AI Rory kept her torch low as she stepped through the gap in the standing stones.
The Richmond Park trees pulled in tight around her, dark trunks rising like columns. In the branches, wildflowers still held colour, too bright for the season and too steady for wind. She told herself it was just Fae-touched light, a trick of eyes and adrenaline. Her shoulders stayed set anyway, like her body already refused to relax.
Her boots sank into damp earth that looked solid until her weight shifted. The soil gave a little, like packed moss. A breath later it firmed up under her again.
She stopped. The wrongness didn’t strike like a jump scare. It arrived with paperwork-level patience.
From somewhere behind the stones, a sound carried—soft, deliberate tapping. Not footsteps . Not rain. Each tap landed on a rhythm that didn’t match anything she knew. A single knock, a pause, a longer pause, then two quick taps. The pattern repeated, slow as a heartbeat someone tried to imitate.
Rory lifted her phone. No service. The screen went dim and then bright again, as if it couldn’t decide whether the world allowed it to exist.
She closed it, slid it into her jacket, and reached for the small pouch at her belt. The Heartstone Pendant sat against her palm like something warm that pretended not to be alive.
When she brought it closer to her chest, the pendant pulsed . Deep crimson light warmed the silver chain from the inside out. It didn’t spill much. It just tightened with each pulse , like her body and the stone negotiated for space.
“Right,” Rory murmured. Her own voice sounded too clean in the trees. “You wanted me here. So talk like a person.”
Silence answered her, but the silence had texture. It pressed against her ears and filled the spaces between her breaths. Somewhere in the grove, something shifted without making a sound.
Rory walked forward anyway, keeping her eyes on the ground and the trunks. She’d chosen a route through the clearance she’d memorised in daylight, a line that avoided certain roots that curled like fingers. The place had always looked strange. At night, it felt actively aware.
The tapping stopped as soon as her torch beam angled toward the centre of the clearing.
She froze. She didn’t lower the light. If she lowered it, she worried she’d blink and find the ground rearranged.
The pendant pulsed once, then twice, and the warmth crept further into her skin. The silver chain tightened. It didn’t strangle. It guided, tugging her toward a patch of air that looked slightly darker than the rest, as if the night there had thicker ink.
Rory edged toward it.
A thin fog curled at knee height. It didn’t roll like mist. It sat in a pool and thinned around it with the patience of something waiting for permission. The air smelled faintly of old pennies and cold iron.
She lifted her torch and aimed it at the fog.
The beam cut through. Light didn’t pierce the darkness in the centre. It died, swallowed by the air. For a second, the torch’s glow held steady, and then it stretched—her light looked longer than the distance between her and the pool, like the ground had warped.
Rory took a step back.
Her heel scraped stone.
She didn’t remember stepping on stone. She hadn’t seen it in the beam. The scrape came anyway, sharp and real, followed by another scrape. On the other side of the torch beam, a narrow strip of ground scraped back, as if something dragged itself along an unseen surface.
Her stomach clenched. She kept her breathing slow.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
No reply. Just the echo of her own question hanging too long in the trees.
Then she heard it: a second sound, layered under the night. A low, wet shuffle that didn’t match any animal’s anatomy. The sound moved, not like walking, but like shifting weight against ground that wanted to resist.
Rory swept the torch beam left.
At the edge of the light, a shape moved.
It didn’t step into view. It stayed half in darkness and half in the spill of her torch, like it refused to commit to one definition. The outline suggested shoulders, then a narrowing toward a head. It moved with the careful pace of something that had learned humans feared sudden movement.
Rory didn’t turn her head fully. She kept the light on it and used peripheral vision to trap it. Her pulse tried to outrun her restraint, but she held it back.
“If you’re watching,” she said, “you’re wasting time.”
The shape paused. The fog near the darker patch shivered.
Rory raised the pendant to eye level, turning it so the faint inner glow faced the centre of the clearing. The crimson light reflected off the silver chain and made her fingers look blood-bright for a moment. The pendant pulsed hard enough that her teeth clicked together.
The fog responded. It drew inward, folding like cloth tugged by an unseen hand.
In the sudden dimness, her torch beam flickered . She gripped it tighter and steadied her aim.
