Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYQ5K4DMH0JX3T8T4S0NTG

The Heartstone Pendant throbbed against my sternum as I forced my way through the boundary stones, grit grinding under my boots and the silver chain biting at my shirt. Gravel scuttled away, and the air tugged at my sleeves as if something unseen poured through the gap behind me. The ring of oak standing stones hummed with a tired, patient murmur, the kind a woman might hear from an old friend who refuses to die. The grove swallowed sound the moment I stepped inside, but not the sound of my own breath, which rattled in my chest like dry leaves. Time behaved here as if someone had tuned a clock to a different heartbeat. An hour inside could mean minutes, or days, or a joke played on a tired traveller. I kept the thought at bay, focused on the crimson pulse at my throat. The Heartstone pendant wasn’t merely decoration. It warmed there, a small sun pinned to my chest, and it breathed with a stubborn stubbornness that did not belong to a trinket. It belonged to whatever benefactor had slipped it into my coat pocket and told me to come here—to Isolde’s grove, to the old stones, to the place where the Fae touch the earth and tell it to listen. Wildflowers bloomed year-round, yes, and the air carried the scent of damp earth, of moss and rain that never seemed to fall. The grove held the kind of quiet that pressed at a person’s eardrums, making the tiniest sounds seem like brickwork on a distant wall. The ancient oak at the centre had its own story, a chimney of an ancient memory that the world kept trying to forget. Time moved differently within the circle, and I knew I had to tread carefully, or it would creep up behind me and change me without my noticing. A branch shifted somewhere to my left with a dry rustle, not far enough to be an animal, not far enough to be a wind. The noise existed for a fraction of a second and then dissolved into the soft rustle of leaves that wouldn’t rustle unless you listened for them. My heartbeat answered in quick, sharp drums against the inside of my ribs. The pendant’s warmth deepened, settling into a slow, even warmth that told me I was near something old and patient, something that did not want to be disturbed yet would not stay quiet for long. “Not tonight,” I whispered to myself, as if the wind might be listening and take the hint. The Grove had a reputation for listening when it felt like listening, and for ignoring when it didn’t want to hear. I kept moving, half my mind on the task, half on the way the air felt heavier with every step, as if the grove itself were drawing in a breath and holding it until curiosity and fear both found their limits. The boundary between Earth and the Fae realm lay at the far side of the clearing, where the wildflowers pressed against a ring of stones that looked ordinary enough until you touched them and found they weren’t. They hummed faintly, like a distant choir of insects rehearsing a song they didn’t quite understand. It was no different from a city street at night, really—noise folded into silence, the familiar made strange by a handful of tiny, careful cues. My fingers brushed the pendant’s silver chain; the chain felt cold for a heartbeat and then warmed again, the crimson stone’s glow turning a shade of ember as it read the room’s mood, or perhaps the room’s fear. I had come here for a reason that felt ancient and personal, even if I could not name it yet. The benefactor who had given me the pendant spoke of gates sharper than knives, of Hel portals and the way the earth remembers. The lips that had pressed the pendant into my palm said nothing more than: “Go where the heartstone tells you.” It sounded like a threat and a blessing at the same time, and I suspect that is exactly how the stranger had intended it. The wrongness began as a scent, faint and metallic, like blood that never quite dries. It lay on the back of my tongue before I recognised it as something else—an unfamiliar copper tang that clung like a second skin. The grove offered scents as a gift, and this particular one warned that I was trespassing into something older than names. And then the sounds started. Not a chorus, not a chorus of crickets or frogs, but nuisances that did not belong to night: a soft ticking, a careful skitter of claws in leaves, a sigh that did not belong to the person who exhaled it. I paused, listening, and the sense of being watched sharpened like a blade brought close to the knuckles. The edge of my vision began to play tricks: a shadow where a shadow should not be, a ripple in the air that resembled heat mirages but did not dissipate when I blinked. The wildflowers shifted with a rustle that did not come from the breeze; they moved as if the grove were a sea and the plants were seaweed, drifting with currents that had no current to ride. The Heartstone Pendant warmed more insistently, and a tremor ran along the chain as if a dragonfly were trapped within the metal, beating its