Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P1WHRX32XF48FV00VT

The park gates had been locked hours ago. That should have stopped her. It would have stopped most people. Aurora Carter slid between iron bars where they widened at a loose bolt, jacket snagging for a heartbeat before she twisted free. Her breath came out pale in the cold, a quick ghost she didn’t have time to watch. Behind her, London kept its distance—traffic hush, far-off sirens, the muffled life of late-night flats stacked like boxes of light. In here, Richmond Park was all black sky and the heavier dark of trees. She checked her phone out of habit. No signal. Of course. The battery icon sulked at twenty percent, as if it, too, regretted being dragged out here. Rory tucked it away and drew her hand from her pocket around the small weight at her throat. The Heartstone pendant lay beneath her shirt, warmed as if it had been held over a candle. The silver chain made a thin, steady pressure around her neck. She could feel the gem’s faint pulse against her sternum—not quite a heartbeat, not quite a vibration. More like a suggestion. A quiet insistence. It had started doing this an hour ago, back above Silas’ bar, when she’d been washing dishes with the radio turned down to a murmur. A warm throb, then another, as if the pendant had remembered it had something to say. It hadn’t stopped. It had only grown warmer as she walked. Hel portal, the old phrase in Yu-Fei’s careful voice. Said like an ugly superstition he didn’t quite believe but wouldn’t risk dismissing. Don’t follow it alone, Rory. Tell someone. Bring salt. Bring iron. She’d nodded, noncommittal. Then she’d left anyway. She told herself she wasn’t being reckless. She was being methodical. The pendant was a compass, and a compass didn’t care about fear. It cared about direction. The path she chose wasn’t the main one. She moved across damp grass, cutting between oak trunks that looked thicker in the dark, their branches laced together overhead like knuckles. Her boots sank softly into earth that gave too easily, as if it had been freshly turned. The air smelled wrong—sweet in places, and underneath, a metallic tang like wet pennies. She paused and listened. Nothing, at first. A distant owl. The light scratch of wind through leaves. Her own breathing. Then, very faintly, a sound that didn’t belong in a park at night. Footsteps. Not on the path—off to her right, among the trees. Slow, deliberate steps that matched the rhythm of her pause, as if whoever made them had stopped when she did. Rory didn’t move. She didn’t turn her head. She kept her gaze forward and let her eyes widen slightly, bright blue trying to make sense of shadow. She’d spent enough time in a flat above a bar to recognize drunk wanderers, weirdos looking for trouble, men who thought a lone woman after dark was an invitation. The park after hours was a magnet for them. The footsteps shifted. A small crack of twig. Then quiet again. “Hello?” she called, voice steady and smaller than she intended. It carried a short distance and died in the trees. “Park’s closed.” No answer. Her hand crept under her jacket to the pendant, thumb brushing the gem. It glowed faintly, an inner crimson that didn’t cast light so much as stain the air close to it. The warmth pulsed once, then again, more insistently. She resumed walking, because stopping was how you made fear into something solid. Her boots made minimal noise, but she couldn’t help feeling the park had turned into a room with a carpet, swallowing sound. The ground rose gently. The oaks gave way to a thinner stand of trees. Ahead, the darkness opened. A clearing. Wildflowers bloomed in it as if it were June instead of February—white, yellow, bruised purple. They waved in a breeze she couldn’t feel on her skin. In the center stood the stones, exactly where Eva had once described them with a laugh she didn’t quite mean. Ancient oak standing stones, she’d said, like they’re pretending to be trees. Like someone wanted a doorway but didn’t want it noticed. Rory slowed at the edge of the clearing. The pendant pressed heat into her skin now, a steady burn that should have been painful but wasn’t. She tasted copper. The stones were taller than she expected. They weren’t smooth, like museum monoliths. They were knotted, ridged, bark-like, their surfaces patterned with grooves that caught moonlight and held it. Moss clung to them in strips. Between them lay darkness that looked deeper than the rest of the night, the kind of black that made her eyes water when she tried to focus on it. She stepped into the clearing. The air changed