Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXFR2YA6WVCCWSVZH7HQMV

The branch snapped behind me, a dry, harsh sound that felt personal, as if the grove itself had just peeled back a rib and whispered my name. I dove for the nearest standing stone, moss scratching my cheek as I hit the rough surface and slid to crouch behind it. The Heartstone Pendant beat against my chest in a slow, stubborn thump, a warmth blooming through fabric and bone, turning my skin into a small, controlled furnace. I kept my hand locked on the chain, fingers pressed to the silver, as if I could pin the world to itself with a stubborn squeeze of metal. I had come here for a reason, or at least so Eva had insisted I needed a reason. To speak with something that might be listening, to learn why the pendant warmed when Hel portals drew near, to understand what it was that lay beyond those ancient oak standing stones that marked the boundary between Earth and the Fae realm. The grove’s name—The Fae Grove, Isolde’s grove, Richmond grove—echoed like a dare in my skull. A pocket between worlds, a throat in the dark where time moved like a patient, deceitful river. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside, and I could not afford to waste a single breath. The air tasted of rain and damp bark, sour and sweet at once, as if the grove pressed a grin into your mouth and watched you swallow. The wildflowers still bloomed in stubborn bunches around the base of the stones, pale blues and cruel whites lacquered with dew that clung to every petal as if afraid of being blown away by a random breeze. The trees—great crowns, knotted and patient—hung over the circle with a quiet, relentless seriousness. The boundary stones themselves looked more like weathered teeth than markers, porous with age, carved with lines I could not decipher, and the deeper I sank into their shadow, the more I felt the world tilt in a slow, dizzying way. I heard it again, a sound out of place: something small, metallic, and deliberate, tapping out a rhythm on something unseen. The noise followed the edge of the clearing, tracing the line where the trees ended and the open air began, and it did not belong to wind or animal. It was too measured, too purposeful. My breath hitched. The pendant’s warmth grew, a little too bright, a pulse that shivered up my wrist and into my elbow, then down into my shoulder. The glow? A soft, inner heat that wasn’t heat but a memory of heat, the kind you feel when you stand beside a hearth you know cannot withstand the night. “Show yourself,” I whispered, though I knew the grove never obeyed the command of a voice, especially not mine. The trees tightened their grip around the circle, as if the grove itself took a breath. The air thickened with the scent of earth after a storm—almost too clean, almost as if someone had scrubbed the world of its usual decay and left a bright, shrill shine in its wake. A silhouette flickered at the far edge of my peripheral vision, something pale and quick moving between the trunks, not quite human, not quite anything I recognised. It vanished as soon as I looked, leaving behind a faint tremor in the air, like heat-distorted air over hot pavement. Not heat, not air—something else, something that moved like a whisper when you tried to catch it with your eyes. I pressed my palm flat to the stone and focused on the pulse of the pendant. The stone’s warmth became a thread, tugging me toward the heart of the grove where the air pressed close and swallowed sound. The wildflowers curved toward the source of warmth as if bowing to a flame they could smell but not touch. The boundary stones hummed, low, ancient, a sound more felt than heard, a vibration you could ride if you kept your balance and did not break. I tried to think of Eva’s warnings—the way she spoke of bargains and shapes with too many teeth, of doors that would not stay closed if you pressed your hands against them in the wrong order. But I did not want to think. I wanted to act, to move fast before anything learned my pace and began to match it, stride for stride, breath for breath. “Rory,” a voice whispered, not inside my head, but as if someone had whispered in the hollow of the stones and I only happened to be near the mouth of it. The syllables came and went with a treacherous ease, like someone playing with a piano and not choosing a key. The name sounded both like a name and like a promise I had never trusted. The whisper came again, and I knew it for what it was: a lure, or a trap, or both. The grove did not know the difference. The walls of living wood pressed a little closer, keeping me in, keeping me from seeing what lay beyond. The Heartstone Pendant pulsed a little faster, a small rhythm that matched the beat in my throat, and I realised there was an order to fear here, a pattern I could learn if I listened long enough. I moved. My foot slipped in moss and I caught myself on the cool stone, the rough surface biting into my palm. I rose to a crouch, then a stand, and I began to trace a careful line along the circle’s inner lip, stepping with the measured