AI Aurora Carter reached Richmond Park after midnight with a takeaway satchel over one shoulder and the Heartstone pendant tucked beneath her jumper, hot enough to sting.
The gate behind her had shut with a soft iron click. London sat beyond it in damp orange haze, buses sighing along distant roads, flats stacked with lit windows, late drinkers spilling noise into gutters. Ahead, the park swallowed sound. Grass rolled away under a thin skin of frost. The trees stood black and packed together, their branches gripping a sky without stars.
Her phone read 00:17.
The message had arrived ten minutes earlier from a number with no name.
Bring the crimson stone to the oaks. Come alone. If you wait till morning, the gate will not.
No signature. No explanation.
Rory had stared at it in the flat above Silas’ bar with her boots half off, a paper bag of dumplings from Golden Empress cooling on the counter, and the pendant pulsing against her sternum like a second heart. She had considered calling Eva. She had considered waking Silas. She had considered ignoring the message and bolting the door.
Then the pendant had warmed until the silver chain burned a line across her neck.
Now she crossed the grass with her hood up, fingers wrapped around the strap of the satchel. The bag held a torch, a folding knife she used for parcels, a cheap packet of salt from the restaurant, and three fortune cookies Yu-Fei had thrown at her with a grunt before closing.
“Bad night for walking, Rory. London eats girls who walk alone.”
“London knows better,” she had answered .
The words tasted thin now.
Wind moved across the open ground, but it did not touch her face. It combed the grass in long silver strokes and left her standing inside a pocket of still air. No fox barked. No bird shifted in the hedges. Even the road behind her had faded too fast, as if someone had shut a door between the park and the city.
The pendant gave another pulse .
Rory stopped.
“Fine. I’m here.”
Her voice dropped dead a few feet from her mouth.
She pulled out her phone and switched on the torch. White light cut over grass, bramble, the slick trunks of trees. Nothing stood there. Nothing crouched. The beam caught a scatter of wildflowers blooming where frost should have killed them: bluebells, primrose, foxglove, and small red flowers she did not know, their petals closed tight like fists.
The Fae Grove never looked the same twice. She knew that much . Isolde’s clearing hid in Richmond Park, marked by ancient oaks that bent like standing stones, trees older than maps and stubborn as judges. Rory had been there once before at sunset, with others, with noise and arguments and a sense that danger wore names you could spit at.
At night, the place had no interest in names.
Her boot struck a root that had not been there a breath earlier. She caught herself against an oak trunk. Bark pressed ridges into her palm. The old crescent scar on her left wrist flashed pale in the phone light.
Something tapped inside the tree.
Three soft knocks.
Rory froze with her hand still on the bark.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Not woodpecker. Too measured . Too close to the shape of a person asking to be let out.
She pulled her hand away.
“Not tonight.”
The tapping stopped.
She walked faster.
The trees thickened, though she had not left the open park behind. Their trunks formed a loose avenue ahead of her, each one angled inwards, and the beam from her phone trembled over knots that looked like sealed eyes . The ground sloped where it should have stayed flat. Moss shone black-green between roots. Her breath fogged once, then stopped fogging, though the cold pressed through her jeans.
A sound came from somewhere to her left.
A delivery scooter.
Rory turned so fast the satchel swung against her hip.
The sound coughed again, close and familiar : the strained little engine of the Golden Empress moped, the one with the cracked mirror and the right indicator that clicked after the lights went off. It sputtered beyond the trees, then idled. A plastic bag rustled. A receipt printer chirped.
Her throat tightened.
“Yu-Fei?”
Only branches answered.
She moved the torch between trunks. The beam caught nothing but flowers, frost, and the glimmer of wet bark.
The scooter engine cut out.
A man’s voice, flat and bored, drifted through the dark.
“Order for Carter.”
Rory’s fingers locked around the phone.
Evan had used that tone when he wanted witnesses to think he was calm. When he wanted her to look unreasonable. When he stood in her Cardiff doorway with flowers in one hand and a bruise-coloured apology in his mouth.
She had left him. She had crossed a border in the night with a backpack, a cracked phone, and Eva talking her through every platform change until London took shape around her.
The voice came again, closer.
“Order for Carter. You need to sign.”
Rory backed away.
“No.”
