AI Aurora found the stones by counting her steps from the broken iron gate, exactly as the note had instructed.
One hundred and twelve paces north along the deer track. Do not use a torch. Do not speak your name.
The note had been folded into the pocket of her delivery jacket, though she did not remember putting it there. She had found it only after closing at the Golden Empress, when the kitchen had gone quiet except for the hiss of cooling woks and Yu-Fei Cheung muttering in Cantonese as he counted the till.
The paper had smelled faintly of woodsmoke.
Now, standing in the dark middle of Richmond Park, Aurora wished she had burned it without reading past the first line.
The park should have felt open. Even at night, it was a familiar sort of darkness: broad fields, black silhouettes of oaks, the occasional distant gleam of a road beyond the trees. London never truly slept. There ought to have been a plane grumbling somewhere overhead, tyres whispering over wet tarmac, the faraway pulse of a city too large to disappear.
Here there was none of it.
The standing stones rose ahead of her, half hidden among the roots of an enormous oak. They were not tall—barely shoulder height on her—but their squatness made them worse. They looked less like a monument than teeth pushing up through the earth. Moss filled the cracks in their grey surfaces. White flowers spilled between them in a bright, impossible scatter.
It was late November. The ground had iced under her trainers. There should not have been flowers.
Aurora stopped at the edge of the clearing.
The Heartstone pendant lay beneath her jumper, cold against her chest for most of the walk. Now it began to warm.
Not much. A faint heat, like a match cupped in a palm. She slid two fingers under her collar and drew the pendant free. The crimson stone, no larger than her thumbnail, held a dim red glow at its centre. Its silver chain trembled against her knuckles.
Her mouth went dry.
The note had said: Bring the stone to the grove. Come alone. If it warms, do not cross between the stones.
That instruction had seemed unnecessarily dramatic beneath the harsh fluorescent strip light of the restaurant kitchen .
It seemed rather more sensible now.
Aurora looked through the gap between two stones.
At first she saw only the clearing beyond: grass silvered with frost, wildflowers bending under no wind, another ring of trees that seemed denser than the ones behind her . Then her eyes adjusted.
There was no frost inside the circle.
The grass shone wet and green. Foxgloves stood among daisies and bluebells, their colours muted by moonlight but unmistakably alive. The oak at the centre had a trunk so wide that six people might have failed to join hands around it. Its branches spread across the sky in black veins.
The air on the other side looked wrong. Not visibly, exactly. It had the subtle blur of heat above a pavement, except the night was cold enough that Aurora could see her breath.
She took a step back.
Something chimed.
It came from behind her: a single, delicate note, like glass tapped with a fingernail.
Aurora turned sharply .
Nothing stood on the deer track. Trees crowded the path, their trunks pale in the thin moonlight. The park beyond them was swallowed by darkness. She listened until the blood thudded heavily in her ears.
No footsteps . No rustle. No breath except her own.
She faced the stones again.
The flowers inside the clearing were all turned toward her.
Aurora stared.
Bluebells, daises, foxgloves. Every bent stem had straightened. Every flower head pointed through the gap in the stones.
She forced herself to breathe slowly .
Wind, she thought. A current of air. Though the night remained perfectly still, and the leaves in the oak overhead did not move.
A flash of memory crossed her mind: Eva leaning across a pub table, her expression severe in a way that never suited her. If you find something weird in London, Rory, you walk away. You do not investigate it. That is how sensible people survive.
Aurora had laughed at the time.
She had not laughed much since receiving an unmarked parcel in the post three months ago: a silver chain, a deep crimson stone, and no explanation. The pendant had become part of her life by degrees. A strange warmth near places she would rather not remember. A pressure behind her eyes in certain alleyways. Dreams of a black shoreline beneath a sky without stars.
And now this note.
She folded her fingers around the Heartstone.
“Who sent me?” she asked.
The words slipped out before she could stop them.
For a moment, the clearing did not change.
Then something beneath the central oak answered in a voice that sounded exactly like hers.
“Who sent me?”
Aurora went still.
The voice had not come from the trees. It had come from within the ring of stones, low and close, as if someone crouched just beyond the oak’s roots.
