AI Aurora Carter shoved the last of the bracken aside and ducked under the hanging branches.
The air bit her throat as soon as she crossed the standing stones, not cold exactly, just… wrong. Her breath came out in a thin ribbon that vanished too quickly , as if the grove refused to remember she’d exhaled.
She tightened her grip on the Heartstone Pendant, the deep crimson gem pressing against her palm through her jacket. The silver chain rasped her skin. It didn’t just feel warm when she held it, it pulsed , faint and steady, like something small and stubborn kept time inside her.
“I’m here,” she said, because silence was starting to feel like an accusation.
Nothing answered.
Not birds. Not insects. Not even the soft leakage of London life she’d left behind. The Fae Grove sat around her like a held breath, and the clearing ahead looked staged, too clean in its wildness. Wildflowers grew in pockets of colour without a single weed daring to jostle them.
Aurora stepped forward anyway, boots finding solid ground, her eyes scanning for the boundary marks she’d been told not to cross. Ancient oak stones stood at her back in a ring, their bark carved with grooves that caught no light.
She’d come alone on purpose.
She’d also come with a promise she couldn’t break.
Her phone had gone dead the moment she stepped through the stones. No signal, no battery drain, just a black screen that refused to wake. She’d tried tapping it until her thumb hurt, then stopped. A device shouldn’t feel offended.
A sound clicked under her boots, sharp as a fingernail on tile.
She froze.
Then, from somewhere to her right, a second click answered, softer, delayed, like an imitation pretending to be human.
Aurora turned her head a fraction, enough to catch the edge of movement without giving the grove her whole gaze. The clearing’s perimeter blurred with motion that wasn’t quite there . At first, she thought it was the sway of her own hair in a draft that never arrived.
No wind moved the blossoms. The flowers held themselves upright like they’d been trained .
Another click sounded. Closer.
Aurora lifted the pendant to her chest. The gem’s warmth spread into her ribs. For a heartbeat, she felt the pulse match the rhythm under her skin, as if the grove had found her heartbeat and pressed its mouth to it.
“Don’t,” she said, barely above a whisper .
The pendant pulsed again. The inner glow brightened, deep crimson turning to a sickened rose at its edges, then dimmed. Someone had said Hel portals reacted to proximity. Someone had also said not to let it light up too long.
A long time ago, a frightened stranger had told her a story about the fae, about bargains and boundaries, and Aurora had laughed then, because she’d still believed laughter could keep monsters at arm’s length.
Now she didn’t laugh. She listened.
A faint rasp ran through the grove, like dry leaves dragging across stone. Aurora searched for the source and found nothing. At the corner of her vision, something moved along the line where trees thickened. Not a branch, not an animal’s tail. It looked like the suggestion of a body, stretched too far, as if the distance between its joints had been measured and then multiplied.
She didn’t turn her whole head. Turning invited attention. Turning gave it permission.
She walked two steps sideways instead, careful, boot soles placed deliberately . The rasp stopped.
Then, behind her, a soft scrape—metal on metal—dragged along bark.
Aurora sucked in air through her teeth. The sound hadn’t come from the oak stones themselves. It came from between them, where the standing stones met the pocket of Earth-and-not-Earth.
She held her breath and waited.
The scrape moved again. Slow. Testing.
She could feel her own pulse in her ears, the blood rushing like she might outrun it. She forced her hands to stay steady and kept her eyes on the flowers ahead. The wildflowers had no scent, none of the usual sharp green sweetness. They looked fresh, too fresh, petals layered like something painted.
A whisper slid through the clearing.
It wasn’t words at first. It sounded like a mouth learning language. Then, as Aurora’s spine tightened, her name surfaced in a voice that didn’t quite fit her ears .
“Au-ro-ra.”
Each syllable landed with a wrong rhythm, as if someone had swallowed the sound and tried to chew it into meaning.
Aurora’s grip clenched around the pendant. The chain bit her skin. She didn’t answer. She didn’t correct it. She refused to give the grove the satisfaction of hearing her respond to bait.
The whisper followed anyway, gliding closer without footsteps .
“Carter.”
The gem flared.
Aurora snapped her hand to her chest and tucked the pendant under the collar of her jacket, pushing fabric over the crimson glow. It pressed against her throat, warm as a brand. The whisper faltered. The sound cut out like someone had pinched a wire.
In the sudden absence, she heard something else: a faint rhythm, too regular to be a heartbeat, too uneven to be machinery. Three beats, then a pause, then two beats. Like a knock code.
Not on wood.
On stone.
