AI Aurora Carter reached the oak standing stones at nine minutes past midnight, with a paper map folded into quarters in her coat pocket, a torch gripped between her teeth, and the Heartstone Pendant burning a small, rude heat against her breastbone.
Richmond Park should have ended at the line of trees.
It did not.
The path slid under the brambles and kept going, narrower than she remembered from the afternoon, its edges crowded by nettles silvered with frost. Beyond the trunks, London had fallen silent. No road-hum. No late bus sighing at the kerb. No fox barking from the bins. Even the wind seemed to have stopped at the park gates and decided against following her in.
Rory took the torch from her mouth.
“Lovely. Not ominous at all.”
Her voice landed flat between the trees. No echo . The woods swallowed it whole.
She checked her phone. No signal. The screen showed 00:09, then blinked to 00:08.
Rory stared at it.
“Don’t start.”
The phone stayed at 00:08.
She locked it and shoved it into her pocket, though her fingers stayed around it a moment longer than necessary. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught on the cuff of her coat, a tiny tug of old pain. She rubbed it once with her thumb and looked up at the stones.
They stood in a broken half-ring ahead, each one no taller than her waist, dark oak grown into shapes that looked too much like hunched figures. Their bark had split into seams. Pale moss filled the cracks, and in the torchlight the moss shone with a faint green wetness, as if the stones breathed through it.
Yu-Fei’s words came back to her from the steam and clatter of the Golden Empress kitchen.
Don’t go in if the flowers point the wrong way.
At the time, Rory had laughed because Yu-Fei had handed her a takeaway bag, a packet of prawn crackers, and that sentence with the same level of concern. Now she crouched beside the first clump of wildflowers at the boundary and aimed the torch at them.
Bluebells, snowdrops, foxgloves, marigolds, all tangled together though none of them had any business blooming in the same season. Their stems leaned towards the grove.
Every last one.
“Fine. We’re all being normal.”
She stepped between the standing stones.
The air changed.
Not warmed. Not cooled. Changed, like she had pushed her face through water and come out the other side with different lungs. The scent of wet earth thickened. Sweet rot threaded through it. Something floral too, heavy as perfume spilled on carpet.
The pendant gave one hard pulse .
Rory flinched and hooked a finger under the silver chain. The deep crimson stone sat against her jumper, the size of a thumbnail, glowing from within like an ember trapped under skin. It had been warm all evening. It had not hurt.
Now it nipped.
“Isolde?” she called.
The name threaded through the clearing ahead.
No answer.
Rory had expected moonlight in the grove. She had expected a round clearing, soft grass, year-round flowers, perhaps a smug fae woman lounging against a tree as if midnight meetings in cursed pockets of Richmond Park were a social hobby. She had not expected the dark to have weight .
The clearing lay ahead, but its edges would not settle. Trees stood where the path opened, then were gone when she turned the torch, replaced by curtains of ivy or stone or empty black. Wildflowers carpeted the ground, their colours muted to bruises under the beam. They did not move in the still air.
At the centre of the grove sat a low table made from a slab of pale wood. On it rested a brass dish, a stoppered glass vial, and a folded square of cream paper.
Rory let out a breath through her nose.
“That better not be an invoice.”
She crossed the grass, boots sinking deeper than they should have. The ground felt soft. Not muddy. Springy. Like something underneath had given way to her weight and then pressed back.
Halfway to the table, a twig snapped behind her.
Rory stopped.
The torch beam fixed on the brass dish. Her hand tightened around the handle until plastic creaked.
No breath. No footsteps . No whisper of fabric.
She turned.
The path between the oak stones had vanished.
In its place stood a wall of black hawthorn, thorns long and pale as teeth. Beyond it, nothing. Not darkness with distance in it. Nothing.
Rory kept the torch on the hedge.
“Right. That’s poor hosting.”
A sound came from the left. A single note, high and thin. Like a child humming into a glass.
Rory swung the beam.
