Run: 2026-02-19-01KHVPFGPPGVYTWVTRX6E47A2V

Rory pushed through the overgrown gorse, ignoring the damp chill of the London night seeping through her delivery jacket. Her flashlight beam cut a pale swath through the darkness of Richmond Park. She had strayed far from the paved paths, walking for nearly an hour, navigating entirely by the strange, rhythmic heat radiating against her sternum. She reached beneath her collar and pulled the silver chain free. The pendant, a deep crimson gemstone roughly the size of a thumbnail, cast a sickeningly red, faint inner glow across her pale knuckles. It was pulsing. A slow, steady throb that felt too much like a second heartbeat. Her unknown benefactor had never explained what the stone was, only that it would keep her safe. But right now, wrapping her cold fingers around the warm gem, Rory felt anything but safe. Ahead of her, the trees parted. Four ancient oak trunks rose from the soil, their bark stripped pale by time, looming like rotting teeth against the starless sky. The standing stones. This was it. Rory stepped between the silent oaks. The air pressure changed instantly, popping in her ears. The distant, humdrum roar of the A3 highway vanished, replaced by an absolute, suffocating stillness. She swept her flashlight across the clearing. The beam illuminated a carpet of wildflowers in full, unnatural bloom. Violets, bluebells, and pale snowdrops tangled together, oblivious to the autumn frost outside the boundary line. They looked bruised in the artificial light, their scent thick and cloying, sticking to the back of her throat like cheap perfume. She was supposed to meet a Fae contact here. A quick drop-off. A simple detour after her last delivery run for the Golden Empress. Yu-Fei would be expecting her back to cash out the till, but time moved differently in the Grove. An hour pacing among these flowers might be only three minutes on the streets of London. Or it might be three days. Rory pushed that thought aside. Cool-headed. That was her reputation. Panic was an inefficient use of energy. But as she stood in the center of the clearing, the intense silence began to fray. A wet snap echoed behind her. Rory pivoted, the flashlight beam darting toward the oak standing stones. Nothing. Just the twisted, skeletal branches of the trees reaching into the void. Hello, Rory called out. Her voice fell flat, swallowed instantly by the thick air. Something shifted at the very edge of her vision. A blur of movement, darker than the night, slipping behind the thickest of the oak trunks. Rory swallowed. She rubbed her left wrist, her right thumb tracing the small crescent-shaped scar exactly the way she used to whenever her ex Evan cornered her in their old flat. Action, she reminded herself. Think outside the box. Do not freeze. She took a step back, her boots crushing a patch of pristine bluebells. The flowers let out a faint, wet hiss as they broke. The pendant against her chest flared hotter. It was no longer a gentle, reassuring warmth. It was the heat of a fever. It burned against her skin through the thin cotton of her dark shirt. A Hel portal. Silas had mentioned them once, leaning over the polished mahogany of his bar downstairs from her flat. Rifts to a rotting underworld that leached the life out of everything they touched. The Heartstone was supposed to warn her. It was doing its job. Another snap. Closer this time. To her left. She snapped the light toward the sound. The beam flickered, the battery draining unnaturally fast, dimming to a sickly yellow circle. In that fading light, the wildflowers were no longer swaying in an unfelt breeze. They were wilting. The petals curled inward, turning brown and sloughing off the stems like dead skin. The cloying floral scent rotted into the stench of sulfur and old, stagnant pond water. The wrongness of the place settled heavily on her shoulders. The Fae Grove was a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm, a sanctuary of endless spring. Something was decaying it from the inside out. A wet, dragging sound started up from the far edge of the tree line. It did not sound like footsteps. It sounded like heavy, sodden canvas being pulled over jagged rocks. Rory backed toward the standing stones where she had entered, keeping the fading beam dead ahead. I am leaving, she said aloud, her voice steady despite the adrenaline spiking in her veins. I do not belong here, and I am leaving. The dragging stopped. The silence that followed was infinitely worse. It felt expectant. Rory turned to face the entrance. The four oak sentinels stood exactly where they had been. But the space between them, the gap that led back out into the dreary, comforting damp of Richmond Park, was gone. Between the pale trunks stretched a shimmering, oily film of darkness. It looked like the surface of a polluted river viewed at midnight. She stepped