Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQQHS2SRV0WD74APY6F793

The lock on the service gate had already been snapped when Aurora found it. Not freshly—rust furred the break, and the metal edges shone only faintly in the wash of her phone torch. Still, it was wrong. Everything about being here was wrong. The park was supposed to be closed. Richmond at night was meant to be that dark quilt she looked at from a bus window, not something she walked into. She pushed the gate with her shoulder. It creaked, too loud in the cold air, and then she was through, boots scuffing damp tarmac. Behind her, the traffic noise died as if someone turned down a volume dial. No progression. Just a clean, abrupt cut. Rory stopped. She held her breath, listening for the hiss of tyres on the A307, the distant thrum of the city. Nothing. Even the ever-present swell of planes on their way into Heathrow was gone. The only sound now was the small, human one of her own breathing, slightly too quick, misting faintly in the beam of her torch. “Brilliant idea, Carter,” she muttered. Her voice came out flat and thin, as though the air didn’t care to carry it. “Middle of the night in a haunted sodding deer park.” She put her hand, automatically, to the weight at her sternum. The Heartstone pendant lay warm against her skin, the thumbnail-sized gem a solid presence beneath the faded cotton of her T-shirt and the zipped-up hoodie. It had been warm when she left the bus stop, a muted kind of comfort, like a hot-water bottle left too long. As she’d walked, it had grown hotter still, enough that she’d shoved her hand under the hoodie to check. The stone hadn’t burned. It never burned. But when she curled her fingers around it now, through the thin barrier of fabric, it pulsed once: a slow, deliberate beat against her palm. Waiting, the anonymous note in her pocket had said. Midnight, the Grove. Come alone. It will make sense then. She’d crumpled it twice and smoothed it twice more. The handwriting was unfamiliar. The fact that it had named her Laila, a name she hadn’t used since she was sixteen, had stopped her throwing it away. Laila. Not Aurora, not Rory. Laila, the one secret between her and— She shut the door on that thought. That was why she was here, walking into a legally-off-limits park after eleven, with only a torch, a pendant that behaved like it had a heartbeat, and the memory of a thin strip of paper she’d burned over the hob. Ahead, the black shapes of trees rose, no longer the airy, open green she knew from daytime food runs through Richmond. Night squeezed the paths into narrow, uncertain cuts through shadow. Her cheap trainers sank slightly into the soft ground as she left the asphalt, onto dirt puddled with chill water that reflected her torch back at her in smeared flashes. Wildflowers, she remembered. All year. Even in December. She angled left, picking out landmarks: the crooked hawthorn, the broken fence, the hollow where the ground dipped and rain collected. She’d only been to the Grove once before, dragged by Eva on a sunny afternoon last June, when foxgloves had towered over them and a doe had watched, unbothered, from the treeline. Eva had laughed that day, said something about faeries and portals. Rory had rolled her eyes and pretended not to feel the subtle hum in her bones as they’d stepped between the ancient oaks that weren’t quite trees and weren’t quite stones. Between worlds, Eva had said. It sits between. Now, the path found her almost of its own accord. Branches rose to form a dark, knuckled arch overhead. On either side, trunks loomed pale in the torchlight, bark slick with a sheen of moisture that glowed in the beam like skin. Her feet knew the turn before her eyes did. A faint widening of the path, a sense of pressure ahead, as if the air grew thicker, denser. Her heart tripped in response, and the pendant against it answered, another heavy, measured thud. Then the trees opened. The Grove was quieter than the park. Not just quieter. Muffled. On the edges of hearing, London had been erased: no sirens, no shouts, no faint thread of music from a distant pub. Inside the ring of oaks that marked the boundary, there was only a folded, waiting stillness. The “stones” themselves stood taller than she remembered, or maybe that was distance. Ancient oaks, but wrong somehow—too smooth, too symmetrical. They had the bulk of trunks, yet the texture of carved rock, fissured and worn by time into shapes that hinted at faces when the light slid across them. Wildflowers rioted between them, unseasonal blues and yellows and whites crowding the winter grass. Their petals were slightly luminescent, catching the faint spill of moonlight and her phone’s beam and holding it, glowing softly. She clicked the torch off. The sudden removal of the cone of artificial light widened the world, made the moon seem brighter. Silver lay across the