The shape at the edge of the light moved closer, still staying just off full view. Something brushed a branch overhead. The branch didn’t sway. It snapped back into place immediately, like the grove refused to let it bend.
Rory swallowed. She tried to tell herself it was an illusion, a trick of the fae-touched air. She’d read enough, listened to enough half-finished stories in pubs and kitchen corners to know fear liked to inflate whatever it found.
But the Heartstone Pendant hummed under her skin now. The warmth surged, then steadied, like the stone had found the seam it needed.
Rory spoke again, calmer than she felt.
“I’m here for Dymas,” she said. “Your portal. Your problem. I didn’t come to play hide and seek.”
The tapping returned.
Not behind the stones now. Closer. The knocks came from somewhere to her left, at a distance that made it impossible to triangulate. Knock. Pause. Two quick taps. Then a longer pause that ended with a soft sound like knuckles pressed against wet paper.
Rory lowered the torch a fraction. She didn’t want to admit she felt the need to listen instead of look . The grove punished that kind of honesty.
The shape at the edge of the beam shifted. This time it did step into clearer view, just enough for her to see what it refused to show.
It looked wrong in the way a photograph looks wrong when it’s been cropped too aggressively—too smooth, too narrow around the edges, as if someone had started to draw a person and then changed their mind halfway through. Where its face should’ve been, there was a blank surface that didn’t reflect the torchlight. The darkness there held the light without giving it back.
Rory’s breath hitched and she hated herself for it.
She forced her voice steady.
“You can’t scare me with shadows,” she said. “I’ve lived with worse than you.”
The figure didn’t recoil. It leaned forward slightly . Her torch beam slid over it and for a second the outline rippled, like heat shimmer on asphalt. The fog pool at the centre deepened.
A memory surfaced without her permission: the way her abusive ex had spoken at dinner tables, calm and controlled until he wasn’t. The way her body had learned to brace for tone shifts, not fists.
This thing didn’t need fists. It hunted through timing.
Rory shifted her weight toward the stone patch she’d scraped her heel on, feeling for stability. The ground under her boots felt subtly uneven, like she stood on a thin layer that floated on something else. The air smelled stronger now—iron and damp, but also something like burnt sugar .
The pendant pulsed hard enough to burn.
Rory jerked it away from her chest. The warmth didn’t fade; it moved. The pendant’s glow stayed inside her palm, refusing to disperse into her body like it normally would. The chain tugged again, not toward the fog pool this time but toward the figure at the edge of her light .
Her wrist scar—small crescent-shaped mark—flared with sensation. Not pain. Pressure. A reminder of an old injury, as if her skin had learned to react when something tried to open her up.
Rory stared at the figure.
“Don’t,” she told it. “Don’t come closer.”
The figure’s head angled in a slow imitation of understanding. It moved one hand up, palm facing her. Its fingers didn’t clench or reach. They spread, flat as if it offered something.
Rory’s torch beam dipped with her movement. That was when she saw it: the air between them had lines.
Not light streaks. Not scratches. Fine, subtle lines like threads stretched taut across invisible gaps. They vibrated faintly, and where they crossed the fog pool, the darkness deepened into a thin seam.
A Hel portal seam.
She’d seen photos once, diagrams in battered books passed between people who kept their fears in margins. The seam in the air looked like those drawings, except this one held a pull strong enough to make the hairs on her arms stand.
The pendant pulsed in rhythm with the seam’s vibration. It didn’t just glow near the portal. It matched it, like a key matches a lock.
Rory didn’t step away.
She reached into her jacket and pulled out a small foil-wrapped packet she’d brought with her: salt, ground iron filings, and a strip of paper inked with an old protective phrase her mother had once used for storm nights. Rory hadn’t believed in it fully. She’d carried it anyway because belief didn’t matter as much as preparation.
She tore the foil open and let the salt slide across her fingers. The granules clung to her skin too long, like they resisted gravity here.
“You want the portal opened?” Rory asked. Her voice carried into the grove and thinned as it went. “You can’t have it for free.”
The figure remained motionless while the tapping at the left resumed. Knock. Pause. Two quick taps. Long pause.
The rhythm sounded like a language that used her nerves instead of her ears.
