Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQPZ55NVFYGQDSBKX377QH

Aurora Carter parked her bike against a railing that wasn’t there yesterday. She paused with one hand on the handlebar, the other around the strap of her delivery bag out of habit, even though it was empty. Richmond Park slept around her in a sheet of cold dark—tree silhouettes, low hills, a thin smear of cloud over the moon. The air smelled like wet soil and fox and something sweeter that didn’t belong in February. The railing ran along the path as if it had always been there: iron, black, topped with blunt points. It looked too new for a park fence and too old for London—pitted and scabbed with rust that formed deliberate little patterns, like handwriting she couldn’t read. Her light caught it and died in it. The beam didn’t bounce back the way it should. Rory forced her grip to loosen. Cool-headed, that was the label friends gave her, like she never startled. She startled now, but she didn’t let it show in her body. She looked down at her left wrist—at the small crescent scar that her childhood self had earned reaching for a broken glass—and pressed her thumb into it, a private check that she was in her own skin. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. Not Eva. Not Yu-Fei. Not even Silas downstairs, who knew every set of footsteps on the stairs to her flat and would’ve raised an eyebrow at a late-night exit. She’d left without turning on the main light, jacket zipped, hair shoved behind her ears, the pendant hidden under her jumper. The Heartstone lay against her sternum, warm as a held penny. When she’d first found it—no, been given it, left in her room like a dare—it had been nothing but an odd, deep crimson gem the size of her thumbnail on a silver chain, faintly glowing if she stared long enough. Pretty, in a cheap-fairy-tale sort of way. Tonight it pulsed with heat in measured beats, as if it had its own quiet heart. Near a Hel portal, she’d been told. Not told by anyone she trusted. A note, ink that smelled like smoke. A single line: When it warms, you’re close. Rory had tried to be sensible. She’d argued with herself in the mirror, listing reasons like she was still in Cardiff preparing an essay: London had enough real dangers. She didn’t need invented ones. She’d stood on her kitchen lino above Silas’ bar and reminded herself of Evan’s hands, the way he’d made the world small around her, the way fear could become a habit you mistook for fate. But the pendant had warmed on the Tube. It had warmed on the bus. It had throbbed in her chest when she stepped off at Richmond and walked into the park, alone, with the city noise thinning behind her. The path ahead narrowed between trees and bracken. Somewhere deep in the dark, a stag barked—a sharp, ugly sound that didn’t fit the animal’s noble postcards. It set her teeth on edge. She unhooked her bike lock and wrapped it through the railing anyway. The metal was cold and left a fine grit on her gloves. When she turned back, the path looked slightly different. Not enough to swear on, but enough to make her eyes do a quick second pass. The curve was tighter. The trees stood closer. It’s a park, she told herself. Parks shift in the dark. Still, she didn’t like that the pendant’s warmth had spread into her ribs. She followed the path until the city became an idea rather than a sound. Her phone showed one bar of service, then none. The screen’s glow painted her knuckles blue. She held it up as if the sky might take pity and hand her a signal. Nothing. Behind her, the park’s open grassland was now a deeper black, as if the night had thickened. The railing was gone. There was only a tangle of branches where it should have been. Rory stopped so fast her bag strap slid on her shoulder. She pivoted and walked three steps back the way she thought she’d come. There was no iron fence. No place to clip a lock. The ground was uneven with roots and damp leaves. Her bike. Her stomach tightened. She pictured it lying on its side, unseen, like a dropped toy. She pictured herself turning around and finding it wasn’t there at all, and the thought brought a flash of annoyance—sharp enough to steady her. Panic was too easy. Anger took work. She clicked on her phone torch and swung the beam across the undergrowth. The light fell on wildflowers. Not a few brave weeds. A spill of blooms—white and pale blue, little starbursts and bell shapes, too lush for this season. Their petals caught the light and held it, as if they had their own thin sheen. The air around them smelled like honey and crushed green stems. She lowered the beam. The flowers were everywhere, creeping up to the path’s edge, pushing through dead leaves that should have smothered them. The ground under her boots felt springy, like turf laid too recently. The Grove, then. Richmond grove, Isolde’s grove—whatever name she’d heard in half-muttered conversations in Silas’ bar when the whisky made people careless. A hidden clearing that wasn’t exactly on Earth, that sat between places like a breath held too long. A pocket where time behaved like a liar. Rory’s mouth went dry. She slid her fingers under her jumper and caught the pendant through the fabric. The gemstone was warm enough now to be almost hot. The heat radiated out in a patient pulse. “If you’re trying to scare me off,” she