AI Rory pulled the hood of her jacket tighter against the damp Richmond air. The car park was empty, just her sensible sedan and a row of silent trees. She checked her phone. 10:47 PM. Eva’s text was still on the screen: *You have to see it. After dark. The standing stones. Follow the path past the deer sanctuary .*
Eva was prone to whimsy, to finding ‘magic’ in London’s forgotten corners. But this had been specific. Almost urgent. Rory owed her a visit anyway; it had been weeks. She locked the car, the beep swallowed by the profound quiet of the park at night.
The trail was a pale ribbon of packed earth under the weak moonlight. Her footsteps sounded too loud. A distant rumble of traffic on the A3 was the only proof the city still existed. The air changed as she moved deeper, growing warmer, sweeter. The usual smells of leaf mould and damp were replaced by something like honey and crushed green stems . Wildflowers brushed her ankles in colours too vivid for the season—electric blues, screaming yellows, velvety blacks.
She found the standing stones where Eva had described: a rough circle of ancient oaks, their bark gnarled into what could be faces in the shifting light. The air between them shimmered , like heat haze on a summer road. Rory’s breath caught. *A trick of the light.*
She stepped through.
The change was instantaneous. The sounds of the park vanished. The damp chill disappeared, replaced by a warm, still air that tasted of pollen. The sky above was a deep, unblinking violet, studded with stars that were too large, too bright. The wildflowers here grew waist-high, a silent, perfumed jungle. A gentle glow emanated from the petals themselves.
“This is it,” Rory murmured, her voice swallowed by the immense quiet. “The Grove.”
She touched the Heartstone pendant beneath her shirt. It was cool, a solid weight of silver and crimson gemstone against her skin. A gift from an unknown source after the incident in the city. It was just a pendant. A beautiful, expensive-looking one. It hadn’t done anything. Not yet.
She followed a narrow path that seemed to clear itself for her, the flowers parting as she passed. The silence wasn't empty. It pressed on her eardrums, a physical weight . The only sound was the soft rustle of her own jacket. Then, a second rustle, from her left. Too light to be a person.
Rory stopped. Turned. The flowers stood still, an unbroken wall of colour and shadow. Nothing moved.
She walked on, faster now. The path led to a central clearing, where the glow was brightest. A single, impossibly large oak stood in the centre, its trunk wider than her car. Its roots were like melted candle wax, pooling on the ground. This had to be the heart of it. Eva had said to “listen for the truth between the heartbeats.”
Rory stood before the tree, her practical mind cataloguing details. The bark was smooth in places, rough in others. The air hummed. She pulled out her phone. No signal. The clock read 10:51 PM. She’d been walking for at least fifteen minutes.
A high, thin sound reached her. Not a whistle. Not a cry. A melody, if it could be called that, played on a pipe made of bone. It was sweet, piercing, and utterly alien. It came from the trees behind her. She spun around, her heart hammering a frantic tattoo against her ribs.
The path was gone . Only the flowers, tall and whispering in a breeze that didn’t touch her face.
“Hello?” Her voice was a croak .
The melody stopped. In its place came a sound like wet leaves slapping against stone, coming from the same direction. Then, from her right, the snap of a twig. Heavy. Deliberate.
Rory backed up until her shoulders hit the great oak’s trunk. The bark was cool and unnervingly smooth, like skin. She slid down it into a crouch, making herself small. Her hand went to her neck again. The Heartstone was no longer cool. It was warm, pulsing faintly against her palm. A slow, steady beat, like a second heart.
A shadow detached itself from the gloom between two of the outer oaks. It was tall, too tall, and its limbs were articulated all wrong. It moved with a jerky, stop-motion gait, its head swivelling on a neck that bent backwards. It had no face, just a smooth, ovoid blankness. It stopped at the edge of the clearing, tilting its head as if sniffing the air .
Rory held her breath. Her eyes burned. *Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.*
The thing took a step into the clearing. The wildflowers around its feet withered instantly, turning to grey ash. It made a clicking sound with its jaw.
Then, from another direction, a giggle. High, childish, and wet. A small shape darted from behind a root, running on all fours. It looked like a child, but its spine was elongated , its skin a patchwork of bark and pale flesh. It circled the tall thing, giggling.
Rory’s pendant pulsed hot, a sudden, sharp spike of warmth . She stifled a gasp.
The tall thing’s head snapped in her direction. The blank face fixed on her position. The clicking grew louder, faster. The child-thing stopped its circling and looked at her too, its mouth splitting open in a grin full of pebble-like teeth.
They knew.
A primal instinct overrode her fear. She scrambled to her feet, putting the massive oak between her and them. Her back scraped against bark. A different sound emerged—soft, wet breathing from the other side of the tree. Close. Too close.