Rory ground the salt between her fingers and flicked it toward the seam.
The salt hit invisible air and fell sideways, drifting along the thread-lines. It didn’t scatter outward. It gathered, drawn to the seam like iron filings to a magnet.
Rory’s stomach dropped. The salt didn’t mark a boundary. It nourished one.
She held the foil packet in her other hand and looked at the figure again. She made her mouth shape around a question she didn’t want to ask.
“Isolde sent you?”
The name landed wrong in the clearing. The wildflower colours seemed to dim for a breath, then return brighter, as if the grove approved of the sound of a name it shouldn’t have.
The figure twitched—just once. The blank face surface caught torchlight for a split second and returned it as a grey sheen, like skin pretending to be stone.
Rory’s pulse hammered. She felt the pendant tug against her palm, warm as a live coal. The chain tightened and her fingers began to ache.
She forced herself to move instead of freeze. She pressed her thumb into the salt dust on her palm, smudging it into a patch of skin, and snapped her torch beam toward her feet.
She saw it then: the ground stones. Not the ancient oak stones at the boundary—those stayed behind her, far enough to feel like another world.
These were smaller. Harder. They hadn’t been there when she arrived. Now they formed a ring around her like a crude circle drawn by someone who didn’t know art but knew boundaries.
The ring stones gleamed faintly, each one catching crimson pulse from her pendant. She hadn’t stepped into a circle.
The circle had appeared.
Rory pulled back, but the ground didn’t give. Her boots scraped. The stones didn’t move. The ring tightened anyway, not with physical force, but with pressure in the air, like the grove held its breath around her.
The figure leaned closer.
This time, Rory saw movement in the periphery more clearly. At the edge of her torchlight, things shifted that didn’t form full shapes—thin tall lines that looked like people’s silhouettes until she focused and they broke into drifting strands. One strand brushed her sleeve without touching it. The cloth rippled as if air had hands.
Rory jerked her arm back. The sleeve didn’t tear, but the sensation lingered, like static under skin.
She took a step sideways to break her own attention on the figure.
The world didn’t let her.
The tapping moved with her, keeping to the same relative position. The thread-lines in the air stretched or shortened as she shifted, constantly adjusting to keep the seam lined up with her.
She’d come for the portal because someone—something—had hinted it would take a route through Dymas that would pull out an answer she needed. She’d left the flat above Silas’ bar at midnight with a plan and a bag and a heartstone that hummed when Hel opened.
She hadn’t expected the grove to treat her like a lock someone had already decided fit.
Rory lifted the pendant higher, until the crimson glow lit the inside of her wristscar with heat.
“Fine,” she said. The word came out brittle.
The figure moved its palm closer, slow as a handshake that didn’t intend politeness.
Rory tore the strip of protective paper from her pocket and threw it at the seam.
The paper flew, fluttered , then caught in the invisible thread-lines. It didn’t fall. It hung there, stretched thin, inked words hovering. The old phrase looked blacker than it should’ve, each letter thickening as the portal’s pull fed it.
The figure’s blank surface tilted again.
The tapping stopped.
For a beat, the grove held still.
Rory heard her own breathing and the torch’s low hum. The flowers glowed steadily. No wind touched them.
Then a sound rose from the seam. Not a scream. Not speech. It sounded like a room full of water trying to decide if it should be liquid or air. The seam vibrated , and the thread-lines tightened until they looked like they might snap .
Rory stared at the protective paper stretched between two worlds.
The ink on it began to crawl.
Letter by letter, shapes rewrote themselves into new marks that didn’t match any alphabet she knew. The paper tried to become a message meant for something else.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
“No,” she said, and she meant it like a command.
She lunged forward, grabbed the paper before it tore, and yanked it back toward her. The thread-lines caught her wrist. Her fingers jolted with a sharp sting that wasn’t pain. It felt like a thought being interrupted .
Her scar pulsed under the skin.
The Heartstone Pendant surged warmth , then dragged her wrist toward the seam.
Rory’s balance shifted. She stumbled half a step, and for a moment the seam’s darkness kissed the edge of her torchlight.
She heard a sound at the back of the figure’s blank face. Something like breathing, but deeper. Like the grove had lungs and had just drawn air.