Her grip tightened around the pendant. The crescent scar on her left wrist pulled pale against her skin.
“Very funny,” she said, because it was easier than admitting she had nearly screamed.
Nothing answered.
She counted to ten. Then twenty.
At thirty, the chime sounded again.
This time, it came from inside the grove.
Aurora should leave.
The thought arrived with the calm clarity of a legal conclusion. Premise: an anonymous person had lured her into Richmond Park after midnight. Premise: the place ahead of her did not obey the season or the weather. Premise: something in it knew the sound of her voice.
Conclusion: leave.
But the pendant was growing warmer. Heat seeped through her closed fist and into the bones of her hand. Its inner crimson glow deepened until red light showed between her fingers.
A Hel portal, she thought.
The phrase had belonged to a dream, or perhaps to the few scattered words she had managed to pry from people who knew more about the pendant than they were willing to say. A door. A tear. Something not meant to be opened from this side.
The note had called this place a grove. Isolde’s grove, in an old ink scrawl beneath the instructions. There had been a final line she had read so often she could see it now without unfolding the paper.
It has begun to call for you.
Aurora had come because she needed answers more than she needed sleep. Because unknown benefactors did not give away ancient-looking jewellery for no reason. Because every time she considered throwing the Heartstone into the Thames, it pulsed against her skin like a second heartbeat.
Because she was tired of being moved around by things she did not understand.
She stepped sideways rather than forward, placing the closest standing stone between herself and the gap.
The pendant’s heat flared.
The world lurched .
For an instant, the stone against her shoulder vanished. The dark park vanished. Aurora found herself staring into a stretch of black water beneath a vast colourless sky. Shapes shifted under the surface, long and pale. The cold that touched her face was not November cold. It was deep, stale, tomb-cold.
Then she stumbled, caught herself on the standing stone, and Richmond Park snapped back around her.
Her palm slapped against the rock.
It was warm.
Aurora jerked her hand away.
A wet handprint remained on the stone.
Not hers. Hers had been dry, apart from the cold sweat gathering at her fingertips. This print was larger. Long-fingered. It gleamed darkly in the moonlight.
She did not look at it for long. Some instinct told her that if she examined it closely enough, she would see the marks of joints bent the wrong way.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Right. I’m leaving.”
From the grove, someone laughed.
It was a woman’s laugh. Soft, breathless, almost fond.
Aurora turned and started down the deer track.
She made it three steps before she heard the grass whisper behind her.
Not footsteps . Too light for that. A dry brushing sound, like someone dragging the ends of a dress through long weeds.
She kept walking.
The path seemed narrower than it had before . Branches reached lower over it, tangling together above her head. Her phone sat useless in her pocket; she had checked it at the gate and found the screen blank, no power despite being fully charged when she left the restaurant. She did not take it out now.
The whispering grass continued.
Aurora counted her paces.
One. Two. Three.
At twelve, the sound stopped.
At seventeen, a voice behind her said, “Rory?”
She stopped despite herself.
Her father called her Aurora. Her mother, when she was angry , called her Aurora Elizabeth Carter as though the extra name were a criminal charge. In London, most people used Rory. Eva had used it since they were children, usually with affection and occasionally with accusation.
But the voice had said it in Evan’s tone.
Not the loud voice. Not the one he used when he wanted people to see how charming he could be. This was the voice from closed rooms. Low and patient. The voice that made her body begin to apologise before her mind knew what she had done.
Rory.
The night seemed to shrink around her.
She did not turn.
Her heart beat hard enough to hurt. For one ugly, disorienting second, she smelled stale lager and cheap aftershave. She saw the old Cardiff flat in fragments: the cracked mirror over the sink, the blue light of a television in another room, Evan’s shadow stretching across the carpet.
“Don’t,” she said.
The voice sighed behind her.
“You always make things difficult.”
Aurora shut her eyes.
That was not him. Evan was not here. Evan was miles away, if he was anywhere at all. The thing behind her had found a shape that fit into the spaces she still carried.
Her hand closed around the pendant through her jumper. The Heartstone burned against her palm.
“You don’t know me,” she said.
A pause.
Then, very close to her left ear, the voice replied, “I know what you leave behind.”
