AI Aurora Carter followed the pulse .
It lived in the Heartstone Pendant at her throat, a deep-crimson warmth that beat against her skin like a second heart trying to remember its rhythm. She kept her thumb pressed to the pendant’s silver chain, fingers trembling in spite of herself, and counted her breaths as if numbers could tether her to reality.
The standing stones waited ahead, their oaks thick with bark that looked too deliberate. Between two of them the clearing opened like a wound, stitched shut with wildflowers that should not have belonged in any season. She stepped closer anyway, boots crunching over springy leaf litter that held the sound too long, as though the ground delayed permission to be heard.
“No one said it would be polite,” she murmured, and the words came out wrong in her own ears. Thin. Like she’d spoken into a spoon.
The pendant warmed again. Not brighter. Closer. The pulse turned syrup-slow, then quickened , then settled into a steady insistence that made her teeth ache.
Aurora stopped just short of the stones and angled her head. The Grove did not answer in bird-song or wind. It answered in absence, a quiet that did not feel natural but engineered, like the hush before an executioner tips their chair back.
She reached into her delivery satchel for the folded paper she’d tucked under a packet of spare batteries and a spare torch. The page was damp already, ink blurring at the edges as though the Grove had started drinking it the moment she arrived. She flattened it against her palm. Coordinates, a diagram of the stone boundary, and a note in someone’s careful hand.
Bring the pendant. Do not wear it inside.
She stared at that last line until the letters stopped behaving. The note didn’t feel threatening, not in the way Evan’s messages had felt threatening. It felt… accurate, like a label on a jar you hadn’t realised you’d picked up.
Aurora slid the pendant out from under her jumper. It resisted slightly, as if the chain wanted to keep contact with her skin. When she held it away, the pulse did not stop. It intensified, warmth spreading up her wrist and into her bones.
“Fine,” she said. “You want it. You can have it.”
She clipped the chain back to her bag, threading it through a carabiner. The stone-warmth eased, though not by much. The Grove still seemed to look at her with steady patience.
A sound came from her left, a soft tick, tick, tick, like a clock running in another room.
Aurora turned. The trees remained. The standing stones remained. The wildflowers remained. Nothing moved. Yet the sound continued, close enough to vibrate the cartilage in her ears.
She lifted her torch and clicked it on. White light cut through the clearing and caught on the nearest oak, a tight beam that painted the bark in quick relief. The tick turned into a faint scuffing sound, then stopped.
Something at the edge of her vision shifted.
Aurora kept her eyes forward and refused to look directly. She’d learned, long ago, that if you stared at something you weren’t meant to acknowledge, it became bolder. A rule. Like the ones you make in your head because the alternative is admitting you’re prey.
The scuffle started again, this time behind her. She held her breath, listened hard enough to hurt, and waited.
Footsteps did not follow.
Instead, there came a wet drag, the sound of fabric sliding over damp earth. It moved a few inches, then halted. The Grove held its breath with her.
Aurora slowly rotated her torch hand, careful not to swing the beam too widely. The light grazed the ground beside a standing stone. A dark smear stained leaves that had been pale moments before. It looked like spilled ink, except it spread without soaking, curling over itself in delicate loops.
Her stomach tightened. She lowered the torch a fraction. The smear rose, not like liquid returning to a source, but like a decision .
A handprint formed on the air, the outline first, then the suggestion of fingers, five too-long digits splayed in invitation. The print did not touch the ground. It hovered, trembling, as if it searched for an object to obey.
Aurora swallowed. Her mouth tasted of pennies.
“No,” she said, and the word came out sharp enough to slice .
The hovering hand dimmed, then vanished, leaving only the stained smear that quickly dulled into normal dark soil.
The tick resumed somewhere to her right.
Aurora forced her body to move. She stepped away from the boundary stones, sliding along their curve, matching the diagram’s layout with her memory. If someone had left instructions, they’d expected her to come alone. That meant she needed to do exactly what she was told , even if the told part made her skin want to crawl off her bones.
She pulled the folded paper back out, the damp edges sticking to her glove. The diagram showed a loop between stones, then a point marked with the word HEL.
Hel. The Hel portal, if the stories were real, if the rumours in London were more than gossip traded between night shifts and broken cups of instant coffee. Dymas, the pendant’s origin, sat behind that myth like a lock behind a lock.
She had no choice but to believe what she’d been offered . Money had been tight. Work had been sporadic. Yu-Fei’s Golden Empress had been generous with tips, but generosity had limits, and Aurora’s flat above Silas’ bar had rent that never missed.
Then the note had arrived, tucked into the delivery bag she hadn’t used that evening. No stamp. No return address. Only the Heartstone Pendant’s sudden appearance, warm as fresh blood, and instructions she didn’t understand until she’d read that one line.
