AI The silver chain bit into my neck as I scrambled over the mossy, uneven earth. My breath came in sharp, ragged hitches, the kind that tear at the throat. Somewhere behind me, the dense, twisted oaks seemed to lean in, their skeletal limbs clawing at the ink-black sky.
Get to the stones. That was the only thought left in my head.
The Heartstone Pendant hung heavy against my chest, pulsating with a rhythmic , sickly warmth that matched the hammering of my own heart. I clutched the metal casing, my thumbnail finding the small, familiar scar on my left wrist as a grounding tether. The air here didn’t taste like the crisp, damp oxygen of a London night. It tasted like ozone and rotted lilies.
"Rory, keep moving," I hissed to myself, the sound swallowed immediately by the oppressive , heavy silence of the grove.
I reached the clearing, my boots sliding on a patch of slick, bioluminescent fungi that clung to the roots of the massive, ancient oak standing stones. They stood like jagged, broken teeth jutting from the earth, surrounding a circle of dead, white grass. The legends were right. Time felt stagnant here, a thick syrup moving through an hourglass that refused to tip.
"You are early."
The voice didn't come from behind me. It came from the air itself, vibrating through my marrow. I spun around, my back hitting the cold, rough stone of the eastern pillar.
A shadow detached itself from the gloom . It wasn't a trick of the moon or a flicker of tired nerves. It was a shifting, coalescing mass of smoke and malice, tall enough to brush the lowest branches of the canopy. It lacked a face, or at least, one that my mind could process without fracturing. Where eyes should have been, there were only twin pinpricks of dull, starving light.
"I didn't come for a conversation." My voice sounded thin, reedy, but I held my ground.
"You came for an audience." The shadow drifted closer, the temperature in the clearing plummeting instantly. Frost bloomed on the silver chain, stinging my skin. "The Heartstone burns. It knows what lies beneath the soil."
"It belongs to the Dymas," I retorted, feigning a confidence I couldn't feel. "You have no claim to it."
"Claim?" The figure laughed, a sound like dry leaves skittering across a tombstone . "Hunger needs no claim. Your benefactor is a fool, tossing a spark into a forest of gasoline."
My hand moved to my pocket, gripping the small, fold-out knife I kept for deliveries. It felt like a toothpick against a hurricane. The shadow pulsed , reaching out a long, translucent digit toward the pendant. I flinched, the motion jerky and desperate.
"Stay back."
"Or what, little delivery girl?"
I looked at the ground, desperate for a path. The white grass beneath the stones was beginning to glow with an eerie, violet luminescence. The stones themselves were vibrating , an infrasonic hum that rattled my teeth and made my vision blur at the edges.
"The grove protects its own," I muttered, hoping the old stories held some grain of truth.
"The grove feeds," the shadow corrected.
It moved then, faster than sight, a blur of smoke and cold. I dived to the right, tumbling over the gnarled, protruding roots. My shoulder slammed into the earth, the impact jarring my bones, but I scrambled up, running toward the center of the arc.
A cacophony erupted in the trees—a sound like a thousand chimes shattering at once. Birds, or things like them, erupted from the canopy, their wings beating the air into a frenzy. I didn't look up. I knew what would be looking down.
"You cannot outrun the threshold, Carter," the voice boomed, deeper now, shaking the very earth beneath my boots.
I reached the center, where the ground dipped into a slight, concave basin. The pendant was nearly glowing to the point of blinding, a crimson beacon in the suffocating dark. It grew scorching hot against my skin, the metal searing a perfect , crescent-shaped mark into my chest. I gasped, the pain sharp and electric .
"I don't need to run," I choked out, dropping to my knees. "I just need to finish what I was sent here to do."
I pressed both hands onto the cold, damp soil, the Heartstone wedged between my palms. The ground shuddered. A deep, resonant thrumming rose from the bedrock, a heartbeat from the earth itself.
The shadows froze. The clearing went deathly still.
"What is that?" The voice lacked its earlier arrogance, replaced by a serrated edge of alarm.
"A wake-up call."
The earth cracked beneath my knees, a jagged, luminous fissure racing toward the shadow. The violet light intensified, turning the night into a blinding, surreal day. The air around me began to fray at the seams, the reality of the grove warping, stretching like pulled taffy.
I felt a sudden, violent tug at my navel, a hook dragging me toward the dark, widening chasm in the ground. The shadow lunged, its fingers lengthening into razor-sharp icicles, but it was too late.
The pendant surged, a brilliant, blinding flash of crimson light that swallowed the clearing, the stones, and the encroaching dark. I felt the ground fall away beneath me, the sensation of plunging into ice-cold water, and for a split second, I wasn't in the grove at all. I was somewhere else entirely, surrounded by shifting, geometric planes of color and sound.
I landed hard on my side, gravel biting into my palm. My breath hitched. The silence was absolute.
I sat up, expecting the grove, the shadow, the suffocating presence. Instead, I saw a blurred, flickering light at the end of a long, concrete corridor. The smell of copper, thick and overwhelming, hung in the stagnant air.
Blood. Recent. And it was coming from the shadows ahead.
I reached for the pendant, but the silver chain was snapped , hanging limp and empty against my throat. The crimson glow was gone . In its place, a low, wet growl echoed off the walls of the tunnel, far too large to belong to anything human.
Something shifted in the dark, just beyond the reach of the flickering bulb. A heavy, rhythmic scraping sound started—claw on concrete—moving toward me.
"Rory," a voice whispered from the darkness, sounding exactly like my own. "Don't look back."