wings in a desperate little storm. Not alone, I told myself, though the thought arrived with the certainty that I did not want to meet whoever—or whatever—shared this space with me. The grove’s time signatures pricked at the back of my skull, a chorus of memories that did not belong to me. My breath slowed, easing into the rhythm the pendant demanded, a careful measure of calm that would let me listen without inviting attention. Then the whisper came. A soft breath of a voice that might have belonged to a child, or to a tired grandmother who had learned to swallow fear and keep walking. The words did not carry themselves in any language I could recognise with certainty, but the cadence was there, a lilting rhythm that made sense in long-buried parts of the brain. “Waited long enough, Rory.” The nickname arrived unbidden, the way the old names do when you’ve left a life behind and a life behind still clings to you. The voice did not belong to any single person I had known, yet it sounded as if it wore the voice of someone I should recognise—if recognition were possible here, in this place where the earth kept its own hours. “Who’s there?” I said aloud, though I doubted I would get a direct answer. The sound of my own voice seemed too loud for the grove, a reminder that I was not only trespassing but trespassing inside someone else’s memory. The first shadow crossed the edge of the path—thin, almost insubstantial, like a branch that had learned to walk. It did not so much approach as glide along the perimeter of my vision, pausing at the edge where the world bends and breaks if you look too long. When I turned to face it, there were two of me in the same moment, a trick of light and leaves, a fear staring back from the surface of a moon-slick pond. The second me vanished as soon as I tried to fix it with my gaze, leaving behind a cold mood, like frost on glass after a long breath. The grove did not feel empty, just unreasonably full—like being in a room where every door leads to a different, darker room, and none of the doors would stay open for longer than a blink. The Heartstone gasped against my chest, the warmth pooling in a neat circle there as if it could protect me from the soft violence of the place. The pendant’s glow ran in small, determined strokes along the chain, a line of fire tracing my skin. “Not tonight,” I told the pendant, borrowing a line from myself in a past version of my life, the one I’d left behind when I ran from an abusive ex and a life that had grown too busy with danger to notice. The words tasted like ash on my tongue, but I meant them. I was not here to flirt with something that could swallow me whole. A soft, breathless laugh drifted through the trees, too close to be merely wind. The sound had a childish echo to it, yet the courage of a predator lay beneath it. The laugh felt like someone tapping the inside of a hollow bone to see if it would ring. The plausible danger became actual when the ring of stones around me did not merely hold the boundary but bent inward, as if the grove itself had chosen to lean closer and listen. The air thickened with the scent of damp earth and metal, the kind of scent you inhale when you stand too near an open grave that has not yet been filled. A branch brushed across the back of my hand. I flinched, instinctively pulling away, and the pendant flared a hotter red. “Rory,” the voice murmured again, not loud but insistent, as if some learned elder had stepped into the same room and learned to speak in the language of this place. It wasn’t a voice that wanted to destroy me outright, but a voice that wanted to remind me I was in someone else’s house, where the furniture moved while you slept and the door never quite fit its frame. I found myself thinking about the day I had first noticed the pendant’s warmth, the way it had felt like a link to someone else’s map, a map that led through altars and shadows to places you were not supposed to enter without a guide. The map had told me to come, but not to stay, to listen and then leave before the listening turned into listening to the last breath. It was a map written in the blood of some other traveler who never came back. The grove’s time trickled again, a series of small moments collapsing into one another. I breathed in, counted to four, then let the breath out in a long, careful exhale. The heartbeat inside my chest—my own—kept opposite time to the grove’s clock, and I kept the cadence steady by tracing the pendant’s warm glow around the edge of the delicate silver chain. A shape appeared where a patch of wildflowers refused to grow, a silhouette with no features that could be named. It appeared not with menace but with that peculiar patience of a thing that knows it can wait forever in the corner of a room you forgot existed. It stood there for a long moment, and then vanished, leaving behind a scent of rain that had not fallen. “Who invited you?” I asked, though I knew the grove would not answer in a direct