AI The standing stones were not stone.
Rory stopped beneath the trees and swept her torch across them again.
Ancient oaks rose from the bracken in a ragged crescent, their trunks broad, pale, and almost entirely bare of bark. In the blunt white beam, they resembled weathered pillars, their roots sunk deep into Richmond Park’s black earth. She had seen photographs. She had read three separate descriptions, all irritatingly vague, and had marked the location from the only account that gave usable directions: west from the pond until the path forked around a lightning-struck beech, then north by northwest for four hundred paces.
Nothing had mentioned that the oaks looked like bones .
“Brilliant,” she murmured.
Her voice vanished into the wood.
No echo . No rustle of startled wings. Not even the small, private stir of leaves disturbed by breath. Rory lowered the torch and listened.
Silence could be noisy in London. Boilers knocked behind walls. Traffic sighed several streets away. Someone somewhere always dragged a chair or shouted into a phone. Even here, far enough into the park to lose sight of the road, she should have heard something: wind combing the canopy, foxes barking, deer shifting through fern.
There was nothing.
She checked her phone. 11:43 p.m. The lock screen still displayed Eva’s last message.
This is an appalling idea. Share your location.
Rory had shared it before slipping through a gap in the fence and ignoring the sign about park closure. The blue location icon now spun uselessly above a blank map. NO SERVICE occupied the corner of the screen.
“Of course.”
Her voice seemed smaller this time.
She put the phone away and touched the pendant beneath her jumper. The Heartstone lay warm against her sternum, a thumbnail-sized weight on its silver chain. It had been cold when she left the flat above Silas’ bar. Cool in the cab. Cool as she crossed the grass under a swollen half-moon.
It had begun to warm when she found the first oak.
That was why she had come. Not for curiosity, despite what she would tell Eva if she got back before dawn. Not to prove a theory. For the third night in a row she had woken with the Heartstone glowing crimson against her skin and a voice whispering from the corner of her bedroom.
Richmond.
Last night, the voice had added her name.
Not Rory.
Aurora.
She had spent the day looking for connections between Richmond Park, ancient sites, and portals. Most of what she found was nonsense stitched together from folklore blogs and occult forums. One post had described a hidden grove between worlds, bounded by oak standing stones. Another, deleted minutes after she opened it, had contained a single line:
If the Heartstone wakes, go where the flowers never die.
Rory stepped between the first two oaks.
Warmth spread beneath her jumper.
Not heat exactly. A pulse .
She froze.
The Heartstone pulsed again, faint but definite, like a second heartbeat set slightly out of rhythm with her own.
She considered turning back. It was not cowardice to reassess when circumstances changed. It was intelligence. The pendant responded near a Hel portal—if the information she had been given was accurate, and if “Hel” meant what it sounded like . Coming alone had already been a concession to stupidity. Continuing would turn stupidity into policy.
Behind her, a twig snapped.
Rory spun.
The torch beam cut between the trees. Fern. Bramble. The bleached flank of an oak. Beyond them, darkness layered upon darkness.
Nothing moved.
She held still long enough for the muscles between her shoulders to begin aching.
“Deer,” she said.
The silence accepted this without comment.
She backed through the boundary.
Or tried to .
Her heel struck something hard. She glanced down, expecting a root, and saw the pale curve of an oak trunk inches behind her. That was wrong. She had walked three full steps into the crescent. The boundary trees should have been several feet away.
Rory turned the torch left, then right.
The oaks stood closer together now.
No. That was panic imposing a pattern. Trees did not rearrange themselves because a woman had crossed between them. She had misjudged the distance in poor light.
The Heartstone gave another slow pulse .
Somewhere ahead, water dripped.
Rory lifted the torch toward the sound. Beyond the boundary lay a narrow path she had not noticed before. White flowers crowded its edges, their open faces luminous in the dark. Wild roses, bluebells, poppies, snowdrops—flowers that belonged to different months and different soils, blooming together in profusion.
Flowers that never died.
She stared along the path.
One of the white blossoms turned toward her.
Only a little. A delicate tilt on its stem, as though stirred by a passing draught.
Then the next turned.
Then the next.
A ripple travelled away from her into the darkness. Hundreds of pale faces pivoted in sequence, marking the course of something moving down the path.
Toward the clearing.
Away from Rory.
Her scalp prickled.
She could leave. Climb the fence, call Eva from the road, and find somebody who knew what the pendant was before she went blundering into a portal. Sensible. Clean. Long overdue.
She turned back toward the trees.
There was no gap.