Rory chanced a look around the trunk. The tall thing and the child were gone . The clearing was empty, the withered patch of flowers the only evidence they’d been there. The relief was short-lived, a fragile soap bubble.
A whisper , right against her ear. Not words, just a sibilant rush of air that carried the smell of damp soil and something like decay .
She lurched away from the tree, stumbling into the flowers. They felt cold now, and their petals left a sticky residue on her skin. She ran, not on any path, just away from the oak. Branches that weren’t there a moment ago whipped at her face. The violet sky above seemed to press down, the stars pulsing like malevolent eyes.
A root, slick and black, erupted from the ground and caught her ankle. She went down hard, the air knocked from her lungs. Her phone flew from her grasp, its screen shattering against a stone. The Heartstone’s glow was now a steady, frantic pulse , illuminating the flowers around her in a bloody red wash.
The sounds closed in. The clicking, the wet giggling, the slap of leaves, the bone-pipe melody—all of them layering over each other, a symphony of wrongness coming from every direction. Shadows danced at the edge of the red light, shapes that didn’t correspond to any plant or tree.
She dragged herself up, ignoring the pain in her knee. The standing stones. She had to get back to the standing stones. She forced herself to think. Eva’s path. The sanctuary was north-east from the car park. The stones were… she didn’t know. Panic was a cold fog in her brain.
A shape coalesced in front of her. Not the tall one. Something shorter, hunched, made of woven vines and knotted wood. It unfolded itself, two knotholes in its ‘head’ opening to reveal milky, blind-looking eyes. It reached for her with fingers like twigs.
Rory backed away, her hand fumbling in her pocket. Her keys. The cold, jagged edge of the car key bit into her palm. She brandished it, a pathetic weapon.
The wood-thing tilted its head. The bone-pipe melody swelled, coming from inside its chest. It took another step.
Her pendant blazed, a wave of heat so intense it stung her skin. The wood-thing recoiled, a hiss escaping its formless mouth. The red glow of the stone seemed to push back the shadows, to hold the encroaching horrors at a distance of a few feet.
Rory clutched it, pressing the fiery gem into her palm. The pain was real, anchoring. The wood-thing circled her, the milky eyes fixed on the light. It was afraid of it.
She held her ground, her mind racing . The pendant. The portal Eva mentioned. The Heartstone pulsed near portals. It was pulsing now, not with the slow warmth from before, but with a rapid, urgent rhythm . A beacon .
A new sound cut through the cacophony . A deep, resonant *thrum *, like a giant tuning fork struck miles away. It vibrated through the soles of her feet. The wood-thing froze, then turned its blind head toward the source of the sound. With a rustle like autumn leaves, it dissolved back into the undergrowth.
The other sounds faltered. The giggling trailed off. The clicking stopped. Even the bone-pipe melody wavered and died. In the sudden, ringing silence , the *thrum * came again, stronger. From ahead. From the direction she’d been running.
Rory didn’t think. She ran toward it, crashing through the flower-jungle. The pendant was her guide, its pulse growing stronger, the heat a constant companion against her chest. The path reappeared under her feet, clear and defined. The wildflowers parted for her again, but now they felt sinister , their perfumed scent cloying, almost narcotic.
She burst into a smaller clearing. In the centre stood not an oak, but a single, vertical slab of dark stone, twice her height . It was smooth, featureless, except for a symbol carved at its base—a crescent moon, identical to the scar on her left wrist.
The *thrum * emanated from the stone, a physical vibration that shook the air. The Heartstone pendant’s glow was now a steady, brilliant crimson, illuminating the symbol, the stone, the terrified circles of her own eyes reflected in its polished surface.
A hand, cold as clay, closed around her ankle from behind.
Rory screamed. The sound was ripped from her throat, raw and loud in the unnatural quiet. She kicked, hard, connecting with something solid. The grip loosened. She wrenched free, scrambling forward, and slapped both her hands against the vertical stone.
It was cold. Smooth. Dead.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the *thrum * stopped. The red glow of her pendant died, plunging her back into the soft, violet gloom . The warmth vanished, leaving a chill that seeped into her bones.
Behind her, in the dark, the giggling started again. Closer this time. And it was joined by a voice, a whisper that might have been Eva’s, or her mother’s, or her own, sighing through the flowers.
“*Stay with us, Laila. Stay in the Grove.*”
Rory pressed her forehead against the cold stone, her breath coming in ragged sobs. The wrongness was no longer at the edges. It was here, in the air, in the stone, in the sound of her own name twisted into an alien tongue. She was not alone. She had never been alone. And the stone, the portal, the thing she had touched to escape, was just another wall. The truth between the heartbeats was silence . And in the silence , something was listening .