AI By the time Aurora reached the outer edge of Richmond Park, the city had fallen away so completely it felt less like distance and more like a trick. London still existed somewhere behind her—streets slick with drizzle, buses hissing at stops, laughter leaking from pub doors—but here the night had teeth. The wind moved through the grass in long, secretive strokes. Bare branches clicked together overhead. Even the path looked less certain than it had by day, thinning into darkness as if the park had begun to reconsider letting her in.
She stopped beneath a dead-looking sycamore and checked her phone for the third time in ten minutes.
No signal.
Of course.
Her thumb hovered over Eva’s last message anyway.
You do not go into weird enchanted murder woods alone, Rory.
Rory had nearly smiled when she read it in the flat. Nearly. But the pendant had gone warm against her chest again, that deep crimson stone thrumming like a second pulse , and that had stripped the humor out of everything. It had been doing that for two days now—small flares of heat whenever she passed mirrors after dark, whenever the air turned suddenly cold, whenever she caught, in the corner of her eye, the impression of a doorway where no doorway stood. Tonight the warmth had sharpened into urgency. Not constant. Not random. Pulling.
Toward the grove.
She tucked the phone into her jacket pocket and started walking again.
The standing stones were farther in than she remembered. The first time she had found the grove, she had not been alone, and the path to it had seemed almost eager to reveal itself . Tonight the park resisted. Brambles snagged at her jeans. Mud sucked at her trainers. Trees massed thickly where she did not remember trees being, their trunks black with damp, the bark shining like wet skin. Her flashlight beam jittered ahead of her, too small for the dark pressing in on either side.
The pendant shifted under her shirt, a coin of heat resting just below her collarbone.
“All right,” she muttered, mostly to hear a human voice. “Point taken.”
Her own words dropped into the night and vanished.
Then, after a beat, something in the trees to her left made the same cadence back.
Not words. Not exactly. Just a shape of sound that rose and fell where her voice had.
Rory stopped.
The wind moved. Grass hissed. Far off, something barked—a deer, maybe. She listened until the silence began to feel performative, too clean to trust.
“Fox,” she said quietly, though she did not believe it.
She kept going.
When the standing stones finally appeared, they did not emerge so much as assemble themselves out of shadow: pale uprights around the mouth of the clearing, ancient oak pillars weathered into blunt, hulking forms. She knew them on sight and still felt her stomach tighten. They stood in a rough circle, taller than any man, their surfaces furred with moss silvered by moonlight. The grove lay beyond them, deceptively open, a patch of impossible summer in the middle of winter-dark parkland.
Wildflowers spread across the clearing in a soft, low riot of color—bluebells, foxgloves, buttercups, things she could not name. Their scent hung thick in the cold air, sweet enough to verge on rotten. In the center, a broad ash tree lifted white limbs into the night sky. The place should have felt beautiful. It did, in a way. That was part of the problem.
Rory stepped between two stones.
At once the world changed.
The air went still. Not calmer—still. The wind ceased so abruptly it was like walking into glass. The sounds of the park dropped away behind her. No distant traffic. No rustle of branches. No bark of fox or deer. Her own breathing turned loud. The beam of her flashlight seemed weaker, swallowed by the clearing before it reached the tree line.
The pendant burned hot enough to make her hiss and pull it free from under her shirt. It hung from its silver chain in her gloved hand, the crimson stone lit from within now, not faintly but with a banked, bloody glow . Warmth pulsed through her palm in small, steady beats.
“Hel portal,” she said under her breath, the words sour in her mouth.
She looked around the clearing. The flowers nodded gently though no breeze touched her. Shadows lay in wrong places. The ash tree’s trunk cast two of them.
Rory stood very still, forcing herself to breathe through the first hard kick of fear. Cool-headed, she reminded herself. Observe first. Panic later.
“Isolde?” she called.
The name slipped out into the clearing and vanished. No answer came.
She took a few steps inward, boots flattening clusters of tiny white blossoms. The grass beneath them felt oddly springy, as if rooted in something softer than soil. The pendant tugged forward, not physically, but with a certainty she could feel all the way up her arm . Toward the far side of the grove, where the flowers grew thickest beneath a stand of hawthorn.