The oaks formed an unbroken wall, trunk pressed to trunk. Their branches knitted overhead. Rory ran the torch across them, searching for the place where she had entered, but every tree had the same stripped, pallid bark. The same deep vertical grooves.
One groove gleamed wetly.
Rory stepped closer before she could stop herself. The mark was narrow and dark, beginning roughly at shoulder height and running toward the roots. Not sap. Water, perhaps.
The beam climbed.
A shape had been cut into the trunk above the wet streak: a crescent, small and precise.
Her left wrist began to ache.
Rory clamped her hand around it. Beneath her fingers lay the childhood scar, the little crescent she had carried for almost twenty years.
The carved mark was the same size.
A breath feathered the back of her neck.
She whirled so fast the pendant swung free of her jumper.
The crimson stone glowed dimly.
Nothing stood behind her. Only the path and its impossible flowers.
But the flowers nearest her had closed.
Not all of them. A patch shaped like two footprints pressed darkly into the white border. Farther along, another pair of blossoms folded inward. Then another.
Step by step, something invisible moved away from her.
No. Not away.
The prints pointed toward her.
The next flowers closed nearer.
Rory’s pulse accelerated. She forced one breath in, one out. Panic narrowed options. Fear lied about time. She needed facts.
The flowers reacted to pressure or proximity. The pendant warmed near a portal. The boundary behind her had closed. The path led somewhere. Something occupied it with her.
She slid her phone from her pocket and opened the camera. Screens sometimes caught what eyes did not; that principle appeared in enough folklore to warrant testing. Through the display, the path showed in grainy blue-black, the torch bleaching the flowers to featureless white.
The moving gap continued toward her.
She raised the phone.
At first she saw only the clearing beyond: tall grass, a ring of darker trees, a low mass in the centre that might have been a stone.
Then autofocus sharpened.
A figure stood halfway down the path.
Rory looked over the phone.
Empty air.
On the screen, the figure remained.
It was too tall to be human. Its head nearly touched the interlaced branches. It wore—or seemed to wear—something long and dark that blended into the shadows beneath it. Where its face should have been, the screen displayed a soft blur, as though the camera refused to hold it in focus.
One arm hung at its side.
The other was extended toward her.
Rory lowered the phone by an inch.
Nothing.
Raised it.
The figure was closer.
She stumbled back and struck the oak wall.
The phone camera juddered. For a fraction of a second, the blur resolved .
Her own face stared out from the figure’s head.
Not quite her face. The skin appeared grey and slack, the bright blue eyes filmed white . Straight black hair hung damply to its shoulders. Its mouth moved soundlessly.
Rory’s finger slipped against the screen, switching to the front camera.
Her own living face filled the display, pale and wide-eyed. Behind her stood the wall of oaks.
Between the trunks, something looked through a narrow crack.
A single bright blue eye.
Rory jerked away. The phone fell, landed in the flowers, and continued filming upward. Its light cast warped shadows across the trees.
A voice spoke from behind the oak wall.
“Rory?”
Eva’s voice.
Every muscle in Rory’s body locked.
“Rory, let me in.”
The plea came from directly behind the trunk bearing the crescent mark. Soft, breathless, terrified.
“Please. There’s something out here.”
Rory pressed her lips together.
Eva had not come. Eva had no car, hated Richmond Park after dark, and had threatened to chain Rory to the radiator if she tried this. Even if she had followed, she could not have reached the grove so quickly .
The voice knocked on the wood.
Three polite taps.
“Rory?”
A pause.
Then, in her father’s voice: “Aurora, open the door.”
Her stomach turned.
The Heartstone flared hot enough to sting.
The trees shuddered.
A low groan passed through the boundary, wood straining against wood. The sound continued downward, deep under the earth, until Rory felt it through the soles of her boots. Soil bulged around the roots. White flowers nodded violently though the air remained dead.
From the path came the sound of bare feet.
Slow.
Wet.
One step, then another.
Rory snatched up her phone. The screen had cracked across one corner, but the camera still worked. She held it toward the path.
The figure had reached the edge of the torchlight.
Its borrowed face no longer resembled her. Features shifted beneath a translucent surface, sliding through expressions and identities: Eva’s dark, furious eyes; her father’s stern mouth; her mother’s worried brow. Then Evan’s face emerged.
Rory’s breath stopped.
He looked as he had the morning she left Cardiff: handsome in the polished, deliberate way people trusted, hair neat, jaw bruised where she had finally struck back. His mouth curved into the smile he used before apologising.
