Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQSZ65VSE3PZXK9V8BG7CG

Rory checked her phone again. 11:47 PM. The screen's blue light carved harsh shadows across her face as she stood at the edge of Richmond Park, the Heartstone pendant pulsing against her sternum with a rhythm that felt almost cardiac. Three hours ago, it had been a dead weight. Now it thrummed, warm as a fever, pulling her north toward the standing stones she'd only read about in Eva's frantic texts. She shouldn't be here. The park closed at dusk, and the November air had teeth, biting through her thin delivery jacket—the golden embroidered dragon of Yu-Fei's restaurant catching stray moonlight. But the pendant had grown hot while she was folding takeaway boxes above Silas' bar, hot enough to burn the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, the one she'd earned falling through a conservatory window at age seven. That scar was aching now, a phantom pain that made her flex her fingers as she stepped over the low iron fence. The grass crunched wrong beneath her trainers. Too crisp, like stepping on glass despite the recent rains. Rory paused, five-foot-six frame rigid, listening. London's perpetual background hum—the distant M25, the arterial thrum of planes overhead—had vanished. In its place, a silence so complete it rang in her ears, tuning-fork sharp. She advanced. The ancient oak standing stones materialized from the dark not twenty yards ahead, their silhouettes wrong somehow, too angular for trees. Between them, the air shimmered like heat off tarmac, though frost gleamed on the surrounding bracken. Rory touched the pendant. Deep crimson, thumbnail-sized, silver chain tangled in her collar. It had arrived last Tuesday, no return address, just her name in calligraphy that seemed to shift when viewed askance. Now it beat against her pulse point, insistent. She passed between the stones. The temperature dropped ten degrees instantly, or perhaps it rose—her skin couldn't decide, flushing hot while her breath crystallized. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing. Bluebells, foxgloves, poppies. In November. Their colors were too vivid, oil-paint saturated under the moon, and they released a cloying scent that made her think of funeral wreaths. Her phone died. Not powered down—dead, the screen cracking silently down the middle as she watched, fissures spiderwebbing from the center like frozen lightning. She dropped it. It made no sound when it hit the earth. "Stop cataloging," she whispered, her Cardiff accent thickening with stress, the vowels flattening. Her father's voice in her head, the barrister's precision: Observe, don't absorb. But Evan had taught her similar things before the shouting started, before London became her escape route, and now the grove was pressing in with the same suffocating intimacy. Something moved. Rory turned, shoulder-length black hair whipping her cheek. The standing stones stood behind her, but the gap she'd entered through had narrowed. The trees beyond them—she could have sworn they'd been bare oaks—now swayed with leaves that rustled like wet silk. And there were more stones than before. Seven, not five. No, nine. She counted again. Eleven. The wildflowers were closer. They hadn't been there, right there, by her left boot. Yet now bluebells nodded against her ankle, their stems too thick, throbbing slightly as if liquid moved through translucent veins. The pendant scalded. Rory yanked it from her collar, the silver chain biting her neck. The crimson gem wasn't glowing—it was bleeding light, thick and viscous, dripping upward into the air where it evaporated into crimson steam. Near a Hel portal, the note had said. The benefactor's warning, scrawled on the back of a takeaway menu she'd found in her flat: When it burns, run. But she couldn't remember which way was out. Time hiccupped. She blinked, and her breath hung before her in a cloud that didn't dissipate, freezing into a sculptural shape—a hand, reaching. She stepped back, and the cloud-hand shattered, each fragment chiming like a bell as it struck the flowers. The flowers sang back. It wasn't music. It was the sound of her mother's voice reading bedtime stories in Welsh, looped and distorted, slowed to a whale-song cadence that emerged from the poppies' pollen-heavy centers. Jennifer Carter, three hundred miles away in Cardiff, suddenly intimate as a secret, whispering from the flora: "Cysga di, maban..." Rory pressed her palms to her ears. The scar on her wrist burned. Seven years old, glass breaking, the blood then—why was she remembering that now? Because the grove wanted it. The grove drank memories like rainwater. She ran. Or tried to. Her legs moved through syrup, each step requiring the effort of wading through setting concrete. The standing stones watched. She could feel their attention, ancient and patient, the weight of centuries pressing on her shoulder blades. Something walked parallel to her, just beyond the tree line, keeping pace without breaking branches. No footfalls, only the displacement of air, a vacuum sucking sound toward it. Don't look. Evan had taught her that, hadn't he? Don't look at what's watching you. It only encourages them. But Rory had always