The wrongness had been with her from the park’s edge. Here, it sharpened. Not danger exactly. More like misalignment, as if the world had shifted a fraction to the left and left her body behind. Her ears prickled. She had the strange conviction of being watched by someone trying very hard not to blink.
She swept the flashlight toward the hawthorn.
For an instant she saw nothing but trunks and blossom-heavy branches.
Then something pale moved between them.
Rory whipped the beam back.
Empty.
Her mouth had gone dry. “Not doing this,” she said, softer now.
She walked anyway.
Each step seemed to take longer than it should. The clearing stretched subtly, treacherously. The ash tree remained at her back for too long; the hawthorn never quite got closer. She knew this sort of place could play games with distance. She knew time moved strangely here. Knowing did not help. Her pulse had begun to thud in her throat.
A sound came from behind her.
Not footsteps . A soft, deliberate crunch, like someone kneeling in frost.
Rory turned so fast the pendant chain bit into her fingers.
Nothing stood behind her. The ash tree, white and motionless. The flowers. The ring of stones beyond. But the grass where she had just walked lay pressed down in a trail, and halfway along it one patch was depressed more deeply than the rest, as if by the weight of a foot not her own.
She stared at it until the flattened grass slowly , carefully , rose again.
Her scalp tightened.
“All right,” she said, because silence was becoming unbearable. “I’m here for the portal. That’s it. I’m not—”
This time the answer came clearly, from somewhere to her right.
“That’s it.”
Her own voice.
Not close. Not far either. It emerged from the dark beneath the hawthorn in a perfect mimicry of her tone, her Cardiff-softened consonants, even the thin thread of irritation she used when she was afraid and refused to admit it.
Every muscle in her body locked.
No more sounds followed. The grove listened.
Rory drew a slow breath through her nose and tasted flowers, damp bark, and underneath it a faint mineral cold like stone cellars and opened graves. She shifted the flashlight to her left hand. Her right closed around the pendant. The small crescent scar on her wrist, old and white against her skin, caught the red gleam and seemed briefly fresh .
“If you can copy me,” she said to the dark, very evenly, “you can understand me. Show yourself.”
Several heartbeats passed.
Then, from behind her this time, almost tenderly : “Show yourself.”
The voice had improved. Less echo now. More breath.
Rory did not turn at once. Some instinct—animal and absolute—warned her against giving whatever it was the satisfaction. Instead she looked down.
The shadow at her feet did not match her stance.
Her own silhouette should have slanted long behind her in the moonlight. Instead, a second darkness lay over it, close and attached, with shoulders a little too narrow and a head tilted at a curious angle. As she watched, frozen, that second shadow lifted one arm.
Rory’s arms stayed at her sides.
She spun.
Nothing.
But the air behind her stirred at last, a brush of movement against the back of her neck, so intimate she flinched. Cold flooded down her spine . She stumbled away and nearly went to one knee, catching herself on one hand in the flowers. The ground felt warm.
Not warm from the season. Warm like skin.
She jerked upright.
The whole clearing seemed subtly animate now. The flowers did not merely move; they oriented. Their faces had turned toward her in a thousand tiny increments. Foxgloves leaned, bells gaping. Blue petals trembled though the air remained dead calm.
The pendant pulsed harder and harder, each beat a stab of heat. It wanted one direction only. Beneath the hawthorn, where the dark pooled thick as ink.
Rory knew better than to obey the thing blindly. She also knew she had not come for curiosity. She had come because if there was a Hel breach opening in the grove and she ignored it, things would get worse. Things always got worse.
Her fear steadied into a cleaner shape. Useful.
“Fine,” she whispered.
She raised the flashlight and walked toward the hawthorn.
The beam shook despite her effort. Branches knitted overhead, white blossoms glowing sickly in the light. The sweet smell grew stronger, almost fermented. The ground sloped slightly downward though she could have sworn the grove was flat. Between the roots of the trees, the darkness ahead seemed less like shadow and more like depth—an absence with contour.
Then she saw it.
At the base of the largest hawthorn, half-veiled by hanging branches, stood a narrow vertical slit in the air. Not open exactly. Pressed. Like a seam in fabric straining from pressure on the other side. Frost rimed the grass around it in a perfect crescent. The darkness inside it was absolute, matte and depthless, and every pulse of the Heartstone answered it.
A portal, or the beginning of one.
Relief came first. Relief was quickly devoured by dread, because someone was already standing in front of it.
