down, the bizarre flora underfoot, a different truth began to assert itself. Her breath hitched. The pendant pulsed again, stronger this time, a distinct throb against her flesh, like a tiny, frantic heart awakening.
She pushed onward, drawn by a force not entirely her own. The trees thinned, and the ground sloped gently upwards. She recognised the transition then, the subtle atmospheric shift from deep woods to something more… exposed. The air itself seemed to shimmer, though her flashlight revealed nothing. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She broke into a clearing, her boot catching on a root and sending her stumbling forward. Her hands shot out, bracing against something monumental. Stone. Cold, solid, ancient stone.
She found herself face-to-face with a standing stone, thick as a tree trunk and twice as tall, its surface rough-hewn yet worn smooth as river rock by millennia of wind and rain. It pulsed with a faint, inherent chill . She straightened, brushing dirt from her trousers. This was it. Three more stones stood nearby, forming a rough circle, their dark silhouettes stark against the bruised twilight sky. The Fae Grove. This was Isolde’s grove.
The wildflowers pushed right up to the base of the stones, their unnatural bloom an insistent, silent scream against the encroaching night. The air here felt different still, thinner, charged . She shone her light around the circle. The inner space of the clearing was unnaturally barren, dirt and a sparse scattering of grey moss, as if the vibrant life of the surrounding grove actively shunned this central point.
She walked slowly around the perimeter, her flashlight beam tracing the contours of the ancient stones. Each one seemed to lean slightly inward, as if in hushed conspiracy. What was she even looking for? Clarity? Her benefactor had provided no details, only a location and a promise of answers. Answers to what? To why a man she’d never met felt she was the one to solve a problem he wouldn’t explain?
A sound. Faint, like a distant sigh. She froze, her hand instinctively going to the pendant beneath her shirt. She tried to attribute it to the wind, but there was no breeze. The leaves on the nearby trees hung limp and still. It came again, a drawn-out whisper that seemed to slither from the shadows beyond the stones. Not words, not human. Something like breath, ragged and impossibly old.
Her eyes darted to the edge of the clearing. Nothing. Just the oppressive, unmoving darkness of the woods pressing in. She took a deep breath, trying to quell the rising tide of unease. She was alone. Miles from anywhere, in a place famous for being… odd. Her imagination was running wild.
She turned back towards the centre of the stones. The pendant was warm now, almost hot, a persistent thrumming against her skin that made her fingers twitch. It felt like it was trying to communicate, to warn her, or perhaps to guide her towards whatever it was reacting to. Hel portal. The codex entry had mentioned Hel portals. Was this grove a gateway? Or was something else stirring within its otherworldly embrace?
She took a step towards the centre of the bare patch. A sound, sharper this time, cracked through the silence . A twig snapping. Close. Too close. She spun around, her flashlight beam sweeping the treeline. Her breath misted in the suddenly frigid air. The light caught something – a blur of grey, a shape that dissolved as soon as her beam hit it. A deer? A fox?
No.
It moved wrong. Too low, too fast, with a disjointed elegance that human or animal couldn’t replicate. It was just at the edge of her vision, a flicker , a disruption in the fabric of the night. She held her breath, straining her ears. The woods were silent again, deeper than before, as if holding their breath along with her .
Her gaze swept the circle of stones. One of them, the one directly opposite where she stood, seemed different . The light from her torch didn’t reflect off it uniformly. Shadows clung to parts of its surface where light should have fallen, pooling and shifting as if the stone itself breathed. The wildflowers at its base seemed to retract slightly , their vibrant colours dimming, the way a startled insect might furl its wings.
A cold shock traced its way down her spine . She wasn't alone. It wasn't just the feeling of being watched ; it was the palpable certainty of *presence *. A presence that was ancient, alien, and utterly unwelcoming. The silence deepened, not a natural quiet, but a forced, terrible stillness that felt like a predator holding its breath before the strike. The pendant burned against her skin now, an insistent, urgent beat that was no longer faint warmth but a desperate drumming. She felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to leave, to scramble back through the bracken, to run until her lungs burst and she collapsed on the familiar tarmac of London’s streets.
But her feet felt rooted. The air grew heavy, smelling of ozone and something like decay . She could feel the tiny hairs on her arms stand erect, not from cold, but from sheer, primal dread . Another whisper , this one closer, seemed to coil around her, a dry rustle of leaves just behind her ear, though she hadn’t heard any foliage disturbance. She spun again, her flashlight beam cutting violent arcs through the oppressive dark. The fleeting shape flickered again, not at the edge of her vision this time, but a little further in, a suggestion of impossibly long limbs unfolding from the gloom between the trees. It wasn't glimpsed; it was *felt *, a pressure in the air, a displacement of reality.
The standing stones seemed to lean closer, their shadowed faces inscrutable. The year-round wildflowers at their feet pulsed with a faint, phosphorescent light, their unnatural bloom now seeming less vibrant and more like a phosphorescent decay. The ground beneath her felt soft, yielding, as if she stood not on solid earth but on the membrane of something vast and buried. The pendant pulsed with a frantic rhythm, a staccato *thump-thump-thump * against her ribs, and for the first time, Rory understood that the warmth wasn't welcoming her; it was a warning bell, shrill and piercing in the profound , terrifying silence of the grove. She took an involuntary step back, her heel sinking into the soft earth. The air crackled, the scents intensified, floral rot and ozone filling her lungs. The darkness between the trees resolved itself into something more substantial, shapes detaching themselves from the deeper shadows, elongating, unfolding, coalescing. They were not moving towards her, not yet. They were simply *there *, observing, waiting. The grove, a pocket between worlds, had opened its mouth, and Rory realized with a sickening lurch that she had walked right in.