AI The ancient oaks did not look like trees at night.
They looked like witnesses.
Aurora stopped between two of the standing stones and listened to the silence settle around her. Richmond Park lay somewhere behind her—its gravel paths, its distant roads, the weak amber smear of London against the clouds—but the moment she crossed the line of oak monoliths, all of it had gone away.
Not faded. Gone.
The air inside the grove held the stillness of a shut room.
She drew her jacket tighter across her chest and glanced back.
The stones stood in a ragged crescent beneath the moonless sky, dark trunks plated with silver-grey bark. Beyond them was not the park. There should have been bracken , a footpath, perhaps the suggestion of a deer slipping through the trees. Instead there was only darkness, thick and depthless, as though someone had painted over the world beyond the boundary.
“Brilliant,” she murmured.
Her voice went nowhere.
Aurora looked down at the pendant hanging against her sternum. The Heartstone had been cold during the bus ride from Hammersmith, cold through the long walk beside the sleeping park gates, cold while she had followed the narrow track Eva had once described in too much detail and too little coherence.
Now it pulsed against her skin.
A low, patient warmth . Like a second heartbeat.
She curled her fingers around it. The crimson stone sat in her palm, thumbnail-sized, its faint inner glow staining the creases of her hand red.
This was why she had come.
Three nights earlier, a note had been pushed beneath the door of her flat above Silas’s bar. No name. No address. Just six words, written in a hand too neat to be comforting .
Bring the Heartstone to Isolde’s grove.
Tonight. Alone.
She had told herself she came because ignoring it felt worse. Because somebody knew where she lived. Because the pendant had begun waking her at odd hours, warming her skin until she could feel its heat through sleep and dreams. Because she was tired of being acted upon by things she did not understand.
All sensible reasons.
None of them explained why she had waited until after midnight, packed a torch, a small folding knife, and the pepper spray she had bought after Evan, then walked into a pocket of impossible forest alone.
The grove opened before her.
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in a dense, pale wash. Bluebells. Foxgloves. Small white flowers she could not name. They grew in every season here, Eva had said once, with a laugh that had sounded far too brittle. Even in frost. Especially in frost.
Tonight they were closed , their heads bowed as though asleep.
The trees gathered close around the clearing. Their branches knitted overhead, blocking what little light the sky offered. The only illumination came from the faint gleam of the Heartstone and a thin bluish radiance pooled low among the flowers.
Aurora took out her phone.
No signal. No surprise there. The screen read 12:17 a.m.
She checked the time, then looked up.
The clearing seemed larger than it had a moment ago .
Not by much. A few steps, perhaps. The far tree line had withdrawn, swallowed by shadow. Her eyes adjusted; she saw the pale flowers spreading onward, row after row, where she was certain the woods had been.
She switched on her torch.
The beam cut across the clearing. It caught flower stems, low silvered leaves, a patch of moss on a half-buried stone.
Then something tall moved behind the nearest tree.
Aurora froze.
The torch beam shook once in her hand. She steadied it with the other.
“Hello?”
No answer.
She kept the light trained on the trunk. It was an old oak, broad enough that three people might have struggled to encircle it. Its roots rose from the earth in twisted ridges. Nothing stood behind it. Nothing could have stood behind it without showing a shoulder, an arm, the hem of a coat.
The Heartstone pressed hot into her fist.
She swallowed. “If you sent the note, this isn’t funny.”
The words sounded too loud this time. Not because the grove carried them, but because something seemed to notice them.
A whisper stirred among the flowers.
Aurora pivoted, torch sweeping left.
Nothing.
The whisper came again, so faint it might have been leaves rubbing together. Except there was no wind. Not a breath of it. The wildflowers remained perfectly motionless, their bowed heads fixed in place.
She listened harder.
Her name threaded through the dark.
Rory.
The sound was soft. Familiar enough to turn her stomach .
Eva’s voice.
Aurora’s grip tightened around the torch. “Eva?”
The name vanished into the clearing. No reply followed.