precision of someone who has learned not to trust what the ground tells you for long. I found the next stone, the one partially hidden behind a ghost of fog that hung like an unspoken threat. The fog felt denser than ordinary mist, something thick enough to part the senses if you stood still long enough. The pendant gave a small, approving sigh—the warmth brightened, the glow turning a steadier ruby that glowed with a life all its own. A sound came then, a sound that did not belong to the grove: a bell’s faint tinkle, far away, as if someone somewhere far beyond these trunks rang out with a cautionary note. It should not have existed here, and yet it did, as if the grove had learned to borrow sounds from far-off places and plant them in its own throat for a moment, just to see what I would do with them. My breath stuttered. The bell rang again, softer, closer this time, the note bending into something almost like a lullaby, something a child might sing to itself when it believes the shadows are asleep. I did not believe the grove’s lullaby. I stepped away from the stone and into a narrower corridor of trees where the light was more filtered, the ground more treacherous with fallen needles and old, hidden roots. The wrongness did not shout; it tiptoed, a whisper of a thing that preferred the sodium scent of old rain to a scream. A shape moved behind one tree, then another, always outside the corner of my eye, never fully visible, as if the forest had decided to make itself a riddle and would not permit me the answer. I heard something else, a rustle that sounded almost like fabric rustling, the creak of leather, a whisper of a boot dragging across a twig-sprung floor. I knew I was not alone because a second heartbeat rose in the grove, not mine, but not entirely alien either. The heartbeat did not belong to a person. It belonged to the place itself, to something older than the stones, older than the oldest stories Eva had whispered to me in the quiet corners of the bar above Silas’. The place kept time in its own stubborn way, and I felt it push back against me, slow and patient, like a trap that would not spring until the moment it saw fit. The pendant hummed a little louder, a warning. I pressed forward, a deliberate choice to ignore the fear that throbbed in my cheeks. If there was a gate here, I would find it; if there was a sign, I would read it. There was always a sign if you looked long enough, a pattern if you listened long enough, a thread that would lead you to the hunter’s mouth where the prey waited. The grove was not a place where it paid to hurry. Then came the noise I cannot forget without flinching: a footstep that did not land on the moss; a breath that did not belong to any creature living in the ordinary way. The sound travelled from behind me, a soft, cruel exhale, and I pivoted, eyes scanning the corridor of trees that now felt claustrophobic, as if the grove had closed ranks and put its back to me, daring me to press on. The illumination from the pendant’s glow traced a thin line along a trunk, and I followed it with the kind of careful attention that keeps you alive when a bull is circling you with a slow, deliberate calm. A figure did not step into the light. It stepped out of it, or rather, out of the space between two trees where light pooled like spilled milk and then stubbornly refused to fade. It was not human and not entirely animal, a silhouette so faint that I could have mistaken it for a trick of the eye if not for the heat rising from the pendant and the way the trees bent toward it, as if the grove itself were bowing to some older force at work here. “Rory.” The voice was soft, but it carried a weight that would have flattened a man’s shoulders. It did not come from one mouth; it came from many angles, from the bark and the leaves and the tiny tremor in the earth beneath my feet. The phrase was a summoning and a warning all at once. The figure stepped forward, and I saw it now only after the movement finished: a tall thing, lean to the point of gaunt, with a pallid face that carried no features I could recognise—the kind of face a draft in the air could wear if the air were a mask and the mask a living thing. Its eyes were stones in a lake of shade, gleaming with a light that did not match the pendant’s glow. It did not blink; it did not need to blink. It watched me with the kind of patient hunger that belongs to predators that have forgotten how to hurry. “Not alone,” it said, voice low and even, a rustle of fabric as though it wore a coat made from the quiet of a midnight street. It almost sounded like something I would expect to hear in Silas’ bar after a round of trouble, a whisper made of liquor and breath and danger. I did not answer. My breath came in measured drafts, and my feet found the line between courage and fear and decided to cross it with caution. The pendant’s glow intensified, not into flame but into a heat-soaked red that pressed against the skin of my neck, as if the heart of the thing behind the trees wanted its own warmth to rest there for a moment longer. “Your benefactor sent you