Do not wear it inside.
Now her pendant sat inside her bag, close to her ribs by metal and fabric, still pulsing in muffled waves. It did not feel like waiting. It felt like calling.
Aurora crossed into the pocket of wrong space.
The air changed first. The smell shifted from soil and leaf mould to something faintly floral and metallic, like crushed violets mixed with pennies and old coins. The wildflowers around her pulsed in colour when she blinked, not brightening, just rearranging their hues like eyes moving behind lids.
The tick became a rhythm, not a clock now, but a heartbeat syncopated with her own . She could not decide which heart the sound belonged to.
She moved slower, shoulders tight. She kept the torch pointed at her feet, a narrow corridor of light that made the ground a simple thing. Beyond the beam, shadows held shape too well.
At the edge of vision, something stepped. Aurora did not look. She listened, and her listening told her it happened without friction. Not a foot on earth, but a decision to occupy space .
Her eyes watered. She rubbed at them and forced her gaze down to the grass.
A coil of ivy unspooled from nowhere and wound around her ankle, gentle at first, then firm, tightening like a knot someone tied while smiling. Aurora jerked her leg back. The ivy resisted, then stretched, as though it had already memorised her shape.
She stabbed the ivy with her torch’s metal handle. It recoiled slightly . The plant hissed, a sound like breath through teeth.
Aurora yanked at her ankle, and the ivy finally snapped free.
When her boot landed on the ground again, the smear beside the standing stones reappeared in her peripheral vision, darker this time, threaded with hair-fine fibres. Those fibres crawled over leaves, finding purchase in veins like fingernails.
The Grove did not rush. It taught.
Aurora stepped forward into the loop indicated on the diagram. The paper trembled in her hand, ink lines writhing like worms.
The tick quickened .
She reached the point marked HEL. The label sat inside a circle drawn around a gap in the standing stones, a space where the ground dipped. Aurora stared at the dip, expecting earth. Instead, she saw depth. Not depth like a hole. Depth like a doorway that refused to be seen head-on.
Her torch beam slid across it and came back dimmer.
A whisper rose from the dip, thin and close. Not words at first. Then syllables, broken and layered, like someone reading a letter aloud in a language Aurora couldn’t place.
“Rory,” it said.
Her grip tightened on the paper. Her name, not the formal Aurora on paperwork, not the Rory shouted by friends over laughter and drinks. Rory, spoken like a memory someone owned.
Aurora’s throat went dry. She forced her voice to behave.
“I’m not your—”
The whisper cut through her sentence, gaining volume as if it delighted in interrupting. “Rory Carter.”
Her bright blue eyes watered again. The Grove used her, named her, then tasted the sound of her name in the air. She felt the pendant’s pulse through the bag like a second tongue licking at her ribs.
Her mind reached for the note again. Do not wear it inside.
She pulled the carabiner open and yanked the Heartstone Pendant free. The crimson gem glowed faintly, inner warmth pushing outward, and for a second the dip’s surface rippled as if it had been waiting for it.
The whisper changed. The words turned smooth, confident, like a mouth learning her language.
“Bring it closer.”
Aurora did not step forward.
She held the pendant at arm’s length, hovering it over the dip without crossing the boundary. The warmth throbbed , and her skin responded, gooseflesh rising along her forearms. The pendant pulsed faster, lightless but undeniable, like an organ not content to sit quietly.
The whisper leaned in. The air around her grew heavier. Her ears popped, and the torch beam bent slightly as though the light had to travel through syrup.
Aurora’s heart hammered. She kept her face still. Cool-headed. Intelligent. That was what people said. She had always preferred facts to fear, but the Grove stripped facts down to their bare bones and let only instincts remain.
She lowered the pendant a fraction nearer to the dip.
Instantly, a sound erupted from the trees behind her. Not footsteps . Not an animal call. A chorus of soft clicks like nails tapping glass, too many for one throat to make. The standing stones behind her shuddered. Leaves lifted as if something exhaled under them.
Aurora jerked the pendant back. The chorus stopped, the sudden silence brutal enough to make her ears ring.
On the ground, where the ivy had wrapped her ankle, a cluster of wildflowers tilted towards her. Their stems bowed as though listening . Their petals trembled , and the tremble carried a pattern like Morse code.
Tick, tick, tick.
Aurora knew then that the sounds were not random. They were instructions, and she had been following them without realising.
She scanned the diagram again. The circle around HEL included a set of tiny marks along the edge, almost like a crown of thorns. She had assumed it was decorative, a flourish to fill space. Now she understood those marks as a barrier pattern, something to do with keeping doors closed.