forward, her bright blue eyes scanning the perimeter. There had to be a way out. She was not a victim anymore. She had fled Cardiff, fled Evan, built a life from scratch in London. She was not going to die in a hidden patch of rotting Fae real estate. The heartbeat of the deep crimson stone spiked. It was scorching her collarbone. She grabbed the silver chain, pulling the gem out over her shirt so it would not blister her skin. The jewel threw a blood-red glare across the clearing. In the red light, she saw the shadow detaching itself from the oak trunk. It was tall. Impossibly tall, its limbs stretched like pulled taffy. It had no discernible features, just a shifting mass of cold, dense vapor that seemed to absorb the light from both her fading flashlight and the glowing pendant. Rory drew in a sharp breath. The air temperature plummeted. Her breath plumed in front of her face in ragged white clouds. Frost crawled up the stems of the dead wildflowers, snapping them into frozen needles. The entity did not rush her. It did not roar or reveal rows of jagged teeth. That restraint made it utterly terrifying. It simply drifted, closing the distance with that same agonizingly slow, dragging sound. The very ground seemed to reject it, freezing and dying beneath whatever passed for its feet. Her mind raced. The time distortion in the Grove worked against her. She had been standing here for what felt like minutes, but to an immortal creature bleeding through a portal, she may have been trapped in its gaze for hours. It had studied her. It had waited until her light began to die. She backed away alongside the outer boundary marked by the stones, scanning the oily darkness trapping her inside. Her straight, shoulder-length black hair whipped across her face as an unnatural wind kicked up, blowing from the center of the clearing outward. The entity was projecting the cold. To her right, the surface of one of the pale oaks seemed to ripple. The wood was warping under the influence of the cold, but the Fae magic still lingered in the roots. Think. Fae magic and Hel magic were incompatible. The entity raised a limb. A long, dark extension pointing directly at her chest. Pointing at the pendant. It did not want her. It wanted the Heartstone. Rory gripped the silver chain tighter. The jewel was hot enough to brand her, but she refused to let go. If it wanted the stone, she could use that. She broke into a run, sprinting in a wide arc around the clearing. The dead, frosted wildflowers crunched loudly beneath her boots. The entity turned, tracking her movement without haste. It drifted diagonally to cut her off. Rory aimed for the warping oak standing stone. The oily film of darkness stretched tight against its bark. Fae boundary on one side, Hel barrier on the other. She slid to a halt ten feet from the barrier, her breath burning in her lungs. The shadow loomed behind her, the unbearable absolute zero of its presence biting into her spine. She ripped the silver chain from her neck. The deep crimson gem dangled from her fingers, casting angry red reflections across the black barrier blocking the exit. Fetch, Rory hissed. She hurled the Heartstone directly at the oily film between the oak trees. The entity lunged. Its slow stalk shattered into sudden, violent speed, a blur of freezing darkness diving after the glowing red arc of the pendant. The Heartstone struck the black barrier. The clash of the artifact and the freezing void of the Hel portal triggered a violent shockwave. A blinding flash of red and white light erupted, followed by a sound like a pane of glass the size of the sky shattering into dust. The shockwave knocked Rory off her feet. She hit the frozen earth hard, the breath driven from her lungs. Above her, the oily darkness between the standing stones ripped open. The entity emitted a high, mechanical sound of pure static as the collapsing barrier sucked it backward. Rory scrambled to her feet, ignoring the scraped skin on her palms. The gap between the oaks was clear. Beyond them, she could see the muddy, fog-covered grass of Richmond park. The comforting, distant drone of London traffic filtered back into the air. She did not look back to see if the flowers were still blooming. She sprinted between the massive pale trunks, bursting out of the Fae Grove and into the freezing damp of the normal world. Rory collapsed onto her knees in the wet grass. She dragged freezing, normal mud-scented oxygen into her lungs, trembling uncontrollably. She instinctively reached up to her collarbone. The silver chain was gone. The heat was gone. She looked back at the four ancient oaks. In the dim light of the city sky, they were just trees again. Silent. Ordinary. She was alone in the dark. But as she touched the fading warmth on her chest, Rory knew with absolute certainty that the thing in the Grove was only waiting for her to come back.