clearing, picking out the curve of her knuckles, the pale stripe of her scar, the cloud of her breath. The flowers glowed without her. She stepped over the invisible threshold with a small, involuntary hesitation, like a child testing bathwater with her toe. Nothing happened. No flash, no vertigo, no swelling music. Just one more footfall in damp grass and then she was inside the ring, the Grove pressing in around her, the pendant a hot coin above her heart. She waited. Cold seeped through the soles of her shoes and crept up her ankles. She shoved her free hand into the pocket of her hoodie and touched the folded scrap of Eva’s last text instead, just to ground herself: a string of emojis, a promise of drinks she’d cancelled on, three weeks before she stopped replying at all. This isn’t about Eva, she told herself. That’s a different problem. Time. Midnight. She dug her phone out, thumb sliding over the cracked screen. 23:58, battery at twenty percent. No signal bars, of course. She hadn’t expected any. Two more minutes, then. The Grove did not shift or stir. The oaks stood in their slow, solid ring, their branches knitting overhead. Moonlight slanted through in neat strips. The wildflowers didn’t even lean in the faint breeze she thought she should be able to feel. Except… should she be able to feel one? The air on her skin felt thick, as if the atmosphere here had more substance than it did beyond the boundary. Moving through it took a fractional amount more effort. Breathing it felt like inhaling just-cooled steam. A twig snapped to her left. Her head jerked that way before she could stop it, pulse leaping in her throat. Nothing. Just the dark bulk of a tree, the pale shimmer of flowers at its base. Rory let the breath out through her nose. Squirrel. Fox. Deer. Richmond was full of things that snapped twigs. Even at night. “Hello?” she called, anyway. The Grove adapted her voice, absorbed it. The word went out a few feet then dropped, as though muffled by a hand. No answer. A fractional, irrational disappointment tugged at her—because if someone answered, even someone who’d lured her here with a creepy note, that would be something. This waiting, this not-knowing, was worse. Her phone vibrated in her hand. No sound, just the haptic buzz against her fingers. She looked down. 23:58 flipped to 23:59. No notifications. No messages. The second hand on the little digital clock icon ticked forward, ticked again, then stuttered. For half a breath, it juddered between 59 and 00, back and forth, as if caught. The Heartstone flared, hot enough that she hissed and jerked her hand away from her chest. That was new. She gripped the phone tighter. “Make sense,” she said, to the empty air. “Any time now.” Something moved at the very edge of her vision, on the far side of the circle—just a darkening, a shifting of shadow against shadow. Her head snapped up, but when she faced it full-on, there was only an unmoved tree, bark silvered by moonlight. She turned in a slow circle, stomach a tight knot. The grove looked as it had when she walked in. Almost. The oaks stood where they had, the flowers, the uneven ground. But some small, indefinable detail had slipped. A notch of bark in a trunk she was certain had faced inward now turned away. A rock by her foot had rotated a quarter turn. The moonlight cut across the clearing at a slightly altered angle. Her phone read 00:01. She hadn’t felt that minute pass. Not really. The air felt as still and held as it had when she’d checked. Her internal sense of time, that steady metronome born of childhood routines and university exams, stumbled. Wind whispered through the branches. Or it should have been wind. It didn’t sound quite right: a susurrus without direction, as if the leaves above stirred themselves without need of air. Another twig broke, this time on her right, a sharp, definite crack. “Okay,” she said, to whatever was out there. “That’s enough fucking about.” Her voice shook on the swear, which annoyed her more than the unwanted company. She prided herself on staying cool. Even with Evan, even when his temper had been a storm she’d learned to predict by the set of his jaw, she’d kept her voice level. Ice while he burned. There was no Evan here. That was the point. No one to hurt her except whatever—whoever—had left that note and knew a name she’d buried. Laila, the paper had said. Come alone. On the edge of hearing, a whisper rose. Leaves, she told herself again. Just leaves. Except the sound carried pattern. Shape. The cadence of words, almost, too soft to parse. Her grin came out thin. “If this is you trying to be dramatic,” she called, “it’s working, but you’re not getting points for originality.” For a second, the whisper sharpened, a rush sweeping around the circumference of the Grove, circling her. Her ponytail lifted, stirred by something that was not wind. Cold traced the nape of