way. I asked because the question was a shield, and the grove responded to shields the way waves answer a boat’s hull. The answer came not in words but in cold sensation—an icy finger tracing the nape of my neck, a whisper that crawled into my ear and seemed to hold the breath there. For a moment, I imagined another pair of eyes on me, eyes that saw through the thin veil of my own. The presence did not want to reveal itself; it wanted to insinuate itself into my narrative, to rewrite a page that already had its own ink. I shifted my weight, keeping the pendant steady, feeling a quiet resolve inside me. The Heartstone’s warmth surged, not as a flame but as a stubborn flame that clung to the wick and refused to burn out. I reminded myself, this is not a story you tell aloud; this is a place where stories sink into the soil and grow into fear. The grass around me twitched as if the ground itself breathed, listening to something just beyond the edge of sound. The grove’s memory pressed in, a slow, heavy weight that pressed into my eyes and made my vision narrow to the smallest possible field of perception. The wildflowers around me did not shudder, exactly, but their stems trembled in a tiny, almost imperceptible rhythm, as if they were doing the waltz with unseen partners. “Not tonight,” I repeated, this time a muttered oath rather than a promise. The pendant’s glow shifted from ember to a pale, nodding red, and the warmth settled again into a patient heat, as one puts a hot cup down on a saucer and leaves it there to speak for itself. The Hel portal—if there was one here in the grove, hidden and waiting—would not reveal itself to the curious or the frightened. It would show itself to the patient, the prepared, the person who could listen without leaping. In the silence that followed, something crossed the boundary of the grove’s edge with a careful, almost deliberate tread. It was not a step so much as a careful placement of weight, a motion that suggested caution rather than aggression. It paused behind a stand of ferns, the leaves trembling just enough to betray its presence to the world when they were not meant to. I did not move, not yet. I watched the shadow, or perhaps the shadow watched me. The distance between us thinned, and I could sense the shape of a figure there, a silhouette with a malevolent normalcy about it, like a receptionist who knew all the secrets of the building but pretended to be ordinary to keep the peace. A sound rose from the earth—a soft chuff, almost like a dog that knows it has done something wrong but cannot admit it. It came from beneath the path, from the dark soil where the roots of the ancient oak tangled with everything else and kept secrets better than any locked box. The sound persisted until I thought I might go mad listening to it, and then, as if a switch had been flipped, it stopped as suddenly as it began. “Do you hear us?” a voice asked, not from the shadow behind the ferns but from the space directly around me, as if the grove itself had learned to speak through the sound of the wind and the sigh of the leaves and the breath in my lungs. It sounded like a chorus of preachers who had spent centuries learning to whisper, and it asked a question that did not require an answer so much as a decision. I decided to test the boundaries of what I could touch and what I could not touch. I stepped forward, careful, measured, and the ground replied with a soft, almost unnoticeable give, like a mattress that has outlived its usefulness but refuses to betray the body resting upon it. The pendant woke a little more, burning with a white-hot core of warmth, and I felt a memory try to slip forward, something about Cardiff, about when I was younger, about holding onto a hope that never quite arrived. The wrongness sharpened, but only just enough that I could sense it but not name it. A minor tremor ran through the turf, and the wildflowers bowed toward the ground as though someone were pressing down on the sky from above. They looked up again in unison, and the motion reminded me of watchers raising their hands in unison, not in prayer but in a silent agreement to observe, to judge, to wait. “Not alone,” I heard again, this time with more clarity, though the tone remained flat and measuring. The voice did not belong to one of the many things I suspected lived here; it belonged to something older, something that had learned to be quiet for a very long time and to move when it believed it was unseen. It was the kind of presence you could feel in your bones, the sense that you were being weighed and found wanting. I widened my stance, glancing toward the stand of trees that marked the grove’s boundary, and I saw something else: a glimmer, a faint string of light that did not belong to any lantern or star. It lay along the edge of the standing stones, an almost imperceptible thread, and it tugged at something inside me, as if the pendant’s warmth had followed it there, eager to investigate whatever