Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYBC1HKF2BRB6PK6Y8T785

A branch whipped my ear and I rolled, boot sole skidding on damp moss as the pendant in my fist throbbed against my pulse. The Heartstone hung warm at my chest, a small warmth in a sea of cold air that smelled of pine needles and old rain. I half crouched behind the ancient oak standing stones, listening to the hush between my heartbeats and the soft, wrong quiet beyond the circle. The Fae Grove had never felt friendly, not since I learned how time pooled here like a slow, viscous liquid. Time folded in on itself inside these roots and branches; an hour inside could be minutes outside, or it could swallow a whole afternoon and spit you out somewhere you didn’t recognise. The stones around me hummed with a low, stubborn vitality, as if they were listening for something I hadn’t learned the words to say. The grove pressed in on all sides, a living boundary between Earth and the Fae realm. Wildflowers bloomed year‑round in defiance of weather, a colourless chorus against the dark, and the air tasted faintly metallic, like coins dropped into a shallow stream. I had come here for a reason I would not admit aloud even to myself. Eva’s name had never left the back of my throat since Cardiff, not even when I left Evan behind and ran for London. She’d said the Hel portal would answer if I brought the Heartstone to where the stones could hear me. The benefactor who’d handed me the pendant had vanished into the ether of memory, leaving only the warm sting of its birthmark‑like glow and a note that said, simply: Trust the pulse. I trusted the pulse because it matched the beat in my left wrist, where a small crescent scar had lain since childhood—proof that fear could cut deep without teaching you how to scream. I pressed the pendant to my sternum. The room within the circle pulsed back, a heartbeat of its own, and the stones around me glowed with a patient, pale light. The pulse from the pendant flowed through me, a soft wind inside my chest, and I found myself listening for something I hadn’t known how to listen for before. The wrongness built slow, like a creeping fog you don’t notice until your teeth ache from it. At first I heard it as a rhythm I could almost place—drip, drip—though the drip came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Then there were sounds that should not have been there: the rustle of leaves that didn’t belong to this grove, the creak of old wood that whispered my name without any mouth moving. The edge of my vision kept snagging on shapes that didn’t sit still, like a reflection in water that refused to settle. “Not yet,” the pendant seemed to murmur, barely a sigh, as if the stone were listening along with me. It warmed again, feeding a tremor in my jaw rather than my nerves. A figure flickered at the corner of my eye: nothing solid, just a pale suggestion between shadow and leaf. When I turned, it had vanished, leaving a chill that clung to the skin. I steadied my breath, finger pressing into the scar on my wrist as if the mark were a seal I could break if I pulled enough air into my lungs. The pulse in the pendant steadied, then brightened, a tiny beacon in the black of the clearing. A sound rose—soft as silk, sharp as a knife’s edge—and the grove answered in a chorus of tiny noises that felt almost deliberate. A branch snapped somewhere far away, and the echo came back through the stones as if the earth itself had cleared its throat. A moth drifted past the edge of my vision, wings catching the pale light, then dissolved into nothing when I blinked. The whispering began, not with a voice but with a collection of mouths that hadn’t been given any air to form words. “Rory,” a voice said, not mine and not fully human, a trickle of sound that sounded like rain through sand. It wasn’t clear enough to be found, yet it felt intimate enough to be heard. The word rolled around inside my skull until it landed in a place I hadn’t planned to expose. “Who’s there?” I managed, though I already knew the grove was listening to me the way a hungry animal listens for footsteps. From the half‑dark deeper inside the circle came a flicker of movement, the sort you mistrust because it’s almost too precise. Branches brushed in a way that suggested a hand, not wind. A silhouette, too deliberate to be stray, stepped between two standing stones. Not human, not animal, something in between—slender, tall, with a presence that pressed against the skin like cold water poured over your head. It did not speak aloud; it pressed a question into the space between us with eyes that glowed a soft, impossible blue. The Heartstone warmed again, as if in approval of the intruder’s timing. The glow spread along the chain and warmed the skin of my chest as if a small sun had tucked itself under my shirt. I forced my breath to stay even, to pretend this was just another unexpected guest at a place where guests