her neck, intimate as fingers. The pendant pulsed—a double beat, fast, a rabbit’s heart skittering. Rory’s hand flew to it, more reflex than choice. Heat met her fingers, deeper this time, as if the stone burned from within. Through the cloth of her shirt, she felt its irregular throbbing, not synced to her own pulse. It tugged, almost imperceptibly, toward the far side of the clearing. She turned with it. Between two of the oaks, the darkness was wrong. Not thicker exactly—thickness suggested substance, and this looked like the absence of it. Where branches and shadows should have layered, the space instead flattened into a single sheet of black, so pure it seemed to swallow the moonlight that touched its edges. Her mouth went dry. The words from Eva’s mouth, half a joke on that summer day, surfaced unbidden. Between worlds. It sits between. “Hel,” Rory said softly, without knowing why the word came. It tasted of iron and smoke. The pendant’s heat spiked, an answer or a confirmation. She realised, suddenly and with a cold clarity, that if she walked toward that hollow place, if she stepped through those twin oaks whose bark looked too smooth, too cleanly carved, she would go somewhere else. Somewhere that was not London, not Earth. Maybe not anywhere under any sky she knew. The hairs on her arms lifted. Every cell in her body lurched backward at once, a visceral, animal recoil that made her knees want to fold in the opposite direction. All the same, a tiny part of her—a curious, furious, exhausted part—considered it. Because someone had brought her this far, had given her a key in the shape of a crimson stone, had whispered her old name across distance and time. What did they want, if not for her to step through? The whisper returned, closer now, curling around her ankles, her waist, like smoke. It brushed her ears from both sides at once, a murmur just behind her skull. Laila. Her father’s voice. Not as he was now, older and worn, but the younger warmth of it from Saturdays in Cardiff, when he’d read case summaries at the kitchen table and called her over to explain a word. Except he never called her Laila. She clenched her jaw. “No. Try again.” The whisper twisted. Her mother, this time, the soft worn cadence of Welsh vowels. Lail, cariad, you’re late— “Stop.” The Grove obeyed. The whisper cut off mid-syllable. The quiet that followed had teeth. It pressed against her eardrums. Made her aware of the creak of her tendons, the tick of her watch, the faint roll of blood through the veins in her neck. On the far side of the ring, something stood between two oaks. Rory saw it only in fragments at first: the angle of a shoulder that didn’t quite line up with the idea of a human shoulder; the suggestion of height, taller than any person she knew, but with an odd narrowness, as though someone had drawn a figure upward without widening it. She didn’t look directly. Instinct told her not to. Instead, she let her gaze drift past, used the trick she’d learned on buses of watching without seeming to watch. In the blurred corner of her sight, the thing resolved more clearly. Limbs too long for its body, joints bending just a touch too far. A head slightly tilted, the faint impression of antlers or branches fanning from its skull, indistinguishable from the tree limbs behind until they moved a fraction out of sync. It did not breathe. Or if it did, it did so in a way her senses could not parse. The pendant thrummed. Warmth poured through her chest, a sick parody of comfort, as though a hand pressed there from the inside. “Rory.” This time, the voice was perfect. It had weight and direction and came from just behind her left shoulder, close enough that her hair stirred, close enough that she felt the shape of the syllable as breath on her ear. Evan. Her stomach dropped, solid as a stone in a pond. The years peeled back, muscle memory roaring in: don’t react, don’t flinch, don’t show him he’s got you. Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head. There was no one behind her. Only the curve of an oak, bark etched in shell-like spirals. The touch on her ear had left a chill print that wouldn’t fade. Her body had already answered, though. Her heart raced, sweat slicked her palms despite the cold. Her mind, traitorous, flung up an image of his face: the mole at the corner of his mouth, the faint whitened scar through his eyebrow. “Pathetic,” she said, pitching the word into the middle of the Grove. “You dig all the way through memory and that’s what you come up with? My ex?” Silence. Then, softly, from the far side of the ring, something laughed. It was a papery sound, as if leaves had learned mockery. Her skin crawled. Her analytical mind, the one that had carried her through case law and domestic violence statutes, stepped in. Catalogue: she was enclosed, but not trapped. The oaks weren’t a wall. There was no visible barrier. Her