Aurora spun around.
The path stood empty.
But the trees were gone .
Not gone entirely. They had moved. Every trunk now stood farther back, arranged in a wide circle around the track. Their branches knit together overhead, making a roof that blotted out the moon. At the centre of that circle, perhaps fifteen feet away, stood the standing stones.
She had walked away from them.
She was certain she had.
Yet there they were.
The gap between the two nearest stones faced her like an open mouth.
Inside it, the grove glimmered with summer green. The flowers had turned away now. All of them faced the central oak.
Aurora’s breath fogged the air. She watched it drift toward the stones instead of rising.
She looked down at the ground.
Her footprints led from the gap to where she stood. Fresh prints, sharp in the frost, as if she had walked backward without noticing. Beside them ran another set.
Bare feet.
Long, narrow impressions pressed into the frozen soil. They began at the grove and ended inches from her own trainers.
Aurora did not move.
The bare footprints continued behind her.
A low hum began inside the clearing.
It had no tune. It was merely a vibration, a thread of sound so quiet she felt it more than heard it. The Heartstone answered with a pulse of heat against her chest.
Once.
Twice.
Then the crimson light bled through her jumper.
At the far side of the grove, beneath the oak, darkness gathered between the roots. It thickened in a shape that could have been a person standing very still. Too tall. Too thin. Its head touched the lowest branches.
Aurora kept her eyes on it and took one careful step backward.
The shape did not move.
Another step.
The bare footprints in the frost deepened behind her, as though someone had shifted their weight .
“Don’t look away,” said a voice from the dark beneath the oak.
It was not Evan’s voice now. It was older than that. Dry and distant and full of a quiet amusement.
Aurora’s throat tightened.
“Why am I here?” she asked.
The shape seemed to lean forward.
The flowers all bowed at once.
“Because you brought the key.”
The pendant burned.
A red line appeared in the air between the standing stones, thin as a knife cut. It ran from the earth to the black canopy overhead. Light leaked from it—not bright, not warm, but the colour of old blood seen underwater .
The cut widened soundlessly.
Beyond it lay no grove.
Aurora saw black water and a shore littered with white stones. She saw a sky without stars. Far away, something vast moved beneath the surface, making the dead water rise and fall.
The smell reached her then: salt, rot, and the sweet iron scent of something long buried.
The shape beneath the oak gave a pleased little sigh.
Aurora did the only thing she could think of.
She tore the chain over her head.
The silver caught in her hair. Pain sparked across her scalp, but she yanked harder until the clasp snapped. The Heartstone came free in her fist, blazing crimson.
For one suspended moment, the thing in the grove was silent.
Then it said, sharply , “No.”
Aurora flung the pendant through the open gap.
It crossed the threshold between the stones.
The world screamed.
Not aloud. The sound tore through her teeth and behind her eyes. The red slit in the air convulsed. Wind burst from it, dragging leaves, grass, and loose earth toward the black shore beyond. Aurora hit the ground hard, fingers clawing frozen soil.
The bare footprints beside her slid forward.
A hand closed around her ankle.
Its skin was cold and smooth. Its fingers had too many joints.
Aurora kicked blindly. Her heel connected with something solid. The grip tightened once, crushingly, and she gasped.
Then the Heartstone flashed.
Crimson light filled the grove.
The hand vanished.
The portal snapped shut with a crack like a tree splitting in winter.
Darkness fell.
Aurora lay facedown in the frost, cheek pressed to mud, unable to hear anything except her own ragged breathing.
Slowly, painfully, she lifted her head.
The trees had returned to their proper places. The deer track stretched away behind her, open and familiar . The standing stones remained ahead, dull grey beneath the moon.
The flowers inside the grove were gone .
Only dead grass grew there.
Her pendant lay just beyond the stones, blackened and still.
Aurora did not go to retrieve it.
She rose on shaking legs and walked down the track without looking back. She did not count her steps. She did not run, though every nerve in her body begged her to. She kept one hand wrapped around her bruised ankle and the other pressed to the empty place at her throat.
Behind her, far beyond the trees, something chimed once.
Then, in her own voice, patient and very close, it whispered her name.