lay on the other side of the thread. It was not a lure but a route. A figure stepped into the circle of light thrown by the Heartstone’s pale glow, not a man or a woman as I knew them, but something that wore a silhouette like a coat of many futures. It paused within the circle and regarded me with an intent gaze that gave nothing away and asked everything at the same time. Its features were indistinct, the kind of face that becomes clear only when you stare at it long enough and forget what you were looking for in the first place. “Rory,” it whispered, the sound like two stones rubbing together, deliberate and cold and aware. The voice did not know my name as a person does, but as a function within a system that had learned to recognise me by the pattern of my footsteps, by the time I reached the grove, by the exact temperature of the air at this moment. It called me by something I recognised—by a version of myself that believed in a different future. “Not tonight,” I said, not to the figure but to the situation, to the moment when the grove would decide whether to keep me or to swallow me whole. The words tasted like iron and rain on my tongue, and I swallowed them to keep my mouth from betraying what I wanted most: to leave this place with my heartbeat intact, with my head unbroken, with the pendant still warm against my chest and the edge of tears not yet climbing my eyes. The figure stepped closer, not quickly but with a slow, inexorable gravity that suggested it had learned to walk through walls and memories, to make itself present without disturbing the room it inhabited. It spoke again, clearly, a voice that carried the ache of old stone and new hunger. “Your purpose sits within reach, if you choose to listen rather than run. The Hel gate hums beneath the earth and remembers you. It remembers all who came before who asked for a door and a key.” I did not answer with a plan or a promise. I kept silent and measured my next move, letting the pendant guide me through the tangle of fear and curiosity that built up inside me like a tower of smoke. The grove would not yield its secrets easily, not to someone who ran as fast as I did in the daylight, not to someone who believed the world could be neatly severed into before and after. But it would yield to someone who could wait, who could breathe and listen and not mistake every creak of a branch for a hand reaching for their throat. Behind the figure, the tree line seemed to bend once more, as if the grove itself was adjusting the geometry of space to accommodate an intruder—me, perhaps, or the figure, or some combination of both. The Heartstone’s glow drifted toward the edge of the circle, and then stopped, curiously anchored by the weight of the presence. The pendant’s warmth intensified, a pulse that sank into my shoulder and spread down my arm to the fingertips. It made the skin tingle and the muscles tighten, and with that came a memory I did not think I possessed and a fear I did not know I could feel. “Keep your heart steady,” a distant part of me whispered, as if someone else stood with me, a partner who could see through the heavy fog of terror. If I were lucky, the gate would reveal itself without my having to beg it open. If I were unlucky, the gate would decide to reveal me to whatever waited behind it. The voice—the presence—stretched into a long moment of silence that felt like a held breath. Then, suddenly, the grove seemed to lean in again, listening with the same patient, inexorable appetite. The tree line blurred, not as a vision, but as a weakening of the boundary between worlds. A sound rose beneath that; not a noise but a sensation, a soft pressure pushing against the skin of my ears, as if you could hear the bones speak when the body could not. And then I saw it, not with my eyes alone but with a reckoning of every nerve in my body. A line of light—thin, pale, almost invisible—snaked along the base of the standing stones and pooled in a small circle at their core. It did not look like a portal. It looked like a wound, a tiny seam where a too-bright seam of something living and old had split the world and was trying to mend itself with reluctance. The Heartstone Pendant hummed with a deeper, steadier warmth. It felt as if the piece of Dymas’ crimson stone in my hand, the little shard of a lost realm, wanted to drink the light from that seam and make it a doorway again—make it a way home for something that once belonged to it. The glow of the pendant intensified to a soft, dangerous red, and I could feel a pull that wasn’t mine, a gravity that pressed my bones toward the seam as if the entire grove were a mouth and I was a coin ready to be swallowed. “Wait,” I said, though I was not sure who would hear the order—the grove, the seam, or the two versions of myself that lived within these boundaries. The seam pulsed. The silhouette behind me shifted, the way a memory might rearrange itself when you’re not looking. It stepped closer and then