said quietly, hearing her own voice and disliking how small it sounded, “you’re doing well.” Nothing answered. Only the hush of leaves, though there wasn’t much wind, and far away the same stag barked again—except it sounded farther inside the trees, closer to her, at the same time. She forced her legs to move. One step, then another. The path became less a path and more a suggestion. Pale stones, half-sunk, guided her as if someone had once bothered to make an entrance. Ahead, in the dark, something stood upright and pale. Standing stones. They rose in a loose circle among the trees—ancient oak-colored slabs marked with lichen and old cracks, but their edges looked too precise. Not carved, exactly. More like they had grown that way. Around them, the wildflowers thickened into a carpet, petals brushing her boots. Her torchlight stumbled; the beam didn’t reach the far side of the clearing in any honest way. The pendant’s heat surged. It wasn’t comfortable now. It was a warning pressed against her skin. Rory stopped at the edge of the stone boundary. The air changed at the threshold. Colder, yes, but also flatter. Sounds dampened as if someone had put a hand over her ears. She could still hear her breath, the soft scuff of her boots. Everything else felt held back. She lifted a hand. The torchlight trembled slightly—her first physical sign of nerves, a tremor she hated. She steadied it by pressing her elbow into her side and swept the beam along the nearest stone. At the base, the wildflowers grew in a tight ring. They leaned inward, toward the stone, like they were listening. Their stems didn’t move with any breeze; they moved as a group, a slow coordinated tilt. Rory blinked. When she opened her eyes, they were still. “I’m seeing things,” she muttered. “Fine. Great. Lovely.” She stepped forward. The moment she crossed between two stones, the pendant’s warmth became a pulse so strong it felt like someone tapping from inside her chest. The faint inner glow of the gem bled through her jumper. She looked down and saw a dull red stain of light on the fabric, as if she’d spilled wine there. Her phone torch flickered. She clicked it off and on. The light returned, weaker. The battery icon showed eighty percent. It should have been bright. No, she thought. No, no, no. Get in and get out. Find the portal, whatever that means, confirm it exists, then leave. Bring someone else next time. Someone with a plan. Someone who isn’t—she swallowed—alone. A faint sound brushed the edge of hearing. Not words. A soft rhythmic scrape, like a chair leg dragged across floorboards in the flat downstairs. Rory turned slowly, torch sweeping. Nothing. Stones. Flowers. Trees. Dark. The scrape came again, closer, and she realized it wasn’t on the ground. It was above her. She tilted the light upward. The trees around the clearing were oaks—old, heavy, their branches interlaced like knuckled fingers. In the torchbeam, something moved among the leaves. Not a bird. Too big. Not a fox. Too high. The movement wasn’t frantic. It was patient, almost careful, as if whatever it was didn’t want to shake the branches. Rory’s throat tightened. She kept her voice level by force. “Show yourself.” The leaves rustled. A shape shifted from branch to branch, keeping just outside the center of her light. She caught glimpses: pale curve, then gone; a line like a limb, but too thin; something that reflected light like wet stone. Her heart thudded. She felt the urge to back out through the stones, to run until she hit a lit road and people and the mundane misery of London. But she couldn’t find the gap she’d entered through. The stones stood in a circle that looked complete now, no obvious opening, each slab leaning slightly inward. That wasn’t possible. She’d walked in. Rory moved toward what she believed was the entrance. The flowers thickened and caught at her boots. The torch flickered harder. A low laugh whispered from somewhere near her ear. Not a human laugh. Too breathy, too close, like someone exhaling amusement directly onto her skin. She spun, light whipping across the clearing. Still nothing. Only the stones, and the trees, and the impossible blooms. The pendant burned. The heat wasn’t just warmth now; it had teeth. Her mind ran hard, as it always did when she refused to panic. Artifact warms near Hel portal. Hel. Underworld. Doorway. If the pendant was reacting, there was something here—some thin place. The Grove wasn’t just strange. It was a border. And borders attracted things that liked to watch from the other side. Rory tried to listen past her own pulse. The scrape above continued, methodical. A branch creaked, then another, but the sound didn’t follow any natural rhythm. It was like someone learning what trees sounded like and getting it slightly wrong. She edged toward the center of the clearing, away from the stones. Her boots pressed into damp earth that felt spongier with each step. The flowers here were taller, brushing her shins like hands. Their scent grew stronger—sweet enough to make her head light. She covered her mouth with her sleeve and breathed through the fabric. It helped, a little. The torchlight struck something on the ground. At first she thought it was a puddle. Then she saw it wasn’t reflecting the torch properly. It swallowed the beam, made the light look thin and tired. A