AI The autumn chill of Richmond Park died the instant Rory stepped between the ancient oak standing stones.
She stopped, one boot still resting on the frost-bitten bracken of London, the other sunk ankle-deep into lush, unseasonable clover. Behind her, the October wind rattled the bare branches of the park’s oaks, carrying the distant, comforting hum of traffic from the A3. Ahead of her, the air sat heavy and entirely motionless.
Rory pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders and took another step forward, crossing the threshold completely . The sound of the city severed like a cut wire.
She had come here because the note slipped under the door of her flat above Silas’s bar had been specific: *Midnight. Isolde’s grove. Come alone if you want the answers you’re looking for.* After a grueling evening shift delivering takeaway for the Golden Empress, cycling into the dark expanse of Richmond Park was the last thing she wanted to do. Her thighs ached, and the cuffs of her jeans were still damp with London drizzle. Yet here she was, standing in a pocket of impossible summer while the rest of England shivered.
The clearing stretched out before her, bathed in a sourceless, bruised-purple twilight. Wildflowers bloomed in thick, riotous patches across the grass—foxgloves, bluebells, and pale anemones that had no business existing in late autumn. Normally, the Fae-touched flora carried a heady, honeyed scent, a dizzying perfume that made the back of her teeth ache. Tonight, the air smelled of nothing at all. Not earth, not pollen, not even the ozone tang of magic. It was the sterile, recycled air of an empty waiting room.
Rory reached up, her fingers brushing the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist before finding the silver chain around her neck. She tugged the Heartstone Pendant free from beneath her collar. The thumbnail-sized crimson gem rested in her palm, holding its usual faint inner glow, cool and dormant against her skin. Whatever was wrong with the Grove tonight, it didn't involve a Hel portal. She wasn't sure if that was a relief or a complication.
She tucked the pendant back under her shirt and clicked on her heavy-duty flashlight. The beam cut a stark white cone through the violet gloom , illuminating the waist-high wildflowers.
Not a single petal trembled .
Rory swept the light across the perimeter of the clearing, where the ancient oak standing stones jutted up like crooked teeth. "Hello?" she called out .
Her voice didn't echo . It didn't even seem to travel. The sound simply dropped dead a foot from her lips, swallowed by the thick, cottony silence .
A prickle of unease crawled up the back of her neck, stirring the straight black hair that brushed her shoulders. Rory prided herself on keeping a cool head—years of dealing with her father’s cross-examinations at the dinner table and surviving Evan’s volatile temper had taught her to suppress panic and look for the exits. She checked her watch . The luminous green hands read 12:04 AM. When she looked closer, she realized the thin second hand wasn't ticking . It was frozen mid-sweep.
Time always moved strangely in the Grove—an hour here could mean minutes or days back in London—but her watch had never outright died before.
She took a slow step toward the center of the clearing. Beneath the sole of her boot, the lush grass didn't rustle. It crunched, dry and brittle as spun glass, despite looking vibrant and green in the beam of her flashlight.
*Snap.*
The sound came from her left, near the boundary stones. It was the sharp crack of a dry twig breaking under weight .
Rory spun, bringing the flashlight up like a weapon. The white beam licked across the dark, furrowed bark of the standing oaks and the thickets of foxgloves between them. Nothing was there. Just the motionless flowers and the deep shadows pooled behind the markers.
"I'm here," Rory said, forcing her voice to remain steady and flat. "I got the note. If you have something to tell me, step into the light."
Silence answered her. Then, from the exact opposite side of the clearing, directly behind her back, came a low, rhythmic rasping.
*Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.*
It sounded like heavy canvas being dragged through wet leaves, though there were no wet leaves here. Rory pivoted sharply , her heart giving a hard, unpleasant thud against her ribs. Her light swept the far edge of the Grove. In the periphery of the beam, just at the edge where the light frayed into the purple dark, a patch of tall bluebells was swaying . Everything else in the clearing remained locked in that unnatural, painting-like stillness, save for that single cluster of stems rocking gently back and forth, as if something low and heavy had just pushed through them.
Rory didn't step forward. Instead, she took two measured paces backward, trying to keep the whole clearing in her field of vision. That was the problem with a circle; no matter which way you faced, half of it was behind you.
She flicked the flashlight off.
It was a gamble, a piece of counter-intuitive logic that had saved her once or twice in the dark alleys of Soho. The light gave away her position and ruined her night vision, tunneling her focus into one narrow strip while leaving the rest of the world pitch black. If something was circling her in the dark, the beam was helping it more than it was helping her.