legs worked, her lungs worked. The pendant was doing… something, but it was also a sensor. Warmth meant proximity to a portal. Logic: move away from warmth if she didn’t want to drift any closer to Hel or wherever this picnic led. She took one step back. Then another. The heartbeat at her chest stuttered, once, then steadied at a lower, more manageable thrum. The dark hollow between the oaks, that impossibly flat patch of black, dimmed a fraction, as if she had increased the distance between herself and the edge of a deep well. The tall thing on the far side of the Grove remained where it was. It did not turn to track her. It didn’t need to. She felt its attention like a physical weight, pressing, inspecting, as she might weigh up a witness on the stand. She reached the line of flowers that marked the inner circle, just shy of the oaks. Up close, their luminescence had an unhealthy quality, a pallor like the inside of a seashell. Their petals were all turned inwards—not toward the scant moonlight, but toward the rough centre of the clearing where she had stood. Toward her. As she watched, one daisy’s head rotated, ever so slowly, following her as she shifted a foot. “Nope,” she said. “That’s enough of that.” She stepped over them, careful not to crush a stem, as if good manners might matter here. Crossing the line felt like walking from a hot room into open air. The pressure in her ears eased. Sound leaked back in: a high, distant siren, the roll of a passing lorry, the faint bark of a dog a world away. When she glanced back at the Grove, the oaks looked like trees again, their odd smoothness blurred by distance. The dark hollow between two trunks was gone. In its place, nothing more sinister than layered shadow. Her phone buzzed. She started, then laughed once, shaky, at herself, and looked down. 00:03. She’d have sworn she’d been in there longer than five minutes. Much longer. Her calves ached as if she’d been standing for an hour. Her teeth hurt. When she looked up again, the Grove was as she’d left it on that summer day with Eva: quiet, bright with impossible flowers, old. Almost. The arrangement of the oaks had shifted by a hair’s breadth. A gap that had been wide enough for two people to walk through side by side now narrowed to one; another had widened. It might have been a trick of angle. It might not. The pendant lay cool now against her skin, its warmth dialled down to a faint residual heat, like cooling embers. She took a step backwards. Then another. The world beyond the service gate stretched ahead in shadowed paths and empty benches, less frightening in its familiarity. Behind her, from the trees, something called her name. Not Aurora. Not Rory. “Laila.” The voice was small, piping, unmistakably her own as a child, the way she’d heard it once on a home video her father insisted on playing every Christmas. It carried farther than anything else had in the Grove, clear and bright and wrong as a star underwater. Her head twitched, half-turning, stopped by a will that had nothing to do with courage and everything to do with survival. Every story she’d ever half-listened to about faeries and spirits and things that lured you back sang in her blood. Don’t look. Don’t answer. She kept walking, eyes on the broken lock of the gate ahead, on the faint smear of sodium orange beyond where streetlights still existed. “Laila,” the little-girl voice pleaded once more. Closer now. Right behind her, at knee height. “Don’t leave me here.” Her fingers curled into fists, nails biting her palms. She didn’t speed up. She didn’t slow down. There was no rustle of footsteps behind her, no extra scuff in the dirt, but she could feel something pacing invisibly at her heels, just at the edge of the Grove’s reach. At the gate, she stepped through, not allowing herself to pause in the narrowing, not allowing herself to wonder if the boundary ran through that small metal frame or elsewhere, unseen. On the other side, the sound crashed back all at once. Traffic roar, a helicopter chop-chopping across the sky, laughter from somewhere down the hill. A fox barked, sharp and real. The suddenness of it made her stumble, hand braced on the cold metal of the gate. She looked down at the lock. The rust-sheared break had become a clean, recent cut, the edges bright, as if someone had snapped it an hour ago. Or five minutes. Rory—Laila to no one, not anymore—touched the pendant through her shirt. It lay quiet, an ordinary weight, the faintest ember of warmth left where it had pressed to her skin too long. The park behind her was just a park. The Grove was just a clearing she could no longer see from here. She walked away without looking back, the memory of her own small voice still curled like a hook between her ribs, and the certainty solidifying in her chest that the next time the Heartstone grew hot, she might not be alone when she answered its call.