AI Rory eased through the last break in the trees and stopped with one hand on a birch trunk, the bark cold and damp under her palm. The grove opened before her in a shallow bowl of moonlit grass, ringed by ancient oaks twisted thick as church pillars. Their roots rose from the earth in knotted humps, half-swallowed by moss, and standing stones cut through the dark between them like broken teeth. Wildflowers scattered the clearing in pale patches of white and blue, each petal catching the silver light and giving it back with a faint, sickly sheen.
She checked her phone again.
No signal. Of course there wasn’t.
Rory slid it back into her coat pocket and adjusted the strap of the satchel on her shoulder. The silver chain inside gave a soft, familiar chime against her keys. Her fingers brushed the Heartstone Pendant through the fabric. Warm. Not hot. Just enough to make her stop and look down at it for a second.
“Great,” she muttered to the trees . “You’re doing that thing again.”
The pendant gave no answer, but the warmth spread a little, as if it had heard her.
She kept walking.
The path into the grove had vanished behind her the moment she crossed the line of standing stones. She knew it had. She had checked over her shoulder three times, and every time the trees had shifted, closing ranks in a way that made her skin tighten along her arms. Richmond Park had been full of the ordinary night noises when she’d stepped off the track: distant traffic from the road, a cyclist bell somewhere beyond the trees, a fox yapping in one of the hollowed gullies. Here, inside the stones, those sounds thinned until they felt miles away.
Something else took their place.
A low murmur moved through the clearing.
Rory stopped with her breath held between her ribs.
It sounded like voices carrying through leaves, too soft to make out, a thread of speech with no clear source. She turned slowly, eyes searching the trunks, the stones, the dark between them. The murmur fell away when she faced it, then returned at her back when she turned again.
“Nope,” she said into the dark . “Not doing that.”
She’d come for a reason. That reason had teeth in it, had weight . Eva’s message still sat raw in her head from earlier: If the pendant goes warm, get to the grove. Don’t argue. Don’t bring anyone.
Rory had not liked the last part. She liked it even less now, standing alone in a place that felt peeled out of the world.
The Heartstone warmed through her coat. She slipped it out on its chain and held the pendant in her palm. Deep crimson caught the moonlight and seemed to drink it instead of reflecting it. A faint inner glow throbbed under the stone’s surface, slow as a pulse .
“Lead on then,” she whispered.
The warmth pointed nowhere. It only grew stronger, as if the grove itself had leaned in to listen.
A twig cracked behind her.
Rory turned so fast her shoulder brushed the bark of a standing stone. Nothing moved in the open grass. The crack came again, from her left this time, and a shape slid between two trees at the edge of sight, not solid enough to hold, gone when she looked straight at it.
She kept her face still. Kept her breathing even.
“Fox,” she told the empty clearing .
Another crack. Then the scrape of something dragging over roots.
Not a fox.
Rory took three careful steps toward the centre of the grove. The grass looked soft enough to lie down in, but there was a wrongness to it, a sense that if she pressed her weight into that pale carpet it would give way into some deeper place. The wildflowers had opened all the way despite the hour, their pale heads turned toward the moon. She passed them with her fingers curled tight around the pendant.
The murmur started again, clearer this time. One voice, then two, then a cluster of them, all speaking at once in a language she didn’t know. The sound rose and dipped through the trunks, circling her without ever landing. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted.
“Isolde?” Rory called.
The name vanished into the trees.
She swallowed and tried again, louder.
“Isolde, I’m here.”
Silence answered. Not the natural kind. This silence had pressure behind it, like a palm pressed hard over her mouth.
Rory looked toward the nearest oak standing stone. It rose taller than she had expected, the bark-black surface veined with silver lichen. A ribbon of something pale hung from one branch above it. She squinted.
A strip of cloth.
No. A scarf.
No. Too pale, too thin.
The shape moved.
Rory’s stomach dropped. She took a step back, pulse hammering under her throat.
The thing on the branch shifted again, and she saw it for what it was: a hand, long-fingered and limp, hanging from the branch with the wrist bent wrong. The moon caught the pale skin, stretched nearly translucent over knuckles that did not match any human hand she’d ever seen. She stared at it until the shape twitched and vanished into shadow as if the tree had swallowed it.
Her mouth went dry.
“Brilliant,” she whispered.
She backed away from the oak. Her heel struck stone.
Something clicked.
Rory froze.
The standing stone behind her had not been there a moment ago, or if it had, it had stood farther off. She’d stepped into a tighter ring of rocks without noticing, and now she stood within six weathered pillars arranged in a rough circle around a patch of bare earth. The ground inside the ring looked churned and dark, as if something large had slept there and dug itself into the soil.
Her chest tightened.
She spun and found the opening she had entered through gone. Not hidden. Gone. The grass flowed uninterrupted from one stone to the next, with only the moonlit slope beyond.
Rory stared at the place where the gap should have been.
“No.” The word came out thin.
She moved to it, put out a hand, and met solid stone. Her fingers slid over rough, cold surface where open air should have been. Her skin prickled.
The grove had shifted.