Flowers. Moss. A tree trunk with a hollow at its base.
The note stopped.
She waited.
Her scalp tightened at the crown. The grove held still around her, too still, every leaf and petal posed as if for a photograph. Then, from somewhere behind the tree with the hollow, came three soft taps.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Rory backed towards the table, each step chosen, heel down first, then sole. Her delivery trainers had no grip for ancient fae weirdness. Of course they didn’t. She had dressed for slipping through park gates, not for being boxed in by a hedge with an attitude problem.
The pendant pulsed again. This time warmth spread across her ribs in a slow ring.
The tapping came again.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Closer.
Rory reached the table without looking away from the trees. Her hip bumped the edge, and something on the slab rattled. The brass dish spun a fraction and settled.
“Isolde, if this is you, I’m going to be extremely Welsh about it.”
The grove answered with a wet click.
Not from the left.
From above.
Rory raised the torch.
Branches knitted over the clearing in a black lattice. Between them, the sky showed no stars. At first she thought leaves clustered there, caught in the crooks of limbs.
Then one of the leaves opened.
A pale lid slid back from a round, glossy eye.
Rory’s breath caught in her throat.
More eyes opened across the canopy. Dozens. No, not eyes in branches. Eyes behind branches. Set in a shape that did not fit the tree, a long bulk crouched across the woven limbs, all angles and patient weight . The torch beam touched a strip of skin the colour of old mushroom flesh. It withdrew behind bark without sound.
Rory lowered the torch.
“Absolutely not.”
The words scraped out small.
Something laughed under the table.
Rory moved before thought caught up. She stumbled back, kicked the brass dish off the slab, and the dish hit the grass with no sound at all. The silence of it struck harder than a clang would have. Her boot heel sank into the soft ground. She yanked it free and aimed the torch beneath the table.
Nothing underneath but flower stems.
Long stems. Too long. They curled around the table legs and the legs were not table legs. They were roots, pale and smooth, vanishing into the grass.
The folded paper had slid open in the disturbance.
A line of ink showed across it.
Rory did not want to look.
She looked.
BRING THE HEART THAT BURNS.
The handwriting was neat. Human. Block capitals, pressed deep enough to score the page.
A second line had begun beneath it, though she had not seen one before.
NOT YOURS.
The ink darkened as she watched. It pushed through the paper fibres in slow threads, as if written from the other side.
Rory snatched the pendant under her jumper. The crimson stone scalded her palm.
“Who gave you this?” she whispered.
The paper curled at the edges.
A whisper moved through the grove.
Not a word. A mouth practising the shape of one.
Rory turned in a circle, torch raised. Flowers bent away from the beam now. Their faces—petals, she told herself, petals—tilted towards the trees instead, towards the gaps between trunks where the dark had begun to gather into columns.
A footstep sounded on the vanished path.
Rory froze.
Another.
Slow. Heavy. Measured. Not approaching from the hedge. From behind it. From the place the path had been. Something walked on the other side of the black hawthorn, close enough for branches to twitch, though no thorns broke.
Rory slipped her phone from her pocket and pressed the side button.
00:08.
Still.
The screen lit her knuckles blue-white. No signal. No emergency call. No torch icon; she had left the torch in her other hand, and the beam trembled over the hedge despite her grip.
A voice spoke from the hawthorn.
“Rory?”
Her stomach dropped cold and fast.
Not Isolde.
Eva.
Rory did not move.
“Rory, open up. It’s freezing.”
The voice came clear through the thorns, breathy with irritation, the exact clipped London edge Eva used when she pretended not to worry. Rory’s fingers went numb around the phone.
“Eva’s in Camden,” Rory called.
A pause.
Then a small laugh.
“Yeah, and you’re in Richmond Park talking to shrubbery. We’re both making poor choices.”
Rory’s throat closed around the reply. That was the kind of thing Eva would say. That was the problem.
“Tell me what you called me after I cut my fringe at fourteen.”
