Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TXDQAAPFAZCTNTCSYB4BZ

The standing stones were wrong. Rory noticed it the moment she ducked beneath the low-hanging branch that marked the informal threshold to the grove — the way her eyes slid off the nearest oak as if the bark itself refused to be looked at directly. She blinked. Looked again. The stone was there, solid and ancient, three feet wide and shouldered with pale lichen. Nothing wrong with it. She was just tired. She'd cycled from the Kew Road gate in the dark and her eyes were still adjusting, and the moon was thin and the path through Richmond Park at half past eleven on a Tuesday was not exactly well-lit. She breathed out through her nose and stepped inside the boundary. The grove received her the way it always did — a faint pressure change, like descent in an aeroplane, her ears popping once and then settling. The temperature shifted, not warmer exactly, but less cold. More neutral. The air tasted green. Overhead, the canopy closed over the clearing in a rough circle, and through it she could see a scatter of stars that had not been visible from the park path, which probably meant something, though she'd never worked out precisely what. The wildflowers were blooming. Of course they were. It was November, and they bloomed regardless, pale clusters of them catching whatever vestigial light filtered down through the branches. She'd stopped being surprised by that weeks ago. She picked her way to the centre of the clearing and crouched to check the ground, looking for the marker she'd left at her last visit — a small flat stone with a scratch across it, her own crude notation system, nothing magic about it, just a way to track where exactly she'd stood when the pendant had last reacted. She found the stone, confirmed the scratch, and straightened up. She pressed two fingers to the Heartstone through the fabric of her jacket. It sat cool and inert against her sternum. Which was the whole problem. She'd come because it had stopped. Four days ago the pendant had pulsed warm the moment she'd stepped inside the grove boundary — a steady, faint throb she'd come to recognise, not unpleasant, like holding a hand to a radiator in another room. But yesterday it had gone quiet. Today it had remained quiet. She'd needed to know whether the quiet was in the stone or in the location, and the only way to know that was to come back at the same time, on foot, the same approach route, and stand in the same spot and pay attention. She counted to thirty. The pendant stayed cold. She unclenched her jaw. Fine. She'd note this and leave. She became aware of the silence only as she was turning to go — becoming aware the way you become aware of a noise that has stopped, that retroactive recognition of an absence. The grove had been quiet when she'd arrived, but there had been background: the distant mutter of the A316, the creak of branches, some small animal foraging somewhere in the undergrowth. She hadn't been conscious of listening for those things, but now that they were gone she felt their absence like a pressure against her eardrums. She stood still. The wildflowers at the edge of the clearing moved. A slow, continuous ripple along the nearest cluster, like fingers running through hair. There was no wind. Rory did not run. She'd learned, somewhere between Cardiff and here, between one version of herself and this one, that running was the thing that made situations worse, that cool was a skill and not a temperament. She turned a slow full circle, eyes tracking the perimeter between the standing stones. The oak trunks were dark. The spaces between them were darker. She counted eight visible gaps around the clearing's edge, the interstices where the boundary had its weak points, and she watched each of them in turn the way she'd learned to read a room when she'd lived with Evan — not looking for the threat directly, but holding her attention wide, catching movement in the periphery before it resolved into anything she had to name. There was nothing. And the nothing was very loud. She touched the pendant again, bare skin this time, working her fingers beneath her collar. Still cold. Still quiet. She took two steps toward the north exit, the way she'd come, and stopped. Something was breathing. It wasn't nearby — or rather, she couldn't tell how near it was, because the grove did things to sound, bent it around the canopy and redirected it at angles that made distance impossible to estimate. But it was regular. Slow. Patient. An in-breath that lasted slightly too long and an out-breath that released with something almost like consideration, as if whatever was producing it was doing so thoughtfully, deliberately. As if it had noticed she was listening and was letting her listen. The hair lifted on the back of her neck with an almost clinical precision. She moved to the exit. Not running. Measured, deliberate steps, her weight forward, her hands free. Three steps from the north gap between two of the standing oaks, she glanced back once — a quick check, nothing more — and in the centre of the clearing, exactly where she'd been crouching to look at her marked stone, there was a shape. It was dark. It was roughly human in outline. It was quite still, in the manner of things that do not need to move because they are not afraid of you, and the difference between that kind of stillness and all other kinds is something the body understands before the mind does. The clearing was forty feet wide. The moon had slipped behind the canopy. She could not see the shape's face and she did not want to. The Heartstone pressed against her fingers, still cold, still silent — and in its silence she understood something that hadn't occurred to her before: warmth near a Hel portal. The pendant pulsed near portals. Near doors. Near openings. The absence of warmth didn't mean nothing was here. It meant she was not near a door. It meant whatever was in this clearing with her had not come through one. She stepped back through the standing stones, met the cold air of the park on the other side, and walked — still not running, still measured, though her hands were shaking now and she could feel her heart in her throat — walked until the stones were behind her, until the pressure in her ears popped again and the sound of the A316 came back and gravel crunched under her trainers. She did not look back. She'd learned that too, somewhere between one city and another. She walked until she found the path. Then she allowed herself to pedal fast. Behind her, through the treeline, through the standing oaks and the inert stone boundary she had always believed kept things out as much as it kept the grove concealed, something exhaled. Long. Slow. Patient. She didn't hear it. But her left wrist ached, the small crescent scar gone suddenly cold, and she'd stopped dismissing things like that weeks ago.