AI Aurora knew Richmond Park well enough to distrust it after dark.
In daylight, the park opened around you—green, broad, ordinary. At night, it became a country with no roads. The trees gathered close. The paths lost their edges. Even the city seemed to withdraw, its lights reduced to a dull orange haze beyond the black ribs of branches.
She left the car at the gate and walked in alone.
The cold found every gap in her clothes. Her boots sank into damp earth beneath the thin crust of frost, and each step made a soft, private sound. She carried no torch. Moonlight spilled between the clouds often enough to show her the way, and besides, the message had been explicit.
Come to the grove. Midnight. Bring the pendant. Come alone.
No name. No explanation.
The Heartstone rested beneath her jumper, suspended from its silver chain. It lay against her sternum like a second, smaller heart. Usually its warmth was faint enough to dismiss. Tonight it had been warm from the moment she fastened it around her neck.
That should have been warning enough.
Aurora pressed two fingers against it as she walked. The gem was no larger than her thumbnail, deep crimson beneath its dull surface. It gave off the faintest inner glow, barely visible through the fabric. A pulse moved through it.
Once.
Then again.
She stopped.
The park held its breath.
A horse shifted somewhere in the darkness. Aurora heard the scrape of a hoof, the wet exhale of an animal, and then silence returned so completely that she could hear the blood in her ears.
“Brilliant,” she muttered.
Her voice seemed to travel farther than it should. It slipped between the trees and came back changed—not an echo exactly, but a soft repetition from somewhere behind her .
Brilliant.
Aurora turned.
Nothing stood on the path. Nothing moved beneath the trees. The moon had gone behind a cloud, leaving the world in layered shades of black.
She waited until her nerves settled, then continued.
She had come because the pendant had begun to pulse near the park three nights ago. Not constantly. Only when she walked past the southern boundary, where the old oaks grew thickest. The first time, she had assumed the warmth came from her body. The second time, she had stopped beneath an oak and watched the crimson stone brighten against her palm.
The third time, she had found the message tucked beneath her flat door.
She should have shown someone. Eva, perhaps. Silas. Anyone.
But the person who had given her the pendant had already demonstrated a frightening ability to know where she lived and when she was alone. Aurora had not yet decided whether the message was an invitation, a threat, or bait. She only knew that ignoring it would leave a question inside her head, and unanswered questions had teeth.
The standing stones appeared just before midnight.
They rose from the earth in a rough crescent, ancient oak trunks planted between them as if the trees had grown around the stones instead of beside them. Their surfaces were black with age and rain. Pale lichen traced shapes across them—lines that looked almost like writing, though the patterns shifted whenever Aurora tried to focus.
Beyond the stones lay the grove.
It was not supposed to be there.
She had walked this section of Richmond Park many times. There should have been an open slope and a stand of hawthorn. Instead, a clearing stretched beyond the stone boundary, bright with wildflowers.
Flowers in January.
White bells, blue stars, red petals like tiny tongues. They bloomed beneath the moon without bending in the wind. Their color seemed too vivid, too deliberate, and they filled the air with a sweet scent that reminded Aurora of bruised grass and old honey.
Her pendant warmed sharply .
She stopped before the stones.
The message had said midnight. Her phone showed 11:58.
The screen flickered .
For one moment, the time read 3:17.
Then it returned to 11:58.
Aurora stared at it. The battery had been at sixty-two percent when she left. Now it showed three.
“No.”
She tapped the screen. Nothing happened.
Behind her, something stepped onto the path.
Aurora heard the soft compression of earth. One foot. A pause. Then another.
She did not turn immediately. Her mind began sorting possibilities with cold efficiency. A fox would be lighter. A deer would move with more weight but less deliberation. A person would have made other sounds—the brush of clothing, breath, perhaps the crunch of frost.
The steps came again.
Aurora slid one hand into her coat pocket and closed it around the small canister of pepper spray she had started carrying after Evan. The other hand gripped the pendant beneath her jumper.
“Hello?”
The night answered with another step.
She turned.
The path was empty.
Her breath showed pale in front of her face. The trees stood in their patient rows. At the edge of her vision, something seemed to move between two trunks—a pale vertical shape, gone before she could look directly at it.
Aurora held still.
A branch creaked.
Not above her. Behind her.
She looked over her shoulder. The nearest oak was several paces away, its bare limbs motionless.
Then the pendant pulsed .
The standing stones answered.
A low vibration passed through the ground. It was so faint she felt it more than heard it, a tremor beneath the soles of her boots. The stones darkened, their edges blurring. The air between them thickened like glass warming under flame.
Aurora took one step backward.
The grove changed.
The flowers remained, but the clearing stretched farther than it had a moment before. Moonlight pooled among the stems. Beyond them, where the park should have continued, stood a line of trees with silver bark and no leaves. Their trunks leaned inward, forming a tunnel.
Something watched from within it.
She could not see a face. She could not even be certain there was a body. But certainty gathered in her chest with the steady pressure of a closing hand.
She was not alone.
Aurora glanced at her phone again. The dead screen reflected her face: bright blue eyes, black hair loose around her shoulders, lips pressed tight. Behind her reflection, something tall stood just over her left shoulder.
She spun around.
Nothing.
The pendant had gone cold.
A sound came from the grove.
A woman humming.
The tune was simple, only four notes, repeated with slight variations. Aurora recognized it after several repetitions. Her mother had sung it when Aurora was small, while washing dishes or marking exercise books at the kitchen table.
A Welsh lullaby.
Her skin tightened.
“Mum?”
The humming stopped.
For several seconds, there was only wind moving through the grass.
Then a voice spoke from somewhere among the flowers.
“Rory.”