She took one step forward, then stopped herself.
That had been stupid. Or nearly stupid. She could still walk back to the stones. She could leave. Go to the nearest road, flag down a cab, get home before the bar opened in the morning. Laugh at herself while Silas made tea strong enough to strip paint.
The thought brought no relief.
Behind her, something clicked.
A small sound. Like a nail tapping stone.
Aurora turned.
The standing stones were gone .
For a second, her mind refused the information. Her torch travelled across the place where they had been and found only trees. Thick trunks. Tangled roots. A wall of black forest.
“No.”
She walked toward it fast, pushing through the flowers. Their stems brushed against her boots with a dry, papery rasp. The clearing had not been this wide. She knew it hadn’t. The stones had been ten , maybe twelve paces behind her.
She took twenty.
Then thirty.
The trees did not get closer.
Her breath fogged before her now, though the night had been mild when she arrived. The cold slid beneath her jacket and hooked its fingers around her ribs.
“Fine,” she said, because speaking helped. “Fine. That’s fine.”
Her own voice sounded thin.
She stopped walking. The beam of her torch swept across a branch hanging low from the nearest oak.
Something white had been tied around it.
Aurora stared.
It was a strip of cloth, narrow and damp-looking, knotted once around the branch. Her torchlight caught a dark mark on it.
Writing.
She moved closer despite herself.
The cloth bore her name in faded blue ink.
AURORA CARTER.
Below it, in a different hand, someone had crossed out Aurora and written LAILA.
That had been done in black ink, heavy enough to soak through the fabric.
She did not touch it.
The whisper began again.
This time it came from everywhere.
Rory.
Rory, where are you?
The voice was Eva’s. It had Eva’s cadence, that impatient lilt at the end of a question. It was the voice that had called Aurora from Cardiff after months of silence . The voice that had said, Come to London. Just come. We’ll work the rest out.
Aurora shut her eyes.
Evan used to do that. Not imitate Eva precisely —he was never subtle enough for that—but he had learned which names could draw her attention. Which old wounds opened fastest. In the first weeks after she left Cardiff, every unknown number felt like him . Every message through a mutual friend. Every man with dark hair on the Tube platform.
But Evan was not here.
That was supposed to make this better.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Aurora flinched so hard she almost dropped the torch.
The screen lit her face blue-white.
No service. No notification.
Still, there was a new message.
UNKNOWN: TURN AROUND.
She stared at it.
The timestamp read 12:17 a.m.
Her phone read 12:17 a.m.
The message arrived again.
UNKNOWN: TURN AROUND.
Then a third time.
UNKNOWN: TURN AROUND.
Aurora’s thumb hovered over the screen. She did not turn around.
The grove had gone silent.
Not quiet. Silent.
The distinction entered her mind with awful clarity. Quiet had room in it: insects, breath, distant traffic, the soft settling sounds of a living place. This silence had no room at all. It pressed close against her ears until she could hear the blood moving in her neck.
The Heartstone pulsed once.
Twice.
Its heat flared through her fingers.
A scent reached her: wet earth, crushed flowers, and something metallic beneath it. Not blood. Something older and cleaner. Rain on iron. A graveyard gate after a storm.
She turned her head a fraction.
At the edge of the torchbeam, between two trees, stood a woman.
Aurora saw her only in pieces. A pale hand resting against bark. Bare feet among the flowers. A long dress, dark enough to vanish from the waist down. Hair streaming over one shoulder, colourless in the low blue light.
The woman’s face remained hidden behind the trunk.
Aurora did not move.
Neither did the woman.
“Who are you?” Aurora asked.
A pause.
Then the woman answered in Aurora’s own voice.
“Who are you?”
The torch flickered .
Aurora slapped it once against her palm. The beam steadied, but the woman had gone.
Behind her, the flowers rustled.
Not in the wind.
Underfoot.
She looked down.
The wildflowers were opening .
Thousands of pale petals unfurled in silence , one after another, lifting their faces toward her. Their centres were black. Not dark blue, not brown. Black, deep and glossy, like little open mouths.