here,” the pale figure said, stepping closer, the fog curling at its feet and tasting the edge of my boots. The voice carried no malice and no compassion, only the blunt fact of a statement. It seemed to expect an answer, but I did not purchase one from the lips I had not learned to trust. “Does it matter who sent me?” I asked, the words rough on my tongue. I made it a question to the stone and the wind and the growing ache in my joints, a question for the grove to hear and answer or pretend not to hear at all. The figure studied me, head tilting as if considering a riddle I had not yet learned to ask correctly. Then it smiled, a twist of mouth that did not reach the eyes but threatened to. It did not reveal teeth; it merely shifted the shadow enough that I felt it touch the edge of my perception, as if something was pressing in from behind my ribcage and asking to be let in. The ground trembled once, very gently, enough to remind me that the grove owned gravity and would remind you of it whenever it pleased. The Heartstone Pendant glowed again, a bright, confident glow, and I pressed the chain more tightly in response, as if the pendant and I shared a single stubborn will to move forward despite everything. The pale figure did not flinch. It watched, a patient sentinel waiting for a moment it could use. “You seek the door,” it said at last, as if stating a fact about the weather rather than making a prophecy. The statement was not a question; it was a statement of inevitability. I did not answer with words but turned my gaze toward the inner circle where the stones stood like teeth in the jaw of the earth. The run of light from the pendant traced a crooked line along the moss, and I thought I might glimpse another world beyond that line, a place where the air tasted of copper and rain and old lies. The wrongness gathered its voice. It came from everywhere and nowhere all at once: a chorus of whispers that did not belong to any one creature, a rustle of leaves that did not belong to a breeze, a clinking of something metallic that did not belong to any human apparatus. The grove was listening to something else now, something that spoke in a language I could not parse, a grammar of time and orbit and hunger. The trees creaked in odd rhythms, as if their joints remembered motions they had never performed in this century, or perhaps in any century at all. The wildflowers blinked, or so it seemed, as if their petals opened and closed in response to a signal I could not hear. I spoke then, very softly, a string of phrases I had spoken to the pendant in the past, the nonsense that sometimes kept fear at bay. The words did not soothe; they burned a little, like a flame that refused to be ignored. The voice of the grove answered in a way that felt almost like a sigh, a long exhalation that pressed against my ear in the same way a breath would press against a window. “Reason is a weakness here,” the pale figure murmured, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck lift with alarm. It was not a threat, not exactly, but it held the certainty that I had stepped into something larger than my personal concerns, something trained to eat fear and digest it slowly, with patience. “If you are listening, tell me what I am supposed to do,” I said, not because I believed there was any obligation for the grove to answer, but because I needed some anchor to hold onto as the world tilted again. The answer did not come in words. It came as sensation: the grove’s own heartbeat, a deep, stern drum that rattled through the stones and into my teeth. The pendant brightened; the warmth blossomed, an almost celestial heat that filled the cavity behind my sternum and spread into my shoulders and wrists. The boundary stones hummed louder in response, as if agreeing with the pulse, as if the earth itself supported the rhythm. “Go deeper,” the pale figure finally said, its voice lowered to a whisper that scraped at the edge of my nerve endings. It was not a request; it was a summons, a directive that arrived on the fold of a breath. I looked past the pale silhouette toward the clearing’s interior where the light pooled in a strange, almost liquid way around a circle of stones. The circle’s centre appeared imperfect—like a portal of sorts, a black mirror that did not reflect properly, showing silhouettes that did not belong to breath and bone. The Heartstone Pendant’s glow intensified again, and I saw, between the trees, a shape that did not exist in the ordinary world: a doorway, not made of wood or stone but of the very air itself, a doorway that breathed as if it lived. The pale figure stepped aside with a slow, deliberate grace, inviting me toward that doorway, toward the space where time’s fabric wore thin. My heart hammered. My hands trembled in ways that refused to be quelled by will. The grove’s magic, the Hel portal, the Heartstone’s pulse—everything converged in a single, unambiguous moment: if I stepped through, I might find the reason I came and possibly lose the me who stood here now. “Not yet,” the figure said, as if reading my hesitation, as if it could