AI The path into Richmond Park felt wrong from the first step. Not physically—the crushed gravel under her trainers was the same, the air carried the same damp-earth scent—but the silence was too thick. Aurora Carter stood at the edge of the tree line, her breath misting in the chill night air. The park’s usual background hum of distant London was gone , snuffed out like a candle. All that remained was a vast, listening quiet that pressed against her eardrums.
She checked her phone. 11:47 PM. A half-hour to midnight. She should never have agreed to this. But the message had been specific, the location precise: The oak circle in the Grove, at the turning of the day. Eva had been frantic, her words tripping over themselves. *You have to come, Rory. Alone. He knows about the place. He knows about you.* Evan. Even the name felt like a bruise pressed. Rory had made a life here in London—a flat above Silas’ bar, shifts at the Golden Empress, a fragile peace. Now this.
Her hand went to the silver chain around her neck, fingers finding the smooth, cool oval of the Heartstone pendant. It sat quiescent, a solid, familiar weight against her collarbone. Its faint inner glow was invisible in the dark, but she knew it was there. A gift from a benefactor she’d never met, a mystery she’d tucked away with the rest of her new life.
The ancient oaks loomed ahead, their branches interlacing into a dark, organic cathedral. They marked the boundary. One step beyond them, and you were in Isolde’s grove. The Fae Grove. A pocket stitched between worlds. Rory had been here twice before, always in daylight, always with Eva. It was a place of eerie beauty, where wildflowers bloomed regardless of season, and time moved like syrup.
Tonight, the oaks looked different. The bark seemed to pulse with a deep, dark vein-work, like slow blood. She took a steadying breath—*in for four, hold for four, out for four*—and stepped between the trees.
The transition was instantaneous and absolute. The soft, ambient light of the London night vanished. The moon above the clearing was bloated and too close, a sickly yellow disc that washed the scene in a murky, jaundiced light. The standing stones, usually weathered and grey, appeared as jagged black teeth around the small meadow. And the silence —God, the silence was a living thing here. It swallowed the sound of her own footsteps on the grass.
The wildflowers were there, as the stories said, but their colours were muted, their petals clenched tight as if against a frost. They glowed with a faint, phosphorescent light, casting soft, wavering patches of green and blue on the ground. It was beautiful, in a way that made the hairs on her arms stand on end.
“Eva?” Her voice sounded flat, stripped of its echo . It died a few feet from her lips. No response. Only the thick, waiting silence .
She walked towards the centre of the circle, her eyes scanning the edges of the clearing where the gloom pooled thick between the oaks. Her training, her cool-headedness—she clung to them. *Observe. Analyze. It’s just a place. Light refraction, nocturnal flora, acoustics.* But the explanations felt like paper shields against a rising tide.
A sound. A dry, whispering scrape, like a footstep on leaves. She spun around. Nothing. The shadowy periphery remained still. But the sound hadn’t been her imagination. It had come from her left, from the direction of a particularly large standing stone.
Her heart began a heavy, deliberate rhythm against her ribs. She faced the stone again, taking a slow step backwards, putting the open centre of the grove at her back. The Heartstone, dormant against her skin, pulsed . A single, faint throb of warmth . It had never done that before, not outside of a dream. She pressed her palm over it through her jacket.
Another sound. A low, wet chuckle that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere . It vibrated in the soles of her feet. Rory’s breath hitched. She was not alone. The certainty was a cold stone settling in her stomach . The message, the midnight summons—it was a lure. Eva might be in danger, or she might be part of it. It didn’t matter now.
She turned in a slow circle, her gaze sweeping the tree line. The shadows there were deep, but they didn’t move. They didn’t *quite * move. It was at the edge of her vision, the trick of perception where what you thought you saw vanished when you looked directly. A flicker of something too tall and too thin, standing with its limbs at an impossible angle, gone when she focused.
She took a steadying breath, forcing her shoulders down. “I know you’re here,” she said, her voice firmer than she felt . “Show yourself.”
The grove answered with a sigh. Not a breeze, but a collective exhalation, as if every leaf, every flower, every stone released a held breath at once. And then the wrongness deepened. The bloated moon began to drift across the sky, impossibly fast, shedding its sickly light as it went. It vanished behind the bank of oaks, plunging the grove into near-total darkness, the only light the eerie floral glow.