She took a sharp breath through her nose and forced herself to look around instead of panicking. Stone ring. Dark soil. Trees beyond, too still. The pendant warmed hard enough now to sting at her palm. It tugged against the chain, a low pull she felt in the bones of her wrist.
“Fine,” she said to herself. “Fine. You want me in here. I’m in here.”
The words steadied her more than she liked.
A sound came from the soil.
Not a footstep. Not a scrape. A wet, tiny tapping from beneath the ground, as if someone underneath had dragged a fingernail against the inside of a coffin lid.
Rory swallowed hard.
The tapping stopped.
Her own breath sounded huge in the ring.
Then, from behind the nearest standing stone, a voice murmured her name.
Not loudly. Right by her ear.
“Rory.”
She jerked away so hard her shoulder hit stone. Pain flashed down her arm.
The voice wasn’t there. No one was there.
But she had heard it. Low. Familiar. A woman’s voice with a Welsh edge that her brain tried, and failed, to place.
Rory stared at the empty space between stones.
“Eva?”
Nothing.
“Don’t be funny.”
The trees held their silence .
Her heart beat once, hard enough to make her jaw ache. She looked down at the pendant. Its crimson glow had deepened, the pulse faster now, matching her own.
A shape moved at the edge of the grove.
Rory lifted her head slowly .
Between two oaks stood a woman in a long dark coat, hair hanging loose around her shoulders, face turned half away. Moonlight touched the line of her cheek and the pale slant of one hand resting against a tree trunk. The figure stood still as a cutout.
Rory’s throat tightened with hope before she crushed it down.
“Isolde?” she asked.
The woman did not turn.
Rory took one step.
The figure moved too fast to follow, sliding behind the tree and out of view. A second later it appeared at the edge of another stone, farther off, then farther still, as if the grove had simply relocated her between blinks.
Rory’s pulse kicked up. “No. Not playing that.”
She angled toward the movement, keeping her eyes fixed on the shape, and the grove answered with a shift in perspective so subtle she nearly missed it. The standing stones no longer formed a circle. They stretched into a corridor lined with ancient rock, leading her deeper between the oaks where the moonlight lay thinner.
A cold thread ran down her spine .
She had the clear, unhelpful certainty that if she looked behind her now, the way back would be gone for good.
So she kept moving forward.
The corridor opened into another clearing, smaller than the first and sunken lower into the earth. At its centre stood a fallen oak split clean through the middle, its roots twisted above the soil like a crown of blackened hands. Something pale hung from the branches above it. Not cloth this time. Too many strips. Pale ribbons, thin as skin, fluttering without wind.
Rory stopped at the edge of the clearing.
The pendant hitched warm in her palm.
There was a sound coming from the tree. Breathing.
Slow. Dry. Close.
She took one step back.
The breathing stopped.
Then a voice, from deep in the roots.
“You came late.”
Rory looked down.
At first she saw only roots, earth, shadow. Then the shape of a face emerged from the dark under the fallen oak, pressed close to the exposed tangle of wood as if grown there. The features were wrong in the way dream faces were wrong, familiar and not, eyes sunk deep and glossy, mouth split in a line too wide for the bones beneath. The skin had the colour of ash left in rainwater.
Rory’s fingers clenched around the pendant until the chain bit her skin.
“You’re not Isolde.”
The thing smiled, and the expression did not fit its face.
“No.”
Its voice came from everywhere at once. From the roots. From the branches. From behind her shoulder, close enough to make her muscles lock. “But she was here.”
Rory kept her eyes on the face in the roots. “Where is she now?”
The smile widened.
The answer came not as words but as a rush of whispers from the stones around her . Isolde. Gone. Taken. Waiting. Not waiting. Wrong door. Wrong hour. Wrong blood.
Rory’s head snapped toward the nearest stone. Nothing there. Only moss and lichen and dark damp bark.
“Stop it,” she said.
The whispers sharpened, becoming a scrape of voices she almost recognised without knowing why. Her own name threaded through them. Carter. Rory. Laila. Aurora. One voice laughed under the others, and the sound put ice under her tongue.
The thing in the roots shifted, and Rory saw more of it now: a shoulder pressing through the earth, a hand with fingers too long folded over one exposed root, nails dark with soil. It did not climb. It simply existed there, half inside the tree, as if the oak had been grown around it and never fully finished the job.
Rory stepped back again.
The ground behind her was not ground.
She pitched sideways as something gave beneath her boot, catching herself with a sharp gasp and a slap of her free hand against the earth. The soil had gone soft underfoot, turned slick and deep, the surface skin thin over a hollow below. She yanked her boot free with a sucking sound that made her stomach lurch .
Then she saw it.
A footprint in the mud beside her hand.
No. Not a footprint.
A handprint. Long fingers. Fresh.
Rory went still.
Another print appeared inches from it, and another, as if something had been dragging itself through the mud beneath the surface, pressing up from below.
The pendant burned warm against her palm.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “I know.”
The thing in the roots laughed then, a dry sound like leaves crushed in a fist.
Rory tightened her grip on the pendant and looked up hard at the empty spaces between the stones, at the trees standing too straight in the dark, at the movement that waited just outside her sight. Her voice came out low and steady, but her mouth had gone numb around the words.
“Who’s here with me?”