A low sound rose from them.
Not whispering this time.
Breathing.
Aurora backed away. Her heel struck something hard. She turned, half expecting a root, a stone—
A standing stone waited behind her.
It had not been there a moment before.
Its bark was ridged with age. Carved into its face were grooves she could not make sense of : spirals, antlered shapes, hands with too many fingers. At its base lay a shallow hollow full of black water.
The Heartstone burned.
Aurora gasped and let it fall from her hand. The silver chain caught against her throat. The pendant swung above the hollow, shedding crimson light across the water.
Something moved beneath its surface.
Not a reflection.
The water trembled though nothing touched it. A face began to form in the darkness below: indistinct at first, pale features rising through blackness. Aurora saw closed eyes. A narrow mouth. Hair drifting as if underwater.
Then the eyes opened.
They were bright blue.
Her eyes.
Aurora stumbled backward, dragging the pendant away.
The face in the water smiled.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
The mouth below moved.
It spoke in a voice muffled by deep water.
Too late.
Every flower in the grove inhaled.
The sound came from the trees next: a soft creak of wood bending under a weight . Aurora raised the torch.
Shapes clung high among the branches.
She had mistaken them for knots and shadows at first. Now she saw limbs folded impossibly close to trunks. White faces tilted down through curtains of hair. There were too many to count. They did not descend. They did not speak.
They watched.
Her breath came quick and shallow. Think, she told herself. Think.
Panic was a trick the body played when it wanted to survive without doing the work. Panic made bad choices feel urgent. She had learned that much . She had learned to breathe through the terror of a raised voice, a slammed door, a hand closing too hard around her wrist.
Her thumb found the small crescent scar there without intention.
In. Hold. Out.
The pendant was hot enough to hurt.
A Hel portal.
The thought surfaced from somewhere beneath the fear. The Heartstone responded to them. That was what it did. Faint warmth near one. This was not faint. This was a warning flare.
The black water in the stone’s hollow had begun to swirl.
A portal, then. Or the beginning of one.
And whatever watched from the trees wanted her near it.
Aurora forced herself to look away from the water. The standing stone had appeared behind her . If the grove was moving its boundaries, then the stones were not a way out so much as a language. A line being redrawn .
She scanned the clearing.
There.
Across the flowers, barely visible in the crimson pulse of the pendant, another oak stone stood at an angle. Beside it, a thin space opened between the trunks. Beyond that gap, she saw something that did not belong in the grove.
A yellow road sign.
Weak. Distant. But real.
The park.
The breathing flowers deepened.
Aurora started toward the gap.
The first step was easy.
The second sank to her ankle.
She looked down. The flower stems had curled around her boot. Not tightly , not yet. Fine green tendrils wound over the leather laces and under the sole, rooting her to the earth.
She pulled.
The stems held.
Above her, branches creaked.
“Let go,” she said.
The flowers breathed out.
Rory.
Eva’s voice came from ahead now, near the gap. “Rory, please.”
Aurora looked up.
Eva stood beside the far stone.
For one blinding moment, it was perfect . Her familiar red coat. Her crooked posture. One hand lifted in an impatient beckon. Her face pale in the dim light, eyes wide with fear.
“Come on,” Eva said. “You don’t have much time.”
Aurora’s chest tightened.
Then she saw that Eva’s feet did not touch the ground.
She hovered an inch above the flowers.
And her shadow pointed toward Aurora though the pendant’s light fell the other way.
“No,” Aurora said.
Eva’s expression broke.
Not changed. Broke, as though the face were a thin mask splitting down the middle. Her smile stretched too far. Her eyes darkened until they became the same black as the centres of the flowers.
“You always leave,” it said.
The stems cinched around Aurora’s ankle.
She yanked the folding knife from her pocket and cut.
The blade met the first tendril with a soft snap. Pale sap beaded along the edge. The flowers screamed.
The sound was not loud. That was worse. It was a thin, piercing cry inside her skull, a sound that made her teeth ache. The pale faces in the trees unfolded.