Aurora backed away from the flower patches, keeping her body angled towards the centre clearing where the stones suggested a boundary. The oak ring marked an edge, but the pocket of wrongness seemed to pull its own geometry around her. She could have sworn she’d walked in a straight line from where she’d entered, yet now the stones looked closer, as if the ring had slipped.
She didn’t panic. Panicking would waste breath, and breath mattered. Panicking also made you easy to catch.
The knock code shifted. Three beats became four. Two became one. It was trying to learn her spacing, matching her distance from the sound.
Aurora forced herself to slow her breathing. Slow her body. Slow her attention.
“What do you want?” she asked, and hated the steadiness in her voice.
The air tightened. Silence pressed down around her shoulders, as if the grove leaned in to hear the shape of her questions.
Then a new sound rose from behind her again, not scrape this time. A soft, careful dragging, like claws smoothing velvet .
Aurora didn’t look back. She angled her gaze down and left, finding the ground near her boot. Tiny lines had appeared in the dirt, pale as chalk. They weren’t scratches from her soles. They formed letters in a language she didn’t know, strokes too precise to be random.
She swallowed.
The pendant warmed under her collar, a warning thrum. The moment she let her eyes lift, the pale letters began to rearrange themselves. Lines slid over one another, re-forming, until the chalk script became a different pattern, then a different one still, as if the grove was writing in real time.
Message received. Message answered.
Aurora’s mind flicked through the lore she’d scrounged out of libraries and late-night forums, everything she’d read with an eye for the places where people lied. Hel portals were unstable without the right anchor. The Heartstone Pendant was an anchor. That was what her benefactor had implied.
Or baited.
The dragging sound stopped.
She felt the absence like pressure changing in her ears.
Something stood closer than it should have. She couldn’t see it. Her peripheral vision jittered, a gap in the world where focus refused to settle. If she stared directly, it might solidify. If she ignored it, it might move.
Aurora kept still and listened for the tiny sounds that would betray a body.
Nothing.
No inhale. No exhale.
Just the grove’s controlled quiet, and her pendant’s pulse .
Once, when she was younger, a solicitor had told her a trick: when a client refused to explain, you ask fewer questions and watch what they do with their hands. People give away more in movement than in speech.
So Aurora watched her own hands.
Her left wrist, the crescent scar, throbbed faintly under her sleeve, like it remembered pain. The scar itched, then eased, and she felt a faint tingling travel up her forearm. Her body was reacting before her brain decided.
The pendant pulsed harder, and warmth spread through her jacket. For a second, the crimson glow leaked from under her collar, lighting the inside of the fabric with a dull rose.
Aurora jerked it further down. The light cut out. But the world around her had already noticed.
The whisper returned, not as a mouth learning syllables now, but as a voice dragging a net through water .
“Show.”
Two blossoms to her left tilted towards her.
Their stems didn’t bend from any external force. They pivoted like hinged joints.
A thin line of shadow slid across the grass between them, a smear of black that didn’t belong to any leaf. It moved with a deliberate speed, cutting from flower to flower without touching petals, as if it couldn’t bear to stain anything that was still alive.
Aurora shifted her weight , and the shadow shifted too, tracking the movement.
She looked at the shadow now, not directly, just enough.
It shivered.
In that shiver, she saw the shape behind it, a suggestion of ribs, too many, too narrow. A face didn’t resolve , but the sensation of being stared at slammed into her like a held fist.
Her stomach clenched. The restraint that had kept her calm threatened to crack.
She forced her voice flat. “I came for the anchor. I came for the portal. I’m not offering you anything.”
The grove didn’t care for bargains.
The air thickened. It smelled suddenly of iron, sharp and clean, like a blade wiped on a clean cloth. Aurora’s tongue tasted copper without any blood in her mouth.
The standing stones at her back gave off a low hum.
Not a sound that came from a source she could locate, but a vibration that lived inside her teeth. The oaks’ grooves brightened faintly, their carved lines filling with a dull sheen.
The pendant flared again under her collar. The gem’s warmth turned to heat.
And then the heat surged through her hand, through her scar, through her bones.
Aurora’s breath caught as the crescent scar on her left wrist flared with pain so sudden it stole her grip on calm. She hissed and jammed her fist against her jacket to hide her reaction. The scar shouldn’t do that. Old injuries didn’t wake for strangers.
The grove answered anyway.
A seam appeared in the air ahead of her, not like a tear in fabric, more like the air decided it had edges. The world along the seam shimmered , bending light in a way that made her eyes ache. The standing stones behind her buzzed louder, their hum now a chord that vibrated the entire clearing.
