AI Aurora Carter pressed her thumb to the Heartstone Pendant and felt it pulse back, warm against her skin like it had a pulse of its own.
The pendant sat under her collarbone, faint crimson glow smudged into her palm when she cupped it, and the warmth surged as she reached for the next standing stone.
She hadn’t come to Richmond Park for a romantic walk. She’d come because the pendant had burned her pocket during her last drop-off, the warmth dragging her thoughts to a single address she didn’t have, a direction she couldn’t explain to anyone in London without sounding cracked.
Now the grove accepted her like a closed door deciding it might open.
She stepped between the old oaks that marked the boundary. Bark and leaves should have looked normal, but the air snagged on her throat, thick with that wrong kind of perfume. Not flowers. Not rot. Something sweet and metallic, like copper rinsed through rose water.
Behind her, the path didn’t fade. It obeyed the rules of distance instead, still visible through the trees, still reachable in theory.
Aurora took her phone out anyway. No signal. Of course. She held the screen close to her face, the blue light catching on her bright blue eyes, making her look like someone who belonged in a different story.
Her own breath sounded too loud.
She told herself the sound came from her, from the thin silence of a place that had waited for her. She’d learned that trick in abusive relationships, the one where you argued with your senses and pretended the argument made you safer.
“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice low. It came out flat, like the grove had swallowed the edges of it. “I’m here. Show yourself.”
Nothing answered. No snap of twigs. No rustle. No voice.
Instead, she felt the pendant throb , a deeper warmth like a heartbeat under skin.
When she moved, she didn’t hear her footsteps at all.
That bothered her more than the lack of birdsong. Birds always made noise when they wanted you to know they existed. Here, the grove offered none of that comfort, as if it had agreed with itself to stay quiet while she walked in.
Aurora turned her head slowly , scanning for motion in the undergrowth. Wildflowers bloomed year-round, she remembered, and they should have been impossible this season. Pale petals, stubborn colour, bright as if they refused to accept the natural cycle.
But she didn’t look at them long.
Movement lived where she couldn’t see it properly. At the edge of her vision, something shifted and corrected itself when she tried to focus, as if the grove adjusted its rules to avoid being observed.
Her mouth went dry.
She took two more steps. The ground felt springy, too smooth under her trainers, like she’d walked onto a mattress the world hadn’t meant to keep.
Then she heard it.
Not a footstep. Not a branch cracking. A sound like a nail dragged along glass, gentle and patient. It came from somewhere to her right, close enough that her skin tightened as if bracing for a touch .
Aurora stopped dead.
The pendant pulsed again, then steadied, like it had decided she’d done the first part. Like it wanted her to do the second part.
She forced herself to look . The undergrowth to her right remained thick and unmoving, leaves settled, flowers hanging their faces as if they had nothing to hide.
The drag scraped again.
This time she turned her head so quickly her neck protested.
Nothing. Only a cluster of leaves quivering in a faint, meaningless way, the sort of vibration you got when you brushed fabric and didn’t know the sound came from your own movement.
Aurora swallowed. The pendant’s warmth climbed her collarbone, climbing until it pressed against the crescent scar on her left wrist whenever she flexed her hand.
She hadn’t come to the grove empty-handed. She’d brought a small chain with the pendant on it and, in her other pocket, the emergency tools she used for deliveries. Wires. Tape. A torch.
And because she was Rory Carter, because she thought like a solicitor and hated leaving gaps for other people to exploit, she’d brought a tiny audio recorder too, cheap but reliable.
She pulled it out and hit record. The little red light blinked like a heartbeat she could control.
“Someone’s here,” she said. “If you want something, say it.”
The grove didn’t answer in language. It answered in correction.
A wildflower beside her shifted colour. Petals that had been white tipped towards crimson, deepening until the bloom looked like bruised fruit . Aurora stared, and the flower paled again, returning to white as if embarrassed to have revealed itself.
Her stomach turned. The sensation didn’t come from fear alone. It came from the understanding that she was being tested , measured for the limits of her attention.
She breathed out slowly . “All right,” she said. “I’m not easy.”
That earned something. A faint chuckle rolled through the clearing, not loud, not from any specific throat. It moved around her, too smooth, as if the sound had no origin because no mouth owned it.
Aurora’s hand went to her phone again. She opened the camera. The screen showed the grove in washed-out colour, and for a moment it looked normal, leaves and stone and flowers.
Then, in the screen only, something slid behind an oak.
On the live view, it passed like a shadow with edges sharpened to a knife. The camera couldn’t decide what to focus on. The shape blurred for half a second, long enough for Aurora to see a bend of something that might have been a shoulder, long enough to see no face at all.
She lowered the phone. In the air before her, behind the same oak, nothing moved.
Her pulse hammered. The audio recorder continued to blink. She hoped the grove didn’t understand it.
She took a step forward anyway, because retreat felt like offering the grove a win .
