Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQM3MSYVGG9ZTEK4RD8PPG

The last bus had dropped Rory at the Richmond Park gate just after eleven. She'd had to climb the fence, which was locked for the night, the iron cold enough to sting her palms even through her gloves. The park stretched before her in a vast dark emptiness, the kind of dark that London wasn't supposed to have — no streetlamps, no glow from shop fronts, nothing but the faint smear of clouds over a half-moon. She knew the way. That was the unsettling part. She'd only been to the grove once before, in daylight, with Isolde guiding her, and yet her feet found the path through the grass as if they'd walked it a thousand times. Left past the copse of hornbeams. Down the slope where the ground went soft. Through the gap between two fallen oaks that smelled of wet rot and something older, something like incense left burning in an empty room. The Heartstone pendant was warm against her sternum. Not the usual faint warmth it sometimes gave off, like a coin held too long in a closed fist. This was deliberate. A slow, rhythmic pulse, as steady as a second heartbeat pressed against her own. She touched it through her jacket. The crimson stone gave off no visible glow tonight — or if it did, the fabric hid it. She kept walking. The standing stones appeared the way they always did: suddenly, as though they'd stepped forward to meet her. Ancient oaks, dead for centuries but still upright, their bark turned to something closer toite than wood. They formed an imperfect ring in a clearing that shouldn't have existed in any park survey. Wildflowers grew between them, pale and luminous, blooming in January as easily as June. Snowdrops and foxglove side by side, which was botanically impossible, but the grove had never much cared about botany. Rory stopped at the boundary. The air was different here — thicker, sweeter, carrying a faint vibration she could feel in her back teeth. She'd been told once that the grove existed in a pocket between worlds, a fold in the fabric where Earth and the Fae realm pressed against each other like two pages of a closed book. Standing here, she could believe it. The moonlight fell differently inside the ring. It pooled rather than scattered, gathering in the spaces between the stones as if something were holding it there. She was alone. She was certain of that. She stepped inside. The sound changed immediately. The distant hum of the M3 motorway, which she hadn't consciously registered until it vanished, cut off as cleanly as a door slamming shut. In its place: silence. Not the comfortable silence of a quiet room, but the pressurized silence of deep water. Her ears adjusted slowly, and she began to pick up smaller sounds — the creak of the standing stones, the whisper of the wildflowers shifting in a wind she couldn't feel. And something else. Something underneath those sounds, barely there, like a radio tuned to a frequency just below the range of hearing. A low, continuous tone that seemed to come from the ground itself. Rory crouched and pressed her palm flat against the earth. It was warm. Warmer than it should have been. And the pendant pulsed harder, quick and urgent now, the way a heart rate climbs before something terrible. She pulled her hand back and wiped it on her jeans. A faint residue clung to her fingertips — dark, slightly viscous. She couldn't see the color in the moonlight, but she could smell it. Copper and something sweeter. Not blood. Not quite. "Right," she said aloud. Her voice sounded wrong. Flat. As if the grove had swallowed the echo before it could form. "Okay." She'd come here because of the message. Three words scratched into the counter of the Golden Empress that afternoon, carved into the lacquered wood with something sharp while Yu-Fei's back was turned and nobody in the restaurant saw a thing: THE GROVE. MIDNIGHT. The handwriting was no one's she recognized. She should have ignored it. She should have shown it to someone, anyone. Instead she'd photographed it on her phone, and when she checked the photo later, the words weren't there. Just the unmarked counter, as if the message had been meant for her eyes alone. Stupid. Reckless. She could hear Brendan Carter's barrister voice in her head, cross-examining her decisions. And what, precisely, compelled you to enter an isolated supernatural location alone at midnight based on an anonymous summons? She didn't have a good answer. Only the feeling that had been sitting in her chest all day, heavy and insistent, that this was something she could not afford to miss. The standing stones creaked again. Not all of them — just the one directly behind her. She turned slowly. It looked the same as it had a moment ago. Tall, dark, the petrified bark etched with grooves that might have been natural and might have been something else entirely. She stared at it for a long time. The moonlight pooled around its base. Something moved. Not the stone. Not anything she could point to. It was movement at the periphery, the kind that vanished the instant she tried to focus on it. A shift in the quality of shadow between two of the far stones, as if a piece of the darkness had rearranged itself. She turned toward it. Nothing. The wildflowers swayed gently, uniformly, in their unfelt wind. Rory exhaled through her nose. She made herself stand still and count to ten, the