Her mother had never called her that.
Aurora backed away from the stones. The voice had sounded close, almost beside her ear, yet the clearing held no one. The wildflowers swayed now, though no wind touched her face. One by one, they bent toward the center of the grove.
Her phone chimed.
The screen lit despite the dead battery.
A new message appeared.
YOU BROUGHT IT.
Aurora’s thumb hovered over the screen. She did not touch it.
Another message arrived.
YOU TOOK YOUR TIME.
The words vanished.
The time displayed was 12:04.
She looked over her shoulder toward the park. The path seemed shorter than before, the gate perhaps fifty yards away . She could see the faint glow of a streetlamp beyond the trees.
Then something moved at the edge of the clearing.
Aurora tracked it without turning her head. A shape passed behind the leftmost standing stone. It was too tall for a person and too narrow for a tree. The movement had no rhythm—an abrupt slide, a pause, another slide.
She raised the pepper spray.
“Stay where you are.”
The shape stopped.
A laugh answered her.
It was almost hers.
Not an imitation of her voice, but a recording of the sound she made when something surprised her—a short, breathless laugh that escaped before she could stop it. Evan had hated that laugh . He had once told her it made her sound stupid.
The thing in the grove laughed again.
Aurora’s grip tightened until the canister dug into her palm.
The sensible choice was to leave. She had come for answers, but answers were no longer the priority. The stones marked a boundary. Whatever lay beyond them had not crossed.
Yet.
She turned toward the path.
The gate had disappeared.
No—there was still a path, but it ran through trees she did not remember seeing. The streetlamp’s glow had gone. In its place, a line of small lights hovered low over the ground, each one pale and blue. They receded into darkness, inviting her deeper.
Aurora swallowed.
Time moved differently in the grove. She had learned that from a book Silas had once left open on the bar, a book he claimed was a joke until she noticed he had underlined an entire page. An hour inside could become minutes outside. Or days.
The thought arrived with a sharper one behind it.
If she crossed the stones, the park might not be waiting for her when she returned.
A flower opened near her boot.
Its petals unfolded without sound, revealing a dark center shaped like a tiny, staring eye.
Aurora stepped back.
The pendant began to pulse again, stronger now. Warmth spread across her chest. Beneath the stone, something beat in answer from the far side of the boundary.
A second heart.
No. Not a heart.
Footsteps.
They came from inside the grove, slow and measured , crushing no flowers. One step. Then another. The humming resumed, lower than before.
Aurora could see the space between the stones clearly. She could see the flowers, the silver trees, the pale lights. She could see nothing walking toward her.
But the flowers leaned away from something approaching.
The pendant’s inner glow brightened until it showed through her jumper like a coal.
A whisper slid across the clearing.
“Malphora.”
Aurora went still.
No one had called her that in London. No one should have known it at all.
The name had belonged to another life, one she had never understood and could barely remember. It surfaced only in dreams: a red sky, a door made of bone-white wood, a voice speaking her name as if it were a title.
The thing whispered it again.
“Malphora.”
Behind her, the park gave a distant, hollow groan.
Aurora looked toward the stones.
Something had appeared on the nearest one. A hand rested over its edge.
The fingers were long and pale, the nails dark. They curled slowly , one after another, as if testing the stone’s surface .
Aurora raised the spray higher.
The hand tightened.
She moved.
Not toward the grove. Away from it.
Her heel struck an exposed root. She caught herself, stumbled, and the pendant tore free of her collar. The silver chain snapped against her throat. The Heartstone fell into her palm, hot enough to hurt.
The hand lifted from the stone.
Aurora ran.
The path twisted beneath her. Trees flashed past on either side, their trunks too close, their branches clawing at her coat. Behind her came no footsteps , but something followed. She felt it in the way the darkness pressed between her shoulder blades.
She did not look back.
The lights ahead flickered . The path sloped sharply , though she knew the ground here was flat. Her lungs burned. Her boots slipped on wet leaves. Somewhere to her right, a child began to cry.
Aurora kept running.
The crying moved with her.
“Mum,” it sobbed.
She bit down hard enough to taste blood.
The standing stones appeared again ahead of her .
She had run in a straight line. She knew she had. Yet the stones now blocked the path, their black surfaces rising like teeth.
Beyond them, the grove waited.
The flowers turned toward her.
Aurora stopped so abruptly that momentum carried her forward. She nearly fell between the stones. The Heartstone throbbed in her fist, blazing crimson through her fingers.
On the other side of the boundary, something stood among the flowers.
It wore her shape.
Same height. Same shoulder-length black hair. Same coat. Same pale face.
But the eyes were wrong. They were not blue. They were dark and reflective, like windows with a night pressed against them.
The other Aurora smiled.
“Rory,” it said.
The voice came from behind her.
Aurora shut her eyes.
The thing in front of her spoke again, and this time the voice was her mother’s.
“Come home.”
Something breathed against the back of her neck.
Aurora opened her hand.
The Heartstone flared.
The grove vanished in a burst of white light. Every sound stopped—the humming, the crying, the breathing at her shoulder. For one suspended instant, the world became utterly blank.
Then Aurora heard a bell.
Once.
She opened her eyes.
She stood beneath the standing oaks, outside the stones. Frost covered the grass. Richmond Park lay around her, dark and empty. The gate lights glowed in the distance.
Her phone lay at her feet.
The screen showed 12:01.
Aurora bent, but before she could pick it up, the phone chimed.
A message appeared.
THANK YOU FOR OPENING THE DOOR.
She stared at the words.
The Heartstone had gone cold in her palm.
Behind her, from somewhere beyond the standing stones, a woman began to hum the lullaby again.
This time, the tune had learned Aurora’s voice.