Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX5XC87FR5FJ759CYB84FS

Aurora left her bike tucked behind a thicket where the park fence bent away from the path. Richmond Park slept in pieces: a smear of London glow behind the trees, a black ceiling of cloud, and the soft grind of distant traffic that never quite went silent. The gate chain felt cold through her fingers. It clinked once, too loud, and she paused with her breath held in her throat. Nobody shouted. No torch beam swept the path. She slipped through and let the chain settle without another sound. The Heartstone Pendant pressed warm against her sternum, a small, stubborn heat that didn’t match the air. She pulled it out from under her hoodie. The crimson gem held a faint inner glow, like a coal you’d forgotten in an ash tray. The silver chain bit into the back of her neck. “All right,” she muttered, and the word came out thin. “In and out. Quick look. Then home.” The path into the trees looked the same as it always did in daylight. Gravel, roots, low bracken. At night it turned into something else. The gaps between trunks felt too narrow, like the wood had leaned closer since she’d last been here. She kept her torch angled low and walked by the beam’s pale oval, pretending the rest of the dark didn’t exist. A fox barked somewhere to her left. The sound cracked across the park like someone laughing with their mouth full. Rory stopped. Her torch beam held steady on a patch of dirt strewn with fallen leaves. “You’re fine,” she told the empty path. “It’s a fox. That’s a fox.” The pendant warmed again, a pulse against her palm when she closed her fingers around the gemstone. Warm… then a pause… then warm again. Like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to her. She moved on. The trees opened in a way that didn’t match the map in her head. She’d walked Richmond Park enough times to know its shapes. This turn should have spat her out by the wide trail with the benches and the dog bins. Instead, the ground dipped and the air changed. Damp, sweet, thick with something like crushed stems. Her torch caught colour where there shouldn’t have been any. Wildflowers. In February. In the dead middle of winter, with breath fogging the air. The flowers grew in a loose scatter, white and purple and a startling red that looked too rich for this light. Their stems rose straight out of the ground, no frost on them, no wilting. They didn’t sway, even when a breeze moved through the branches overhead. Rory crouched and brushed a petal with the back of her knuckle. It felt cool, alive. Real. “Right,” she whispered. “So you exist.” Her pendant answered with a stronger pulse. The gem’s glow deepened, a faint crimson throb that bled into her fingers. She stood and kept walking, careful where she put her boots. The gravel vanished under her soles. The ground turned springy, mossy, like the park had grown a carpet overnight. Each step sank a little. Each step made almost no sound. The silence pressed against her ears until she noticed what sat inside it. Not birds. Not the usual late-night scrabble of rodents. She listened and caught… a low murmur, far off, like a crowd at a football match behind closed doors. The sound came and went with no rhythm. It carried no words. It didn’t belong in the park. Rory swallowed and took the Heartstone in her fist again. “Hel portal,” she said, as if naming it pinned it down. “That’s why you’re hot. That’s why I’m here.” She lifted her phone, thumbed the screen awake. No bars. Of course. She opened her messages anyway and tapped Eva’s chat. The typing cursor blinked in a void of signal. I’m in the park. Grove is here. Pendant’s reacting. She stared at the unsent message until the screen dimmed. “Cheers,” she told the phone. She pocketed it and angled her torch ahead. The first standing stone appeared at the edge of her beam like a shoulder in the dark. Ancient oak, the codex voice in her head supplied, because she’d read Yu-Fei’s old notes twice and Eva’s stolen pamphlet three times and still hadn’t believed any of it until that moment. The stone rose taller than her, its surface rough and pale, veins of darker wood threading through it like old scars. It didn’t look like it grew from the earth. It looked placed. Rory walked closer. Her torchlight slid across carvings that didn’t settle into any pattern. Lines that looped, then broke, then rejoined as if the stone refused to hold a single shape. When she tried to focus, her eyes watered. She looked away and breathed through her nose. The air tasted sweet, like honey left out too long. “Not looking at you,” she murmured. “You can keep your secrets.” A second stone stood a few steps away, and a third. Together they made the beginning of a ring. Beyond them, darkness pooled thicker than the rest of the park, a patch that swallowed her torch beam instead of reflecting it back. The pendant burned now, not painful but insistent, like a mug of hot tea held too long. The gem pulsed against her skin even when she let it hang. She stepped between two stones. The moment her boot crossed the boundary, her torch flickered. Rory stopped with one foot inside, one foot out. She held still and watched the beam stutter, bright-dim-bright, like a failing bulb. “No,” she said, and her voice snapped. “Not now.” She pulled her foot back and the torch steadied. She put her foot forward again and it flickered again. The air inside the ring felt heavier. Not colder. Not warmer. Just… thicker. Like she’d walked into a room where someone had sprayed perfume and shut the windows. Rory lifted her wrist and rubbed her thumb over the small crescent scar on her