never brought good news. “Rory,” the pale figure echoed, and the air rippled with that name like a thread being pulled tight across a guitar string. The voice wasn’t male or female—human understanding strained at its pitch and cadence. It wasn’t entirely here or there, a memory pretending to be a person. It stepped closer, but the space between us did not close so much as breathe. I kept my eyes on the figure and tried to read the room as one reads a contract they didn’t want to sign but had to because it had your name on it. The standing stones—rough, ancient—stood like sentinels. The ancient oak between them lowered its branches as if listening. The grove itself seemed to lean inward, as though the ground were listening too and did not approve of what was being said. “What do you want?” I asked, letting the question come out with smooth certainty, as if I’d asked it a hundred times in a hundred different places, and never for myself. The figure did not smile. It didn’t show teeth. It did not nod. It did something with the air—a tremor at the edge of perception, a perturbation in the space just beyond the edge of my sight. The scent shifted, a blend of wet bark and something metallic, and the wildflowers that had refused to die in this place trembled as if hearing a joke they didn’t understand. “Time needs a guest,” the voice said, or perhaps thought. It wasn’t easy to tell where the speech ended and the idea began. “A guest?” I asked, which was not the right question, but it was the one that slid from my tongue before I could stop it. The figure raised a hand—an elegant, pale thing with long fingers and no nails to speak of. A line appeared along its wrist, a seam that hadn’t been there before, and a chill ran up my arm as if frost had crawled up from the ground. The binding in my scar tingled, a memory pricking at the back of my skull, telling me to run, to dive into the trees and never come back. I did not move. The pendant’s warmth intensified, and the light around the circle gathered, forming a doorway of sorts in the air, a window with no glass, a portal that hummed with a pitch I could hear if I concentrated hard enough. The Hel portal. The thing—whatever it was—stood next to the doorway in a way that suggested it owned the space, not just occupied it. The edges of the world peeled back a little where it stood, and for a heartbeat the grove looked like a painting someone was rotating slowly, the colours bleeding into one another. “Not yet,” the pendant whispered again, insisting, not in words but in a sense of pressure at my sternum. The urge to reach out was overwhelming, to touch the edge of the doorway and see what it hid, but I kept my hands tight around the chain, not daring to extend my length toward whatever lay beyond. The figure moved again, a gliding opposition to gravity. It pressed its head forward, a curious tilt that suggested both interest and disapproval. The blue light in its eyes deepened, and for a moment I saw a reflection of myself inside them, a Rory with a different set of choices, a life that never left Wales, never learned London’s grit. Then the vision dissolved and was replaced by the present: the cool damp air, the hollow whisper of leaves, the damp smell of earth cracking open somewhere unseen. “Are you alone?” I asked, partly as a test, partly because it felt like the only sentence that could make sense in this place. It did not answer with words or even a thought. Instead, the figure lowered its gaze to the pendant, and the light dimmed, as if it understood a truth I kept trying to pretend I did not know. The grove exhaled, a deep, patient sigh that carried the scent of rain that would never come. I shifted my stance, feeling the ground give way ever so slightly beneath one boot, as if the earth itself were tilting toward revelation and I was not prepared to stand upright for it. “Show me,” I said, because the smallest act of forcing a thing to reveal itself often did more than a dozen questions ever could. The figure’s lips did not move, but the space between us filled with a new sound—the soft scrabble of something scraping along the stones, a whisper of cloth on stone, a soft, childlike chime that wasn’t bells and wasn’t perfectly human. A second silhouette—no, not a silhouette, but a second breath of the grove—slid into view, taller than the first, slender and motionless in the shadow between two stones. The two figures formed a loose triangle, one at each end of the glade, the third barely there, a suggestion of something that belonged to the space in between. The Heartstone’s glow intensified. The warmth at my chest flared, then steadied into a steady, insistent throb, tracking a path on my skin the way a fingerprint traces the inside of a glove. The faint edge of a scent rose again, copper and rain and something almost like lilac, and something in the back of my skull whispered that I should turn and run, that the exit lay toward