And in that darkness, she heard her father’s voice.
“Laila, darling. Over here.” His accent, the precise Irish lilt she hadn’t heard in years.
Rory froze, every muscle locking. “Dad?” The word was a choked whisper .
“Come away from the light, love. It’s not safe.” The voice came from the shadow of the largest stone.
Her feet moved before her mind caught up. One step. Two. The Heartstone pulsed again, hotter this time, a warning. *Wrong. This is wrong. He’s in Cardiff. He’s safe.* She stopped, her hand flying to the pendant. Its warmth was a comfort, an anchor. “You’re not him,” she said, the words coming out ragged .
The chuckle again, wet and close this time, from the stone she stood before. The air beside her shimmered , like heat haze. A shape began to resolve —tall, human in silhouette, but the proportions were stretched , the limbs too long. It had no face, just a smooth, pale oval in the gloom .
A twig snapped behind her. She whirled. Nothing. Then, a whisper, in her own voice. *“You shouldn’t have come, Rory.”*
From another direction, a third voice, Eva’s sob. *“Help me, please!”*
They were coming from all sides now, layered over each other, a chorus of voices she knew, twisting into pleas and accusations. Her mother, calling her home. Yu-Fei Cheung, shouting an order. Silas, telling her last call was over. It was a cacophony designed to disorient, to pull her in every direction at once.
She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her palms over her ears. The Heartstone was a steady, scorching heat now, its pulse quickening. It was a tool, she realized. It reacted to this kind of energy, to portals, to *otherness *. This wasn’t just a hidden place; it was a thin spot. And something on the other side was pushing through.
The voices stopped. The silence that returned was heavier, more profound . Rory opened her eyes. The floral glow had intensified, casting long, wavering shadows from the stones. And the shadows were moving. Not from the light shifting, but from within themselves . They oozed across the grass like pools of oil, stretching, reaching towards her.
One of them touched the toe of her trainer. A sensation of absolute cold, of draining warmth , shot up her leg. She gasped and stumbled back.
The moon, impossibly, began to reappear, racing back across the sky from the opposite direction. Time was stuttering , looping. The bloated yellow orb hung overhead, watching.
And then she saw him. Standing between two oaks at the far edge of the clearing. Evan. Or something wearing Evan’s face. He was smiling, but it was the wrong smile, too wide, too knowing. He didn’t move, just watched her with eyes that reflected no light.
Rory’s cool-headedness fractured . The out-of-the-box thinking kicked in, not as strategy, but as pure, adrenalized instinct . The pendant was warm. It pulsed near portals. This place was a portal. Or it was becoming one.
She had to get out. Not away from Evan-that-wasn’t-Evan, but out of the circle entirely . Back through the oaks.
She turned and ran, not towards the figure, but towards the nearest standing stone, the point where she’d entered. The ground seemed to tilt, the wildflowers grabbing at her ankles with their luminous petals. The shadows raced alongside her, dark fingers stretching from the trees.
As she neared the boundary, she saw the change. The space between the two oaks was no longer a simple path. It shimmered , a curtain of distorted air, like a waterfall of glass. And through it, she could see not the dark of Richmond Park, but a different night —a sky crowded with unfamiliar constellations, a landscape of jagged, crystalline mountains under a greenish moon.
The Heartstone burned against her skin, a searing point of pain and light. It pulsed once, twice, in a frantic rhythm. It wasn’t warning her about the portal in front of her. It was warning her about the one *behind * her.
She skidded to a halt, turning slowly . The grove was transforming . The stones were rearranging themselves with slow, grinding movements. The oaks were twisting , their bark flowing like water. The figure of Evan had dissolved, but the watching presence was everywhere now. The very air was thick with it, a predatory attention that pressed down on her, isolating her in a circle of glowing flowers and shifting stone.
She was alone, in the strangest of places, at a time that had ceased to mean anything. And something was coming . The wrongness hadn’t just built; it had revealed itself. She was standing in the heart of it, the sole, still point in a world that was unmaking itself around her. The Heartstone pulsed , a frantic, warm heartbeat against her own cold skin. It was all she had to hold onto, and it was not enough.