Aurora hacked at the stems. Once. Twice. The knife slipped in her cold hand. The vines loosened enough for her to wrench her foot free, leaving a torn strip of leather from her boot behind.
She ran.
The grove changed around her.
Trees lurched sideways in the torchbeam. Roots heaved up like knuckled hands. The gap between the trunks narrowed, then shifted ten feet left. Aurora veered toward it, boots skidding on wet earth.
Behind her came the dry rush of flowers bending in pursuit.
She did not look.
Her phone began ringing.
Eva’s name flashed on the screen.
Aurora ran harder.
The call stopped.
A second later, it began again—not from the phone, but from somewhere in the dark behind her . The bright electronic trill echoed between the oaks, growing nearer. Then another phone joined it. Then another, each ringing at a different pitch.
A chorus of unanswered calls.
The gap lay ahead.
The yellow road sign sharpened through the trees. She could make out the reflective surface, the black arrow on it. Behind it, the familiar broad darkness of Richmond Park. A wash of distant light. The ordinary night.
The thing wearing Eva’s shape stood in the gap.
It had not walked there. Aurora had not seen it move.
“Don’t go,” it said.
Its voice had changed again. It was no longer Eva’s.
It was Brendan Carter’s voice. Her father’s low, careful voice from years ago, speaking to her in the kitchen after Evan had called for the twelfth time.
Come home, Rory. We can sort this out properly.
Aurora nearly stopped.
The thing smiled.
Her father had never said that. Not exactly. He had said, Come home if you need to. Jennifer had taken the phone and said, You don’t need permission, darling. Just get on the train.
Tiny differences. The kind that mattered.
Aurora seized the Heartstone in her fist.
“Wrong answer,” she said.
She swung it outward, not knowing what she expected.
The crimson stone struck the air.
The grove recoiled.
The sound that followed was neither scream nor thunder. It was the noise of a door being forced open in a house that had stood empty for centuries. Every branch snapped back. The flowers flattened. The false Eva jerked as if hooked through the spine.
Red light spilled from the Heartstone in a hard, narrow arc.
It struck the ground between Aurora and the figure.
For an instant, the earth opened.
Not physically. Not in any way her eyes could have explained. A vertical seam appeared in the air, blacker than the surrounding dark, rimmed in frost and crimson sparks. From beyond it came a wind that smelled of snow, ash, and something profoundly dead.
The thing in the gap recoiled with a sound like breath dragged through wet cloth.
Aurora did not wait to see more.
She threw herself through the space between the trees.
Cold ripped across her skin.
Then she was falling forward onto gravel.
Her torch bounced from her hand and spun its beam across a park path. Real grass. Real mud. A low wooden fence. Far away, a car passed, tyres hissing over wet road.
Aurora lay still for several seconds, cheek pressed to the gravel, lungs refusing to work properly.
Behind her, the grove made no sound.
She raised her head.
The ancient oak standing stones stood in their old crescent, exactly where they should have been. Beyond them lay a dark, ordinary clump of trees. No blue light. No flowers. No faces in the branches.
Her phone lay beside her, screen cracked but lit.
1:43 a.m.
She stared at it.
It had been 12:17 when she entered.
Or it had been.
The Heartstone rested against her chest, no longer hot. Its crimson glow had faded to a dull ember beneath the surface. Around the silver chain, the skin at her throat throbbed with warmth .
Aurora pushed herself upright.
Her boot was torn . Mud streaked her jeans. Her hands shook badly enough that she had to pick up the torch twice.
At the edge of the stones, something pale fluttered from the bark.
The strip of cloth.
She should have left it.
Instead, she crossed the path, stopping just short of the boundary. The cloth hung from an oak branch on the grove side. Her name was still written there.
AURORA CARTER.
Below it, LAILA had been crossed out.
And beneath that, in fresh dark ink that gleamed wetly in the torchlight, was a new name.
MALPHORA.
The trees breathed in.
Aurora ran.