AI Rory stepped beneath the twisted arms of the oaks, their knuckles of bark arching like the spines of ancient soldiers. The Fae Grove was no place for a human, she knew that. But the pendant—warm now, thrumming against her chest like a trapped bird—demanded she be here, in the marrow of this untamed pocket between worlds.
The air was thick with the scent of foxglove and damp earth, though she’d noticed the flowers hadn’t withered as they should have in November. They clung to their color with a stubbornness that made her uneasy, their petals glistening as if dusted with starlight even though the moon remained obscured by mist. Her boots crunched over frost-laced grass, but the sound was muffled , smothered by a sucking dampness that seemed to crawl up her laces .
She checked her phone for the sixth time in as many minutes. The screen remained stubbornly dead, no signal, no light. According to the library archives where she’d dug this up, time didn’t flow straight here. Out past the Stone Marker that stood crooked at the edge of the clearing, her friend Silas had said he’d waited three days for a cab to plow through the fog and "accidentally" find him. He’d called it an urban legend, a façon de parler. But the scar on her wrist—useless, trivial—itched like the tip of her finger was pressed to a stove.
The pendant’s warmth had grown urgent since she crossed into the grove. She tugged it beneath her woolen scarf, the silver chain cool to the touch, the crimson gemstone glowing harder, brighter, as though lit from within. *Find the portal *, she reminded herself. *Fix the thing Eva said would come for you if you don’t *.
She’d hoped the map was wrong. Hoped the ancient text—*follow the singer’s path to the heartstone song *—would resolve itself through some mortal trick, like a hidden stair or a memory. But the grove had swallowed her quiet escape from Evan, and now there was no turning back until the truth revealed itself.
A sound rippled through the trees.
Not a rustle, not a break in the underbrush. A *step*—precise, deliberate, and heavy enough to shake the pebbles in the soil. It echoed in the distance, then again, closer. Rory froze. The wick clinched in her throat. That step didn’t match her own. It beat against the woods like the heel of a court shoe, staccato and sharp. Not human. Not entirely.
The wildflowers swayed.
She turned, scanning the hedgerow on her left. Nothing. Just the plants, their tendrils dancing together in a way too smooth for the wind. The grove’s rules: it was a place of passage, not pursuit. If something followed a mortal in, it wasn’t a trick of perspective. It was always worse.
Rory forced her breath slow, even. A delivery girl could outwalk any predator , up or under. She thought of Silas’s flat above the bar, of the way the door chain rattled when she missed a curfew. But Silas wasn’t here. Neither was the London drizzle, though the scent of it clung fast to her coat sleeves.
The Heartstone pendant pulsed .
She pressed her thumb to it, running the scar across her wrist against her pulse point until it burned. The moon wove through the canopy now, a slim sickle of light catching on silver leaves. It wasn’t the plants it touched that made her skin crawl—it was the shadows folding not quite right where the light *wasn’t *.
Her third time through the grove, the path should have been easier to follow. But the stones in the clearing, those ancient oaken markers the librarians had gaped at through half-lidded, fearful eyes, were shifting . When she’d entered, a trio had stood at the far edge by a crooked sapling. Now there were four. No, wait—*five.* She squinted.
They hadn’t moved. She had.
Rory cursed under her breath and picked up her pace. The grove seemed to wrap tighter around her , the branches above meeting until she was walking blind under a tunnel of leaves, the only light the pendant’s inner glow. Her eyes ached to adjust. Her breath stung her teeth. And still—*the step followed *.
It was closer now. When she darted her head to the left, a figure emerged from the dark, its form so fine as a cut just pressuring her vision. A flicker of black hair catching the moon? A glint of leather? She couldn’t tell the shape of it, only that it had paused atop the next standing stone, its weight making the trunk creak.
"Fae," she whispered. The word felt like a hex .
Legends Silas had hobbled into the dark: the Silver Court, the Broken Crown, the Empire of Breath. The old books in Cardiff hadn’t dealt in specifics—that was for small children, for fools. But they all agreed with one thing: the Fae wanted names not cards. If you told them your true name , you were bound to their will. If you lied, you were bound to their wrath.
Her mother had called her *Aurora *—a name to make girls bold and bright as the dawn. Brendan, her father, had corrected her in her childhood, saying soon the world would teach her she was just Carter after all. But the pendant had come with no note, no explanation, only this startling vacancy of memory when she glimpsed it that first time: *someone had given her this *.
The crackle of twigs erupted behind her .
