Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W0EHT7N18ECFJAFPNYPVV

Rory pulled her jacket tighter against the night chill. The air in Richmond Park after sunset held a damp, earthy bite that seeped through her clothes. The Heartstone pendant, tucked beneath her sweater, was a steady, warm weight against her sternum. It had been pulsing softly all evening, a persistent, silent alarm clock she couldn’t ignore. It had led her here, to this specific, forgotten corner of the park, where the ancient oak standing stones formed a rough circle just visible in the gloom. She’d come because she had to. The pendant’s behavior was the only clue she had about the Hel portals, and Dymas, the man who’d given it to her, was long gone. Answers weren’t going to walk into Silas’s bar. She had to go looking, even if it meant trespassing in a closed park, even if every instinct told her this was a profoundly stupid idea. From the moment she’d slipped between the moss-covered stones, the air had changed. It wasn’t just colder; it was stiller, as if the very molecules had stopped vibrating. The distant hum of London traffic vanished, replaced by a thick, cottony silence that pressed against her eardrums. The Fae Grove, Isolde’s domain. According to the codex, time moved differently here. Rory checked her watch; the digital face was dark, frozen at 10:17 PM, the moment she’d crossed the threshold. “Great,” she muttered, her voice swallowed by the clearing. The wildflowers, which supposedly bloomed year-round, were there, but their colors were leached in the moonlight, pale blues and yellows looking like faded bruises on the dark grass. Their scent was too sweet, cloying, like overripe fruit just beginning to ferment. She walked slowly toward the center of the clearing, the damp grass whispering against her boots. The reason she’d come was to see if the Grove itself was a portal, or a stabilizer for one. The pendant’s warmth had spiked as she entered. Now, it was a constant, low-grade heat, like a fever. Then came the first wrong sound. It was a scrape. Not the scrape of a branch, but something harder, like stone on stone. It came from her left, near the perimeter of standing stones. Rory froze, her bright blue eyes scanning the darkness. Nothing moved. The stones stood sentinel, blacker shapes against the black. She forced a breath, the cool-headed part of her brain engaging. *Animal. Probably a fox. Or a badger.* She took another step. The scrape came again, this time from her right. A perfect mirror of the first sound. Her head snapped around. Again, nothing. The silence rushed back in, heavier than before. The sweet smell of the flowers sharpened, tickling the back of her throat. *You’re not alone.* The thought wasn’t a panic; it was a cold, clinical assessment. The certainty settled in her gut like a stone. The Grove was a pocket between worlds. Things could be here that weren’t entirely of hers. Rory’s hand went to the pendant through her sweater. Its pulse seemed to quicken in time with her own heartbeat. She decided to test a theory. She took three deliberate steps forward. *Scritch-scritch-scrape.* From behind her now. Not a single sound, but a series, like something with long, hard claws was dragging itself over the root-veined earth. She didn’t turn. Turning would acknowledge it. Instead, she looked straight ahead, focusing on a particularly large oak stone at the clearing’s far edge. Her mind, trained for argument and quick thinking, raced. *It’s herding you. Or mirroring you. For every movement you make, it makes one.* She stopped. The silence was absolute for a count of ten. Then, from the exact spot where she stood, she heard a faint, wet *shhhhk* sound, as if something had just licked its lips. Aurora Carter did not scream. A chill, sharper than the night air, shot down her spine, but she clamped down on the fear. Out-of-the-box thinking. If it was mimicking her location… She sidestepped quickly, two paces to the left. The licking sound came again, from her new, original position. *Okay. It’s not following me. It’s… echoing me. But delayed.* The wrongness of it was profound. It wasn’t a physical threat she could see and outrun; it was a violation of space, of presence. She began to walk, not toward the edge, but in a slow, wide circle around the clearing’s interior. *Scrape. Shuffle. Scritch.