sense the precise moment my fear would become a liability. It lifted a hand, slow as snowfall, and pointed to the ring of stones around the circle. The runnels of light that traced the circumference glowed with a pale, steady sheen, and the message was clear without needing to be spoken: find the door within the door, find the door within the moment, find the moment that is you when you choose. I did not answer aloud. Instead I stepped closer to the circle of stones, my gaze fixed on the shifting boundary where the air grew thick and pale and the world beyond seemed to tilt at a wrong angle, as if gravity itself had mislaid its footing. The pendant’s warmth stoked inside me, a flame that burned only enough to keep me from faltering. The surrounding trees, hearing something in my chest, leaned closer, their shadows crawling along the ground as though watching for a fall I might not survive. The wrongness finally revealed a form, not a person but an impression of one: a second Rory, maybe, or perhaps a memory wearing a very convincing mask. The image stood inside the boundary circle, the light around it bending toward it as though the circle itself wanted to cradle a patient in pain. The figure wore Rory’s own coat, the kind I had worn the day I first met Eva in that little café two blocks away from the hospital where she used to work. It moved with a measured stiffness, as if its muscles remembered a different life and found themselves unwilling to forget. The two could have collided there, the present Rory and the shadow of Rory; they faced each other but did not speak. The grove did not need either of us to talk when it had the power to reveal halvings of a life, to let a person witness the twin of what they hoped to become or fear to lose. The Heartstone Pendant throbbed against my skin, a little louder now, as if acknowledging the duel I was about to wage with a memory that wanted to stay buried. “Go deeper,” the pale figure repeated, softer this time, almost fond, as if it would grant mercy if mercy were a meaningful thing in this place. And I did, stepping into the boundary circle, letting the light from the stones wrap around me like a cloak. The air thickened, and the world’s edges sharpened until I could glimpse the smallest things—dust motes turning to diamonds, a leaf with a minor vein that mirrored a map of some distant country I had never seen, the smell of damp wool and old rain from a time when it did not worry about the present. The doorway within the doorway opened not with a crash but with a sigh, a sound that suggested both relief and pain, as if something—someone—had waited a long time for a trespasser and had finally decided to let me in, if only for a moment. The circle’s light pooled into a circle of heat at my feet, as if the ground itself offered a hot apology for all the days it had waited for someone to notice it. I stepped onto that inner circle with a careful, deliberate tread, the pendant’s warmth now a second heartbeat in my own chest. The pale figure drifted to the side, not stepping out of my way but thinning into the air as though fading into a painting that refused to fade completely. The grove’s boundary—those standing stones and the ancient oak beyond—seemed to lean back, listening for every footfall, the old stones creaking in an old language I could not speak but could perhaps learn if I did not panic. A whisper found me again, the same soft murmur that had named me earlier, but now layered with a pronunciation I could barely recognise, as though the grove were speaking in a choir of voices both familiar and foreign. The door in the air grew more distinct, a seam of black glass shimmering in the air, a surface that promised an answer and warned of a cost. We were not alone anymore, not really. The sense of presence steadied around me like a second pair of eyes, or perhaps a hundred. The grove’s other watchers, if watchers they were, chose to reveal nothing of themselves—only the sense that something had been waiting for a long time for me to come seeking what I sought. The Heartstone Pendant pulsed again, a bright, stubborn red that demanded attention, and I let the glow pull me toward the seam in the air, toward the reminder that the Hel portal could be near and that I might be foolish enough to step through. The voice returned, not the pale figure’s but a chorus of it, a murmur that seemed to come from deep within the earth itself, from the roots, from something old and patient that had learned to survive by letting fear do the work for it. It asked me a question I could not answer without risking more than my own life. It asked me what I believed in, what I was willing to sell or endure to uncover the truth. It asked me if I trusted the Heartstone, if I trusted the warmth that spread through my chest when the world demanded a choice. It asked me to name what I wanted most in the world and to swallow the consequence. I did not answer in words. I answered with action, with a step forward onto the seam of night that opened into the unknown, with the distribution of weight that announced I would not