AI Rory hauled herself over the Richmond Park chain link at 10:47 PM, frost crusting the knees of her jeans and biting through the thin leather of her gloves. She’d snuck into the park a dozen times before to sneak beers and watch the fallow deer roam the open meadows, but this was the first time she’d aimed for the stand of gnarled ancient oaks Eva had ranted about over Christmas dinner the year prior, the cluster of trees no local dog walker or runner ever touched, the ones that marked the Grove’s boundary. The Heartstone pendant had started pulsing three nights prior, a faint, steady thrum against her sternum that seeped through her layers and kept her awake until 3 AM, its warmth bleeding into her skin until she couldn’t focus on her delivery routes for Golden Empress or sleep through the night without flinching at every creak of the flat above Silas’ bar. The scrawled note tucked into the manila envelope that had landed on her doormat a week after Evan showed up at the restaurant’s back entrance, begging her to take him back, had only said two lines: If the stone grows warm, go to the oak stones in Richmond. The Grove will keep what follows you out, if you reach the center before it catches you.
She’d stuffed the pendant back under her sweater that night, but its thrum only grew louder, until by the third night it was a burn against her chest, and she’d grabbed her keys and her flashlight and driven the hour across London to Richmond. She crunched through the frost that coated the ground outside the oak stand, her scuffed Doc Martens cracking the thin layer of ice, and pushed between the first two trunks. The frost vanished before her boots hit the next patch of ground.
Under her feet, grass grew soft and thick, dotted with white clover and yellow daisies and bluebells, wildflowers that had died off in London three months prior. The November cold that had nipped at her cheeks through the scarf she’d wrapped around her face vanished, replaced by a warm, heavy air that smelled like clover and turned earth, like mid-spring instead of late fall. She froze, her hand flying to the pocket of her jacket where she’d stuffed her phone. She pulled it out, the screen lighting up to show the time: 11:07 PM, the same number it had showed when she’d crested the fence ten minutes prior. She shrugged it off, assuming she’d misjudged the walk, and took three more steps deeper into the clearing, the oak boundary vanishing behind her into the dark. When she checked her phone again, the time still read 11:07.
She tapped the screen, swiped at the clock widget, and the 98% battery bar dropped to zero in the space of a second. The screen went black, no matter how many times she jammed the power button. She pulled the analog watch off her wrist, the beat-up leather strap her dad had given her for her 21st birthday, a reliable piece that had never once stopped in four years. The second hand hung frozen between the 12 and 1, the time stuck at 11:06, the exact minute she’d stepped between the oak trunks. A cold lurch dropped into her stomach , the first real prickle of wrong that had nothing to do with mid-spring wildflowers in November. Eva had thrown off a throwaway line about the Grove’s time, how it didn’t stick to the same rules as the rest of London, how an hour inside could be a minute or a week outside, how it stretched for people who ran from something, gave whatever hunted them more time to catch up. She’d laughed it off at the time, Eva’s nan’s old faerie tales, the kind of Welsh folklore her own mom had told her to scare her into being home before dark.
The Heartstone pulsed, harder this time, a thud against her sternum that matched the beat of her own heart. She pulled her keychain flashlight out of her pocket, clicked it on, and the thin beam cut through the dark, illuminating the stretch of grass in front of her, and a single weathered stone menhir that jutted out of the ground a hundred yards ahead, the center of the Grove, she assumed. She started walking, her boots silent on the soft grass, and a twig snapped behind her.
She spun, the flashlight beam swinging. Nothing but grass and wildflowers stretched behind her, no trees, no animals, no sign of anyone. The oak boundary she’d crossed ten minutes prior had vanished, swallowed by the dark, no trace of the trunks that had marked the entrance.
Who’s there?
Her voice bounced off nothing, the sound swallowed by the warm dark, and a second later an echo drifted back to her, the same word stretched thin, higher, like a child mimicking her tone. There. It lingered for three beats, then vanished. She gripped the flashlight so tight her knuckles ached, the crescent scar on her left wrist itching under her glove, the old childhood injury that had never quite faded. She ripped the glove off, scrubbed at the scar, and when she looked up, a flash of gray moved at the edge of her flashlight’s beam, to her right.
She swung the light that way, and caught a fallow deer, the kind that roamed Richmond Park’s open meadows. It stood twenty feet away, its head tilted, and for a split second she registered that its neck was twisted at an angle that would have shattered any animal’s spine, its eyes too bright, too human. It dropped to all fours before she could process what she’d seen, and trotted into the dark, vanishing before she could take a step toward it. When she blinked, it was like it had never existed, no rustle of grass, no trace of its passing.