paused, hovering, as if the floor had suddenly become a mirror and the figure stood behind me, looking at its own reflection in the glass. The sense of a gaze became a pressure against the back of my neck, and I could feel the hairs on my skin rise as though a thousand tiny bees crawled beneath the surface. “Not alone,” the whisper returned, this time closer, a breath at the side of my ear that did not belong to me or to the figure in the tree line, but to something older, something patient, something hungry for a door and the promise of a memory left behind. I touched the pendant with the edge of my fingertips, letting the warmth transfer into my palm, the heat travelling along my arm until it settled at my elbow. The ring of stones hummed again, slower this time, as if the grove itself had decided to test me with a final question. The Hel portal’s pull tugged at something inside me, a faint insistence that this world would never be enough on its own, that there was always another gate somewhere, waiting. The sound of your name on a tongue that is not yours is a strange thing to hear. It is the echo of a life you used to pretend you had left behind. It was in that moment that I understood the nature of the wrongness here: I wasn’t alone with a memory. I was standing at the threshold of someone else’s memory, someone who had walked through this very place with a different motive and a different fear, someone who may still be listening. The grove’s breathing grew heavier, the leaves clutched at the air as if trying to hold on to a promise that was slipping away. The seam throbbed once, then twice, with a cautionary pulse that suggested caution more than threat. I braced myself, feeling the pendant warm anew, and the world’s edges began to sharpen, as if the grove itself had decided to put me through a test. Then the ground sighed, a low sound that travelled from roots to canopy, and the seam opened a fraction more, revealing a pale, misty light that did not belong to any earthly glow. It did not illuminate so much as it exhaled a memory. And in that memory, I glimpsed a figure I knew, one of those nearly-forgotten faces that drifted at the corners of a life you meant to leave behind, wearing an expression of resignation and hunger that the living should never have to bear. I did not know what that memory was trying to tell me, but I knew enough to understand that I stood not simply at the edge of a boundary but within a negotiation that spanned the centuries, one in which my choices mattered more than my fear. The Hel gate did not force itself into this world with a loud crash; it slid in, slow and patient, a thread pulled at the very edge of reality until it became a seam through which a different night might slip in. “Stay,” I whispered to myself, a vow rather than a plan. The stage was set, and the players had begun to murmur their lines behind the stage curtained by fern and shadow. The wearing of time in this place pressed in tight, almost suffocating, but I stood straight, letting the Heartstone’s warmth steady me, letting it tell me what to do next without my needing to name the words. The first sensation of danger came as a whisper of air along the nape of my neck, followed by a cool kiss of air across my wrists that told me I had once more forgotten how to breathe. The weight of the pendant grew heavier, or perhaps it was simply that every heartbeat was a small, desperate drum in the quiet. Something broad and dark pressed at the far edge of the circle, gathering in the periphery, a presence that did not want to be seen but wanted to remind me that this was its place and I had trespassed. And then, without ceremony, the shadow moved in a way that told me I had not imagined it: a figure stepped from the edge of a fern, not with the strangled slowness of a dream but with the precise, practiced ease of a hunter who had learned all the angles of a forest and never forgot. The figure did not reveal itself fully, but the outline was enough to make the breath catch in my throat. The silhouette wore a cloak that did not rustle so much as sigh around it, the fabric dark and velvet-like, swallowing light rather than reflecting it. Its face remained hidden beneath the hood, but I felt eyes on me—curious, patient, calculating. The boundary’s hum deepened, a bass note that seemed to resonate in the space between my ribs. The Heartstone Pendant pulsed again, the crimson glow flaring briefly in a way that suggested something in the world beyond was hungry for it, keen to pull it through and into itself. My hand rose to the pendant again, fingers moving almost of their own accord, drawing the chain to cradle the stone as I stepped a cautious inch backward, away from the seam, toward the old oak’s gnarled trunk. “Not tonight,” I told the figure, softer than before but no less clear. The discarded phrase gathered weight, a shield erected against whatever this place might offer next. The figure stopped its advance, and for a moment the