retreat, not this time. The doorway of the air drew me in as if it were a mouth, a breath, a throat that could swallow me whole and spit me out in a different shape. The grove did not protest. It did not mourn. It watched with patient, unblinking indifference as I crossed the threshold between breath and stillness. The moment broke cleanly, and the other side did not resemble the grove any longer, but a mirrored corridor of black glass, a corridor that stretched into an endless, impossible distance. The boundary’s memory clung to my skin—the damp of the earth, the heat in the pendant, the ache in my wrists as if I were still grasping a rope that would pull me to safety or drag me into a depth I could not survive. The corridor hummed with a soft voice, a whispering chorus of dissonant vowels and consonants that did not belong to any language I knew. It did not threaten; it merely reminded me that power, curiosity, and danger were not strangers here. They shared a single table and a single chair and watched you eat your own fear. I stepped again, into a new room of the doorway, and found myself alone with the sense of something vast and patient, something that had awaited me as surely as I had moved toward it. And then a sound—subtle, intimate, intimately alarming—slid along the back of my skull, a whisper of a name I would not allow to become real, not here, not now. The old oak’s voice, if such a thing could speak, whispered my name in a way that did not pretend to be comforting. The whisper did not stop. It kept circling my skull like a small, cold bird, stitching its way into my memory. The initial fear transformed into a quiet acceptance of danger, a decision to let the voice carry me if it must, to rely on the pendant’s warmth as my guide through a space that did not care whether I believed in it or not. The corridor widened and narrowed like a breathing lung, and I walked, not running, not fleeing, but moving with a pace that allowed for noticing: a crack in the glass that reflected something I could not look at directly, a tremor in the floor that suggested something heavy and slow moving beneath it, a scent—paradoxically sweet and rotten—that clung to the air like a second skin. Time, as the grove had promised, continued to make its own rules. A minute might stretch into a year, a year vanish in a breath. The pendant pulsed with a stubborn warmth, a bright red heartbeat that did not falter even as the corridor’s light changed hue, first pale blue, then a molten gold, then a shade that felt almost like a memory of red that did not exist in the world outside this place. Each shift of light stitched a new detail into the scene: a doorway that did not need to be opened because it had already opened, a floor that produced a soft murmur of rain against stone, a pair of shoes—no, two shadows of shoes—standing perfectly still a few paces ahead of me, as if someone had paused mid-step and simply held themselves there to watch me pass. I did not speak to them. I did not need to. The Heartstone’s warmth turned almost to a whisper at my skin, the glow fading slightly, as if it preferred to observe rather than burn. Then the two shadows stepped forward in unison, two figures that wore the same coat, the same hat, the same expression of calm and danger. They did not draw weapons. They extended their hands in a gesture that meant nothing in our world but something in theirs—a gesture of invitation, or perhaps of surrender, or maybe both. The real shock was not their presence but the certainty that they were not here as enemies, not exactly. They were custodians, perhaps. Gatekeepers. They did not threaten me with violence; they offered a choice with a quiet gravity that made me feel the ground shift beneath me, as if a new gravity well had formed around my ankles and was now pulling me deeper. The pressure built in the pendant’s warmth, and I was suddenly aware that the Hel portal’s proximity was not a matter of distance but of intent—someone’s intent was close enough to touch, and I was the only measure of it left in the world I knew. “Not alone,” I heard in a whisper, not from the two figures but from the grove itself, a chorus of the trees and the stones and the old oak, all agreeing that the hour had arrived when my choices would define the next movement of the clockwork that bound this place to mine. The two figures hovered for a breath—a long, calm breath—and then one spoke, a voice that could have been my own if my own life had leaned toward something colder and wiser and older than I believed myself to be. “Where you end, we begin,” it said, the words rolling through the doorway and into the space behind my eyes, echoing in the small hollow of a childhood memory I could not fully identify, the scent of something warm and comforting and terrifying all at once. I stood there, feeling the world’s patience press against my nerves, listening to the river of time move behind the world’s palms, waiting, always waiting, while the pendant hummed a last, stubborn note, and the two figures watched in quiet, almost affectionate insistence as if they