AI Aurora Carter knew Richmond Park well enough by daylight to distrust it by night.
In the day, it was joggers and cyclists, prams with rain covers, tourists taking photographs of red deer as if the animals had been placed there for their benefit. It was open grass and old trees and the mild, damp smell of London trying to remember it had once been wilderness.
At night, beyond the last ribbon of road and the last smear of orange streetlamp, the park forgot London entirely.
Rory stood at the edge of a stand of oaks, one hand curled around the strap of her rucksack, the other tucked beneath her jacket around the Heartstone pendant. The little crimson gem lay against her palm, no larger than her thumbnail, warm as a living thing. Its silver chain had knotted itself once around her fingers when she’d climbed the low fence, and she had almost turned back then, taking it as permission to be sensible.
She had never been good at mistaking fear for good advice.
The text had come at 11:43 p.m. from a number she didn’t know.
If the stone warms, go to the oaks in Richmond. Before dawn. Go alone.
That was it. No name. No explanation. No proof that the sender knew anything about the pendant beyond what could be guessed from a security camera or a stalker with too much time.
She had deleted the message.
Then the pendant had begun to heat against her chest.
Not burn. Not hurt. Just pulse with a faint, steady warmth that deepened whenever she faced west. Like a heartbeat answering something too far away to hear.
By midnight, it was hot enough that she’d taken it off and wrapped it in a tea towel. By half past, the towel steamed faintly in the cold kitchen above Silas’ bar, and Rory had stood there with her bright blue eyes fixed on it, thinking of every horror film idiot who walked willingly toward the red light in the woods.
Then she’d packed her rucksack.
Torch. Power bank. Pocketknife Eva had given her with an expression that said she knew exactly why Rory might need it. A bottle of water. A packet of cheap custard creams because fear made her practical and hungry in equal measure. She’d left a note on the kitchen table—Gone to Richmond. If not back by 8, call Eva first, then police. Don’t let Silas be dramatic—and taken the night bus as far as she could stomach before getting out and walking.
Now, beneath the oaks, the pendant pulsed in her hand.
The trees ahead were wrong.
That was her first clear thought.
Not wrong in the way of disease or storm damage. They stood too still, their branches interlaced high overhead into a black lattice that admitted no stars. Their trunks were thick and ancient, bark deeply furrowed , but here and there the moonlight caught pale streaks in the wood that looked less like lichen and more like old bone. Between them grew wildflowers in impossible profusion, white and purple and yellow heads nodding in the cold. It was late autumn. Nothing should have been blooming like this.
Rory took one step forward.
The city fell away.
Not faded. Not softened. Fell. The distant hum of traffic, the sigh of wind across open grass, the faint metallic bark of a fox—gone, as if someone had clapped glass over the world.
Her boot settled into damp earth.
A drop of water fell from a leaf and struck her shoulder.
She did not move. She listened.
Silence had texture. Rory had learned that in the flat after Evan, in the hours when every creak of plumbing became a footstep, every murmur downstairs became his voice. Silence could press against the eardrums until the body invented sound to defend itself.
This silence pressed.
She drew the torch from her pocket and clicked it on.
The beam caught tree roots, wet leaves, wildflowers shining pale as teeth. Ahead, the oaks arranged themselves into a kind of corridor. She had not seen a path from outside, but now one lay there, narrow and deliberate, leading deeper between the trunks.
“Of course,” Rory muttered. Her voice sounded small and impolite. “Why wouldn’t there be a murder corridor?”
The pendant warmed in answer.
She wanted to call Eva. She took out her phone, thumb already moving.
No service.
The screen showed 12:58.
Rory glanced back.
Behind her, the park was not visible. Not the dark grass, not the fence, not the faint glow of London on low cloud. Only more trees, standing shoulder to shoulder, their branches lowering like the ribs of an animal closing around her.
Her mouth went dry.
“All right,” she said. “That’s new.”
She turned slowly in place, forcing herself not to hurry. Panic liked speed. Panic made mistakes feel like instincts. She took inventory instead.
Torch working. Phone working, useless. Knife in right jacket pocket. Pendant warm and getting warmer. No visible exit.
The path ahead bent left.
She had come here for a reason. She told herself that as if it were a rope tied around her waist. The pendant had been given to her by someone she still could not name, and every strange thing that had happened since seemed to orbit it. If the message was a trap, it was at least a trap set by someone who knew what the Heartstone was reacting to. If it wasn’t a trap—
She didn’t finish that thought .
Rory stepped onto the path.
The wildflowers leaned away from her boots. Not bending beneath the brush of her jeans. Leaning. Their pale faces turned as she passed, tracking her with the slow, blind attention of things without eyes.
She kept the torch beam low.
