AI The silver chain felt cold against Rory’s collarbone, but the stone hanging from it was not. Against her bare skin, the Heartstone Pendant thrummed. It was a tiny thing, no larger than a thumbnail, but the deep crimson gem pulsed with a steady, rhythmic heat that had slowly intensified the closer she got to Richmond Park.
Now, standing at the edge of the tree line, the heat of the artifact was almost uncomfortable, a feverish heartbeat against her chest.
Rory adjusted the collar of her jacket and stepped into the shadows of the ancient oaks. The city noise—the distant drone of the A3, the hum of London’s perpetual motion—faded with unnatural speed. Within a dozen paces, the silence of the park swallowed her whole.
She had come searching for answers, guided by the persistent warmth of the pendant and a scrap of a map she’d puzzled over in her flat above Silas’ bar. There was a threshold here. A boundary. But as her boots crunched over damp twigs, the cool-headed logic she usually relied upon began to fray.
The air was too thick. It tasted of ozone and crushed pine needles, heavy and damp, pressing down on her lungs.
She pushed through a dense thicket of gorse, her eyes adjusting to the deep gloom . The moon was a sliver of bone in the sky, offering barely enough light to trace the path. And then, the trees parted.
Before her lay the grove.
It was a perfect circular clearing, bounded by massive, ancient oaks that stood like silent sentinels . Beneath their sprawling branches, despite the autumn chill gripping the rest of London, the ground was thick with wildflowers. Bluebells, anemones, and pale primroses bloomed in impossible abundance, their petals gleaming faint and ghostly in the dark.
Rory hesitated at the edge of the clearing. Her left hand rose instinctively, her thumb tracing the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist—a nervous tic she’d never quite managed to break.
Something was wrong.
The silence here wasn't just the absence of sound; it was a physical weight . There was no wind. Not a single leaf rustled in the canopy above. The wildflowers stood perfectly rigid, as if frozen in glass. Rory took a breath, stepped forward, and cleared the threshold between the outermost oaks.
The heat from the crimson pendant flared, a sharp spike of warmth that made her gasp.
She stopped, her breath pluming in the air. Only, the mist of her breath didn't drift away. It lingered, suspended in front of her face, before slowly dissolving.
Rory glanced back. The path she had just walked was visible, but the trees beyond it looked distant, blurred as if viewed through a dirty pane of glass. When she checked her watch , the secondhand was ticking , but it seemed agonizingly slow, dragging itself from one marker to the next with agonizing reluctance.
*Time moves differently here,* she realized, remembering the scraps of lore she had unearthed. minutes inside could be hours outside. Or worse, days.
Rory shook her head, forcing her straight, shoulder-length black hair behind her ears. She couldn't afford to panic. Quick, analytical thinking had saved her from bad situations before, not least of all when she had fled Cardiff to escape Evan. Fear was just data. You analyze it, you find the flaw, you bypass it.
She took another step toward the center of the grove.
*Snap.*
It was a tiny sound, the sharp fracture of a dry twig. It came from the shadows to her left, near one of the massive oak trunks.
Rory froze. Her bright blue eyes darted toward the sound. The darkness beneath the branches was absolute, a solid ink that daylight had never truly touched.
"Is someone there?" she called out . Her voice sounded flat, swallowed instantly by the heavy air.
No answer.
She waited, her heart hammering against her ribs. The pendant pulse -pulse -pulsed in tandem with her quickening blood. Nothing moved. After a long moment, she let out a slow breath, chastising herself. It was probably a deer. Richmond Park was famous for them, after all.
But as she took her next step, she saw it.
At the very edge of her peripheral vision, a pale shape shifted. It was a subtle, fluid movement, like a white cloth being drawn behind a tree. When she whipped her head around to look directly at the spot, there was only the rough, dark bark of the oak.
Rory’s skin prickled with gooseflesh. The temperature in the grove had plummeted.
She took a step backward, toward the safety of the path she had entered through.
Another sound. This time, it wasn't a snap. It was a rustle, a soft, sliding noise like heavy silk dragging across the damp grass. It didn't come from one direction; it seemed to circle the perimeter of the clearing, just beyond the line of the standing oaks.
"I'm leaving," Rory said aloud, her voice tight . She didn't care if she sounded foolish talking to the dark.
She turned fully to face the exit.
The path was gone .
Where the gap between the two sentinel oaks had been, there was now only a solid wall of dense, thorny brambles, woven together so tightly that not even a mouse could have squeezed through. The roses on the vines were black, their thorns curving like talons.
Panic, sharp and cold, flared in her chest. She spun around, scanning the perimeter. The entire clearing was sealed. The ancient trees seemed to have drawn closer together, their branches overlapping overhead to block out even the sliver of moonlight. The only illumination came from the faint, sickly glow of the wildflowers and the crimson pulse of the Heartstone against her throat.
The pendant was hot now, burning her skin, warning her. The portal was near. Or something from it was.
The rustling sound stopped.
The silence returned, but it was no longer empty. It was filled with the heavy, wet sound of slow, deliberate breathing. It was close. Too close.
Rory stared at the center of the clearing.
The wildflowers were bending .
One by one, the stems of the primroses and bluebells bowed to the earth, flattened by an invisible weight that was moving toward her. There was no shape to see, no beast of muscle and bone, only the violent depression of the grass and flowers, leaving a trail of crushed petals in its wake.
The air grew putrid, smelling of old graves and stagnant water.
Rory backed away until her spine hit the rough, damp bark of one of the boundary oaks. The wood felt freezing cold through her jacket, a stark contrast to the burning heat of the pendant.
The invisible weight stopped five feet in front of her.
The air warped. The space directly before her seemed to ripple, like heat rising from asphalt. For a fraction of a second, the moonlight caught something in the warp—the suggestion of an impossibly long, pale limb, a joint bending the wrong way, and a face that possessed too many eyes and no mouth at all.
It was watching her. She could feel the intensity of its gaze, a physical pressure that made her knees want to buckle.
Rory clenched her fists , her fingernails biting into her palms. Her left thumb desperately rubbed the crescent scar on her wrist. *Think,* she told herself. *Think.*
The thing in front of her leaned closer. The smell of decay was overwhelming.
She reached up and grabbed the Heartstone Pendant. Ignoring the searing heat that blistered her fingertips, she ripped the silver chain from her neck and held the glowing crimson gem outward, thrusting it into the rippling air between them.
The artifact flared. A brilliant, blinding pulse of blood-red light shattered the darkness of the grove.
There was a high-pitched, screeching hiss—a sound like hot iron being plunged into water. The invisible pressure violently recoiled. The warped air shattered , and a gust of freezing wind exploded outward, tearing through the clearing.
Rory didn't wait to see if the creature would return.
She threw herself to the left, where the light of the pendant had briefly illuminated a tear in the briars. She kicked through the tangled thorns, ignoring the sharp pain of wood tearing her jeans and scratching her ankles. She scrambled, hands scraping the dirt, and burst through the perimeter.
Instantly, the heavy, stagnant air of the grove vanished.
She fell onto the damp, normal grass of Richmond Park. Above her, the city sky was orange with light pollution. In the distance, the faint, beautiful roar of London traffic echoed through the trees.
Rory sat up, gasping for air, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm. She looked back.
Behind her stood the ordinary park trees, dark and silent. There was no grove. No wildflowers. No glowing eyes.
She looked down at her hand. Her fingertips were red and blistered, but clutch tightly in her palm was the Heartstone. It was cold now. Inert.
Rory stood up on trembling legs, wrapping her jacket tightly around herself, and began the long walk back to the city, never looking behind her.