immediately. It grew thick, heavy with the scent of flowers that shouldn’t be alive. The cold eased, but not like warmth—like the absence of temperature, as if her skin had stopped receiving information. Behind her, the park fell silent. Even the owl cut off mid-thought. Rory swallowed. The click of her throat sounded too loud. She made herself take stock. She was alone. She was rational. She could leave at any time. She could tell Yu-Fei that the pendant led her to a weird patch of flowers and some stones, and that was that. But the pendant throbbed as if amused by her attempt at simplicity. She walked closer to the stones. Each step felt slightly delayed, as if her body was taking an extra moment to decide whether to obey her. Her straight black hair brushed her jaw in the faint wind; she tucked it behind her ear and wished, suddenly, for a hood. For something to make her smaller. At the first stone, she stopped. Up close, the grooves in its surface were not natural. They weren’t bark patterns. They were marks—lines that curved and intersected like a language she almost recognized. Her stomach tightened, and she couldn’t have said why. The symbols were simple, the way a child might draw a sun, but something about them prickled at her mind. Rory lifted her left wrist to steady herself against the stone and felt the crescent-shaped scar there pull tight, as if the skin remembered an old pain. She lowered her hand quickly, annoyed at her own reaction. “Alright,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “Show me what you want.” The pendant’s warmth flared in response, a sudden surge that stole her breath. She fumbled it out from under her shirt. The crimson gem looked darker here, as if it drank the moonlight rather than reflecting it. The faint inner glow pulsed, steady now, like a beckoning finger. The darkness between the stones shifted. Not like a shadow moved. Like a curtain had been touched from the other side. Rory’s heart kicked. She held the pendant out before her, arm extended, as if it could protect her. Her other hand curled into her jacket pocket around her keys, the metal teeth biting her palm. Not iron. Not salt. Just keys and the thin comfort of having something sharp. She listened again. At first, there was only the soft, constant hush of flowers rubbing against each other in a wind that didn’t reach her skin. Then—faintly, from somewhere behind the stones—she heard humming. It was tuneless, almost absent-minded, like someone tidying up and forgetting they were doing it. The sound rose and fell in small waves, and it was wrong in the way it was too close without being loud, intimate without being clear. Rory didn’t move. Her gaze locked on the gap between the stones. The darkness there no longer looked empty. It looked occupied. It had depth. It had the sense of an eye half-opened. “Who’s there?” she asked. The humming stopped. In the silence that followed, something else became audible: a faint, wet click, like a tongue against teeth. Rory’s skin tightened over her bones. “I’m not here to—” She cut herself off. Not here to what? Trespass? Challenge? Beg? The words were all wrong. Behind her, in the direction she’d come from, the grass rustled. Not wind. Not small animals. A single, careful disturbance, as if a foot had tested the ground. Rory didn’t turn. Every instinct screamed at her to look, and she forced herself not to. That was how fear led you. That was how it made you break your own rules. Her thumb rubbed the edge of the Heartstone. The gem was hot now, almost uncomfortably so, and with that heat came an odd sensation—like being near a radiator and realizing the air is moving even when you can’t feel a draft. Something was flowing around her. Something unseen. The grass rustled again, closer. Rory spoke without looking. “If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. You can stop now.” A breath answered her. Not her own. Not close enough to touch her neck, but close enough that the hairs along her arms lifted, every follicle turning toward it like plants seeking light. The breath carried a smell: damp earth, wildflowers, and something older, like the inside of a closed wardrobe that had never been opened. Her chest tightened. She forced her lungs to work. “Eva?” she called, before she could stop herself. The name fell out of her, unwanted. Eva had been the one who dragged her to London, the one who believed in odd little things. But Eva wasn’t here. No one answered. But the darkness between the stones brightened—not with light, but with contrast, like the edges of it sharpened. The symbols in the stone seemed to deepen. The pendant pulsed so hard it felt like it might crack. Rory’s mind, cool-headed by habit, tried to assemble a plan. Step back. Leave the clearing. Don’t run. Don’t trip. Get to the gate. Call Yu-Fei. Call Silas. Call anyone. Her feet didn’t move. Not because she couldn’t. Because the clearing had changed the rules. She became aware of time in a new way, as if it had thickened, the seconds stretching like taffy. Her heartbeat felt slow, then fast, then oddly out of sync with her breathing. