Run: 2026-02-19-01KHVP23EV4NQEC3XNGME91YYQ

Richmond Park stretched into a sea of absolute black. Rory stood at the perimeter. The ancient oak standing stones loomed ahead, stripped of leaves, their heavy trunks twisted into shapes resembling splintered bones. Isolde’s grove. The boundary line into a pocket dimension. She stepped past the petrified wood. The air shifted the moment her boots crossed the threshold. The familiar hum of London traffic, the distant, unending drone of the M4, vanished. Silence slammed into her ears. An unnatural, suffocating quiet hung over the clearing. Beneath her, wildflowers blanketed the soil, blooming in a riot of colors the moonless night bled into shades of gray. The blossoms opened wide, drinking in the freezing midnight air. Fae territory bred impossibilities. Winter or summer, the Richmond grove stayed eternally in bloom. Rory rubbed her left wrist. Her thumb traced the crescent-shaped scar, a physical grounding ritual. She came here for a name. The unknown benefactor who dropped the artifact into her life needed to answer for the chaos unspooling in her wake. Yu-Fei’s restaurant, Silas’s bar, the flat in the city—none of it felt secure anymore. She brought the object back to the source. Against her collarbone, a dull heat stirred. Rory hooked a finger under the silver chain, pulling the thumbnail-sized gemstone from beneath her jacket collar. The deep crimson facets pulsed. A faint inner glow cast a sickly red sheen over her throat. It vibrated. A rhythmic, thudding warmth seeped into her skin. Hel. The Heartstone only reacted to under-realm rifts. The grove belonged to the Fae court. A Hel portal inside an Earth-bound boundary meant a severe, deliberate breach. The magic in the air felt infected. A violent crack echoed through the clearing. Rory dropped into a crouch. Her bright blue eyes scanned the darkness, tracking the silhouettes of the oak stones. The noise originated from the forest canopy, not the forest floor. A wet, heavy thud followed. Something dropped from the branches. "Show yourself." Nothing moved. The blooming wildflowers swayed, though no breeze disturbed the heavy air. Rory remained motionless. She possessed no weapons, just quick, out-of-the-box reasoning and an artifact she barely understood. Running back out past the oak stones meant turning her back to the dark. Her legal-trained mind demanded logic, sifting through angles and environmental escapes. She noted the distance to the outer standing stones. Twenty paces. She spotted a dense thicket of briars to the east. Impassable. A low scraping noise drifted from her left. Wood dragging across stone. The heels of her boots ground into the soil. She kept her gaze fixed on the periphery. Another scrape. A rhythmic, uneven slide-and-thud. Someone—or something—paced the perimeter of the standing stones, keeping just outside her direct line of sight. She focused on the gaps between the massive oaks. The darkness congealed. A cluster of twisted branches detached itself from a trunk, stretching unnaturally long before snapping back into place. Her brain processed the shadows as threats, assembling limbs out of empty space. A faint, rhythmic clicking broke the silence. Teeth chattering. Rory exhaled a sharp breath. The air bloomed around her mouth in a thick white cloud. The temperature plunged well below freezing in the span of a single heartbeat. The cloying Fae scent of crushed pearls and ozone vanished, replaced entirely by the stench of an open cellar. The wildflowers curled inward, petals blackening and shriveling against the unnatural frost. She unzipped her jacket pocket, fishing out her phone. The screen blazed to life, casting harsh light over the dying flora. The digital clock read 11:42 PM. She tapped the flashlight icon. The LED strobed once, flickered, and died. The battery drained from eighty percent to three in a fraction of a second. The clock warped, numbers glitching into garbled symbols before the screen went entirely black. Time distortion. The pocket grove swallowed hours and spat out minutes. She risked standing in this exact spot for days in the outside world, trapped in a single, endlessly stretching night. The clicking grew louder. It echoed from the opposite direction now. Her right. "I have the pendant." Rory held the silver chain out, dangling the Heartstone from her fist. The crimson glow intensified, spilling a pooling, bloody light over her boots and the frostbitten soil. The warmth escalated to a searing brand against her palm. She ignored the pain. "You want it. Come take it." The clicking stopped abruptly. A profound, inescapable wrongness crashed down on her shoulders. The invisible weight bowed her spine. Evan’s intimidation tactics back in Cardiff used to make her pulse race with adrenaline, a primitive biological response to a physical threat. This struck deeper. This bypassed the nervous system and injected ice straight into her marrow. The certainty of outnumbering, of being hunted by things that defied natural law, settled heavy in her gut. A silhouette carved itself out of the negative space beside the largest oak stone twenty feet ahead. It stood too tall. The proportions defied basic anatomy. Limbs hung like loose ropes, swinging with a jerky, disjointed rhythm. It didn't step forward. It glided, the ongoing dragging sound entirely out of sync with its physical movements. Rory forced her legs to hold steady. She refused to retreat. She categorized and cataloged the approaching shape, stripping away the supernatural dread to locate a mechanical weakness. No eyes visible. No face. Just a void wrapped in peeling, gray tissue. The creature tilted an elongated head. The air pressure dropped violently. Rory's ears popped. The Heartstone pulsed a frantic, erratic beat against her knuckles. The crimson light flared, illuminating the creature's lower half. Pale, translucent flesh stretched tight over jagged, protruding joints. The thing possessed too many articulation points. Knees bent backward. Ankles rotated at impossible angles. Rory snatched a heavy fallen branch from the frost-covered ground. She tested the weight, wrapping both hands around the textured bark. The wood felt brittle, slick with frozen condensation. "Last chance to stay in the dark." A guttural hiss scraped against the inside of her skull, bypassing her auditory canals entirely. The creature stepped into the perimeter ring, crossing the boundary of the oak stones. Then, three more shadows peeled themselves away from the surrounding trees. Rory backed away, her boot heel hitting the central altar stone of the clearing. Solid rock blocked her escape. The shadows synced their movements. Slide. Drag. Thud. They corralled her toward the center, closing the circle. The blinding red glow of the pendant revealed more anomalies lurking deeper in the trees, a dozen pairs of elongated limbs weaving through the petrified wood. The collective chattering of invisible teeth drowned out the sound of her own harsh breathing. The vast isolation of Richmond Park compressed into a tiny, inescapable cage. The wrongness saturated every frozen blade of grass, every withered flower petal. She tightened her grip on the makeshift weapon. The pendant burned a blister into her palm, marking her skin with the heat of the under-realm.