circle of darkness sat in the grass, perfectly round, a patch where nothing grew. It was about the width of a manhole cover, but there was no metal rim, no sign of a lid. Just absence, as if someone had cut a hole in the world and forgotten to finish. The pendant pulsed like a frantic heartbeat. Rory crouched at the edge and aimed the torch into it. The beam didn’t reach bottom. It didn’t even seem to enter. The light bent slightly, as if the air over the circle had weight. Cold rolled out of it in slow waves. Not wind—cold, like a cellar door opened in summer, like a fridge left ajar. It carried a smell that didn’t belong in a park: old stone, iron, and something faintly charred. Her skin prickled. Every instinct in her screamed that the circle wasn’t a hole. It was a mouth. Something moved in the trees above her. The scrape stopped. Silence pressed down so hard her ears rang. Rory kept her eyes on the dark circle. She didn’t want to look up. She didn’t want to give whatever watched her the satisfaction of seeing fear plainly on her face. “You’re the portal,” she said softly, as if naming it could make it behave. “Right. Fine.” Her voice sounded wrong in the clearing—flattened, as if the air refused to carry it properly. She reached into her jumper and pulled the Heartstone pendant out. The crimson gem glowed faintly, its inner light deepening in the presence of the circle. It threw a dull red sheen across her fingertips. The silver chain was warm, almost hot. The moment the gem cleared the fabric, the dark circle reacted. Not by opening wider. By listening. The cold rose a fraction, as if the hole drew breath. Rory held the pendant steady at arm’s length over the circle. Her hand shook now, no matter how she tried to lock her wrist. She pictured herself in her flat above Silas’ bar, safe behind a door that never quite latched properly. She pictured Eva’s face when she’d demanded Rory come to London, the fierce insistence that there was life after fear. She pictured Yu-Fei’s kitchen at the Golden Empress, steam and noise and orders shouted in Cantonese, the solid comfort of mundane chaos. This—this was not that. In the circle’s darkness, something brightened. Not light, but a suggestion of depth resolving into form. The torch beam still wouldn’t catch it, but the pendant’s red glow seemed to outline a shape below, a vague movement like a hand turning palm-up. A whisper rose from the hole, thin as thread. It wasn’t words. It was the sound of someone trying to speak with a mouth full of earth. Rory’s stomach lurched. She leaned back instinctively, and the flowers around her ankles leaned too, as if they were tugged by the same invisible pull. Up in the branches, the patient movement began again—slow, deliberate shifting. A sense of attention tightened around her, not just from above but from all sides. As if the whole grove had turned its face toward her. The torch went out. Her phone screen stayed lit for half a second, then dimmed to black. She was left with only the pendant’s glow, a small red ember in the dark, and the cold breathing up from the circle. Rory swallowed hard, tasting the sweet flower-scent on her tongue. In the red light, the standing stones looked closer than before. Not moved, exactly. Just… nearer, their inward lean more pronounced. The wildflowers had tilted again, all at once, toward her. From the dark circle, the whisper sharpened into a sound that almost, almost formed her name. Not Rory. Aurora. She froze. No one here should know that. No one here should know anything about her except what she carried in on her skin. The pendant pulsed, hot enough to sting. Above her, something shifted into the edge of the gem’s red light. She caught the briefest glimpse: a pale limb, jointed wrong, hanging down between leaves like a question mark. It withdrew instantly, too quick for her to track. Rory forced herself to breathe. In. Out. Her mind reached for a plan and found only one thing to do—one sane action in an insane place. Leave. She stood, careful not to step into the dark circle, and turned toward where she believed the entrance was. The stones formed a continuous ring. No gap. No path. Only slabs of pale darkness, leaning in like listeners at a door. Rory’s pulse hammered in her throat. She moved to the nearest stone and pressed her palm against it. The surface felt warm, like skin that had sat near a fire. Under her hand, something throbbed in slow sympathy with the Heartstone. The whisper from the circle rose again, eager now, and the flowers brushed her calves as if urging her forward. Rory tightened her grip on the pendant until the chain bit into her fingers. “I’m not doing this,” she said, the words meant for herself as much as anything. “I’m not—” The stone under her palm shifted. Not a scrape, not a crumble. A smooth, subtle movement, like a door easing shut. Her hand slid off. She stared at the stone’s edge. It hadn’t moved far, but it had moved enough to confirm the impossible: the grove was rearranging itself around her. Quietly. Patiently. Like it had all the time in the world. And maybe it did. The cold from the circle touched her ankles, gentle as a cat rubbing against a leg, and Rory felt the first true certainty of the night settle into her bones. She hadn’t come here alone. Something had been waiting for her to arrive.