AI Aurora Carter dug her boot heel into the mud and hauled herself over the last root, the silver chain around her neck yanking hard enough to sting her throat.
The pendant knocked once against her sternum, hot as a swallowed ember.
She caught herself against an oak trunk, slapped a hand over the small crimson stone, and felt it pulse beneath her palm. Not a steady beat. A cramped, urgent throb, like something trapped under glass.
“Steady.”
Her own voice sounded thin in the black between the trees.
She lowered her hand and stared into the clearing ahead. The standing stones rose from the grass in a loose ring, ancient oak pillars shouldering up out of the earth like broken teeth. Wildflowers crowded their bases, pale heads turning in the dark with no breeze to trouble them. A shallow bowl of light sat in the middle of the grove, not from any lamp or lantern, just a faint wrongness that let her see the moss, the roots, the pale sheen on the stone faces.
Richmond Park had fallen away behind her. Here, the city felt like a story someone had half-remembered and then abandoned.
She stepped through the ring.
The pendant warmed again.
Aurora stopped so fast her trainers slid in the damp grass. The stone at her chest gave a hard, excited thump. Her skin prickled. She looked down at it, then up at the nearest monolith, then at the one beyond it, each one etched with scratches that resembled runes until she got close enough to see they were older than any language she knew. Not carved by hand. Worn. Pressed into the wood by time and teeth.
A faint sound moved through the grove.
Not wind. Not quite.
She turned in place.
Nothing.
Her phone light shook in her grip, a white cone that skimmed over foxgloves and nettles, over a ring of mushrooms crusted silver at the edges, over a patch of grass bent flat as if some heavy body had lain there and risen a second before she arrived.
“You’re wound up for nothing,” she muttered.
The grove answered with a soft crack from somewhere beyond the stones.
Aurora froze.
It came again, a dry little snap, followed by another. Branches? Bones? She let the light crawl towards the far side of the clearing. A line of black trunks stood there, close together, their bark slick with a dark shine that caught her torch and swallowed it. Nothing moved. Then, in the corner of her eye, something pale flicked between two trees.
She swung round.
The light hit a hanging strip of bark, white on one side, dark on the other, twisting slowly from a branch.
Aurora let out a breath through her teeth. “Brilliant.”
The pendant had gone hot enough to burn. She pulled it from under her collar and held it out. The crimson stone glowed from within, not bright, just alive. The silver chain slipped through her fingers. Near the grove’s centre, the warmth sharpened, aimed itself, as if the pendant had smelled something.
A Hel portal.
Yu-Fei’s warning came back to her, crisp as a knife against a plate. Don’t go near anything that hums. Don’t go near anything that listens back. And if your little red charm starts acting like it owns you, call me first.
Aurora curled her fingers around the pendant and kept walking.
The grass muffled her steps. The standing stones watched. She passed the first one and caught herself looking at the pitted surface, at the shallow grooves near the base where handprints might once have worn themselves into the oak. The air in the centre of the grove had a taste to it, metallic and green, like pennies left in rainwater. She drew a breath and regretted it.
Something chirped from the trees.
Not a bird. Too neat. Too close to human. It sounded like a child clicking a toy between thumb and finger.
Aurora stopped again.
Silence dropped over the grove so fast it felt forced.
Then, from somewhere behind her, the same sound answered.
Click.
Her spine went tight. She turned.
The phone beam swept the ring of stones, the black undergrowth, the broken roots. Nothing. The sound had come from her left, or perhaps from behind the nearest stone, or perhaps from the far trees. The grove seemed to shift every time she looked at it. A path appeared where none had been a second before, then folded shut with a hush of leaves.
She backed towards the centre.
The pendant jerked against her grip.
She lowered it and saw the stone had brightened again, a small pulse beating beneath her fingers. The warmth had a direction now. Not the middle of the grove. Beyond it.
At the far edge of the clearing, between two standing stones, a seam of darkness ran from the ground to chest height. It looked like a tear in the air, narrow as a split in cloth. The grass around it leaned away. The flowers nearby had gone still, their heads angled towards the gap as if listening .
Aurora’s mouth dried.
“Well,” she said, and hated how small it sounded, “that’s new.”
The seam shivered.