From the seam, something breathed in.
Aurora couldn’t see what exhaled. She saw the effects, thin tendrils of darkness curling out, tasting the air, searching for her pendant’s pulse . The darkness moved as if it had joints made of ink.
One tendril brushed the edge of a wildflower. The blossom wilted instantly, petals collapsing inward like something sucked the colour out of it. No rot smell. No decay. Just disappearance.
Aurora’s skin prickled. The grove wasn’t protecting itself. It was feeding .
“I’m not your meal,” she said, and tried to keep the tremor from her voice.
The seam widened.
A cold wind crawled out, dragging a new set of sounds with it. Not distant echoes , not wind noise. Sounds too close and too layered, like voices recorded wrong.
A laugh. A sob. A metal clink. A prayer. None of them belonged together, and all of them belonged to somewhere on the far side of her decision.
The darkness tendrils twitched towards her chest.
Aurora yanked the pendant free of her jacket before she could think better. The silver chain snapped back against her skin with a sting, and the Heartstone Pendant glowed bright enough to stain the air around it crimson.
The seam shuddered.
So did the standing stones.
Aurora held the pendant up with both hands as if she could perform the correct gesture with enough force. The gem’s pulse matched the knock code now, a perfect alignment of rhythm and intention.
The whisper surged, louder, closer, delighted in a way that made her teeth hurt.
“Open.”
The darkness surged in response, tendrils reaching, and at last Aurora turned her head fully.
In the space between her breath and her ability to move, the figure behind her finally resolved out of the edge-wobble. It looked almost human in outline, but every detail refused to settle. Its shoulders were too narrow, its limbs too long, its joints wrong, like someone stretched a puppet and then tightened it until the seams strained.
It wore no clothing. It wore shadows that dressed it without hiding it.
Its eyes were bright points of reflected light, the kind you saw in water at night, except there was no water. Its attention locked onto the pendant, then onto Aurora’s scar.
It leaned forward.
Aurora’s body reacted faster than thought. She thrust the pendant towards the seam.
Heat exploded outward. The crimson glow spilled through the air like a spill of blood made light. The seam roared without sound, a vibration that rattled the oaks, the dirt, the flowers, and Aurora’s ribs.
The figure behind her lunged too, reaching for the pendant with hands that looked carved from darkness and bone.
Aurora let go.
The Heartstone Pendant vanished into the seam, and for a heartbeat the clearing went dead silent, as if the grove had decided to stop breathing just to see what she’d do next.
Then the seam snapped open wider, not like a door but like an eye tearing itself free .
The air around Aurora folded.
Her stomach rose as gravity shifted, just slightly , enough to make her boots skate. The standing stones hummed into a higher pitch that turned her hearing into pain. The figure behind her hit the invisible edge of the seam and recoiled, shadows flinching away like they’d touched flame.
Aurora staggered forward anyway, driven by momentum and the shape of the opening. She grabbed at the nearest standing stone, bark rough under her fingers, grooves slick with something that felt like cold sap .
The seam’s light flared crimson again, and this time it didn’t just shine, it pulled.
It dragged her pendant-less hands towards it, tugging her skin, tugging at her scar, tugging at the memory of injury as if the grove wanted to reopen an old wound in her body to match its new opening.
Aurora yanked her hands free and reached for her phone, stupid hope flashing like a match.
The screen lit with a crackle of static, words scrambling across it in a font she’d never seen, letters that rearranged before her eyes could settle.
Then the phone buzzed with a sound that didn’t belong to electronics. It buzzed like a trapped thing vibrating in sympathy.
The figure behind her scraped its fingers across the air, trying to feel the seam’s edge again, and where its shadow-tipped hands hovered, Aurora saw the faint outline of something else reaching back, shapes just beyond sight pushing through the fold.
The seam trembled .
A new pulse , not hers, not the pendant’s, answered from the far side, too heavy and too slow, as if whatever waited in Hel didn’t need to rush.
Aurora planted her feet and braced for impact, her breath ragged, the bark tearing her palm as she clung.
The seam stretched a final inch, and something on the other side leaned close enough that Aurora smelled wet stone and old smoke.
Its presence pressed against her like a weight .
Then the grove’s boundary screamed, and the standing stones began to crack, not with falling rocks but with light splitting along their grooves, crimson veins spreading through oak bark as the opening refused to stay small.
Aurora felt the figure behind her step back, uncertain.
She wasn’t.
She’d brought an anchor.
Now the grove had taken it, and the door had decided it was done listening.