left wrist, a habit from childhood that still turned up when she needed grounding. The skin felt raised under her touch, familiar. Her own. “Okay,” she breathed. “Okay.” She stepped fully inside. The torch didn’t just flicker. The light thinned. The beam reached a shorter distance, as if the dark drank it. The wildflowers inside the grove shone in their own colours, faint but clear, and the crimson pendant glow added a weak wash over her hands. A sound came from behind her. Not a footstep. More like a soft brush, as if someone dragged fabric over the moss. Rory froze. The hair at her nape tightened under the chain. She turned her head, slow. The ring of stones stood empty behind her. The park beyond them looked wrong. The trees sat too close together, their trunks bent into shapes that didn’t match their roots. The distant London glow faded. She saw only black between branches. She took a step back towards the stones. The distance didn’t change. Rory stared. Her boot had moved. She felt the moss compress under her sole. Yet the stones stayed the same, like a backdrop painted on a theatre wall. “Very funny,” she said, but her throat tightened on the words. “Let me out.” Silence answered, and then the low murmur returned—closer now, like it rose from under the ground. It carried the faintest hint of melody, a sing-song lift that scraped at something inside her memory. Childhood games. A circle of kids. Hands clapping. Words she couldn’t quite recall. She shoved the thought away and walked deeper into the grove, because standing still would turn her into a statue. She aimed for the centre where the darkness pooled. Wildflowers brushed her ankles. None of them moved until she touched them, and then they leaned away from her legs as if they disliked her heat. “Sorry,” she told the flowers, and then she shut her mouth. Talking to them felt like making an agreement. Her torch beam caught something pale hanging from a branch. A strip of fabric. No—too narrow. A ribbon, tied in a knot that looked neat despite the damp. Rory reached up and pinched it between two fingers. The ribbon felt dry. Clean. Like it came straight from a shop. She dropped it at once and wiped her fingers on her jeans. A giggle cut through the grove, sharp and close. Rory spun, torch sweeping. No one stood there. The giggle came again, and it sounded like it came from her right. She swung the light. Empty flowers. Moss. Stone. Then she heard her own breath echo back at her, half a beat late. Not the normal bounce of sound off trees. This echoed like someone breathed with her, matching her inhale, then copying it. She forced herself to breathe shallow. The echo breathed shallow too. “All right,” she whispered. “So you can do that. Great.” Her pendant pulsed fast, heat climbing into her skin. The gem’s faint glow turned richer, as if it fed on the dark. Rory pulled the chain over her head, wrapped it twice around her fist, and held the Heartstone out like a compass. The stone tugged. Not physically, but she felt a pull in her wrist, a nudge that aimed her towards the darkness at the grove’s centre. She followed. Each step shortened the sounds behind her. The murmur sank into the ground. The echo of her breath stopped. Her torch beam dimmed until it painted the world in washed-out grey. She entered the pooled dark and her torch went out. Rory clicked it once. Nothing. She clicked it again. The switch snapped under her thumb like it hit a dead end. “Don’t,” she said to the darkness, and the word landed flat. “Don’t do that.” The pendant still glowed, a small crimson heart in her fist. It lit her knuckles and the edges of the flowers near her boots. Beyond that, the grove vanished. Something shifted at the edge of the Heartstone’s light. A movement that didn’t belong to a branch or leaf. It slid away when she focused on it, and she caught only the afterimage of pale shape. Rory turned, slow, holding the Heartstone up. The light painted the nearest standing stone and the flowers at its base. A face looked back from the stone. Not carved. Not etched. A face pressed under the wood grain like something trapped beneath ice. Eyes closed. Mouth open in a silent O. Rory jerked the Heartstone away, and the face vanished into rough bark. “Nope,” she breathed. “No. That’s not—” The murmur rose again, right behind her now, so close it warmed her neck. Rory whirled. The Heartstone lit nothing but flowers and the shadow of her own arm. Yet someone stood there. She felt it in the way the air resisted. The way the scent thickened, honey and rot together. Her lips parted. She forced words out because silence felt like consent. “Show yourself.” A voice answered from the dark, using her own mouth shape, her own Cardiff lilt, the exact pitch she heard in her skull when she read. “Show yourself.” Rory’s jaw clenched. She held the pendant higher until the chain cut into her palm. “I’m not playing,” she snapped. The voice stayed close, almost tender, almost inside her ear. “I’m not playing.” Rory backed up, and the moss didn’t compress under her heel. Her foot met something firm, like a shoe. She looked down. In the pendant’s red light, a second pair of boots stood toe-to-toe with hers, close enough to touch. Black leather, scuffed at the toe the same way hers scuffed, laces tied in the same quick knot she used when she rushed out the door. Rory lifted her gaze, inch by inch, and the red glow climbed a body shaped like her own. Hoodie. Jeans. A silver chain hanging at the throat. The other pendant lay against the other chest, crimson and breathing. Rory swallowed and raised the Heartstone between them like a barrier. “Step back.”