A low hum rolled out of it, felt more than heard, and the pendant answered with a hot, bright pulse that sent a sting through her palm. She hissed and almost dropped it. The silver chain tangled round her knuckles. She took one step closer, then stopped when her torch beam thinned and bent at the edges of the dark.
Her eyes caught movement beyond the seam.
A shape stood in the gap.
She raised the phone higher. The light touched nothing solid. It slid over the black like oil over glass.
Then the shape moved again, and for one awful second she thought she saw a face pressed close to the other side, pale and oval, with a mouth too wide for the rest of it. She blinked. The image broke apart into bark, shadow, and the split in the air.
“Nope.”
Her voice came out sharp, almost angry.
The grove clicked back at her.
Not one sound. A dozen. Scattered through the trees. Some close, some far, some circling her from all sides in a loose, mocking rhythm.
Click. Click-click. Click.
Aurora spun with the torch. The light snagged on a flash of movement low to the ground, white and quick, then on a handprint in the mud. Five fingers. Fresh. No track leading to it. Just the hand, spread wide as if someone had planted themselves there and listened.
Her stomach tightened.
She swept the light farther and found another print on a stone. Smaller. Smudged. Then another on the next stone, as though someone had climbed over the boundary stones on all fours.
Her own breath sounded too loud. She forced her shoulders down, dragged air into her lungs, and took a careful step back.
The pendant beat once against her skin.
Then the warm pulse stopped.
Aurora looked down.
The crimson stone had gone dark.
Her fingers closed around it. Cold now. Not the ordinary sort. A deep, draining cold that made her scar ache on her left wrist, the crescent mark whitening under her skin. She looked up at the seam in the air. It had widened while she watched, though she could not have said by how much. The edge wavered like heat over a road, but there was no road here, only grass and stone and whatever waited behind the dark.
A whisper brushed her ear.
Aurora whipped round so hard her phone almost flew from her hand.
Nothing stood behind her.
Nothing except the nearest oak stone and the wildflowers pressed thick around its base.
The whisper came again, this time from inside the grove, not behind her.
Rory.
Her stomach dropped through her boots.
No one called her that here. No one knew it here.
She took a step towards the sound before her common sense caught up and bit her hard. The torch beam slid over the ground, over roots, over a fallen branch shaped too much like a bent finger. Her mouth worked once before any sound came out.
“Who’s there?”
The click answered from all around.
Something moved on the edge of her vision, just at the boundary where the torch’s white cone gave way to darkness. A person, or the idea of one. Tall. Thin. Head tilted at the wrong angle. When she swung the light towards it, the shape unmade itself into two trees standing closer together than she had first thought.
The air smelled of wet bark and crushed leaves, but beneath that sat another scent, sweet and rotten, like fruit left in a sealed drawer until it split.
Aurora swallowed hard. “If this is some sort of welcome, I hate it.”
No answer.
The seam in the air gave a twitch.
The phone light dimmed, flared, then steadied. Her screen showed no signal, no surprise there, only a cracked reflection of her own face, pale and sharp-eyed and too still. Behind that reflection, something stood at her shoulder.
She dropped the phone.
It struck the grass and lit the ground in a cone of white. Aurora jerked round, heart hammering against her ribs so hard it hurt.
No one.
The grove had gone quiet again, but not empty. She could feel it. A pressure in the space between the stones, a patient attention. The kind that made the back of her neck crawl and her skin bunch at the scalp.
Her pendant went hot.
Aurora snatched it up. The crimson stone blazed from within now, bright enough to paint her fingers red. The silver chain quivered as if pulled from the other end. She stared at it, then at the seam in the air.
The split had opened wide enough to show depth.
Not a place. Depth. Black layers folding over black, and in the middle of them a pale shape turning very slowly , as if something on the far side had noticed her and was considering whether to step through.
The standing stones around her answered with a deep groan.
Aurora backed away, one careful step, then another. The grass hissed under her boots. The flowers at the seam bowed low, their pale heads trembling like teeth.
A hand emerged from the dark.
It passed through the tear with no sound, long-fingered and grey, the nails too clean and too white. The wrist followed, then part of a sleeve the colour of old ash. The hand flexed once, testing the air.
Aurora could not move.
The hand turned.
It pointed straight at her.
Then the rest of the thing began to come through.