The word came out clean.
A receipt printer chirped behind her.
She spun. The torch beam whipped across an empty path.
Her phone screen flickered .
00:17.
The same minute.
A faint warmth spread from the pendant, no longer a pulse but a slow push, as if the Heartstone had turned its face towards something buried under the grove. Rory slipped her hand beneath her jumper and closed her fingers around the deep crimson gem. It fit against her palm, thumbnail-sized and slick, but the heat inside it shifted like breath. The silver chain hummed.
She followed the pull because standing still felt worse.
The trees parted.
The boundary of the Fae Grove rose ahead.
The oaks stood in a ring, ancient trunks gnarled into shapes too deliberate for chance. Their limbs arched together without touching, making a doorway with no door. Wildflowers covered the ground inside the circle, bright as spilled paint under moonless sky. No frost lay there. No fallen leaf spoiled the colours. The air shimmered just above the petals.
Rory had expected beauty. The grove had that. Too much of it. The flowers faced her, thousands of small heads tilted towards the light of her phone, though flowers had no business noticing.
Beyond the ring, in the centre of the clearing, stood a stone basin.
It had not been there before.
Rory swallowed. The pendant grew hotter.
“Right. Of course there’s a basin.”
She took one step between the oaks.
Every sound vanished.
Not softened. Cut.
Her own boots made no noise on the grass. Her breathing moved through her chest without reaching her ears. The world beyond the ring blurred, trees smearing into grey and black. Time pressed against her skin. Her phone vibrated once in her hand.
The screen changed.
00:18.
Then 03:42.
Then 19:06.
Then blank.
The torch stayed on.
Rory kept walking.
The basin sat waist-high, carved from a dark stone that drank the beam instead of reflecting it. Symbols crawled around its rim. Not letters. Not any alphabet she knew from law books, restaurant menus, or the weird scraps Isolde had shown them with a smile too old for her face. These marks looked less written than scored by nails dragged through wet ash.
The Heartstone tugged hard enough to make her stumble.
“Easy.”
Her voice reached her ears a second late.
Easy.
The echo did not sound like her.
Rory stopped two arm-lengths from the basin.
A movement flickered on her right. Small. Low. Gone when she looked. The flowers there swayed, though the air remained still. On her left, another flicker . A pale edge slipping behind an oak. The shape of a hand without a wrist.
She kept the torch steady.
“Who sent the message?”
No answer.
The basin held water.
At least, it wore the shape of water. Its surface stayed black, thicker than it should have been, and the torch beam lay across it like a strip of paper. No ripple moved. No reflection showed the oaks, the flowers, or Rory’s face.
Only the pendant appeared in that black surface, glowing crimson beneath her jumper.
Rory looked down at her chest. The Heartstone shone through wool and cotton, a muted red circle. She pulled it free. The gem lit her fingers from inside, showing the pale crescent scar on her wrist as if moonlight had caught under her skin.
The black water rippled.
A voice rose from it.
“Laila.”
Rory’s hand tightened around the pendant. She hated that name in someone else’s mouth when she had not offered it.
“Wrong Carter.”
“Malphora.”
The grove seemed to lean in.
That name struck the air harder. The flowers bowed under it. The oaks creaked without wind. Rory’s pulse kicked against the chain.
“No.”
The water changed.
A street appeared under its surface . Not reflected. Seen from above. Wet pavement. A yellow sign swinging over the Golden Empress. Yu-Fei locking the door, shoulders hunched against rain. The image shifted to the bar beneath Rory’s flat, Silas stacking chairs, one hand on a glass, head turned as if he had heard someone behind him.
Then Cardiff. Her parents’ kitchen. Her mother at the table with marking spread around her. Her father asleep in an armchair, papers sliding from his lap.
Then the view dropped into a dark corridor Rory knew.
Her old flat. The one she had left.
A door opened.
Rory stepped back, but the basin held her gaze. The corridor waited. A damp coat hung from the peg. Her own red mug sat on the table though she had smashed it before she left. A phone buzzed on the floor.
A man’s hand entered the image and picked it up.
The torch in Rory’s grip flickered .
“Cheap trick.”
The water answered with her own voice, soft and worn thin.
“Rory, please. Don’t make him cross.”
She flinched despite herself.
