Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W7QJRWVC18X0WWMTRP3CJ

The last dog walker had left Richmond Park an hour ago. Rory watched the final torchlight bob along the path toward the Roehampton Gate until it shrank to a pinprick and vanished, and then she climbed the fence. The iron railing bit cold through her gloves. She dropped onto soft earth on the other side, her boots sinking into turf that had gone spongy with three days of rain. The park spread before her in shades of charcoal — the skeletal canopy of oaks against a sky smeared with London's amber light pollution, the long slope of open grassland where deer sometimes bedded down. No deer tonight. She'd noticed that. The dark meadow lay empty, the grass undisturbed. She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. The map she'd screenshotted from Eva's notes showed a route that cut northwest through the Isabella Plantation and into a section of old-growth woodland that didn't appear on the official park maps. The Fae Grove. Isolde's grove. Whatever you wanted to call the place that shouldn't exist in a public park in Zone 4. The Heartstone Pendant rested against her collarbone beneath two layers of fabric, and she pressed her fingers to it through her jacket. Cool. Inert. That was fine. She wasn't looking for a Hel portal tonight. She was looking for answers. The footpath crunched under her boots. Gravel, then packed dirt, then something softer as she left the maintained trail and pushed into the trees. Branches scraped her shoulders. She kept her phone's torch aimed low, the beam catching root systems that erupted from the soil like the knuckles of buried hands. The smell changed — wet bark and leaf mould giving way to something sweeter, almost cloying. Night-blooming jasmine, maybe. In November. Rory stopped walking. She stood in the dark between two oaks and listened. The city noise had faded. Not gradually, the way sound drops off when you move further from a road, but abruptly, as if someone had pressed a thumb over the speaker of the world. No distant traffic. No planes descending toward Heathrow. No foxes screaming in the undergrowth. Just her breath, and the creak of wood above her, and something else — a low, arrhythmic tapping, like a fingernail against glass. She turned her head. The sound stopped. "Right," she whispered. She walked on. The oaks grew closer together the deeper she went. Their trunks had thickened beyond anything natural, bark split into deep vertical fissures that gaped like open mouths. Eva's notes had mentioned standing stones, but these weren't stones. They were trees that had forgotten how to be trees — petrified in some halfway state, their wood gone to something dense and mineral, grey as granite under her torchlight. She ran her hand along one as she passed. Cold. Hard. It did not feel like bark. The standing stones marked the boundary. She was at the edge. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between the trunks. Bluebells and foxglove and things she couldn't name, all blooming in vivid defiance of the season, their petals slightly luminous in the dark. Not reflecting her torchlight. Generating their own. A faint bioluminescence, blue-white at the margins, that gave the undergrowth the appearance of shallow water. She switched off her phone torch. The flowers provided enough light to see by — just barely. Enough to make out the clearing ahead, a rough circle perhaps thirty feet across, bounded by more of the petrified oaks. The Fae Grove. It was smaller than she'd imagined. Quieter, too. The air hung still. No breeze moved the flowers. Nothing moved at all. Rory stepped into the clearing. The ground beneath her feet felt different. Harder. Each step produced a faint resonance, as if the earth were hollow underneath. She knelt and brushed the grass aside. Beneath the thin layer of soil, her fingertips met stone — smooth, fitted stone, like a floor. She straightened up and turned in a slow circle, scanning the perimeter. That was when she noticed the flowers had stopped glowing behind her. Not all of them — just along the path she'd walked in on. A corridor of darkness cut through the luminescent carpet, stretching back into the woods. The light had died in a perfect line, as though something had followed her trail and extinguished each bloom as it passed. The dark corridor ended about fifteen feet from where she stood. Whatever had been following it had stopped there. Rory held very still. Her hand moved to the pendant at her throat — still cool, still inert, its crimson facets dark beneath her shirt. Not a Hel portal, then. Something else. "I know you're there," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was grateful for that, because the rest of her had gone rigid, every muscle locked in the ancient calculus of fight or flee. Nothing answered. But the darkness at the end of the corridor shifted. Not movement, exactly. More like a rearrangement. The shadows between the nearest petrified oaks deepened and consolidated, gaining a density that shadows shouldn't have. She could feel it — a weight in the air, a pressure