* The sounds followed her path, but always a few seconds behind, always from the ground where her feet had just been. It was studying her gait. Learning her rhythm. Then, at the edge of her vision, something moved. Not an animal shape, but a distortion, like heat haze off summer pavement, only it was night-cold. It flickered where she had been standing moments before, a faint shimmer that suggested a crouched form. When she focused on it directly, it was gone. The pendant throbbed, a sudden wave of heat that was almost painful. *Near a Hel portal.* The Grove wasn’t the portal. Something *in* the Grove was. Or had opened one. A new sound began. A whisper. It wasn’t words, not at first. It was the rustle of dead leaves, the sigh of wind through a crack, but it held a cadence, an intelligence. It seemed to come from all around, from the flowers, from the stones, from the earth itself. “—alone here—” The whisper was a dry, papery thing. It echoed her earlier thought. Rory’s breath hitched. She saw her own breath mist in the air, a pale plume. The temperature was dropping fast. “—stay a while—” This whisper came from right beside her ear. She flinched, stumbling back. Her left wrist, where the small crescent-shaped scar from a childhood bicycle fall stood pale against her skin, tingled with a phantom ache. The shimmer appeared again, this time closer. It lingered longer. She could make out a suggestion of limbs, too long, too thin, folded at wrong angles. It didn’t move like a creature. It *unfolded*, segment by segment, from the spot where she’d heard the lick. Its head—if it was a head—was a dark blotch that seemed to drink the moonlight. The whispers coalesced. They weren’t repeating her thoughts anymore. They were digging. “Cardiff… smells of rain and law books… disappointment…” Her father’s study. The weight of expected futures. “Evan… says you still jump at slamming doors…” A cold fury cut through her fear. That was hers. That memory was a locked box. “No,” Rory said, and her voice was steady, flat. It was the voice she used when dealing with drunk patrons in Silas’s bar, the voice that brooked no nonsense. “You don’t get that.” The thing shimmered, halted. The whispering stuttered. Rory’s mind was clear, cold. It was drawing on her, on her presence, on her memories. An echo needs a source. The Grove messed with time. What if this thing was a temporal echo, something spilled from a Hel portal, and it was using her *now* to anchor itself *here*? It needed her timeline. The pendant was burning hot. The portal was active. *It* was the portal, or it was clinging to one. She didn’t run. Running would create more echo, more data for it to use. Instead, she did the opposite. She went utterly still. She closed her eyes, shutting out the ghastly shimmer. She focused on her breathing, in and out. She thought of nothing. Not the law books, not the slammed doors, not the warm, spicy smell of the Golden Empress kitchen. She thought of static. Of white noise. The whispers became frantic, confused. “—silence?—where is—?—give us the shape—” The scraping started again, frantic now, circling her. She felt a cold draft, like the passage of something large and insubstantial, brushing the hairs on her arm. The sweet-rotten flower smell was overpowering, making her head swim. Still, she held. She was a void. An empty space in the clearing. With a sound like a sigh of immense relief, the pressure in the clearing shifted. The cold eased a fraction. The whispering faded to a faint, resentful hiss that seemed to seep into the ground. Rory opened her eyes. The shimmer was gone. The clearing was just a clearing again, silent but for the natural rustle of night breeze in distant trees. The traffic hum of London was back, faint but real. She looked at her watch. It flickered, then updated: 10:19 PM. Two minutes. It had felt like an hour. The Heartstone’s warmth receded to its usual, barely-there pulse. The threat, the wrongness, was gone. For now. She turned and walked back toward the standing stones, her legs trembling slightly now that the adrenaline was receding. She didn’t look back. She knew it hadn’t been defeated, only frustrated. It had tasted her memory, her fear. It knew her shape now. As she passed between the oak stones, leaving the Fae Grove behind, one final, paper-dry whisper chased her, so faint it might have been the wind. “—next time, Rory—” She broke into a run, the true dark of the normal park feeling like a sanctuary. She had come for answers. She’d found one, terrible and clear: some doors, once opened, remember the hand that turned the knob.