The oaks thickened. Their trunks stood close enough that she had to angle her shoulders between them in places. A branch brushed her hair, and she flinched before she could stop herself. It felt like fingers.
Somewhere ahead, a child laughed.
Rory froze.
The sound was high and brief, delighted. It rang once between the trunks and vanished.
Her scalp prickled.
There should not have been a child here at one in the morning. There should not have been anyone here. That was the obvious truth, and therefore the least useful one.
“Hello?” she called.
The trees took the word and returned it strangely.
Hello.
Hello.
Lo.
Not echoes . Too soft. Too close.
Rory swallowed. “If someone’s there, this is the part where you say something normal and not creepy.”
No answer.
A twig snapped behind her.
She spun, torch slicing through the dark.
Nothing.
The path behind her extended maybe ten feet, then dissolved into trunks. There was no corridor there now, no way back, only oak bark and hanging leaves and flowers growing in a perfect little crescent where her footprints should have been.
Rory stared.
“Right,” she whispered. “So we’re doing that.”
The pendant pulsed , stronger than before. Warmth filled her fist. Beneath her thumb, the deep crimson stone gave off the faintest inner glow, like an ember buried under ash.
She followed the heat.
The path wound on. The air smelled of wet leaves, loam, and something sweet enough to make her teeth ache. Honeysuckle, maybe, though she saw none. The torch beam seemed weaker now; the circle of light had shrunk to the size of a dinner plate . Beyond it, darkness pressed close, full of suggestion.
Movement flickered at the edge of her vision.
Rory snapped the beam left.
A gap between two trees. A curtain of ivy. Nothing else.
She held the light there, waiting.
The ivy moved.
Not in a wind. There was no wind. It lifted from the trunk in one long, slow breath, leaves peeling away from bark as if something behind it had shifted its weight .
Rory backed up.
The ivy settled.
Her heel touched a root. She caught herself, heart punching hard enough to hurt.
“Not alone,” she said under her breath. Saying it made the certainty less shapeless, though no less bad. “Fine. Good to know.”
Her left wrist ached suddenly . She looked down despite herself.
The crescent-shaped scar there, the small pale mark from a childhood accident with broken glass and a shouted warning too late, stood out white against her skin. It prickled as if a nettle had brushed it.
The child laughed again.
This time from behind.
Rory didn’t turn. Every instinct demanded it. Her shoulders tightened, neck going rigid with the expectation of breath against her ear.
The laugh became a whisper .
“Rory.”
No.
The name drifted through the trees in Eva’s voice.
“Rory, come back.”
Rory closed her eyes for half a second. When she opened them, she fixed on the path ahead.
“Cheap,” she said, though her voice shook . “Very cheap.”
“Rory.” Eva sounded closer now, frightened. “Please. I’m here.”
The pendant flared hot in Rory’s hand.
Pain flashed up her fingers. She bit back a gasp and nearly dropped it, but the heat cut through the voice like a knife through cord. Eva’s pleading snapped off mid-breath.
In the silence that followed, something sighed.
It was not close. That was the worst part. It came from all around the grove, from the high branches and deep earth, from the flowers and the spaces between the trunks. A collective exhalation, disappointed and old.
Rory slid the pendant over her head. The silver chain caught briefly in her black hair before settling at her throat. The stone burned warm against her sternum, but not painfully now. It beat once, twice, three times.
Ahead, the path opened.
She came to the standing stones without seeing them approach.
They were not stones at first glance. They were oaks, or had been. Ancient trunks cut or broken to waist and shoulder height, arranged in a rough ring around a clearing. Their wood had petrified into something grey-brown and dense, bark ridges hardened like carved faces. Roots twined in and out of the earth at their bases, gripping the soil. Each stump leaned slightly inward, as if listening .
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing. Their colours were wrong under the moonless sky—too vivid, too wet. Red poppies, bluebells, foxgloves, snowdrops, all blooming together out of season, their stems packed so tightly there was no bare earth between them.
At the centre of the ring stood an arch.
No, not stood. Hung.
Two black stones rose from the flowers, each taller than Rory, rough and slick, leaning toward one another without touching. Between them shimmered a vertical seam of darkness. The air around it rippled, as heat rippled above summer tarmac, though the clearing was cold enough to numb her cheeks.
The Heartstone pendant thudded against her chest.
Warmth spread through her ribs.
“A Hel portal,” Rory whispered, though she did not know how she knew. The phrase arrived fully formed, heavy with someone else’s certainty.
The seam widened a fraction.
Darkness breathed out.
The smell hit her first: iron left in rainwater, candle smoke, earth opened too deep. Beneath it lay a winter cold so absolute it felt personal. The wildflowers nearest the arch blackened at the edges. Their petals curled inward.