against her skin, the way you feel a hand hovering just above your arm before it touches. The tapping started again. Closer now. Not a fingernail against glass — she'd been wrong about that. It was a clicking, wet and organic, like a tongue unsticking from the roof of a mouth. Click. Click. Click. Arrhythmic. Almost exploratory, as if whatever produced the sound was tasting the air. Rory took one step backward. Her heel hit the stone beneath the soil and produced that hollow resonance, and the clicking stopped. Silence. Then, from directly behind her: breathing. Not her own. She knew the rhythm of her own breath, and this was wrong — too slow, too deep, with a ragged undertone that sounded like air being drawn through wet cloth. It was close enough that she should have felt it on the back of her neck. She didn't. Whatever breathed behind her produced no warmth. She didn't turn around. Every instinct screamed at her to spin, to look, to confront whatever stood at her back. She locked her knees and held her ground and kept her eyes forward in the dark, because some buried part of her understood with absolute clarity that turning around was exactly what it wanted. The breathing drew closer. The pressure against her skin intensified — not physical contact, but the promise of it, the charge before the spark. The pendant at her throat remained cold. Whatever this was, it wasn't from Hel. It belonged here. It was native to this place, to this impossible clearing with its hollow stone floor and its year-round flowers and its petrified sentinels. She'd walked into someone's home uninvited. "I came to talk," Rory said. She kept her voice low. Calm. The barrister's daughter, trained from childhood in the architecture of controlled speech, in the way tone could defuse or escalate. "I was told I could find answers here. About the pendant. About what's happening in the city." The breathing paused. Then something cold grazed the back of her left hand — not a touch, lighter than that, the brush of a single fingertip tracing the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. It lingered there. Pressed, gently, into the old raised tissue. Rory's vision blurred. For an instant — less than a second — she saw the clearing as it existed in some other frequency. The petrified oaks blazed with silver light. The stone floor beneath the grass was carved with symbols that spiraled inward toward the center of the grove, and at the center stood something tall and pale, with too many joints in its limbs and a face made of overlapping angles that her mind refused to assemble into features. She blinked and it was gone. The grove returned to its dim blue glow, its silence, its emptiness. Except the flowers behind her had all gone dark now. Every single one. The only light came from the blooms at the far edge of the clearing, a thin crescent of bioluminescence that illuminated nothing useful. And the stone beneath her feet had grown warm. The pendant pulsed once against her collarbone. Not its usual response — not the steady warmth that signaled a Hel portal. This was a single sharp throb, like a heartbeat, and then nothing. A warning shot. A signal flare fired into the dark of her ribcage. The clicking resumed. Not from one direction now but from several — from the trees to her left, from the darkness behind her, from somewhere beneath the hollow stone floor. Multiple sources. Multiple mouths. The sound filled the clearing from every angle, overlapping and asynchronous, building in speed and volume until it became continuous, a wet rattling chatter that vibrated in her teeth. Rory bolted. She didn't choose a direction so much as her legs chose it for her — forward, toward the last remaining light, through the gap between two standing oaks that still held a thin vein of luminescence in their bark. Branches whipped her face. Something grabbed at her jacket — not hands, something fibrous and strong, root or vine, wrapping her elbow with a grip that tore fabric when she wrenched free. The park materialized around her with the violence of a cold plunge. Traffic noise crashed back in. A plane roared overhead, landing gear visible against the clouds. Her boots hit gravel, a maintained path, and she ran until her lungs burned and the fence appeared before her in the streetlight glow. She hit the iron railing at full speed and climbed it with shaking hands. On the pavement outside Richmond Park, under a functioning streetlamp, a night bus hissing past on the road behind her, Rory bent double and pressed her hands to her knees and gasped until the black spots left her vision. Her left wrist throbbed. She pushed her sleeve back. The crescent-shaped scar, the one she'd carried since she was seven years old, had turned black. Not bruised. Not discolored. Black, as if someone had filled the old wound with ink. And beneath her shirt, the Heartstone Pendant pulsed with a warmth that hadn't been there before — faint, steady, and oriented not toward any Hel portal she knew of, but back toward the park. Back toward the grove. Back toward whatever had touched her and learned her name without asking.