Aurora looked down at her torch, at the narrow beam that refused to widen beyond her hand. She glanced at the dip. The surface inside the gap did not reflect the torchlight. It absorbed it, then returned it wrong, as though the light had taken a wrong turn and come back wearing someone else’s eyes.
Behind her, the chorus of clicks began again, softer this time, patient, coaxing.
Aurora tightened her jaw, then stepped sideways to align her body with the boundary marks.
The world tugged.
Her stomach dipped, and the air around her seemed to thin. For a heartbeat, she felt lighter, as if the Grove pulled at her from the soles of her feet, trying to slide her into the pocket where time behaved like wet cloth.
She gritted her teeth and planted her boot harder.
The pendant at her hand pulsed so violently the chain bit into her skin. She forced her fingers to loosen without letting the pendant drop. Its warmth spread like smoke.
The whisper behind the dip shifted into a more distinct voice, less like wind and more like a person speaking through a wall.
“Do you know what Dymas wanted?” it asked.
Aurora’s voice scraped out. “To open things.”
A new sound joined the clicks, a wet, steady breathing from somewhere in the dip. Not air. Something thicker, dragging against itself.
The voice answered with a smile you could hear. “To keep you. To keep what follows you.”
Aurora froze.
Her mind flashed to the crescent scar on her left wrist, a memory of pain she had thought belonged to childhood and nothing more. She held her wrist up under the pendant’s glow and saw, for an instant, a faint warmth where the scar sat. The Crescent scar itched.
The voice in the dip continued, pleased. “A door with a lock. You learned young.”
Aurora snapped her wrist down. The itching flared, then steadied. The Grove seemed to enjoy forcing connections between her history and this place.
Behind her, the leaves rustled with a movement too precise, like a group shifting into a better formation.
Aurora did not turn. She refused to give it that courtesy.
She pulled her delivery satchel to her hip and fished out the packet of spare batteries and a small roll of tape, things she'd carried for emergencies that had never prepared her for the emergency she faced. She tore the tape free with her teeth, then pressed it to the pendant’s silver chain.
The gem pulsed against the tape, warmth blooming under it, but the tape held. Forcing contact, refusing to allow the chain’s intimacy with the pendant’s own longing.
The voice in the dip hissed. The whisper sharpened into a reprimand.
“Stop.”
Aurora slid the pendant away from the dip, dragging it through the air like an anchor dragged through deep water. The chorus of clicks behind her rose in volume. It filled the clearing, layered and dense, an auditory swarm.
The wildflowers nearest her shook their petals open and closed in quick, nervous beats.
Aurora forced her hand to keep moving, stepping backwards, keeping the pendant from crossing the boundary of the stones.
The dip’s edge flared. Crimson light licked the ground like fire that refused to burn. Her torchlight guttered as if an unseen hand smothered its flame.
She stumbled back into the loop’s border marks.
The tape on the pendant snapped.
Metal clicked, the sound sharp as a gunshot in the hush.
Aurora swore, lunged to catch the pendant, and her fingers closed on the gem just as the dip opened a fraction wider than it had before.
Not physically. Not like a mouth. Like reality taking a careful step away from itself.
Cold poured out, smelling of crushed flowers and copper. Her breath puffed white and vanished too quickly , as though the air couldn’t hold it. The whisper became a roar, not loud but thick, wrapping around her skull .
“Rory,” it said again, no longer asking.
The chorus of clicks behind her turned into an unmistakable pattern, quick and coordinated, the sound of many small movements lining up for one larger action.
Aurora stood with her knees shaking, pendant in hand, tape broken, the note’s warning collapsing around her like paper soaked through.
She could feel the Grove reaching for her through the pendant, through the scar, through whatever door had already learned her name.
Then the standing stones behind her groaned.
One of them tilted a finger’s width, bark cracking with a sound like bone. The air stretched. The boundary moved.
Aurora’s torch beam flickered wildly, and in that flicker she saw shapes at the edge of the clearing, too tall and too narrow, like silhouettes drawn by someone who had seen humans only in passing. Their heads angled towards her with a synchronized hunger.
She threw the pendant towards the boundary stones, not releasing it exactly but arcing it with a desperate snap of her wrist, aiming for the gap the diagram marked HEL.
The gem struck earth beside the dip, and warmth surged outward in a single expanding pulse .
The silhouettes froze.
The dip inhaled.
Aurora’s fingers came up empty, and the pendant’s crimson glow flared bright enough to bleach the wildflowers into ghost-pink. The air tore with a quiet ripping sound, like cloth pulled too far.
The boundary shifted fully open.
And in the split-second after the Grove welcomed the pulse , something stepped across it from the dark side with the grace of a dancer and the wrong weight of a corpse.