The standing stones formed a loose circle around her, ancient oak giants like watching eyes. She walked until one stone matched the pendant’s glow, until crimson inside the gem seemed to line up with the veins of the world.
The air tightened again, becoming thread-thin. A pressure built in her ears like she’d driven too fast up a mountain without warning.
Aurora lifted her left wrist. The crescent scar itched, and the pendant surged warm enough that she flinched.
A line of dark marks appeared on the standing stone.
Not carved. Not painted. The stone itself took on lines like bruises, faint at first, then darker when she stared. They weren’t letters exactly. They were impressions that looked like words from a language that refused to sit still in her mind.
She leaned closer, holding her breath. Her own body tried to protect her from the act of reading. The inside of her nose filled with copper again, stinging.
The marks shifted.
They rearranged themselves, and a pattern formed that her brain recognised despite refusing to remember where. A Hel portal signature, something she’d studied late at Cardiff when a lecturer had dismissed fae-touched geography as superstition and Aurora hadn’t accepted that answer.
The pendant pulsed like a held note.
Aurora pressed the pendant against the stone.
Warmth met warmth , a click of resonance . The grove shuddered. Leaves trembled without wind. Wildflowers snapped their heads towards her like a field of startled eyes.
A sound rose then, low and deep.
Not a growl. Not a roar.
A doorway clearing its throat.
Aurora jerked back. The standing stone’s bruised lines widened, darkening into a seam. The air beside it folded, not with the physics of torn fabric but with the logic of something deciding to exist differently .
Her breath came fast. She tried to keep it quiet.
The seam opened a finger’s width.
On the other side: darkness so complete it didn’t look like absence of light, more like it had eaten light and kept it. There was a scent too, faint and cool, like snow stored in a metal box.
The grove itself went very still.
Then she heard footsteps behind her.
Not hers. Not the drag on glass this time. Real weight , solid and measured , crunching through something that should have been soft but didn’t give.
Aurora didn’t turn. She kept her eyes on the seam, because if she looked away, the portal might close, and she needed it open long enough to do the thing she’d come to do.
The footsteps stopped.
Her neck tightened.
A whisper brushed past her ear, so close her skin prickled. The voice didn’t speak English. The words came out wrong in her head, syllables she couldn’t catch, but the intention landed like a shove.
Come closer.
Her throat worked. She forced herself to speak anyway, in English, because rules mattered when you were dealing with rules that wanted to unmake you.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The portal seam wavered , as if the whisper had tugged on it. Aurora tightened her grip on the pendant chain. Silver bit into her palm, grounding her.
The voice came again, now with a different shape to it, more coherent. “The one who carries your borrowed warmth .”
Aurora’s stomach hollowed. Borrowed warmth . She’d felt the pendant pulse since the moment she’d arrived, as if it had been waiting for her body to sync with something else.
She turned her head just enough to see the standing stone’s edge and, in the blurred gap between it and the flowers, a movement.
Not a figure stepping into view. A distortion, like heat over asphalt, except the grove’s air wasn’t hot. The distortion held shape briefly, a silhouette that suggested shoulders and a head too narrow.
A face refused to resolve .
Aurora’s voice stayed steady. “You’re not taking it.”
The silhouette tilted, listening, then shifted as if closer without moving. The whisper grew more intimate.
“You already offered it.”
“I offered nothing,” Aurora said.
The silhouette’s outline flickered . The flowers around the portal seam browned at the edges, petals shrivelling like paper catching flame. No fire. Just the idea of decay, dragged across the grove like a hand.
Aurora backed away from the seam and kept her left wrist visible. The scar on her wrist throbbed , responding to the change in the grove’s tension .
She hadn’t brought the pendant just to open a door.
She’d brought it because her benefactor, whoever they’d been, had told her one thing with no letter, only the pendant itself warming in her pocket, one message pressed into her bones like a map.
If a Hel portal stirred in the grove, you didn’t send someone else through. You went yourself and you held the line with the artefact.
Aurora had assumed the “line” would be between life and death.
Now she wasn’t sure it wasn’t between her and whatever lived in the in-between.
The seam widened. Cold breath seeped out, enough to raise gooseflesh on her arms. Her trainers slipped slightly on the springy ground, and she caught herself on the standing stone.
The silhouette behind her made a sound like satisfaction. The whisper didn’t need words now, because the grove itself seemed to echo it.
Open.
Aurora jammed her pendant against the stone and leaned in, forcing her body to obey the instruction written into her muscles. She felt resistance like a door pushing back.
For a second, the pendant’s glow brightened. The crimson gem became a small, contained sun.
Then something tugged from within the seam, pulling at the pendant chain. It didn’t rip it free. It tested it, like fingers probing fabric to find a seam.
Aurora gritted her teeth. She reached into her other pocket and yanked out tape and wire, hands shaking now that fear had found its hook.
“What do you want?” she demanded, as if wanting could negotiate .