She kept walking, faster now, the menhir still a hundred yards ahead. She’d been walking for five minutes by the thud of her own heartbeat, and the distance hadn’t shrunk an inch. The clearing was stretching , pulling the center away from her with every step she took. The Heartstone burned hotter, seeping through her sweater, and she yanked the chain out from under her clothes, the silver burning her palm as she wrapped her fingers around it. The crimson gem, roughly the size of a thumbnail, glowed with a faint inner light, pulsing so fast it blended into a steady red bleed, painting the grass at her feet. It pulled her forward, a magnetic tug, and she realized it was leading her toward the menhir, the Hel portal it had been pulsing toward this whole time, the way out of the Grove.
A footstep crunched behind her. Slow, heavy, the telltale clink of steel toes on stone, the same sound Evan’s boots had made when he kicked in the door of her Cardiff flat, the same sound that had chased her out of the city and to London six months prior. She didn’t turn. She couldn’t. The smell of cherry tobacco, the brand Evan had smoked for the whole four years they’d been together, wrapped around her, thick and sweet, mixing with an undercurrent of rot, the smell of something dead and buried for weeks. It seeped into her throat, and she gagged, picking up her pace into a jog. The footsteps behind her matched, speed for speed, another set of boots hitting the grass in perfect lockstep with hers.
Aurora.
The name breathed into her ear, a cold gust of wind that brushed the back of her neck, and it wasn’t Evan’s voice. It was hers, exact same Cardiff lilt , same sharp edge she used when she argued with Silas about the rent being too high, same soft pitch she used to order takeout from Golden Empress. She darted a glance to the side, and the flashlight beam caught something at the edge of her vision, a shadow too tall, its arms dragging on the grass, its fingers too long, its face half-hidden by the dark. When she swung the light directly at it, it was just an oak tree, a trunk she could have sworn wasn’t there a second before, but when she looked back ahead, the shadow was there again, lingering at the edge of the red glow from the Heartstone.
Aurora.
The name echoed from every direction, in front of her, behind her, to her left and right, a chorus of her own voices chanting her name, overlapping until it was a roar in her ears. She glanced down at the grass as she ran, and spotted a crumpled Golden Empress delivery bag, the same navy blue canvas she carried every shift, the logo peeling at the corner just like hers. She skidded to a stop, leaning down to flip it open, and a receipt tumbled out, dated November 14, 2019, five years prior, for the same order of pork dumplings and chow mein she’d dropped off an hour before she left for Richmond. Tucked next to it was her old Cardiff University pre-law textbook, the same beat-up copy she’d lost when she left the city, her name scribbled on the cover in the same blue gel pen she’d used through college, the page dog-eared at the chapter she’d re-read a dozen times before she dropped out. The crescent scar on her wrist burned, and she realized the Grove didn’t just stretch time. It collected the versions of her that had come before, all the Rorys that had wandered into the Grove and never made it to the center, all the ones that the thing had caught.
She ran again, her lungs burning, the menhir now only fifty feet ahead, the glow of the Heartstone lighting up the spiral carvings etched into its surface, the same symbols her mom had shown her in old Welsh history books, wards to keep evil out. The thing behind her screamed, a sound that tore through the chorus of voices, and she heard it lunge, its fingers brushing the back of her leather jacket, the cold of its skin seeping through the fabric. She threw her hand out, her palm slamming into the cold stone of the menhir, and the Heartstone exploded in a flash of red light so bright it blinded her. The thing screamed again, the sound shrinking, fading, and the warm spring air of the Grove vanished, replaced by the November frost, the oak boundary of the Grove visible ten feet behind her, the meadow of Richmond Park stretching out around her, the deer grazing a hundred yards away, no trace of the wildflowers or the thing or the endless stretch of grass.
She leaned against the menhir, gasping for air, and pulled the Heartstone out of her sweater. It hung cold and inert against her chest, the crimson glow gone, the pulse vanished. She checked her phone, the screen turning on to show 11:12 PM, five minutes after she’d stepped into the Grove. The menhir stood in the middle of a normal small clearing, the grass frost-covered, no wildflowers, no trace of the delivery bag or the textbook. She turned and walked back through the oak trunks, her boots crunching on the frost, and didn’t look back.