Rory took a step back.
Something took a step with her.
Not in the clearing. Not on the path. Behind the nearest standing oak, where her torch beam had not reached.
She turned the light.
For a moment she saw only hardened bark, flowers, a fringe of shadow.
Then fingers slid around the side of the oak.
Long. Pale. Too many joints.
Rory’s breath stopped.
The fingers gripped the bark soundlessly. Another hand appeared higher up, then a suggestion of a face easing around the trunk—white as fungus, featureless except for a vertical slit where a mouth should be . No eyes. No nose. It tilted its head toward her all the same.
The torch flickered .
Rory did not scream. The scream rose, found no room, and lodged behind her teeth.
A second shape shifted between two stones on her left.
Then a third, crouched low among the flowers.
They had been there all along. Not hiding. Waiting to be noticed.
The first one opened its mouth-slit.
“Aurora Carter,” it said.
The voice was not Eva’s. Not anyone’s. It sounded like wet paper tearing in a church .
Rory’s knees wanted to fold. She locked them.
“You’ve got me at a disadvantage,” she said. Her tone came out flat, almost bored, the voice she used with aggressive customers at the Golden Empress who thought shouting would produce faster noodles. “Because you’re… what? Tree perverts?”
The thing’s head tilted farther. Too far.
The others did not move.
The portal breathed again. The pendant answered with a fierce pulse .
Rory’s mind raced in clean, bright fragments.
They were between her and the path. The path might not exist anymore. The portal was active, or opening, or waiting. The pendant reacted to it. The creatures knew her name but had used the wrong voice first. They wanted something, because they hadn’t rushed her. Predators didn’t wait unless there was a cost.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“A door must open,” said the thing behind the oak.
Rory’s fingers slid toward her pocketknife. Useless, probably. Comforting, definitely. “Use a handle.”
“A heart must warm it.”
The pendant seemed to sink its heat into her bones.
Rory looked at the arch again. The seam of darkness widened another inch. Behind it, not quite visible, something vast shifted . The cold pushed outward in slow waves. Frost limned the nearest flowers.
The message. If the stone warms, go to the oaks. Before dawn. Go alone.
Not a warning. An instruction.
Or bait.
Rory’s lips parted. Her breath smoked.
“You need the pendant.”
The thing smiled. It had no lips, but the slit widened. “We need the bearer.”
The flowers around her ankles tightened.
She felt them then, little stems pressing against her boots, sliding around the leather, around her jeans. Rory jerked one foot back and tore free with a soft ripping sound. The flowers released a smell like crushed herbs and blood.
The creatures moved.
Not lunging. Gliding. One step from behind the oak. One from the stones. One rising from the flowers with dreadful, unfolding grace.
Rory backed toward the arch because it was the only direction open, and every instinct in her body screamed against it. Cold licked her spine. The pendant burned so hot tears sprang to her eyes.
“No,” she said. To them. To the portal. To the part of herself that wanted to freeze because freezing had once kept her alive in a kitchen while Evan punched the cupboard beside her head.
No.
Her hand closed around the Heartstone.
Heat flared.
The creatures recoiled as if struck. The flowers fell limp around her boots. For one heartbeat, the clearing flashed red—standing stones, black arch, pale bodies, all washed in the crimson glow spilling between her fingers.
Rory didn’t understand the pendant. She didn’t know what Dymas was, or why some unknown benefactor had thought she should have this cursed little ember. But she understood leverage.
She ripped the chain upward until it bit the back of her neck.
“Come closer,” she said, “and I throw it in.”
The nearest creature stilled.
The portal pulsed .
Rory had no idea what throwing the pendant into the seam would do. Destroy the world. Close the door. Open it wider. Turn her inside out. The odds were poor in every direction, but uncertainty worked both ways. She saw it in the way the pale things paused, their blank faces angling toward one another.
“You won’t,” said the first.
“Mate,” Rory said, breathing hard, “you have no idea what kind of week I’ve had.”
A sound came from behind her.
Not from the creatures. Not from the trees.
From the portal.
It was a knock.
Three slow taps from the other side of the dark seam.
Rory’s skin went cold beneath the pendant’s heat.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The creatures bowed their heads.
Every flower in the clearing turned toward the arch.
The seam widened another inch, and in its darkness Rory saw, for a fraction of a second, a light very far away. Not warm. Not welcoming. A pinprick of blue-white gleaming in the depths like an eye opening under ice.
The pendant’s glow faltered.
The pale creatures began to whisper . The sound braided around the clearing, words too soft to catch, rhythm too precise to be random. The standing oak stones groaned, old wood shifting after centuries of stillness. Their inward lean deepened.