the path that led back to Richmond Park, to the world that still existed outside this circle. But the rightness of the pulse kept me in place. I spoke aloud, keeping my voice even, calm, careful not to betray the tremor behind my teeth. “The reason I came here isn’t a story you want to hear,” I said to the air, to the stones, to whatever watched us from beyond the circle. “I am not your guest. I am here to stop what comes through if I fail.” The pale figure stepped closer, the blue light in its eyes boiling to a pale white, and the other silhouette bent its head as if listening to an old spine crack in its own chest. The grove did not tremble with fear; it trembled with curiosity, as if it expected something to happen and was resigned to witnessing it. From the corner of my eye, something moved again, something small and quick and wrong. A leaf fell, but the breeze did not stir the branches nearby. The stems of the wildflowers fanned outward in a slow, impossible bloom, petals opening and closing in the same moment, as if commanded by a single, unseen hand. It should have looked absurd, but it felt almost ceremonial, like a ritual performed by plants that exist only in a book of fae lore I had never finished reading. The whispering intensified, a chorus of voices that did not belong to any creature I’d seen in my life. They spoke in syllables that clicked and chimed, a language of bells and breath. The edge of my sight caught movement again—this time a figure more of suggestion than shape, a presence that did not advance so much as insinuate itself into the space between us. The standing stones glowed faintly, and the air between the stones widened as though the grove had drawn a breath. “Show me,” I repeated, not as a demand but as a hinge upon which risk could swing either way. The second silhouette raised a hand, palm open, and in that gesture I saw something I recognised from my own past—a name spoken softly to a child who slept too little. The memory rose and stung, a reminder that danger here was not loud and grotesque but patient, waiting for you to tilt your head just the wrong way. The Heartstone sighed against my chest and the warmth through the chain steadied, like a quiet hand in the dark. The portal’s hum turned into a whispering current that ran along my nerves, a sting of static that answered the pulse in my scar. Then the first figure spoke without moving its mouth, a sentence I could not quite hear but felt in the hollow of my skull: you came for a truth that does not end where you think. A sudden, sharp crack split the air—the kind of sound that makes your bones answer in fear. The grove held its breath. The two silhouettes froze, the one closest to me lowering its head as if listening to the tick of a clock I could not hear. The circle of stones brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again in a rhythm that wasn’t a beat but a warning. The ground shifted under my boots, not violently, but with enough intent to reminder that nothing here was stable. The oak’s boughs moved as if a ghost were walking their limbs in a slow dance. The Wildflowers’ petals trembled; one blossom, purple-black and almost luminescent, swiveled toward me as if it had eyes and chose to rest on my shoulder for a moment before fluttering away. A voice, thinner than a thread of silk, whispered again, this time closer to reality, almost a voice you could catch if you listened very hard. The words did not land as sentences but as shards of meaning, each a promise and a warning. They are not your own. The sentence landed in my chest like a key turning in a lock. I felt the scar on my wrist tug as if it remembered this exact door in a different life, a door I had believed sealed long ago. The pale figure stepped back, and the circle narrowed, the glow tracing their edges until they became nothing more than silhouettes stitched into shadow. The air grew heavier, as though every breath I took drew a weight I hadn’t known I carried. A sudden, desperate thought rose in me—Could I survive the Hel portal if I passed through tonight? Could I bring back something that would redeem what came next? The Heartstone pulsed again, warmer now, a little warning around the bone of my collarbone. For a moment the grove opened, not a door but a window, and beyond it I saw a thread of moving light—the Hel, a seam between two worlds, strong enough to hold a future if you believed in it, fragile enough to tear you apart if you blinked. Then the first silhouette stepped forward once more, and something moved with it—an absence, a slipping away of a presence that should have shadowed its steps but did not. The second silhouette did not move; it simply absorbed light, becoming less a shape and more a texture of the air itself. The ripple of the grove intensified. The stone circle brightened in unison, as if the entire place exhaled in a single breath. And then, from the very edge of perception, a