Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQFFVN5X17SGJ18NTZADPE

Rory pushed through the low-hanging branches at the edge of Richmond Park, her phone's torch beam cutting weak angles through the darkness. The Heartstone pendant lay against her collarbone, its warmth a constant presence beneath her jacket. It had been pulsing for the last twenty minutes—faint, insistent—leading her here like a compass needle drawn north. The standing stones appeared without warning. Ancient oaks twisted into something that wasn't quite natural, their bark scarred with symbols she couldn't read in the torchlight. She'd passed this way a dozen times in daylight and never seen them. The wrongness of that settled into her stomach like a stone. "Brilliant," she muttered, her breath fogging in air that had turned suddenly cold. October in London was chilly, but this was different. This was the kind of cold that lived in old cellars and forgotten places. The pendant pulsed harder. She thought about Eva's text from this morning: *Found something in my grandmother's journals. Meet me tonight?* But Eva had given her this location, not a street address. A clearing in Richmond Park. Rory had assumed she'd meant near the car park, somewhere sensible. Not here, wherever here was. Her phone buzzed. No signal. Of course. Rory stepped between the standing stones. The world didn't shift dramatically—there was no flash of light, no sensation of movement—but everything changed nonetheless. The ambient glow of London, that orange haze that never quite let the city sleep, vanished. Stars wheeled overhead, too many and too bright, arranged in patterns that made her eyes ache when she tried to focus on them. Wildflowers carpeted the ground beneath her feet, their petals luminous in the starlight, blooming in defiance of the season. The Fae Grove. It had to be. Eva had mentioned it once, months ago, after too much wine and not enough sleep. Rory had filed the information away with all the other impossible things she'd learned since moving to London. The difference between filing information away and standing in the middle of it made her hands shake. She forced herself to breathe slowly. Eva knew about this place. Eva had sent her here. That meant it was safe. Probably. The clearing stretched perhaps thirty meters across, ringed by trees that looked older than memory. Their branches wove together overhead, creating a canopy that should have blocked the starlight but somehow didn't. The flowers swayed though there was no wind. Rory checked her phone again. 11:47 PM. Eva had said midnight. She had thirteen minutes to wait. The silence pressed against her ears. Not the peaceful quiet of an empty park, but an active, listening silence. The kind that made you aware of your own breathing, your own heartbeat, the small sounds of your jacket rustling as you moved. Rory walked to the center of the clearing, where a flat stone lay half-buried in the flowers. It looked like it might have been an altar once, or a table. The surface was worn smooth. She sat down, pulling her jacket tighter, and tried not to think about how the temperature had dropped another few degrees. At the edge of her vision, something moved. Rory's head snapped up, but there was nothing there. Just trees and flowers and that too-bright starlight. She counted the standing stones—seven visible from where she sat. Her eyes tracked across them slowly, cataloguing, grounding herself in concrete details the way her mother had taught her during childhood thunderstorms. The movement came again, left side this time. Quicker. Closer to the ground. She stood, turning in a slow circle. The pendant had stopped pulsing. That should have been comforting. It wasn't. "Eva?" Her voice sounded too loud and too small at the same time. "If this is a joke, it's not funny." The flowers nearest her feet bent sideways, as if pressed by invisible hands. The pressure moved in a circle around her, methodical, deliberate. Rory stepped back toward the altar stone, her mouth dry. Something was walking around her. Something she couldn't see. The rational part of her mind, the part that had gotten her through law lectures and bitter breakup arguments and the surreal revelation that Fae and demons and things from other realms actually existed, supplied helpful observations: no footprints appeared in the flowers despite their movement. No smell accompanied the presence. No sound except the whisper of petals bending. The terrified animal part of her brain just screamed to run. She didn't run. Running in strange magical groves at midnight seemed like the kind of mistake people in horror films made right before things went very badly. Instead, she pressed her back against the altar stone and reached up to grip the pendant. The metal was cool now, inert. "I was invited here," she said, forcing her voice steady. "By Eva Chen. I'm not trespassing." The circling motion stopped. Rory's chest tightened. Had that made it better or worse? In the silence that followed, she became aware of other sounds. Not sounds from the grove itself, but sounds from elsewhere, muffled and distant. Voices, maybe. Or screaming. Or laughter. She couldn't tell which. They came from no direction and every direction, as if the air itself was remembering sounds from other times, other visitors to this place. Her phone screen flickered. 11:51 PM. Nine minutes. The trees had grown closer. Rory stared at the nearest oak, trying to convince herself she was wrong, that it was a trick of shadow and starlight. But no—she'd marked its position earlier, unconsciously, relative to one of the standing stones. It was definitely closer. Not by much. Just a meter or so. Just enough to notice if you were paying attention. All the trees were closer. The clearing was getting smaller. Rory's breath came faster now, her professional composure cracking at the edges. The pendant warmed suddenly against her skin, not with the steady pulse that indicated a portal, but with a different rhythm. Urgent. Warning. Behind her, something breathed. Not close—maybe three meters away—but definitely there. Definitely breathing. Long, slow inhalations that sounded too deep for human lungs. She didn't turn around. Every instinct she possessed told her that turning around would be a mistake, that seeing would be worse than not-seeing. The breathing moved. Circling again, but higher now. At shoulder height. "Eva," Rory said quietly, "I could really use you showing up right about now." Her phone screen showed 11:53 PM, then flickered and changed to 11:52 PM. Then 11:55 PM. Time moves differently here, Eva had said. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside. But what about inside the hour itself? What if time didn't just move differently but wrong? The breathing was in front of her now. Close enough that if there had been anything visible, she would have been able to touch it. Close enough that its breath should have fogged in the cold air. There was no fog. Rory stood perfectly still, her fingers white-knuckled around the pendant. The metal had grown hot enough to burn, but she didn't let go. Something touched her left wrist. Exactly where the crescent-shaped scar marked her skin.