had waited for me to arrive at this very step, this exact moment, to decide what happened next. Then the glimmer of a door widened and deepened, and the two figures stepped back as if to yield the stage. The doorway yawned and settled, a mouth of air that offered entry but not exit—an invitation to step into a memory I could not quite own, a memory that would not belong to the Rory who stood before it now. The moment froze. The pendant flared in a fierce, living red, and the air between the two rivals—if such they were—hung with a weight that made me swallow hard. A figure—no longer just an impression—emerged from the doorway, or rather, from the space the doorway breathed. It was a woman, tall and pale, eyes the colour of frost, hair a river of shadows that slid around her shoulders. She wore clothing that belonged to a time I could not name, a way of moving that suggested she had learned to walk the distance between centuries with the same ease with which I cross a room to fetch a lamplight. The woman turned her cold gaze on me, not hostile, but analyzing. The two gatekeepers lowered their hands, as if they had anticipated her arrival and had a plan for her to see me. She did not smile. Instead she stepped closer, and the air around her bent the way heat does when you stare at a flame too long. The pendant’s glow steadied, then brightened, as if acknowledging a new ally or an old, unquiet ally returning to the ring. “You came for a door,” she said, her voice a clear tessellation of syllables that seemed to belong to both my language and hers, a blend born of the grove’s patient, patient breath. “You came for the one that keeps the story from breaking. The one that makes the night remember its own name.” I did not answer with bravado or bravura. I answered with the simplest truth I could hold onto: the truth of my breath, the truth of the pendant, the truth of the grove’s patient, hungry gaze. “Is there a price?” I asked, the words coming out tight, as if the room itself had clenched its teeth to hear them. The pale woman did not blink. She did not nod. She let silence answer for her. Then she reached out, fingers pale and calm, and touched the Heartstone Pendant with the gentleness of someone who has learned that a flame, even a small one, can swallow a life if you feed it wrong. The pendant flared in that moment, a bright, furious glow that filled the corridor with light and warmth and a heat that pressed against my wrists and ankles as if the very fabric of my body remembered something I had forgotten. I gasped, shuddered, and steadied myself against the invisible force that kept the doorway open just long enough for me to see what I needed to see. In the light cast by the pendant, the corridor appeared to widen into a long corridor of mirrors. Each mirror reflected a version of me—some young and frightened, some older and wiser, some lined with the maps of cities I had never visited, some with a face that looked back at me with a cruelty I did not recognise as mine. The voices—the grove’s choir—grew louder, but not loud enough to drown out a single, precise phrase spoken by the pale woman. “Choose how you will remember this night,” she said, her voice now a warm breath in my ear rather than an outward sound. “Choose what you will leave behind when you step back through the door you opened.” The two gatekeepers watched, not offering guidance so much as bearing witness, and the doorway blossomed again, a widening throat that drank in the light and breathed out a different world, a world where a memory could be altered, a future redirected, a life tempered by a choice made in the dark and kept secret from all who would ask why you walked away from a door with a warm heart and a price you did not yet understand. I did not move toward any of the mirrors. I did not rush at the doorway. I stood still for a breath, then another, letting the pulse of the pendant guide the exact moment when I would step. The grove’s time was not mine to command, but its rhythm could be tuned with a single, deliberate act: to decide and commit and accept the consequences. The choice came not with thunder but with a whisper—soft enough to be missed by anyone who did not listen with the part of the soul that keeps secrets well. I let the whisper stroke my name, and I answered not with words but with a step forward into the mirrors’ reflectivity, into the heat that burned without burning, into the memory of a Rory who would choose a different path if it meant keeping a future she could still call her own. The moment swallowed me whole. The grove kept its breath. The mist at the edge of vision gathered itself into a shape I could not discern yet recognised as a kind of sentinel, a watcher that would tell me whether I had chosen wisely or foolishly when the door closed behind me. The Heartstone Pendant flared once, intensely, and then settled into a quiet heartbeat in the hollow of my throat, a gauge of the new course I had decided to take. And then the sound—the one that had started this cascade of fear and curiosity—returned, louder, nearer, a chain of small chimes