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside. The codex of rumors, the warnings. She’d repeated them like trivia. Now they settled in her bones like lead. The rustle behind her stopped. A voice spoke. Not behind her. Not in front. It sounded as if it came from the stones themselves, vibrating through the grooves. “You carry it openly,” the voice said. It wasn’t male or female. It had texture, like someone speaking through water. The words were clear, but the cadence was wrong, the pauses in places that made her mouth want to mirror them and fail. Rory tightened her grip on the pendant until the chain bit into her fingers. “Who are you?” Silence. Then the voice again, closer in her head this time. “You are early.” “I didn’t—” Rory swallowed. Her throat felt dry despite the wet smell in the air. “I didn’t mean to be.” The voice gave a sound that might have been a laugh if laughter could be made without a human mouth. “Meaning is a human comfort.” She forced herself to turn her head, slowly, not whipping around, not giving the darkness behind her the satisfaction of her panic. The clearing looked the same. Flowers swaying. Stones looming. But at the edge of her vision, near the treeline where the park should have been, she saw something that made her stomach flip. The trees were too far away. The clearing had widened. The boundary had moved as if it were breathing. The path she’d come in on was gone, not hidden—gone, replaced by a deeper tangle of trunks. Her mouth went numb. “That’s not—” “Not correct,” the voice finished. “Not comforting.” Rory turned back to the stones. The gap between them was no longer just darkness. It had the faintest suggestion of shape within it, like a figure standing just out of sight, draped in night. She couldn’t make out edges. She couldn’t see eyes. But she knew, with the certainty of an animal cornered, that something looked back. The pendant flared with heat. A sharp, clean warmth, like a brand pressed just close enough to be felt without touching. The crimson glow intensified, and with it came a thin, ringing tone that set her teeth on edge. The figure in the dark shifted. Rory took one step back. The flowers bent toward her as she moved, heads turning in unison, petals angling as if to watch. She froze, and they froze too, caught in an almost-human imitation of curiosity. Her skin crawled. She forced her gaze away from them. “What do you want from me?” The voice answered softly, too softly. “Not from you.” The darkness between the stones thinned for a moment, like fog pulled aside. Rory saw a glimpse of something beyond—an impression rather than a view. A landscape washed in dim silver. A sky with no stars. Shapes moving at a distance, slow and deliberate, as if they had all the time in the world and time was theirs. And then, closer, a suggestion of a hand. Not human. Long-fingered, jointed wrong, reaching with patient confidence. Rory’s breath hitched. Her grip on the pendant went slick with sweat. Her mind screamed to throw it, to run, to do something, and the cool part of her—the part that had walked away from an abusive ex and never looked back—shoved panic aside long enough to think one clear thought: The pendant is what it wants. She snapped the chain upward, yanking it hard enough that it stung her neck, and for a second the pendant lifted free in her fist, no longer resting against her skin. The heat lessened immediately, like a mouth closing. The reaching shape paused. Rory stepped back again. “No,” she said, voice shaking now despite her efforts. “You don’t get it.” The flowers quivered. The voice sighed, and the sound filled the clearing, pressing against her eardrums. “You are not the giver.” “I don’t care.” Rory’s fingers found the clasp at the back of her neck, fumbling. Her hair snagged under the chain. She tore it free, pain sparking as the clasp dug into her skin. The pendant came loose. For one wild second she considered stuffing it into her pocket, hiding it, keeping it close. But the presence behind the stones felt like gravity. Anything close would be pulled. So she did the only thing she could