The figure had its back to her. A woman, by the shape. Shoulder-length black hair. Dark jacket. Narrow build. Five foot six, give or take.
Rory stopped breathing.
The figure did not move.
Moonlight caught the side of its face as it turned, very slowly , toward her.
Her own face looked back.
Not quite perfectly . The eyes were wrong first: too bright, too reflective, blue gone thin and glassy as winter sky over ice. The skin had the waxen stillness of something assembled from memory rather than flesh. Her mouth curved a second too late, as if smile and intention had failed to meet.
“Rory,” it said, and the voice was hers now down to the smallest grain .
She took one involuntary step back.
The thing’s gaze dropped to the pendant in her hand. Its smile widened by a breath. Behind it, the slit in the air flexed, and from within came a sound like someone inhaling through a long, wet tunnel.
“No,” Rory said.
The copy tilted its head. She had seen herself make that exact movement in mirrors while considering an argument. Here it became unbearable.
“You came,” it said.
The flowers around Rory’s ankles bent toward the thing as if listening .
Her mind moved fast, cold and clear in the center despite the terror clawing at her ribs. The pendant reacted to Hel portals. Warmth, proximity. Maybe more than that. Given by an unknown benefactor, yes, but not meaningless. Not ornamental. If this thing wanted it, that was information.
“You’re not getting this,” she said.
The copy’s expression changed. Not anger. Hunger, cleaner than anger and far older.
It took one step forward.
The clearing answered. Around them, the ring of standing stones groaned softly , ancient wood under strain. Somewhere beyond the hawthorn, something began to circle through the flowers with patient, dragging steps. Not one thing. More than one. She could not see them. She could hear the careful crush of stems, first to her left, then behind, then ahead again.
The copy took another step. “Give it to me.”
This time the voice was almost hers and almost not. A second speaker moved beneath it, deeper, threaded through with distance.
Rory backed toward the ash tree, keeping the flashlight trained on the thing. Her heel caught on a root, and she recovered before she fell. Do not run. Running invited pursuit. Running in a place where distance lied was how you vanished for a day or a century.
The dragging steps continued in the dark perimeter of the grove. Once, just once, her light snagged on a shape between the flowers: a white hand laid flat against the ground as if something were pulling itself forward without wanting to rise.
When she looked directly, it was gone .
The copy smiled again, seeing the flicker in her.
“You’re alone,” it said.
It was meant to sound comforting . That made it far worse.
Rory’s back hit the ash tree. The bark was icy. The pendant burned in her fist, almost unbearable now. The seam in the air behind the copy widened by a hair. Cold rolled out of it in a thin exhale, carrying a smell like old iron and river mud and rooms sealed for years.
She thought, absurdly and clearly, of the flat above Silas’ bar. Of the radiator that never worked properly. Of Eva swearing over takeaway cartons. Of ordinary noise, ordinary mess, ordinary life. The world beyond the stones. She would not let this place take her shape and wear it out there.
The copy came one step closer.
Rory lifted the Heartstone between them.
The crimson gem flared. Not glowed—flared, sudden and fierce, a clot of red light flooding the hawthorn shadows. The copy recoiled at once, not with pain but with surprise so naked it looked almost human . The seam behind it shuddered. Frost raced outward in thin white veins.
There. A reaction.
Rory tightened her grip until the chain cut into her skin. Her fear remained, but now it had edges she could use.
“Back up,” she said.
The thing’s face smoothed. “Rory—”
“Back up.”
The red light deepened, throbbing in time with her pulse . Around the clearing, the unseen circling halted. The flowers bowed low, all at once, as if a pressure had settled over them. For one impossible second the grove held itself in suspension.
The copy’s eyes fixed on the pendant. Its borrowed features began, very subtly, to slip. One corner of the mouth lagged behind the other. The pupils widened until the blue nearly vanished.
Then, from somewhere just beyond the standing stones, a woman screamed.
The sound tore through the clearing with such raw human terror that Rory’s entire body reacted before her mind did. She twisted toward it, heart dropping into her stomach .
That was the mistake.
When she snapped her gaze back, the copy was gone from the hawthorn.
The flashlight beam found only swinging branches, the black seam in the air, and flowers shuddering as if something had rushed through them at speed.
Behind her, very close, her own voice whispered into her ear.
“Too slow.”