“There you are,” he said.
This time the voice came from the path, not the screen.
Rory lowered the phone.
The path was still empty.
On the display, Evan took another step.
Her body remembered before her mind did. Shoulders drawing in. Wrist throbbing where his fingers had once closed. That old calculation—tone, distance, exits—returned with nauseating ease.
“There you are,” it repeated. “You always make everything difficult.”
The flowers folded beneath its unseen feet.
Rory tightened her grip on the phone until the cracked edge bit her palm. Fear wanted her small. Evan had always wanted the same thing. Perhaps that was why the creature had chosen his face.
“Poor choice,” she said, though her voice shook .
The thing stopped.
“You should’ve used someone I’d open a door for.”
Its smile vanished.
The pendant pulsed violently. Once. Twice. Each beat cast crimson light across Rory’s hands. The silver chain lifted from her skin as if tugged toward the clearing.
Not toward the creature.
Past it.
The portal lay ahead.
Rory looked down at the flowers. The thing disturbed them despite being invisible. That gave her its position. The path was narrow, but not impossibly so. To her right, wild roses formed a dense bank beneath the trees. To her left, bluebells spread through tall grass.
The flowers along the right edge leaned away from the creature before its steps landed. Proximity, not pressure.
A map.
On the screen, Evan’s face softened.
“You can’t run from me forever.”
“I don’t need forever.”
Rory hurled the torch to the left.
It struck the grass and rolled, the beam spinning wildly. Shadows wheeled. The bluebells recoiled in a broad wave as the creature turned toward the movement.
Rory ran right.
Thorns seized her jeans and raked her hands. She drove through the roses shoulder-first, shielding her face. Behind her, the phone screen filled with static. Something rushed through the path with a noise like a crowd inhaling.
She broke into the clearing.
Moonlight poured down where no opening should have existed in the canopy. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in concentric rings. At the centre stood a slab of black earth, upright and narrow, its surface swallowing light.
Not stone.
A doorway.
The Heartstone burned against her chest.
Rory sprinted toward it. The clearing stretched with every stride. The upright darkness remained twenty feet away, then twenty feet, then twenty feet. Flowers whipped against her boots. Her breath tore at her throat.
Behind her, Eva screamed.
Not called. Screamed.
Rory faltered.
The sound ended in a wet choke.
She took one backward step before sense reasserted itself. Not Eva. Not real. She turned toward the doorway and saw, in its lightless surface, her bedroom reflected.
Her bed. The chair by the window. The familiar patch of damp on the ceiling.
A figure stood in the corner.
The one that had whispered Richmond.
It was small, no more than a child, draped in a white shift. Long hair concealed its face. One thin arm rose and pointed—not at Rory, but below her .
She looked down.
The flowers around her boots were closing.
All of them.
A perfect circle tightened inward.
Rory lunged. The distance to the doorway collapsed at once. She hit the black surface with both hands.
It was warm and soft.
It yielded like skin.
Something caught the silver chain at the back of her neck.
Rory choked. The pendant snapped tight against her throat as she was pulled backward. She clawed at the chain, found the clasp, missed it. Behind her, Evan whispered into her hair.
“You never know when to stop.”
The crescent scar on her wrist touched the black doorway.
The darkness split.
Cold seized her arm. Not air—hands, dozens of small hands gripping from the other side. They pulled.
The chain broke.
Rory fell forward into freezing dark as the Heartstone tore free. For one sick instant she saw it suspended behind her, crimson and blazing, caught between long colourless fingers.
Then the grove vanished.
She struck damp ground hard enough to empty her lungs.
Noise crashed over her: wind, traffic in the distance, leaves rattling, the bark of a fox. Ordinary night sounds, deafening in their abundance.
Rory rolled onto her back. Trees swayed overhead. The moon hung above Richmond Park, lower than before.
Her phone lay beside her.
The screen read 3:17 p.m.
She stared at it. Sunlight should have filled the sky, but night pressed close on every side.
The clock flickered .
11:44 p.m.
One minute had passed.
Rory touched her throat. The chain was gone . A thin welt crossed her skin.
Something warm rested in her clenched left hand.
She opened her fingers.
The Heartstone glowed against her palm.
Relief struck so sharply she almost laughed.
Then she saw the hand holding it.
The nails were packed with black earth. The fingers were too long. The wrist bore a small crescent-shaped scar.
Rory’s own left hand remained braced on the ground beside her.
The other hand tightened around the pendant.
From somewhere beneath her, in her own voice, something whispered:
“Let me in.”