AI The silence was the first wrong thing.
Aurora stopped dead at the boundary stones, her boots sinking a fraction into the soft earth, and the sound of her footsteps died as if a heavy curtain had fallen. For a moment, she thought her hearing had gone. The rustle of the wind in the ancient oaks above, the distant hum of cars on the road behind her, the frantic, high-pitched chirping of a blackbird, all of it, simply gone. In its place was a deep, muffled nothing, like a thick blanket of snow had fallen over the entire world.
It had been no trouble at all to slip into Richmond Park after the gates closed. A gate left carelessly unlatched near the Roehampton entrance had made it almost laughably easy. Eva’s voice echoed in her head, a nagging, worried whisper she could almost hear: *Rory, you can’t be serious. A place out of a storybook? It’s a trap.* Eva would have called the police, or the nearest sanatorium. But Eva wasn’t holding the heartstone pendant.
The little crimson gem, resting just below Aurora’s collarbone on its thin silver chain, was pulsing . It was a not entirely unpleasant sensation, a warm, rhythmic thrumming against her skin, like a second, tiny heartbeat. It had been doing it ever since she got off the bus. Now, at the edge of this perfect , unnaturally silent clearing, the pulse felt urgent. Insistent.
Aurora took a breath. The air, which should have smelled of damp earth and decaying leaves, was instead thick with the cloying sweetness of honeysuckle and honeysuckle alone. Wildflowers bloomed with impossible abundance in the clearing before her, foxgloves and bluebells and strange, pale lilies she couldn’t name, all swaying in unison, though the air was still.
*Time moves differently here.* That’s what the stranger who gave her the pendant had told her, his voice a low murmur in the corner of a crowded café. The memory of him was a blur: a grey coat, eyes the colour of old stone, and the odd, insistent way he’d pressed the warm stone into her palm. He’d said it would guide her here, to this Grove, where he’d claimed the answers to her parents’ deaths could be found.
It was a lie, of course. It had to be. But it was a lie she’d risk a police caution for.
She stepped past the oak standing stones, and the world tilted. A wave of vertigo washed over her, a sensation not unlike the moment a lift starts its descent. The last chirp of the blackbird vanished completely . The atmosphere, which had been merely quiet, now felt vacuum-sealed. The light here was different, too. The moon's pale glow seemed to filter through a film of amber, lending the clearing a warm, autumnal cast that felt wholly alien in the heart of spring.
The pendant flared, a spike of heat that made her gasp. Its pulsing was frantic now, tapping against her breastbone like a trapped insect.
“Right then,” she said aloud, her voice sounding flat and absorbed by the thick air. “Answers. Here for answers.”
She began to walk, her feet making no sound on the grass. The clearing was larger than it had appeared from the boundary, stretching out into a perfect meadow of strange flowers. The ancient grove of trees she was aiming for, a cluster of massive oaks whose branches twisted together into a dark, natural cathedral, seemed no closer than it had before. A trick of the light, she reasoned. Or she was more tired from her shift than she’d thought.
A whisper of sound, right at the edge of her hearing, made her freeze. It was a soft, rustling noise, like a silk dress being dragged across a stone floor. She turned her head slowly , her heart hammering against her ribs.
There was nothing. Only the flowers, all of them, every single blossom, now nodding gently in her direction. As if she’d just missed them doing something else. She stared hard at them, but they were just flowers. Bloody flowers.
“Get a grip, Carter,” she muttered, a welcome burst of anger cutting through the rising fear. She pushed on.
Another sound. A tick-tock, tick-tock, a rhythmic clicking that started from the direction of the trees and seemed to echo from all around her at once. It didn't sound like a clock, but like a thick, irregular finger-tapping on a hollow piece of wood. She tried to pinpoint it, but the sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It would be to her left, then behind her, then from the trees ahead, all within the space of a breath.
The sensation of being watched was so strong it was a physical pressure on her back, a prickling heat that crept up her neck and into her scalp. She felt her shoulders bunch up and forced them down. *Out-of-the-box thinking *, she reminded herself. *What’s the logical explanation?*
An owl. A fox. Some other nocturnal animal she was disturbing. That was all.
A breeze, the first she’d felt since entering the place, ruffled a lock of black hair across her cheek. It carried that same sweet scent of honeysuckle, but now there was another note in it. A faint, underlying mustiness, like a tomb that had been sealed for a very long time and opened for just a second. The pendant, which had been a constant, steady drumbeat, went abruptly cold against her skin.
That was no animal.
Aurora’s eyes swept the clearing. She was halfway to the grove now, but the twisted oaks didn’t seem to have grown any larger. The light hadn’t changed either, frozen in that perpetual, amber dusk. The tick-tock sound had stopped as suddenly as it had started, leaving a silence that felt deeper, more expectant than before.
She saw it then. A shape, darker than the shadows between the ancient trunks, slipping from one gnarled oak to another. It was a fluid movement, too smooth to be human, too silent to be anything natural. The silhouette for a moment resembled a tall, thin woman with hair that floated around her head like smoke, but when Aurora blinked, it was gone .
“Hello?” she called out, immediately feeling foolish. “I’m here about the… the thing.”
The pendant flared hot again. Not a pulse this time, but a searing, bright heat that was almost painful. It wasn't pointing to the grove anymore.
Following its silent urging, Aurora turned in a slow circle. Her gaze landed on the clearing's other edge, the opposite side from where she'd entered. A trail of luminescent white mushrooms, like a path of tiny, pale skulls, led away through the gnarled roots and vanished into a dark thicket. Somewhere beyond it, a light flickered , a lone, beckoning star moving through the trees. It wasn't a natural, flickering fire, but a steady, sickly green orb that drifted with a purpose that was distinctly human.
The pendant didn't just pulse . It felt as though a tiny, frantic bird was trapped against her chest, beating its wings against her ribs. The sensation wasn't coming from the grove she’d been aiming for; it was pointing straight at that green light. Into the trail of white mushrooms, into the thicket, and into the forest beyond. The answers she came for weren't in the grove.
Before she could take a single step toward it, the green light winked out. The silence deepened, and the sound of the rustling silk returned, much closer this time. She saw a flash of movement from the corner of her eye, something tall and gaunt moving between the trees near the mushroom path, and this time, it was definitely not slipping away. It was turning towards her.
Aurora took a step back, her heel catching a root. The pendant burned hot, a frantic drum against her ribcage. The rustling was right behind her now, a dry, slithering sound on the grass, close enough to feel the displaced air on the back of her neck. She froze, her own heartbeat a frantic echo of the stone on her chest, every instinct screaming at her to run.