The silhouette’s outline sharpened by degrees. The air around it looked scraped, the way smoke looks after a gust.
“You came for what you lost,” it whispered. “Not your love. Not your money. Your safety.”
Aurora’s breath caught. She didn’t answer. The grove could smell her denial, the way it corrected her flower colours when she stared.
She took advantage of the silence . She wrapped wire around the standing stone seam, pressing hard enough that her fingertips numbed.
The stone reacted, bruising deeper, dark lines crawling along the grain. The seam jerked, fighting the wire like a living wound resisting stitches.
A low groan came from the seam, and the sound seemed to vibrate in Aurora’s teeth.
She tightened the wire anyway, pulling tape into place so the wire couldn’t loosen.
The silhouette behind her shifted and, for the first time, the drag on glass returned, not near her ears but across her peripheral vision, circling as though it watched from more angles than one.
Aurora swallowed a scream and kept working. If she panicked, her hands would betray her.
The portal seam pulsed . Warmth and cold warred in the air around the stone, condensation beading on her forearms. Her pendant heated until it hurt.
Then the seam did something impossible.
It didn’t open wider. It snapped sideways.
The line of the portal jerked, as if the other side had grabbed the handle and pulled it off-centre. A slice of black spilled into the grove like ink into water.
Aurora’s wire snapped tight in response, humming.
The silhouette behind her laughed again, but this time the laugh carried hunger. “Wrong door.”
Aurora froze. The wrong door meant someone else had aimed at her.
The seam’s edge bent again, dragging air with it. The grove’s stillness broke. Leaves fluttered . Wildflowers shook so hard their stems creaked.
Aurora yanked her pendant back to her chest, instinct screaming to secure the artefact. The Heartstone fought her pull, warming in protest, like it wanted to stay where it had become important.
The audio recorder’s red light blinked once, then cut out.
Silence crashed down so hard her ears rang. No hum. No footsteps . No whisper .
Only her breath.
Aurora stared at the seam, and the black inside it changed. For a heartbeat, she saw motion behind the darkness, shapes moving too quickly to belong to anything with bones.
Then a thin sound came from the portal, like a string drawn across a bow.
It aimed at her.
The crescent scar on her left wrist burned, and the pendant in her hands flared crimson so bright it painted the stone and her skin in violent colour.
Aurora tried to inhale, but her lungs wouldn’t quite cooperate .
The seam snapped open again, this time straightened and stable, as if the grove had decided to stop teasing and deliver.
A hand pushed through.
Not a clawed thing in a theatrical flourish. A human hand, pale and slightly too smooth, fingers long. Fingernails clean as if it had just washed them, clean as if it had never held anything heavy.
It reached towards her wrist scar, towards the crescent mark.
Aurora moved without thinking. She grabbed the wrist, pulled her hand back, and drove the pendant’s chain between the hand and the opening like a wedge.
The hand paused, as though reconsidering the offer of her warmth .
Aurora held the pendant with both hands now, shoulders straining. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough that her vision blurred at the edges. The seam groaned, and the grove’s air thickened around it, trying to close the wound while something inside pulled to keep it open.
The silhouette behind her leaned in close again, whispering at her cheek. The words landed now in English, crisp and cruel.
“Let me borrow it properly.”
Aurora’s wire and tape held for half a second longer than she expected, then the standing stone bruised line began to fade, the dark markings unravelling like ink pulled back into skin.
She had minutes at best. Maybe seconds.
The hand inside the seam flexed, fingers curling, searching.
Aurora yanked the wire free with a sharp jerk, the tape shredding. She didn’t know what she meant to do until she did it, until her body chose it like it had always known.
She jammed the pendant against the centre of the seam and shoved.
The Heartstone flared, crimson light bursting outward.
For a moment the grove looked wrong in a different way, like the world had been rubbed out and redrawn with wet ink. The standing stones stretched, their lines elongating. Flowers leaned too far, petals trembling like paper in a draft that didn’t exist.
The hand recoiled.
Aurora felt the pull between realms change direction, tugging her instead of the opening. The seam snapped wider to catch her movement, to drag her into the in-between to complete whatever bargain the pendant had started.
Her trainers slid on the springy ground. She grabbed the standing stone with her right hand, fingers digging into bark that felt too soft, like meat beneath a thin skin.
Her pendant chain cut into her throat when she surged forward with it, trying to keep her grip firm.
The silhouette behind her exhaled, satisfied.
The seam grabbed.
Aurora’s vision tunneled to crimson, and then the grove tore sideways around her, swallowing the air, swallowing the quiet, swallowing the idea that she could choose to stay on this side.
Her body crossed the threshold with a jerk that stole her balance, and she fell into darkness that smelled like cold metal and rosewater, light vanishing behind her in a snap.
Behind her, the portal’s opening closed with a soft, final sound, like a mouth clicking shut right before it started to chew.