been the one to look. Pre-Law at Cardiff, the girl who asked questions in lectures that made professors stutter. The delivery driver who noticed when Yu-Fei's customers stopped ordering, when patterns broke. She looked now, bright blue eyes straining against the dark. There was nothing there. Only the flowers, swaying without wind. Only the stones, now thirteen in number, arranged in a spiral that wound inward toward a center that hadn't existed when she arrived. The spiral was a path. It wanted her to walk it. The pendant's warmth had turned to ice. Rory clutched it, her breath ragged. The Hel portal—if that's what this was—wasn't a door. It was a throat. She was standing in something's mouth, and the teeth were closing. A sound behind her. Wet. Organic. The distinct noise of a root system pulling free from soil, but magnified, meaty, like a femur being extracted from a socket. Rory spun. The standing stone directly behind her—wept. Sap ran down its oak bark, thick and amber, smelling of copper and myrrh. The sap formed runes that her eyes refused to focus on, slipping sideways in her vision like oil on water. But she understood the meaning nonetheless: Stay. "I can't," she said, and her voice was wrong. Too high, or perhaps too low, echoing back to her before she'd finished speaking, creating a harmony that made her teeth ache. The grove answered. The wildflowers erupted. Not bloomed—erupted, stems elongating with the sound of tearing silk, buds bursting into faces. Her face. Rory's own features, rendered in petal and pollen, stared back at her from a thousand stems, expressionless, eyes closed. The Rory-flowers opened their mouths and screamed with her mother's voice. She ran again, no longer caring about direction, about the physics of the place. The scar on her wrist split open, blood welling, not from the old wound but through it, as if the grove had found the channel of her childhood trauma and was pouring itself inside. The pain anchored her, sharp and specific, different from the creeping wrongness. Use it. Think. The pendant. It pulsed in her fist, ice-cold now, a beacon not of warmth but of warning. If it reacted to portals, then following its temperature gradient might lead her out—or deeper in. But the cold meant distance. The warmth meant proximity. She turned toward the cold. The grove shifted, offended. Trees that had been distant now blocked her path, their branches knitting together like fingers. The air grew heavy, pressing against her eardrums, and she tasted ozone. Time was accelerating, or she was slowing—her watch, analog, mechanical, a gift from Eva before the bad times, now spun backward, the hands whirling counterclockwise with a mosquito whine. "I'm not yours," Rory said, louder, the words cutting through the floral screaming. "I'm not lost. I'm not food." The thing at the edge of vision finally stepped into the moonlight. It wasn't a creature. It was an absence wearing the shape of one, a silhouette cut from blacker black, taller than the standing stones, thin as a heron, with joints that bent wrong, backwards, like the legs of the mantises she'd collected as a girl in Cardiff. It had no face, only the suggestion of one, features smoothed away like wax melting upward. It didn't move toward her. It simply became closer, collapsing the distance between them without traversing it. Rory backed away, her heel striking one of the weeping stones. The sap coated her trainer, sticky, binding. The pendant flared. Not cold. Not hot. A neutral, blinding white that seared through her closed eyelids. The Rory-flowers recoiled, petals curling like burned skin. The tall thing paused, head tilting at an angle that snapped something in the air, a physical crack of pressure. Rory didn't wait. She ran toward the light, toward the standing stone that wasn't weeping, the one that pulsed in rhythm with her actual heartbeat, not the grove's parasitic imitation. Her lungs burned. The scar on her wrist bled freely now, dripping onto the wildflowers, which hissed as her blood struck them, acid on sugar. The stones blurred. Seven. Five. Three. She dove between the last two oaks, the gap a knife-slash of reality, and hit the frost-rimed grass of Richmond Park proper. The city roared back—traffic, planes, the distant siren. Her phone, intact in her pocket, buzzed with a notification. 11:48 PM. One minute had passed. Rory lay on her back, gasping, the Heartstone pendant dark against her chest, cold as a stone in a stream. Above her, the winter stars wheeled in their proper courses, distant and indifferent. But when she raised her left wrist to check the bleeding, the crescent scar had changed. It was no longer a scar. It was a fresh wound, wet and gleaming, shaped like a crescent moon, and it was facing the wrong direction. In the grove, the screaming continued, muffled now by the barrier between worlds, rising in pitch as the flowers realized their meal had escaped. Rory stood on shaking legs, five-foot-six and suddenly very small, and did not look back as she ran for the lights of London, the pendant silent, the scar burning, and the certainty settling in her chest that she had been marked, catalogued, and would be collected later, when the stones had finished counting.