Beyond the hedge, something shifted its weight . Branches rasped over skin or cloth or something slick.
“Open up first.”
“No.”
“Rory.”
The voice changed on the second syllable. Not enough for anyone else to catch. Too smooth. Eva’s voice always had grit in it, a scuff from too many late nights and cheap coffee. This one had copied the pitch, not the damage.
Rory backed away from the hawthorn.
“Bad impression. Two stars.”
The voice stopped breathing.
The phone in her hand vibrated .
She looked down.
Incoming call: Eva.
Her thumb hovered.
The screen glitched. Eva’s name stretched, the letters thinning, black cracks cutting through the white glow. Then the phone answered itself.
Static filled the clearing.
Under it, something scratched at the receiver. A nail on glass. A tooth on wire.
Then Eva’s voice, far away and frantic.
“Rory? Don’t listen if it uses me. Don’t answer anything. Don’t—”
The call cut.
The phone showed 00:07.
The hawthorn shuddered.
A face pressed between the thorns.
Rory saw only pieces: a cheek too flat, an eye bright as wet slate, a mouth shaped like Eva’s mouth but set too low. Thorns pierced it and did not draw blood. The lips widened, caught, split at the corners without tearing. It smiled because it had learned that faces did that.
“Open up first,” it repeated.
Rory hurled the brass dish.
It passed through the hedge without striking leaves and vanished.
A second later, from somewhere deep in the dark beyond, metal rang once.
The creature behind the hawthorn snapped its head towards the sound.
Rory ran.
Not towards the path. There was no path. She sprinted deeper into the clearing, over the flowers, towards the far line of trees where the grove blurred and remade itself. Her boots crushed stems that gave off a smell of pepper and milk. The torch beam jumped across trunks, roots, white stones half-buried in the grass.
Behind her, the hawthorn tore itself open.
Branches cracked. Not like wood. Like fingers pulled from sockets.
Rory did not look back.
The pendant beat against her chest with each stride. Heat gathered in it, fierce now, a hot coin beneath fabric. Ahead, between two yew trees, a red thread of light appeared in the air. Thin. Vertical. The Heartstone answered with a pulse so strong it jolted her step.
A portal.
Or a wound.
At that moment, Rory did not care which.
The humming began again, high and thin, but now voices layered beneath it. Women. Men. Children. All speaking from the edges of the grove, from under leaves, from the earth under her feet.
“Carter.”
“Laila.”
“Malphora.”
“Rory.”
She stumbled at the last one because it came from directly beside her ear.
Cold breath touched the hair at her temple.
Rory swung the torch like a club.
The beam caught empty air.
Something moved at the edge of vision. Tall. Bent sideways. It passed between trees without disturbing a single branch. The canopy eyes opened again, tracking her, glossy and patient.
Her foot hit a root. She pitched forward, caught herself on both hands, and the torch flew from her grip. It landed in the flowers and rolled, beam spinning, throwing the grove into slices: white petals, black bark, pale hand, grass, stone, eye, nothing.
Rory pushed up on one knee.
A hand had risen from the flowers ten feet ahead.
Long fingers spread against the air as if feeling for rain . They were not attached to an arm she could see. Another hand rose beside it. Then another, each one pale, each one slow, the flowers parting around wrists that ended in darkness below the ground.
The red slit between the yews flickered .
Rory grabbed the pendant through her jumper. The heat blistered her palm, but she held on.
“You want the heart that burns?”
The hands turned towards her voice.
Rory ripped the chain over her head.
The clasp caught in her hair. Pain flashed along her scalp. She pulled harder, teeth bared, and the silver chain snapped free. The Heartstone swung from her fist, crimson light strobing across her knuckles.
The grove inhaled.
Every flower faced her.
Every eye in the canopy opened.
The false Eva stood at the broken hawthorn, its borrowed face slack now, too many teeth crowded behind the lips. It took one step into the clearing, and the grass bent away from its feet.
Rory held the pendant out towards the red slit.
“Fetch.”
She threw it.