sound grew and grew until it dominated the space—the sound of something very old waking up, something with a dozen names and no names at all. The ground beneath me thrummed, faint but undeniable, and the air tasted of iron and rain and something sweeter I could not name. The glow of the Hel doorway widened fractionally, and the silhouettes bent toward it as if drawn by gravity, by necessity, by some obligation I had no part in setting. The pulse in the pendant leapt, louder, a drumbeat against my sternum, a speed‑up in a body that had learned to survive by keeping its own tempo. I steadied my breathing and stepped a little closer to the circle’s edge, careful to keep within the circle’s protective glow. The scar on my wrist glowed faintly in return, a tiny sunburst under my skin, and I felt a strange relief that I could still feel fear. Fear meant I was alive, and alive was a thing I could fight. The grove shifted again, not with wind but with intention. The two silhouettes now stood at the portal as if guarding it, while the third, that eerie, almost not-there presence, hovered near the outer fringe of the stones, watching everything, listening to something inside the hollow of the Hel doorway. The Heartstone’s warmth braided with that other presence, and I understood—whatever came through tonight would demand a bargain. It would ask for something in return for passage, for safety, for a future I might not want to sign away. And then a sound beyond sound—a sudden, abrupt click like a lock turning, muffled by distance and age—and the Hel portal flared. Not bright, not blinding, but a doorway of compressed possibility, the old fabric between worlds thinning to reveal a corridor of pale light and shadow. The two silhouettes stepped backward as if the space itself resisted their intrusion. The third came forward more decisively, the thing that did not belong to light or shadow, something with a breath that smelled like rain and copper and old coins. The approaches of that presence blocked my breath; I felt it more than I saw it, a pressure that pressed against my lungs and whispered a single, chilling sentence into the space between my ribs: You are not ready. I did not look away. I returned to the centre of the circle, to the warm heartbeat against my chest, to the way the stones thrummed in a rhythm that matched the pulse in my scar and, for a moment, in the room behind my eyes, I saw the city of London in miniature, a map burned into memory by a fire I had not yet learned to extinguish. Then the third presence stepped closer, and the grove exhaled again as if it had been holding its breath for decades. The air grew colder, and the edge of the blue light sharpened until it felt like a blade against my thoughts. I heard a voice, not mine, a whisper brushing against my ear, a promise and a warning rolled into one. The pulse in the Heartstone surged, not violently but with assurance, and the world narrowed to a single point—the place where I stood, the stones around me, the portal that glowed with pale intent, and the figure who would decide whether I walked away with part of my soul intact. I did not blink. I did not hesitate. I felt the scar ashore with that ancient memory, felt the pendant’s glow spike in a last, bright flare, and I stepped toward the Hel doorway, toward the thing that would answer or undo the reason I had come here. The moment before I crossed, the grove stuttered—the light wavered, the petals froze mid‑bloom, and the world in that loop of time trembled with a fierce, sudden edge. Something unsaid pressed against me from the other side, a presence eager and terrible, and the air turned thick with something like velvet and rust. Then the doorway swallowed me, not with the violence of a fall but with the inevitability of a verdict. I did not scream. I did not think. I moved as if guided by a compass I never learned to read, bearing the heart within me, the breath of the grove in my lungs, and the quiet, stubborn resolve that I would not become a memory folded away in someone else’s pocket. And in the moment of crossing, the last thing I heard was the grove’s old oak creaking a reply to the Hel’s demand, a sound that might have been laughter or a hinge protesting its fate. The standing stones dimmed, the light around the circle dimmed, and for an instant I felt the weight of a future being tipped toward me like a coin held between two fingers. Then the world snapped shut behind me with a cold, final air—that moment when nothing is certain and everything is possible—and I found myself standing in something not quite real, with the Heartstone burning at my sternum and the two silhouettes of the grove receding into memory, while the third presence pressed closer, and the pulse in my scar beat louder, as if answering a question I hadn’t yet dared to ask. The horror, restraint intact, waited in the silence that followed, and the next breath would decide everything.