that clicked against one another as if someone had shaken a handful of bells just out of sight. The corridor shifted again, as if the room itself had decided to rearrange its furniture to accommodate my decision. The air trembled, and in that tremor, a voice—feminine, old, patient—whispered my new name, the name I would go by if I could keep this choice intact. “Rory,” it breathed, the word both a memory and a warning, a call that could heal or ruin, a tether to a life I could still have if I kept moving and did not look back. The moment did not break. It did not demand a scream or a cry for help. It simply allowed me to pass through the door, to cross from the world that believed it could cage fear into the world that understood fear as a companion, a guide, a tool. The corridor closed behind me with a soft sigh—an almost affectionate farewell from the grove—and the black glass of the doorway registered a final, patient ripple of light that faded into the ordinary darkness of anything that has already vanished but never truly leaves. I stood on the other side, heart hammering, the pendant’s warmth now a steady, familiar glow against my sternum. The air here smelled clean, the sound muted, the sense of distance between places rewritten. The room. The corridor. The step I had taken. It all felt new and old at once, as if a memory of a place I had never visited was being introduced to my senses for the first time. The door was behind me, and the grove’s breathing, the annual, patient clockwork of it, persisted somewhere beyond the border. I could not see it, but I could feel it, as if the stones still clung to my skin with the memory of the moment I crossed. Then I heard it. A voice, not the grove’s simple whisper but a human voice, faint and quickly swallowed by the space between walls that did not exist in the world I still knew. It called my name, a single syllable that held the promise of reunion, of something I had hoped might be possible if I dared to push past fear and into something I had been told to leave behind. The voice spoke again, clearer now, closer, as if whoever spoke drawn nearer with every breath I took. The breath caught in my throat. The pendant glowed brighter, not with the fierce heat of a flame but with a resolute, patient flame that reminded me why I had come here in the first place: to ask for something I could not ask elsewhere, to bargain with an ancient thing whose rules I could barely stomach but must obey. Voices—the grove’s, the two gatekeepers’, the echo of someone I would recognise from a dream—rose in a chorus that refused to let me pretend this was a coincidence, refused to let me pretend that any ordinary path could have led here. The moment paused, a held breath before the world snapped into motion. I stood still, listening to the silent grammar of this place, letting the pendant’s heartbeat steady my own. The wrongness did not vanish; it shifted, like a room rearranging its furniture while you slept, so that every familiar thing now held a hidden edge. I felt the weight of a choice on my shoulders and the sense that something was listening behind the air, something that would remember how I moved when I thought I was alone. Then, with the Grove and its watchers still hovering at the edge of perception, with the Heartstone pendant shining with a confident, crimson glow against my chest, with the two silent gatekeepers now at my back and the door a heartbeat away from closing, I understood the truth that had always lay just beyond my sight: the wrongness wasn’t around me. It was inside me, a possibility I could choose to uphold or snuff out with a single act—one decision, one step, one breath deciding the shape of my future as it bent toward the door and what lay beyond. And as the last, soft chime of bells rang once more—not a warning, but a sad, patient reminder that every door here has a cost—the portal answered with silence more profound than any scream, and I knew I had chosen. The door remained slightly ajar, the world beyond whispering my name with a new, darker sweetness. The Heartstone Pendant beat in time with something larger than my fear, something ancient and patient and inexorable. The grove exhaled, the boundary stones settled into quiet resolve, and the night refused to give back what it had never offered in the first place. I stepped forward again, not into light, but into possibility. The air thickened, the air between worlds grew heavier, and somewhere behind me—or perhaps beneath—someone spoke my name once more, a last, careful benediction, and then I was moving, my body bending toward a truth I could not yet bear to speak aloud, toward a doorway that knew me better than I knew myself, toward a future that would remember my name even if I forgot it once I crossed. The grove’s heartbeat kept time with mine, and as the first breath of the other side touched my skin, I felt the walls thin, the boundary between now and then blur, and the first, cold touch of whatever waited beyond the door’s mouth. The night did not swallow me. It invited me to become someone else. And I stepped through.