Rory understood then with a clean, sick certainty that she had not arrived before the door opened.
She had arrived just in time to be the key.
The flowers surged.
Rory moved before thought could trap her.
She dropped, not backward but sideways, throwing her weight into the nearest standing oak . Her shoulder hit petrified bark hard enough to send pain flashing down her arm. The oak did not move, but the impact jolted loose a piece of dead, hardened branch jutting from its side. It cracked. Rory grabbed it with both hands and wrenched.
The branch snapped free.
The first creature reached her.
She swung.
The branch passed through its arm with a sound like tearing silk . No blood. No resistance. But the creature shrieked and recoiled, its long hand unraveling into smoke at the edges.
Oak, Rory thought wildly. Boundary stones. Ancient oak. Of course.
The flowers whipped around her calves. She hacked downward with the broken branch, tearing stems. The whispers sharpened into a hiss. Something cold brushed the back of her neck—air from the portal, or fingers, or worse.
She ran.
Not for the vanished path. Not away from the arch. Around it.
The creatures had spread to block her retreat, but they moved as if the standing stones mattered, as if the ring held rules even they disliked. Rory plunged between two oak stones where the wildflowers grew thinner. Pain seared her chest as the pendant swung and struck her collarbone. The seam of darkness flared in protest.
A hand closed around her rucksack.
Rory twisted out of the straps. The bag tore away, torch, water, phone, custard creams and all. She didn’t look back. Another hand caught her sleeve. She slashed with the oak branch. The grip vanished with a shriek that drilled into her teeth.
Then she was through the ring.
The clearing behind her erupted in whispers.
The path appeared ahead, narrow and dark between the oaks.
Rory ran.
Branches clawed at her hair. Roots rose underfoot where none had been a step before. The grove bent around her, trees leaning inward, trunks sliding into place at the edges of her vision. She kept one hand around the pendant and one around the branch, lungs burning, shoulder throbbing from the impact with the stone.
“Rory!”
Eva’s voice again, sobbing.
“Rory, don’t leave me!”
She almost stumbled.
Anger saved her. Pure, bright, Cardiff-born anger that tasted of rain and courtrooms and her father saying, Then make them prove it.
“You’re not her,” Rory gasped, and kept running.
The child laughed beside her ear.
Something pale moved between the trees on her right, keeping pace without footsteps . Another flickered left. The path narrowed. The silence broke into layered sounds: leaves rustling with no wind, distant knocking, her own breath, whispers repeating her name in voices she almost knew.
Aurora.
Rory.
Laila.
Carter.
Malphora.
That last one hit like a hook behind the ribs. She didn’t know the name, but the pendant did. It blazed, and the grove recoiled.
Ahead, faint and impossible, glimmered London’s light.
Rory drove toward it.
The oaks at the boundary rose from the earth like gateposts. Beyond them lay open grass silvered by weak moonlight. She could hear traffic. A plane overhead. A fox screaming somewhere far off and ordinary.
She threw herself between the trees.
For one terrible second, the grove held her.
Pressure clamped around her waist, her throat, her wrist. The crescent scar on her left wrist burned white-hot. Fingers—real or root or flower—tightened around the pendant chain, tugging her backward.
Rory jammed the broken oak branch against the chain and twisted.
The pressure snapped.
She fell hard onto wet grass.
Sound crashed back into the world.
Traffic. Wind. Her own ragged coughing. The distant thump of bass from a car on the road. She rolled onto her back, clutching the pendant, and stared up at the London sky, bruised orange with cloud.
For several seconds, she did nothing but breathe.
Then she sat up so fast her head swam.
The trees stood behind her: ordinary oaks, dark and still. No path. No wildflowers blooming out of season. No standing stones visible between the trunks. Just Richmond Park at night, cold and empty.
Her phone was gone . Her rucksack was gone . Her torch. Her note back at the flat suddenly seemed less clever than inadequate.
Rory pushed to her feet, knees shaking.
The pendant lay against her palm, its crimson glow dimmed to a sullen ember. It was no longer hot. Only faintly warm, like skin after a fever.
She looked at her wrist.
The crescent scar had darkened. Not bleeding. Not broken. But flushed red, as if something beneath the skin had pressed upward and nearly found a way out.
From deep among the oaks came three slow knocks.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Rory stepped back.
A child’s laugh drifted after her, soft as falling leaves.
She turned and walked fast toward the nearest road. She did not run, because running would mean believing the trees could chase her across open ground. She did not look back, because looking back had never saved anyone.
But as the park widened around her and the city’s glow strengthened, Rory heard one final sound from the dark behind her.
Eva’s voice, no longer pleading. No longer afraid.
Just curious.
“Before dawn, then.”