space between us stretched into a long, thin line of tension that felt as fragile as a thread of glass. “Not tonight, maybe,” the figure said, the words slow and measured, almost a caress and a threat in equal measure. Then the voice—my own memory’s echo or its other half’s—gave a quiet, level chuckle, hollow and knowing. The grove kept the sound for itself, as if aching to hold onto every syllable and every syllable’s consequence. The heart of the grove seemed to glow with a deeper light, pale and otherworldly, and the edge of the standing stones exhaled a sigh that smelled of rain and old copper coins. The seam pulsed in a slower rhythm, as if it had learned to keep time with two clocks that refused to agree. I could feel the hair on my arms rise in anticipation, feel the breath come a fraction sooner than I would expect, feel the weight of a decision pressing on my chest. If I turned toward the memory-gate, if I stepped closer to the line that split this world from the next, what would I find? A door? A trap? The proof that I was not who I thought I was? The possibility tugged at me with a cold, careful touch, and I resisted with everything I had—by standing still, by not moving toward the seam, by keeping my eyes trained on the figure and my breath even. The figure shifted again, not stepping closer but presenting a new figure—one that had not appeared before, a secondary silhouette behind the first, melding with it in a way that suggested there was more than one presence occupying this same space and time, all of them waiting for something to tip the balance. “Listen,” the first voice said, though it did not demand obedience so much as offer a lure. “The heart knows its door.” I did not answer with words or promises. I stood and watched, letting the moment crystallise into something I could carry away if I managed to leave this place with my mind intact. The Heartstone warmed, not with the blunt force of fear but with the quiet insistence of a stubborn compass needle, keening toward a destination I did not yet know how to name. The old oak’s trunk pressed against my shoulder as if it understood my need to hide there for a breath, to disappear behind the rough bark and wait for the right breath to push me back into the world. The edge of the world—the seam—gave just enough for me to glimpse a memory: a corridor of stone and light, a cold corridor that led somewhere I could not safely recall. The glimpsed memory was not mine but it belonged to the grove, to the memory of the old gatekeepers who had learned to live between things, to survive by offering warnings in the form of whispers and slipshod paths that could lead a traveller awry or home. I spoke then, not to the two silhouettes or to the memory behind them, but to the pendant itself, as if it were a living thing with its own conscience and its own voice. “Show me what I’m here to find,” I murmured, the words not loud but deliberate, a request rather than a demand, a plea that did not break the moment’s spell but asked it to bend. The glow of the Heartstone intensified in direct proportion to the narrowing seam, and the two shapes—their outlines coalescing into something more definite—shifted their stance, as if listening to something beyond the circle. The grove itself answered in a low, soft rang, like distant bells struck by wind, a sound that did not resolve into any known note or key. The memory of a door opened, flashed in the spaces between the leaves; the door did not stand in front of me, but behind the world’s skin, a thin line of light that promised a way out of the fear that pressed against my lungs. And then came a moment of sudden, stark clarity: I understood why I had come here and why the wrongness felt like a teaching rather than a trap. The Hel portal—if the seam was the gate’s first breath—was not a thing to be faced with bravado or cunning. It demanded a patient respect for its power and a willingness to pass if the world allowed it, and only if I bore the mark in me that could carry the gate’s memory back across the threshold into the life I kept trying to live outside of danger. The two silhouettes wavered, as if the air between them were a screen catching a fever dream. The softer presence—perhaps more cunning and older—spoke again in that odd, delicate cadence. “You carry a memory you did not choose,” it said, almost in apology. “It calls you to return what was borrowed, and to take what is owed.” The words did not threaten so much as recount a debt long overdue. I touched the pendant again, the silver chain cool under my fingers, and answered with the only thing I could: a decision made in the marrow of my bones. The decision was not a guarantee of safety, nor a promise of reunion with a future that felt unearned. It was simply a refusal to surrender to fear’s inevitable claim. In the smallest possible instant, events moved. The grove exhaled a long, slow breath, the kind you release after a storm that never truly ends. The seam widened