AI The air in Richmond Park held the damp chill of London winter, a weight that settled into the marrow, but as Aurora pushed past the line of ancient oak standing stones, the cold seemed to vanish. Instead, a thick, sugary stillness pressed against her eardrums. She stopped in the center of the clearing, the grass beneath her boots soft and unnaturally damp, the wildflowers blooming in vibrant clusters of yellow and white despite the frost biting at her cheeks. It was October, yet this pocket of earth existed in a perpetual, impossible May.
Aurora checked her watch . The hands were spinning, the sweep blurred, but she ignored the mechanism in favor of the skin of her chest. Beneath the thin wool of her cardigan, the Heartstone Pendant hummed against her sternum. It wasn't heat; it was a vibration, a low thrum that matched the rhythm of a trapped heartbeat. She pulled her hair back from her face, the short black strands falling across her forehead, her bright blue eyes scanning the perimeter. The boundary stones were wrong. They leaned inward, as if the ring had collapsed on itself, forming the walls of a cage.
She had come for answers about the portal. The benefactor had been cryptic, slipping the pendant into her hand in a darkened alleyway near Chinatown, whispering only the coordinates of this grove before vanishing. Now, alone under the canopy of the park, those coordinates felt like a command she couldn't disobey. The pulse from the gem grew sharper, pulling her toward the center, away from the exit where the path she had used to arrive now seemed indistinguishable from the wildflowers .
Rory exhaled, watching the steam curl and vanish before it could reach ten feet. No wind. There had never been a sound of wind here from the moment she crossed the threshold. Just the crunch of her sneakers and the rhythm of her own breathing, which she suddenly made a conscious effort to make audible.
*It’s too quiet,* she thought. *It’s too safe.*
Her eyes darted to the tree line. Between the trunks of the oaks, shadows stretched longer than the moonlight allowed. She had a trick for spotting them in the dark, learned from years of late-night shifts delivering food in neighborhoods where the streetlights didn't want to work. She looked for the breaks in the geometry. The trees weren't just trees. There were shapes behind the bark.
A twig snapped.
Rory froze. Her left hand instinctively reached toward her left wrist, her fingers grazing the small crescent-shaped scar there. Touching the scar was a grounding ritual, a reminder that her skin was real, that she was human, and that she had a body that could bleed. The wood of the stone felt smooth, unyielding. The twig snap came from her left, then right, a rhythmic repetition that mimicked footsteps . But there was no weight to them. No displacement of air. No crunch of the ground beneath weight .
She turned slowly . The wildflowers remained unmoving, their petals rigid as glass. The pendant flared, a deep crimson light pushing back the gloom . For a second, the light showed her something that wasn't there before. The roots of the standing stones were exposed, twisting up like fingers of a buried hand.
Rory stepped back. The ground felt spongy, yielding like a lung. She needed to get out. The instructions had said to find the source of the pulse and return before the hour turned. But which hour? Time moved differently here—an hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She checked her phone. No signal. The clock read 11:42 PM. It had to be the same time.
She took another step back and her heel caught on a root, but the ground didn't rise. It sank. The panic started low in her stomach , a cold knot that tightened as she realized the distance to the tree line hadn't changed. She had taken ten steps. The distance was the same.
*Don't run,* her internal voice commanded. *Running changes nothing if the path moves.*
She stood still, forcing her muscles to relax, breathing through her nose to keep the terror from becoming a physical tremor. Her eyes adjusted to the crimson glow. It was moving now. It wasn't coming from the pendant alone; it was reflecting off the shadows in the periphery. They were shifting , sliding against the grain of the trees.
Then she heard it again, but this time it was closer. Not a snap, but a breath . A long, shuddering inhalation that wasn't hers. It came from behind her, filling the space between her shoulder blades. The scent of damp earth and rot came with it, overwhelming the floral sweetness of the grove.
Rory spun around. Nothing. Just the dark, the stones, the flowers. But the air behind her was cooler than the air in front of her.
She turned back to the center. The pendant was burning hot now. She could feel the silver chain cutting into her skin. She needed to find the Hel portal. That was the key. But as she looked down, the pulsing light illuminating the ground revealed a reflection she didn't expect. For an instant, she saw her face in the grass. It was looking back at her, but her reflection's eyes were wrong. They were empty, voids where her bright blue irises should have been.
Rory jerked her gaze away, looking up at the canopy where the sky should be. There was no sky. There was only a ceiling of black, heavy clouds, static and silent, blocking out the moon. The temperature dropped ten degrees in a second, her breath pluming in the air.
*Time,* she realized. *I haven't moved time.*
She reached for the pendant to rip it off, to throw it away. But her hands wouldn't obey her. They were steady, too steady, her movements precise, efficient . Cool-headed, intelligent, as her friends said. But the mind was the thing that was wrong. The thoughts were hers, but they felt... filtered. Like she was reading them out loud and hearing them back with a delay.
She looked down at her left wrist. The scar was glowing . The small crescent mark was turning deep crimson, matching the pendant. She hadn't noticed it before. It was spreading , veins of color tracing up her skin toward her elbow.
The sounds returned. Not footsteps this time, but voices . A thousand whispers overlapping, speaking in a language that wasn't English, not Welsh, not Welsh. It sounded like a chorus of insects and rain falling upward.
Rory squeezed her eyes shut. She focused on the memory of the restaurant kitchen in Dalston. The smell of frying oil, the clatter of pans, the sound of Yu-Fei’s voice. She clung to the reality of the noise, anchoring herself to the chaos of human life.
When she opened her eyes, the clearing had changed. The stones were gone . The path was open. But the light was different. It wasn't twilight anymore. It was a harsh, white midday sun, casting sharp, brutal shadows. And she could see them.
They were standing at the edge of the clearing. Figures made of shadow, tall and thin, their heads tilted at unnatural angles. They were watching her.
Rory backed up, her heel hitting a stump. She stumbled. The ground was hard now. The grass was mud. The time shift was reversing . The panic that had been a cold knot was now a roar in her ears. She turned and ran.
She ran through the wildflowers, her breath tearing at her throat, the pendant screaming against her chest. She didn't look back. She didn't check the trees. She pushed toward the gap in the canopy, the one where the oak stones used to be. The fabric of the grove strained around her, the wind finally picking up, howling. It wasn't a normal wind. It sounded like voices.
She reached the edge. A wall of air. She threw herself through it.
The impact drove the wind from her lungs. She fell onto the wet grass of Richmond Park, the London cold hitting her like a wall of ice. The sky above was real, filled with grey clouds and the glint of rain. The sun was gone . It was night.
Rory rolled onto her back, gasping. Her wrist throbbed . The scar was dark, no longer glowing, but the skin was swollen. The pendant was cold, dead against her chest.
She sat up, shivering, her eyes scanning the perimeter. The oak standing stones were gone . Replaced by the usual iron railing of the park. The flowers were mud and dead leaves.
She was alone. Or at least, the clearing looked empty.
But as she stood, shakily brushing the dirt from her cardigan, she heard the wind again. It didn't sound like the wind. It sounded like a whisper , coming from the inside of the ring where the grove had been.
You left, the wind said. You always come back.
Rory pulled her cardigan tight. The scar on her wrist burned. She checked her watch . It read midnight. It should have read 11:42 PM.
She turned her back on the trees. She had work at five. She needed to get to the pub. She needed the noise, the humans. But as she walked toward the path, her footsteps were too quiet. And when she looked back, the reflection in a puddle didn't blink.
She walked faster. The pendant was cold again. But somewhere, deep in the stone, there was still a heat waiting for the next time. And she knew, with a quiet, terrible certainty, that this was the last time she would be alone.