Rory spun. Nothing but the bent end of a dead branch snapping back beneath itself. Yet the breath had left her chest empty. She unclenched the pendant again, its heat now dizzying, and stuffed her hands in her pockets, trying for careless, failing.
A bell.
She blinked. No. A sound like bells, yes, but hollowed—*wet *, even. Tinkling through the leaves. She knew the source even before she saw it: trapped beneath the moss at the grove’s heart, a circular stone defaced by ivy, a ring of those out-of-place flowers. The portal, perhaps. Or the place where the portal would open. Either way, the pendant’s glow had sharpened toward it, a pinning light in her ribs.
The circle of moss was beginning to *bubble,* faintly. She stepped closer. The bubbling became a chittering, like the noise of a thousand wasps drunk on spring. Then the water—old rain gathered in the hollow—turning silver. Turning *metal *.
A hand brushed the back of her neck.
Rory didn’t scream. Screaming brought things no mind could escape. Instead she twisted into a crouch, cold trailing down her spine like the tip of a knife she hadn’t seen yet. No hand. No pressure. Just the tingle of bad breath against her hair, if that.
She straightened. The texture of the grove had changed. The flowers were *watching *. Not the blooming kind. The *aware * kind. Her eyes swept the underbrush: a sliver of pale skin? Too still. The black , unblinking sheen of a pebble that had been a *face *?
The pedestal in the circle trembled .
"Alright," she muttered. "Alright." She reached for the pendant, which pulsed again, brighter. The light hit the center of the mossy ring and the water boiled—real now, no prank. A hiss unfurled as the surface roiled, and then the center went black , pitch black , liquid glass.
Heartstone’s function was clear now: a test for the portal.
Something moved in the dark pool. A shadow that brought none of the bubbly distortions of water. It *clung.*
Three steps back.
She didn’t look over her shoulder. She *never looked back *.
But the step came anyway.
Closer.
"Who’s there?" Her voice didn’t even as much as tremble—it *cracked *, like a stick split underfoot.
A face emerged in the water. Pale. Female. Eyes lidless, white and watchful. It opened its mouth, and a vibration hit her molars: not a sound, but the idea of it, as though the grove’s trees were all laughing. The figure’s hand rose, two fingers tapped the surface. The water parted smooth and clean.
"Names ," it seemed to say. The vibration shifted as though its tongue dipped and curled. *More than one *.
Rory’s first thought: lie. Her second: the lying wouldn’t matter. Names didn’t work that way . They were *known,* and once known, humans became thread in anyone’s tapestry .
The grove’s time compressed now—her boots suddenly dry as when she entered, though her hair dripped. She knew she’d been here for at least half an hour, and yet another sapling had merged with the wall of trunks behind her , blocking her escape.
"Alright," she said again, flatly . She tugged at the chain. The gemstone caught the moonlight and flared red as fire. "I was given this. Someone *else *—"
The face narrowed. The Fae figure tilted its head, then submerged. The pool became static. The grove clicked.
Movement.
This time, it was at her periphery. Between the roots at her feet. *A stitch of white eye skin slid slow across the undergrowth like a finished thought.*
Rory took her final breath of space and began to run.
The trees didn’t close in, exactly. But they changed: branches knotted at her pace, shadows dangled at ankle height, loam became spongy, each step sinking like syrup. Behind her , the pool’s silence had ruptured into a keening. It was high, almost melodic—like a wind chime without the metal , or the sound a man could make if he were *willing * to lose his mind.
She didn’t stop.
Her lung gasped. Her ribs clicked. And then the trees peeled apart in one spot, not of her choosing, and she leapt into it, nearly losing the pendant in the cold slap of air. When she landed—her boots, her hands—there was no crunch of roots, no scent of foxglove. Just the smooth, wet hush of stone tile, the *glitter * of real moonlight.
She had a moment to breathe before the portal shuddered closed.
Rory stood in a cavern made of white stone and hung strings of leaves. Moss clung to the walls like shivering hair. A cold fire burned in pools atop what could have been altars, the flames blue and flickering. Somewhere in the distance, a bird screeched. The sound made her knees ache.
Her hand went to her neck instinctually. No pendant.
Dead ahead, a mirror stood upright in the dark. Not framed. Not even held upright—it *floated *, glass perfect and featureless as a sky.
The periphery, again: shapes. Not Fae, not yet. Something like clothes stretched over the hills of stone, like remnants of a dead game she’d never heard of.
Rory crept forward, the chaos at her edges growing. A coat of leaves—where had this *original forest * come from, here in London? She pressed a palm against the mirror. Her fingers passed through.