Rory snapped her arm back again, hard enough to make the pendant swing and hit her palm. The crimson glow flared and then dimmed. The ring of stones around her gave a faint click, as if approving her resistance .
Her breath came fast. She forced it slow again, because panic didn’t untangle anything here.
She kept her eyes on the figure and held the rewritten paper between thumb and forefinger. The ink continued to shift, trying to settle into something stable. The longer she watched, the more her own thoughts felt like they had edges that could be sanded away.
She lowered the paper toward the ring stones and pressed it against the ground.
The paper stuck.
Not with glue. With pull.
The thread-lines in the air trembled . The seam vibrated once, harder, then flinched backward like something surprised by an unexpected answer.
Rory took that opening and spoke, voice roughened by effort and anger.
“You’re not taking me,” she said. “You’re not using me as a handle.”
The figure didn’t respond with words. It responded with movement—one step forward, then another. The blank face tilted lower, and the torchlight finally caught something that resembled eyes, only they weren’t set in a face. Two dull points appeared in the dark like lanterns behind frosted glass.
Rory felt the pendant pulse in a new rhythm. This one aligned with the figure’s movement, like the stone had found its partner.
She clenched the pendant chain in her fist, heart pounding through her ribs.
“You came first,” she told it, as if accusing a person who could be held accountable . “So you can leave first.”
She tried to back away from the seam. The ring stones bit into the ground through pressure. The air held her in place with a gentle, unarguable force.
The figure lifted its hands again, palms open.
Rory didn’t wait for whatever it offered. She rammed her free hand into her pocket and pulled out a second packet she’d kept for emergencies—salt mixed with iron filings and a pinch of ground charcoal. It looked like dirt when she tipped it into her palm, but it felt heavier than it should’ve.
She tossed it at the air where the seam sat.
The charcoal streaked through the thread-lines and blackened them. For a second the seam’s vibration faltered. The grove’s wrongness tightened, not loosening.
Then the thread-lines snapped back into place, and the charcoal clung to them like soot on glass.
Rory’s torchbeam shivered.
The figure’s head rose, slow. The blank face surface stayed blank, but the posture said it had decided she couldn’t win through stubbornness alone.
The tapping returned again, faster now. The rhythm turned into a stutter, like a signal interrupted and forced to resend itself.
Rory swallowed hard and forced her mind to work. The Heartstone Pendant pulsed near a Hel portal. It behaved like a key. Keys needed an action.
She looked down at the ring stones around her feet. The stones gleamed with faint crimson heat. The ring wasn’t random. It aligned with the thread-lines.
She pressed the pendant against the closest stone.
The warmth met resistance, then expanded outward in a slow bloom. Crimson light seeped into the stone ring, and the thread-lines brightened just enough for her to see their direction clearly. They ran from the seam to each stone in the ring like cables.
Rory didn’t remove the pendant. She kept pressure and spoke through clenched teeth.
“Hold,” she told the pendant, because that was the only thing she could command. “Hold your side.”
The figure surged forward at the same moment, hands cutting through the fog with no disturbance. The air between it and the seam rippled, and the seam pressed back as if it had been waiting for her to lock it in.
Rory refused to let go. The pendant’s glow intensified until it lit the underside of her chin and made her breath look like smoke in crimson.
The scar on her wrist burned with familiar heat.
Her thoughts threatened to scatter. She grabbed one thought and pinned it down: open the door, then close it before whatever stood behind it learned her name.
The ring stones flared.
The thread-lines tightened hard enough that Rory’s teeth clicked again. The figure paused mid-lean, blank face tilting as if it had hit an invisible wall it hadn’t expected.
The seam shuddered. The wrongness in the air thickened into a sensation like pressure in a tunnel.
Rory heard, through the seam, something that sounded like a distant crowd all whispering at once without lungs to breathe. It wrapped around her name without using the syllables. It tasted like iron and wet paper .
She bit down on the inside of her cheek until the pain grounded her.
Then the figure reached for her pendant.
It moved with sudden intent, not rushing, but choosing the exact angle it needed . Its hand closed over her wrist and chain at the edge of the light.
Cold slammed into her skin, colder than the grove’s air. The pendant’s warmth pushed back, fighting to stay lit.