again, not violently, but with a certainty that could have been a guiding hand rather than an assault. The silhouettes grew brighter, their edges sharpening as if a painter had finally decided to finish the portrait they began many summers ago. A figure stepped forward—a taller form, hooded but not entirely hidden, whose presence carried the scent of rain and old, damp earth. The Heartstone brightened to a fierce crimson, not radiating heat so much as demanding attention, insisting that every memory in the grove belonged to this moment and no other. The air grew thinner, the breath more precious. Something in me loosened, a thread I hadn’t known I was holding, and I felt the gravity of the gate pull at my chest with a dangerous tenderness. And then the first crack appeared in the boundary not as a break but as a kiss, a soft contact that promised both peril and passage. The seam’s light flared, becoming a corridor of pale, shifting colour—like moonlight poured through a broken glass bottle. It did not cast simple illumination; it altered perception, tinting shapes and distances, bending the sense of gravity so that objects seemed to slide rather than stand still. The two silhouettes stepped closer; the older one reached out with a gloved hand, a glove that did not conceal a living stigma but made the living thing behind it seem more real, more dangerous. “Not tonight,” I breathed again, but the phrase this time carried the weight of a pact, a line drawn in soil that could not be washed away. The door, if such it was, hovered at the edge of my vision, a thing I could almost reach with a single outstretched finger, if only I believed the world to be honest for a moment more. The first touch came then—not a grip, not a grab, but a press of air against my cheek, as if a hand had been laid on me and then slid away. It was a warning and a pledge, all at once: ask what you need, and you will be granted a doorway, but you will pay the price in fear. The pendant flared again, stronger than before, and the two silhouettes paused, their forms solidifying into something that might have made sense in a dream. I did not run. I did not retreat. I stood steady, eyes fixed on the seam and the figures that hovered on its edge, listening to the grove’s ancient breath as if it might whisper a name, a word that would unlock something buried in the soil. My wrist tingled where the crescent-shaped scar rested, a reminder of what fear can do to a person who refuses to look away. The little scar caught the light of the pendant, a tiny crescent of pale white that glinted against the dark. The gate, which had waited so long to be unbound, pressed closer, and the room between here and there became a thin, humming corridor of possibility. The Heartstone’s warmth gathered at the place where the seam and the memory met, and I felt a quiet certainty that I would know the next moment when it came—whether I would step through or be forced to stay on this side, watching the others pass into a future that I could not predict. A final hush fell over the grove, deeper and older than the night ever pretended to be. The two silhouettes finally spoke in unison, a low, almost musical murmur that threaded through my nerves and stitched a glimmer of resolve into my chest. “Choose, Rory.” Not a demand, but a summons. And in that word, I heard all the costs and all the reasons for coming here in the first place. The heartstone answered with a willing spark, and the light around the seam brightened to a nearly blinding white, then cooled to a pale, dangerous glow. The figure behind the two silhouettes stepped into the light, so close that I could catch a scent of rain and something darker, something not quite elemental and not quite animal—a presence that felt like a page torn from an older book and still smelling of ink and damp stone. The moment stretched into something heavier, more final, and I realised I was no longer merely observing a boundary but standing on the brink of a choice that would change what I believed about myself and perhaps about the world I walked through every day. My breath came in shallow, careful gasps, and the pendant’s warmth spread beyond my chest, down my arm, reaching my fingers as if the stone had learned to cradle my fear and reframe it as courage. Then, exactly at the edge where fear should have won, I made my decision. It did not require words. It did not require a dramatic exit or a display of strength. It required a single, quiet act—lifting my chin, letting the seam glow with its own stubborn light, and stepping forward, a fraction, a breath at a time, toward the gate that promised something more than safety. The grove did not resist. It exhaled in one long sigh that shook the leaves and sent a drift of pollen into my eyes. The seam’s light pulsed, and I felt the tug of the Hel gate like a hand on my shoulder, a gentle insistence that this was the moment to move from one world to the next, to honour the debt owed to the memory