AI Rory Carter had never believed in fairy stories, but at ten past midnight in Richmond Park, with frost silvering the grass and the Heartstone pulsing a steady warmth against her sternum, belief felt like a luxury she could no longer afford. She had come because the pendant had been warm for three days. At first she’d blamed the radiators in her flat above Silas’ bar, or the leftover heat of the Golden Empress kitchen where she worked part-time delivering noodles for Yu-Fei Cheung. Then she noticed the pattern: the crimson stone only woke when she was still, a slow heartbeat of heat under her palm, as if it were listening for something. The unknown benefactor who had left it on her kitchen table with a note reading only It will guide you home had not mentioned that home might be a hidden clearing in a public park at midnight, and had certainly not mentioned Hel. Whatever Dymas was, the old texts agreed on one thing: the Heartstone pulsed faintly with warmth when near a Hel portal. It was not supposed to react to a Fae grove.
She was twenty-five, five-foot-six, and built for hauling thermal bags up narrow stairwells, but her legs felt unsteady now. She had left her e-bike padlocked near the gate, the Golden Empress bag zipped shut on the back, the delivery tablet inside it. Officially she was off shift, but the jacket was still hers, the golden crown stitched over her left breast. She touched the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a habit left over from the childhood accident that had put it there, and told herself she was calm. Her father, the barrister, would have called this trespass; her mother, the teacher, would have called it foolish. Her childhood friend Eva would have called her an idiot for coming alone. Rory had come anyway.
The footpath ended at a ring of ancient oak standing stones. Not stone at all, though they held the stillness of it: towering slabs of iron-hard oak, bark blackened by centuries, ringed in a perfect circle. They marked the boundary of the Fae Grove. Rory knew the stories. The clearing existed in a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm. Wildflowers bloomed year-round there. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She had never seen the entrance on any map, but the pendant’s warmth had pulled her straight to it, and now the crimson glow beneath her jacket pulsed faster. She laid her palm on the nearest oak. The wood was cold. The air beyond was warmer, green and sweet, and utterly wrong.
She stepped through.
The grove opened before her, a hidden clearing rimmed by the oak sentinels . Frost rimed the world she had left, but here wildflowers bloomed in a thick silver carpet, untouched by season, their petals painted by a moon that seemed too large, too close. The silence hit her first. Richmond Park at night was never silent: distant traffic, foxes barking, the low hum of London. Here there was nothing. Her boots made no sound on the flowers. She drew the pendant out from under her jacket. The silver chain slid through her fingers; the deep crimson gemstone, no bigger than her thumbnail, held a faint inner glow like a coal that would never go out. It pulsed warm against her skin. She frowned. There were no Hel portals in a Fae grove. There shouldn’t be. And yet the metallic tang beneath the green sweetness smelled like old blood and cold iron .
Unease prickled the back of her neck. She tapped her phone. The torch app flared, catching her reflection in the black glass: straight shoulder-length black hair, bright blue eyes wide and animal with fright, the crescent scar on her left wrist pale against her skin. No signal. The time read 00:12. She had checked the clock outside the stones at 00:09. Only three minutes had passed. It felt much longer.
She moved deeper into the grove, pushing the phone back into her pocket. The wildflowers ahead were crushed in a line, stems bent but not broken, as if something heavy had passed. Deer, she thought. Richmond had deer. But deer left cloven prints, and these were bare, narrow, almost human, leading toward the center. The line ended at a ring of flattened blooms, the moss still warm beneath her fingertips. Something had been sitting there. Or standing. Seconds before she arrived, maybe. Watching her from a place that had no cover at all.
Then the sound came: a bright, cheerful gong, the order alert from the Golden Empress tablet. It rang twice from the far side of the clearing, absurd and ordinary and completely impossible. The tablet was zipped inside the thermal bag on her bike, half a mile away. Unless she had imagined it. She hadn’t. Yu-Fei had programmed that chime himself, a silly little sound that always made her jump. “Okay,” Rory said aloud, her voice too loud and then instantly smothered, as if the grove had swallowed it. “Very funny. Who’s there?”
No answer. Only the flowers trembling, though there was no wind.
She checked her phone again. 00:47. She had been standing still for perhaps a minute. The numbers ticked to 00:48, flipped back to 00:12, then jumped to 02:15. She shook the phone, but the screen settled on 00:12 and stayed there. Her mouth went dry. The stories were true: time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She was thirsty. How long had she walked? Eva thought she was working a late shift. Silas thought she was asleep upstairs. Yu-Fei would assume she’d quit if she didn’t show up tomorrow. No one would come to Richmond Park at night to look for her.