Rory jerked her wrist away.
The figure didn’t let go.
Rory’s torch beam wavered across its blank face and found that the surface now showed faint cracks, like glass under stress. Those cracks didn’t spread. They formed patterns, and the patterns matched the thread-lines’ geometry.
It wasn’t just a watcher.
It had been built around the portal’s shape.
Rory’s voice broke through her teeth.
“Alright,” she said, and she moved the only way she could—down, toward the stone ring, forcing the pendant to press deeper into the circle. “If you’re the gate, you’ll hate when I lock you shut.”
The ring stones flared again, and the light ran like veins across their faces.
The seam pulled inward with a sound like cloth being sucked into a drain.
The figure jerked back, first in confusion, then in anger. Its blank face tilted toward the dark pull, and its hands clawed at invisible thread-lines.
The tapping turned frantic—knock, knock, quick taps, then a long pause that felt like the end of a sentence .
Rory held her ground and kept the pendant pressed. The warmth spread through her fingers into her wrist scar, steady and stubborn.
The fog pool at the clearing’s centre drew thin.
The thread-lines dimmed from crimson to dull grey. The seam’s darkness contracted until it looked like a bruise shrinking back under skin.
Rory’s breath came in a ragged rhythm now. The grove felt like it had been holding pressure and finally released some of it.
The figure stood at the edge of the shrinking darkness, swaying as if the ground beneath it had become uncertain. Its blank face cracked further, and this time it showed a faint sheen of reflected torchlight, like a mask losing cohesion.
Rory didn’t celebrate. She tightened her grip on the pendant and watched for the moment the seam reopened.
The tapping didn’t return.
Instead, the grove answered with a new sound—soft, distant steps, not from any direction she could pinpoint. They moved through leaves and vanished before her torch beam could catch a body.
Rory stared hard into the thinning fog.
Her torchlight steadied. The wildflowers in the background looked normal again, or as normal as they ever got in a place that treated time like a suggestion.
The figure took one step backward, then another. It didn’t flee. It recalibrated. The blank face stayed turned toward the seam as if listening for instructions .
Rory kept pressure on the stone.
The pendant pulsed once more, weaker now, like a key losing its match.
The seam shrank to a thin dark line in the air and then stopped existing like a thought erased mid-sentence. The fog settled into ordinary mist. The air smelled less like iron and more like soil.
The standing stones at the grove’s boundary looked farther away than they had a minute ago.
Rory realised her hands shook. She didn’t let go.
The figure remained in front of her, half in torchlight and half in the darkness it seemed to own. Its cracked blank face looked unstable now, like a mask held on by impatience.
Rory leaned forward, voice low.
“You wanted me here,” she said. “You got me. Now you go.”
The figure lifted its hands again, palms open, but this time it didn’t reach. It held them out like it awaited a decision from the portal that no longer existed.
Rory pressed the pendant one last time against the ring stone.
The stone ring clicked. A dull sound ran through the ground and into her boots. The circle’s crimson heat faded, leaving only faint marks where the light had touched.
Rory withdrew her pendant from the stone with effort, as if pulling it from deep water .
The warmth in the pendant dimmed to a softer glow. It still lived, still pulsed faintly, but the aggressive tug stopped. The thread-lines didn’t return.
The figure watched her without stepping closer. It leaned slightly , like it weighed whether she had truly ended something or only paused it.
Rory kept her torch aimed steady and stepped back, one careful boot at a time, until the ring stones fell behind her.
She didn’t relax until she crossed the invisible boundary the standing stones marked. The air at the boundary felt thicker, like a membrane. When she touched it with her hand, it prickled her skin instead of grabbing her.
Behind her, the grove stayed quiet.
Rory turned in place to look once more, torchlight cutting through the mist and wildflowers.
The figure didn’t chase her. It stood where the seam had been, half-lit, blank-faced, waiting in the posture of an interrupted mechanism.
Rory stared at it until the glow in her pendant settled into something steady and she could hear her own heartbeat again.
Then she walked toward the gap between the standing stones, never taking her eyes fully off the clearing, and the night outside the Grove felt less like relief and more like a door she’d managed to shut with her back still to it.