The flowers rustled.
Not all of them.
Only the red ones.
Their closed petals opened by a fraction. Inside each bloom, something pale moved like the tip of a tongue tasting the air.
Rory lifted the packet of salt from her satchel and tore it open with her teeth. Granules spilled over her fingers. She scattered a line between herself and the basin. The salt struck grass and vanished, swallowed without a sound.
A laugh came from behind an oak.
Childlike. Breathless. Not amused.
Rory swung the torch.
A figure stood half-hidden between two trunks.
Tall. Thin. Wrapped in a delivery coat from Golden Empress, the reflective strips dull under the light. The hood shadowed its face. One sleeve hung longer than the arm inside. A plastic takeaway bag dangled from its hand, bulging and dripping something clear that made the flowers bend away.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
“Take one more step and I’ll put this knife somewhere awkward.”
The figure lifted the bag.
The receipt stapled to it fluttered , though nothing else moved.
Aurora Carter
The Fae Grove
Paid
The figure’s head tilted.
The hood sagged back.
No face waited there. Only a smooth hollow of bark, split down the centre with a vertical seam. From inside came the thin clicking of a receipt printer.
Chirrup.
Chirrup.
Chirrup.
Rory’s phone died.
Darkness dropped over the clearing.
The Heartstone burned red in her fist, filling the grove with a pulse that swelled and shrank, swelled and shrank. With each beat, the faceless courier changed position. First by the oak. Then inside the ring. Then beside the basin. It did not walk. It arrived between blinks, each new place marked by the wet creak of roots beneath strain.
Rory backed towards the gap between the oaks.
The gap had closed.
Branches knitted across it in a lattice too tight for a fox. Bark moved over bark with patient pressure. Beyond the ring, Richmond Park had vanished. No city glow. No distant road. Only black trunks, more rings of oaks, and among them small red points that opened and shut like watching eyes.
Her breathing came loud now, returned all at once. Too loud. It filled the clearing, bounced from the basin, multiplied under the trees.
The courier lifted one wooden hand and pointed at the pendant.
The basin voice spoke again, deeper, crowded with other mouths.
“Bring the crimson stone to the oaks.”
“I did.”
“Lay it down.”
“No.”
The courier’s head split along the seam.
Inside the hollow, Rory saw not teeth, not blood, but a narrow darkness packed with tiny white receipts, each one printed with her name. They slid over one another in the gap. Paper tongues. Ink marks. Dates she had not reached. Addresses she did not know.
One receipt pushed free and drifted to the grass.
Rory did not pick it up.
The pendant pulsed . The basin pulsed back.
Heat crawled up her arm, under her sleeve, over the old scar on her wrist. The crescent mark darkened. For one sharp second the scar looked filled with crimson light, a little moon cut into flesh.
The courier lurched towards her.
Rory threw the torch.
It hit the basin rim with a crack and spun into the black water. Light burst beneath the surface, trapped there, turning the basin into a blind white eye. The courier jerked its head towards it.
Rory ran at the closed wall of branches.
She drove her shoulder into the lattice. Bark scraped her cheek. Twigs snapped against her hood. The branches bent, then pushed back with slow strength. One looped around her satchel strap and held. She twisted out of the strap, leaving the bag hanging there, and rammed both hands into a gap.
“Open.”
The oaks groaned.
“Open, you miserable wooden bastards.”
Behind her, paper chattered.
The courier dragged itself across the grass now, one leg too long, one foot turned backwards, the takeaway bag swinging from its wrist. The receipt in the grass crawled after it, inch by inch, pulled by no visible thread.
Rory wedged the pendant between two crossing branches.
The Heartstone flared.
The wood recoiled.
A slit opened, narrow enough to bruise her ribs if she forced it. She shoved one arm through, then her head. Bark clamped around her shoulder. Her necklace chain bit into the back of her neck. The pendant remained trapped in the branches, burning brighter as the grove pressed in.
The courier reached the basin.
It placed the dripping takeaway bag on the rim.
The bag split open.
Inside lay her phone, screen lit.
00:17.
An incoming call flashed across it.
Mum.
Rory stopped breathing.
The phone vibrated against the stone rim. Once. Twice.
The courier placed one wooden finger on the green answer icon and slid.