behind the door, and to find the way home through the door that the heartstone had prepared for me. And then, in a heartbeat that seemed to stretch into an eternity, the ground gave a soft, decisive sigh and opened beneath me, not violently, but as if the earth itself had decided this was the place to widen for a passage. The seam flared into a corridor of light, and I saw a thin thread of something—call it memory, call it power—pull away from the circle toward a destination I could not name. The two silhouettes blurred into shapes of living intent as the corridor’s brightness grew, and I felt the grip of gravity loosen, then lift. For the merest moment I heard a single, haunting word flutter through the air, not spoken aloud but carried by the pulse of the pendant and the breath of the grove: Go. I did not hesitate. The Heartstone thrummed, fierce and bright, as I stepped fully forward into the light that wrapped around me like a foreign, warm rain. The world became a tunnel of silvery-milk, the noises behind me fading into a soft, far-off tremor, the edges of the grove receding into mere memory as if I were being drawn through a thread toward something both dangerous and crucial. Then the horror—still restrained, still patient—snarled at the edge of comprehension: a sound behind the gate that did not belong to the night, which did not belong to fear or courage. Something old and watching and hungry pressed its attention against the barrier, trying to reach through the light, to touch me with its cold, careful hands. The memory of the room I had left behind pressed on my tongue, a silence that waited for a voice to break it. I swallowed, steadying myself, and pressed on. The corridor narrowed to a point, the light gleaming in a narrow line that promised a door, a gate, a way home or a way further into trouble. I reached out with my free hand—the one not clutching the pendant—and touched the light, feeling it respond as if to a second heartbeat, a second breath. And then, just as I thought I would be swallowed by brightness and the door behind me would close forever, a cry—soft, human, not entirely human—broke through the tunnel. It did not come from the realm I left, nor from the figure that followed me through the boundary. It came from inside me, or perhaps from the space where memory and fear and hope had learned to argue with one another for control. The corridor stretched, extended, and then there was the sensation of falling, not downward but inward, as if I had stepped through to a hidden basement of a house I had never known existed. The light steadied, and the cold dropped away, replaced by a warmth that was both unfamiliar and intimate. I landed on something soft, not soil but a kind of living carpet of warmth and scent that did not belong to the grove nor to any room I had ever entered. The world reassembled around me in a rush of fresh air, a chorus of sounds I could not yet name, and the heavy, damp memory of old stone pressing into my back. The Hel gate had shown me its memory and offered me a path. The pendant lay against my chest, almost politely now, as if it understood that I was not yet ready to call this a victory. The room I stood in wasn’t a room at all, but a space between spaces, a waystation that seemed to exist only because I had chosen to walk through the seam. The shadows moved with the kind of patience I knew too well, the patience of a predator that has learned to wait for the precise moment it needs to act. I rose, careful not to disturb the delicate balance of this place. The memory behind me pressed against my thoughts with the force of a whisper, begging me to recognise the debt I owed to those who came before me, to the earth that held me, to the heart that beat with a stubborn rhythm that refused to go away. The wrongness remained, but with it came a glimmer of purpose. The path ahead would not be easy, and I did not know what awaited me on the other side of that pale corridor. Yet I suspected the answer lay not in cunning or bravado but in listening, in accepting that the grove may take more than it gives and that sometimes the way home is to walk through the gate and carry the gate’s memory with you. I did not look back once as the passage widened again and then narrowed, as if something in the world had decided to tighten around a thread. The Heartstone’s warmth steadied at my chest, a quiet, constant flame that claimed no glory and asked for nothing beyond a quiet commitment to stay true to what lay beyond the glow. The last thing I felt before the tunnel closed behind me was the soft brush of air on my cheek and the memory of the grove’s patient breath, as if it had exhaled a warning to remember: If you come here again, you bring more than yourself with you. And I understood that the chapter I had entered would not close with a neat bow or a promise of relief. It would close with the next breath, and a memory that would insist on becoming part of me, whether I wished it or not.