For a few seconds, the darkness was absolute. Rory stood perfectly still, breathing through her nose, forcing the air in and out of her lungs without a sound. Slowly, her bright blue eyes adjusted to the weird, ambient twilight of the pocket realm. The wildflowers emerged as pale smudges against the dark earth. The standing stones rose up like hulking silhouettes against the starless canopy of the trees beyond.
And then she noticed that there were too many silhouettes.
Rory knew the Richmond grove. She had counted the boundary markers the first time she’d ever stumbled into this place: seven ancient oak standing stones arranged in an irregular ring.
She counted them now, her gaze flicking from left to right. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
The eighth shape stood between the third and fourth markers. It was the same height and roughly the same width as the ancient oaks, blending seamlessly into the ring. If she hadn't memorized the layout, her eyes would have slid right past it. She stared hard through the gloom , her fingers tightening around the cold metal cylinder of her unlit flashlight.
As she watched, the eighth stone tilted its head.
It was a subtle movement, a slow, unnatural canting of the top few inches of the silhouette, like an owl trying to get a better look at a mouse in the grass.
Ice flooded Rory ’s veins. Every instinct screamed at her to bolt for the gap between the stones behind her, to throw herself back into the freezing autumn night of Richmond Park. She didn't. Running meant turning her back. Running meant triggering a chase. Instead, she began to walk backward, heel to toe, keeping her eyes locked on the eighth shape.
The brittle grass crunched beneath her boot.
Across the clearing, the silhouette didn't step forward. It simply seemed to blur at the edges, and then the space between the third and fourth stones was empty again.
Rory froze. Her eyes darted left, then right, scanning the waist-high sea of wildflowers. Nothing moved. The terrible, dead silence pressed in on her eardrums until they rang with a phantom high-pitched whine.
Then, beneath the ringing, she heard breathing.
It wasn't hers. She was holding her breath so tightly her chest burned. This sound was wet and ragged, a slow inhalation that seemed to come from only a few yards away, hidden somewhere in the thickets of foxglove to her right .
And then, closer still, a whisper brushed against the shell of her left ear, so close she felt the stir of dead, cold air against her cheek.
"...*Rory *..."
The voice was a horrific patchwork—the cadence of her mother, the low timber of Silas, and beneath it all, the sharp, sneering inflection of Evan. It sounded like a radio tuning frantically through stations to assemble a single word.
Rory didn't look left. She threw herself sideways and bolted for the boundary stones.
Behind her, the silence shattered . The clearing erupted with the sound of thrashing stems—hundreds of them snapping at once, as if a pack of invisible hounds were bounding through the flora on all fours.
Under her collarbone, the Heartstone Pendant suddenly flared. It didn't just grow warm; it burned like a live coal pressed directly against her sternum, searing through the fabric of her shirt. A deep crimson light bled through her collar, painting her chin and the frantic puff of her breath in the color of fresh blood.
She didn't have twenty feet to cover, only ten, maybe less, to reach the gap between the two nearest oak markers. Yet as her boots pounded the glass-brittle turf, the stones didn't seem to get any closer. The pocket realm was stretching , the distance warping like pulled taffy, keeping her suspended in the violet twilight while the heavy, thrashing footsteps closed in directly at her heels.
Something cold and dry, like winter branches wrapped in linen, brushed the back of her jacket.
Rory didn't try to outrun the warped space. Thinking fast, she veered hard to the left, abandoning the gap entirely and lunging directly at the nearest standing stone itself. If the space between the markers was a trap, the markers themselves were the anchor.
Her outstretched hand slammed against the rough, ancient oak of the boundary stone. Her left wrist scraped hard against the wood, tearing skin right over the pale crescent of her childhood scar.
The smell of wet dirt and rotting autumn leaves hit her face like a bucket of cold water.
Gravity lurched . Rory tumbled forward, her knees skidding Painfully across frosted mud and dead bracken. The sudden roar of the October wind filled her ears, howling through the bare branches overhead.
She scrambled around on the cold ground, kicking backward with her heels until her back hit the trunk of a normal, living tree, and thumbed the button on her flashlight.
The white beam cut through the damp London night. Twenty feet away stood the ring of ancient oak stones. Beyond them, there was no purple twilight, no summer wildflowers, no pocket realm. There was only an empty patch of muddy grass, littered with dead leaves and dark brambles.
Against her chest, the pendant had gone cold again.
Rory sat in the mud, her chest heaving as she dragged the freezing autumn air into her lungs. She kept the flashlight beam trained squarely on the empty center of the ring for a long time. Nothing moved inside the circle, except for a single, tall stem of summer foxglove that sat crushed into the frost right at the boundary line, its purple bells slowly blackening in the cold.
She glanced down at her watch . The second hand was ticking again, steady and mechanical .
It was 4:15 in the morning.