think of: she held the pendant out at arm’s length and stepped sideways, away from the gap, as if moving it like bait. The darkness swelled, following the gem’s crimson throb. The flowers leaned with it. The treeline crept farther away. Rory’s pulse roared in her ears. She could hear her own blood louder than the world. She kept her eyes on the stones, on the thick black between them, refusing to look at the shifting perimeter of the clearing again. If she looked, she might see it closing, might see there was no outside anymore. The voice spoke with a new edge. “Do not waste time you do not own.” Rory’s mouth tasted of fear, but her mind latched onto the words. Time. The Grove. Minutes or days. A pocket between worlds. She thought of Silas wiping down glasses, the bar quiet. Of Yu-Fei counting receipts. Of Eva—wherever she was—laughing too loudly at something to cover what she really felt. If Rory disappeared into this place, it might be years before anyone noticed. Or seconds. There was no fairness in it. She tightened her grip on the pendant until the gem’s facets bit her skin. “Then I’ll be quick.” With a sharp motion, she swung the pendant and hurled it—not into the darkness, but over her shoulder, toward the far edge of the clearing, toward the trees that looked too distant. The silver chain flashed briefly in moonlight like a fishhook. The pendant landed somewhere in the wildflowers with a soft thud. The crimson glow winked between petals. The darkness between the stones surged in the direction it had been thrown, hungry attention snapping to it. The air moved—finally, a wind Rory could feel, cold and wet, rushing past her toward the fallen gem. She didn’t wait to see what followed. She ran. Her boots tore through flowers that tried to cling, stems catching at her laces like fingers. The clearing seemed to stretch as she sprinted, the distance to the trees refusing to close, like a bad dream where your legs move but the world doesn’t. Behind her, the voice rose—not loud, but layered, multiplied, as if the stones themselves spoke in chorus. “You cannot—” Rory shoved her terror into a single action: she picked a direction and committed to it. She ran not toward where she thought she’d entered, because that path was gone, but toward the thickest cluster of oaks, the darkest seam in the air that might have been the boundary. The ground changed under her feet. Grass gave way to something harder, packed earth, then to scattered leaves that crunched too loudly, blessedly real. She burst into the trees. Branches whipped her face. Her black hair flew loose again, stinging her cheeks. She threw an arm up to protect her eyes, and in the brief moment her wrist passed in front of her face, she saw her scar—pale crescent in the moonlight—standing out like a mark. A mark, the irrational part of her whispered. Like the pendant. She kept running. The sounds behind her shifted. The wind died. The chorus voice cut off as if someone had shut a door. Silence rushed in, heavy and immediate. Rory stumbled to a stop, chest heaving, and turned in place, trying to find the clearing. There was no clearing. Only trees. Ordinary oaks. Dark trunks, bare branches. Damp leaves. The smell of mud and winter. The distant, reassuring hiss of traffic returned faintly, like a memory she could touch. Her hands shook. Her throat burned. She patted her jacket pockets reflexively, then froze. The pendant. She’d thrown it. It was gone. For a moment she felt relief so sharp it bordered on laughter. Then the relief drained away and left a hollow cold. She was alive. She was out. But the absence at her throat felt like a missing tooth. The chain’s pressure was gone, and her skin remembered it with phantom warmth. Rory stood very still and listened. At first, there was only the park. The night. The ordinary. Then, faintly—so faintly she almost convinced herself it was her pulse—she heard humming. Not behind her. Not ahead. Inside the trees, all around, as if the park itself had picked up a tune it didn’t know the words to. Rory swallowed and forced her feet to move, one careful step at a time toward where she thought the gates would be, toward the sound of cars. She didn’t run now. Running made noise. Running drew attention. The humming followed at the same distance, neither closer nor farther. And beneath it, barely audible, like a smile in the dark, a voice murmured with patient certainty, “Early or late is only a way to measure waiting.” Rory kept walking. She didn’t look back. She didn’t stop. But the skin at her throat, where the pendant used to rest, pulsed with a warmth that wasn’t her own.