way she'd learned to do in the months after Evan — when panic was a beast that lived in her ribcage and came out at the sound of a raised voice or a closed door. One. Two. Three. The grove was quiet. Four. Five. The pendant pulsed. Six. Seven. On eight, something breathed. She heard it clearly. A single, slow exhalation, close enough that she should have felt it on the back of her neck. She spun, hands up, the crescent scar on her left wrist catching moonlight as her sleeve rode up. The clearing was empty. Every stone accounted for. Every shadow where it should be. But the flowers at her feet had changed. Where she'd been standing, in a rough circle the size of her own body, the wildflowers had turned to face her. Every bloom, every stem, oriented inward like the petals of a closing fist. She stepped back and watched them track her movement. They tilted as she moved, slow and deliberate, the way sunflowers follow the sun. Only there was no sun. And they were following her. The low tone beneath the ground shifted upward, climbing through frequencies she could now feel in her jawbone, in her teeth, in the fine bones of her inner ear. She reached for the pendant and closed her fingers around it. The silver chain bit cold into the back of her neck, but the stone itself was almost hot — a deep, insistent heat, the crimson gem pulsing so fast now that the individual beats blurred together into a continuous thrum. She should leave. She knew she should leave. The stones were right there, the boundary only ten paces in any direction, and the rational part of her mind — the part that had survived Evan, survived the flight to London, survived every terrible thing by knowing when to run — was screaming at her to move. She didn't move. Because the shadows between the two farthest stones had thickened into something that was no longer shadow. It had depth. It had texture. It hung in the air like smoke, but smoke didn't behave like this — it didn't hold its shape, didn't coalesce with such slow, purposeful intent into a form that was almost, almost recognizable. A silhouette. Tall. Motionless. Watching her from across the clearing with an attention she could feel like a hand pressed flat against her chest. The wildflowers around the silhouette had gone still. Not just still — rigid. Frozen in mid-sway as if time had stopped for them and nothing else. Rory's mouth had gone dry. She swallowed twice before she could speak. "I got your message," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I'm here. So say what you came to say." The silence stretched. The figure did not move. Did not breathe. Did not do anything at all except exist there, in the space between the stones, darker than the darkness around it. Then the ground beneath Rory's feet exhaled. It rose — a subtle swelling, as if the earth had taken a breath and held it, and now the topsoil shifted under her boots and the wildflowers shuddered and the standing stones gave a collective groan so deep she felt it in her spine. The pendant flared. Not just warmth now but genuine heat, burning through her shirt, and when she looked down she could see it — a faint crimson glow seeping through the fabric, painting her jacket in the color of old blood. Near a Hel portal. The pendant pulsed like this near a Hel portal. She'd been told that. She'd filed it away as information she wouldn't need, because Hel portals were rare, were guarded, were not supposed to open in hidden groves in the middle of Richmond bloody Park. She looked up. The silhouette had moved. Not closer — it was simply in a different place now, three stones to the left, without any indication that it had crossed the intervening space. It stood with the same dreadful stillness, a cutout in the world, a place where light refused to go. And now there were others. Not many. Two more, perhaps three — it was hard to tell where shadow ended and figure began. They occupied the spaces between the stones like sentries, evenly spaced around the ring, and Rory realized with a cold, plummeting certainty that they were not between her and the boundary. They were the boundary. They had positioned themselves at every gap, every exit, every place where she might have slipped through and run. The earth settled. The heat from the pendant dropped to a steady, warning pulse. The low tone faded to a hum. And in the silence that followed, Rory Carter stood very still in the center of a ring of ancient stones, surrounded by wildflowers that watched her with their blind pale faces, and she understood two things clearly. The first was that whatever had summoned her here had not done so to talk. The second was that time in the grove moved differently — an hour inside could be minutes or days outside — and no one knew she was here, and no one was coming, and midnight had passed into something older and darker, and the figures at the boundary had all the time in any world. She reached up and pulled the pendant free from her collar. The Heartstone sat in her palm, thumbnail-sized, crimson, pulsing with its own terrible light. She closed her fingers around it and felt the heat climb into her wrist, her forearm, her shoulder, settling behind her ribs like a coal. "Okay," she said quietly, to herself, to whatever was listening. "Okay." The figures did not move. The flowers watched. The grove held its breath and waited for what would come next.