Warmth—
The stone floor had turned to frost.
She yanked back as the mirror gave a deep, resonant hum. Her breath formed clouds, sharp on her skin, and the tiles iced over*, fast, slick with liquid cold. Her feet had no purchase. She flailed, catching a stone root that twisted like muscle beneath the surface and rendering her still—hand flat against the mirror, fingers buried in its center.
A face lit up there.
The Fae girl. Eyes open now, not just white—now *black *, bottomless caverns drinking the moonlight. Her lips formed soundless words. Her mouth didn’t move. Yet Rory heard the command: *What are you doing here, human?*
She swallowed. The pendant’s warmth wasn’t here. There was *nothing * to help her now except her lies.
"Move to my father’s seat in the High Court," she said quickly . "Bring him a full transcript of the trial for double homicide. You want me to say truth, but I am not a pawn of the Crown. I was given a chance to change what was done, what was undone. I have to—"
The mirror’s face *irked.*
"—prove I’m not Fae, I know . Try this one: I’m a knight-errant." She felt doltish instantly.
*"Knight-errant."* Voice, tone, whatever the thing wanted to hear—Rory tried to sound like a title. Like a *name *.
The girl in the glass gave a small, slow nod. The space behind the mirror dissolved into a tunnel of stars.
The temperature began to drop. *Severely *.
"Thank you," she said, and slipped her fingers through the glass surface.
Stars tipped to the left.
A body pressed behind her , shoulders three inches away from hers, and Rory felt her heart go *mio *, a dog’s cadence in her mouth, yes it was there. But not human. The creature had a heartbeat like pebbles dropped into a well.
It *didn’t * have a voice at all.
Someone’s boots now, dragging. Not Rory’s, either.
When she turned, it looked like a man . Taller, broader. Not a monster made of veils, but a monster nonetheless . Its face was a pane of white glass, the nose a comma etched in faint lines, mouth absent as though *devoured * and explained.
*Names *, she remembered.
"Call me Laila." The alias felt desperate , unformed, and yet—
The face crumbled, disintegrating into faked stone shards.
"—But only if you call me fair." She flinched at the cowardice of that. *Fair * was always the weakness.
The creature gave a *slither * and left her .
She dove into the mirror’s reflection.
There was no ground on the other side. Just falling.
Stars shifted and bent above her , then—impact.
Her boots hit soft grass.
She rolled clear, screaming into her hand.
Moonlit fields now, endless. No trees. Only the scent of peat and the sky a furnace of constellations. A path led off to her left, a line of grey stones. She sprinted, the pedestal’s corrupted chime of *ice and breath * still echoing in her ears.
At the stones’ end, dawn had broken.
A child sat cross-legged in the heather.
Rory’s mouth dropped.
The girl was her .
Or she had been: a face not yet scarred, with bright blue eyes unclouded by London’s smoke and milk, a braid tucked behind her ears instead of its careless shadow down her back.
"You don’t belong here," the girl said, rising.
"Where am I?"
"Home," the child said. "Before they took it."
The grove had shifted again. This time it hadn’t merely buried her in fairy twilight; it had *shown her something * worse than Evan. Worse than being called a beggar name in her mother’s tongue.
Behind the child, a figure loomed .
Taller. Familiar. The dampness of his breath, the shadows in his pockets.
"Go back," the girl whispered. "It’s not too late."
Rory didn’t wait. She turned and ran.
But the stars had brightened to suns. The grass rose to twine around her ankles.
By the time she found the portal back to the grove—another circle, this one of light in a sunlit field—her boots were soaked , her face streaked, and the birds in the heather had stopped singing.
The grove’s ivy had grown over the floor in her absence. The pedestal stood broken. The surface of the pool was cracked , effective as a mirror. And the trees behind her , again, had closed in. Not jammed. Not merely a trick. *Sheltering *.
So now she was alone with *her *, and the mirror-girl had two simple choices: a shard of glass here or the boy whose name was erased from her phone.
The red pendant was gone .
The grove was *suddenly * empty.
No more highland sun. No more child.
Only the terrible, treacherous sound of a human step .
Silas had told Rory to never walk across the grove, step by step , until she was certain of the other footings. But the Heartstone had lied to her , concealing the *drag * in her shadow.
The mirror showed the Fae girl no longer. It showed Rory’s face .
And in the glass, *behind her *, that dead, white-faced creature had grown a mouth.
It yawned fast and wide.