A movement flickered at the edge of her vision. She turned her head, and there was nothing among the oak stones but black grain and moonlight. She looked back. From the corner of her eye, a figure stood ten paces away, tall and too thin, draped in something that might have been a coat or might have been shadow. It had no feet; the wildflowers bent around nothing. She did not look directly at it. She had read enough to know that was a mistake. The figure did not move. Then it was gone, and the pressure of being watched settled on the back of her neck like a hand.
The pendant’s pulse slowed, then raced to match her heart, then outran it. Warmth spread up her sternum. Footsteps sounded behind her, soft, deliberate, matching her own gait. She stopped. The footsteps stopped a half-second later. Her skin crawled. “I know you’re there,” she said.
The voice that answered was her mother’s. “Rory, cariad.” A Welsh lullaby, the one Jennifer Carter used to sing when thunder scared her, back in the house in Cardiff. The melody was wrong, dipping where it should have risen, and the end of the line was a wet clicking sound, like a tongue against a broken tooth. “Come home, Rory. Come home.” Her mother was three hundred miles away, asleep in the house Rory had fled. The scar on her wrist itched fiercely. She backed away, and the singing followed, keeping pace.
Then another voice, low and slurred with drink, the particular cadence she had trained herself to hear even in sleep. “Aurora.” Not Rory. Never Rory. Evan always used the full name, the one she had grown to hate. “You always did run, didn’t you, Aurora?” The sound shouldn’t be there. Evan was gone . She had left him, fled to London at Eva’s urging, changed her number, bolted the flat above Silas’ bar with three locks. He had no idea where Richmond Park was. Something in the grove had plucked the voice from her memory and put a mouth around it. She pressed her thumb to the crescent scar, grounding herself. “You’re not real,” she whispered.
The grove whispered back, in her own voice: “You came here for a reason.”
She had. She had come because the pendant had led her, because the note said it would guide her home, because Cardiff held Evan and her parents’ disappointment and London held nothing but a room above a bar and a job delivering noodles. She had wanted answers. Now the green air curdled into the metallic reek of a Hel portal, and she understood with a cold drop in her stomach that the Heartstone had not been guiding her to safety. It had been reacting to a wound in the world that had been waiting here all along, in a place that should only ever have been Fae. Something from Hel had leaked into the grove, and it had been alone for a very long time.
She turned in a slow circle. The standing stones had multiplied. Every direction showed the same black oak slabs, the same silver wildflowers, the same dark hollow where the order chime had rung. The entrance was gone . The grove had folded around her. The footsteps circled, closer, and the bare footprints she had seen earlier now overlapped her boot prints, walking backward in front of her, step for step, as if something invisible paced just ahead, wearing her path. She stopped. The prints stopped. A cold breath stirred the hair at her nape. She did not scream. She did not run. She stood very still, the way she had learned to stand when Evan was in one of his moods, and waited for the thing to decide.
Then the pressure lifted.
The singing cut off mid-word. The footsteps retreated, crunching over frost that wasn’t there. A gap opened between two oak stones, and beyond them she saw the frost-lit grass of the ordinary park, the gate, the path, her e-bike with the Golden Empress bag still zipped shut. She ran.
She stumbled through the boundary. The night air hit her like a slap. She gagged on diesel and cold earth. Behind her, the grove was only a stand of oaks, no wildflowers, no standing stones, just the ordinary dark of Richmond Park. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Signal returned. The screen read 04:03. Three hours and fifty-one minutes had passed outside, though she could have sworn she had been inside for less than one. Her thumbs were numb. She touched the pendant; the stone was dark, the silver chain ice-cold. No glow, no pulse .
She unlocked the bike, fumbling with the frozen lock, and that was when she heard it: the cheerful gong of the Golden Empress order chime, sounding from inside the zipped thermal bag on the back of the bike. She had never taken the tablet out. She had never unzipped the bag. The bag moved, just slightly , as if something inside had shifted its weight . From the darkness of the park behind her, in her own voice, the grove whispered, “Welcome home, Rory.”
She didn’t look back. She rode for the gate, the empty lanes, the distant orange glow of London, and tried not to think about the fact that the thing in the bag had learned her name.