Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WHSAXPT8DN7TXEE3T790C

The gravel path through Richmond Park crunched under Rory’s boots, a solitary sound in the profound stillness of the night. The Heartstone Pendant was a live coal against her sternum, its warmth bleeding through her jumper. It had been pulling her here for days, a persistent, silent tug behind her ribs that had finally overridden her better judgment. The rational part of her, the part forged by a barrister father and a life of measured decisions, told her to turn back. But the part that had fled Cardiff in the dead of night, the part that now lived above a bar and delivered Chinese food, knew that some doors, once opened, couldn’t be shut. She found the standing stones not by sight, but by the sudden drop in temperature. One moment she was in the ordinary, if deeply shadowed, parkland; the next, the ancient oaks rose around her like slumbering giants, forming a rough circle. The air within the Grove was different. It smelled of damp earth and something sweeter, like crushed petals and ozone. Moonlight, which had been weak and diffuse outside, fell here in sharp, silver pools, illuminating the wildflowers that carpeted the clearing. They did bloom year-round, just as the stories said. Tonight, their colors were leached to monochrome, but their presence was a wrongness in itself, a defiance of the sleeping winter world beyond the stones. Rory stepped across the threshold, the pendant giving a distinct, slow throb of heat. She paused, listening. The night sounds of the park—the distant rustle of deer, the sigh of wind—had vanished. Here, there was only a dense, watchful silence. It was the silence of a held breath. She moved forward, her own breathing loud in her ears. The crescent scar on her left wrist itched, a nervous habit she thought she’d broken. She rubbed it absently, the raised tissue familiar under her thumb. *Cool-headed*, she reminded herself. *Out-of-the-box*. Right now, the box felt very small, and the world outside it very large and very dark. A soft crunch, like a footstep on dry leaves, came from her left. She froze, head snapping toward the sound. Nothing. Just the stark, moonlit trunk of an oak and the deep velvet black of shadow beneath it. She waited, counting her heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. Nothing moved. “Just an animal,” she whispered, the words swallowed by the silence. She walked toward the center of the clearing, where the flowers grew thickest. The pendant’s warmth was a constant now, a second heartbeat. She pulled it out from under her jumper, the deep crimson gemstone catching the moonlight. It glowed from within, a faint pulse of light that matched the rhythm of the heat. *When near a Hel portal*, the note from her unknown benefactor had said. She didn’t know what a Hel portal was, but the name alone was enough to coil ice in her stomach. Another sound. This one wasn’t a crunch. It was a whisper, so faint it could have been the blood rushing in her own ears. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, a sibilant thread woven through the air. It didn’t form words, but it had the *shape* of words, the cadence of speech. Rory’s hand closed tightly around the pendant. The silver chain bit into the back of her neck. *Think*. She was here for a reason. The pendant was a guide, or a key. Or bait. The thought arrived, cold and unwelcome. What if Evan hadn’t been the only predator in her life? What if something else had been watching, waiting for her to be alone and vulnerable and curious enough to walk into a trap? She turned slowly, scanning the circle of stones. They were just as they had been. Weren’t they? The stone directly opposite where she had entered—had it been slightly more to the left before? She tried to recall the mental snapshot she’d taken upon entering. The arrangement had been irregular, haphazard. Now, as she looked, they seemed to have shifted, just a degree, as if they had silently rotated to face her. A flicker of movement at the extreme edge of her right vision. She whipped her head around. Nothing. Just a patch of flowers swaying. There was no wind. The whispering grew louder. Not louder in volume, but in clarity. It was now unmistakably a voice, or voices, layered over one another. She caught a syllable that sounded like her name—not “Rory,” but “Aurora,” drawn out and mangled. Then a sound that was almost a laugh, dry and rasping like leaves skittering on stone. Fear, clean and sharp, pierced her calm. This wasn’t the fear of a raised voice or a threatening text. This was primal, the fear of something that did not belong to her world. She took a step back toward where she thought the entrance was. The path was gone. Where there had been a clear gap between two particular stones, now there was only a dense thicket of brambles that she was certain hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. They glittered with thorns like black needles in the moonlight. *Time moves differently here*, she remembered. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. Had she been here an hour? She glanced at her watch. The digital display was a scramble of meaningless symbols, then went dark. When she tapped it, it flashed “12:07” over and over—the time she’d entered the park. Panic bubbled up, hot and acrid in her throat. She forced it down. Panic was a luxury. Evan had taught her that. Panic made you stupid. Panic made you slow. She needed to move. She chose a new direction, aiming for a gap between two other stones. As she walked, the whispering voices kept pace, just behind her, just beside her. She felt a cool draft on the back of her neck, as if someone were standing close enough to share her air. She didn’t turn. She knew there would be nothing there to see. The flowers around her feet began to glow. A soft, phosphorescent light seeped from their petals, first a faint blue, then shifting to a sickly green. The clearing was now illuminated by this unearthly bioluminescence, casting long, writhing shadows from the standing stones. The shadows did not match the stones’ shapes. They were taller, thinner, and they moved independently, stretching and contracting like breathing things. A figure stood between two stones ahead. Rory’s breath hitched. It was a man’s silhouette, tall and lean. For a heart-stopping moment, every detail of Evan—the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head—flooded her memory. But as she stared, the silhouette blurred. It wasn’t solid. It was made of the same shifting, darkness-as-substance as the wrong shadows, a concentration of the gloom. It had no face, just a deeper darkness where a face should be. It took a step toward her. Rory backpedaled, her boots sinking into the soft, glowing earth. The pendant was burning now, not just warm but hot, the crimson light bleeding through her fingers. It was screaming a warning she could feel in her teeth. The thing that was not Evan took another step, and its movement was wrong. It didn’t walk so much as *unfold*, its limbs elongating and snapping back into place with a sound like cracking twigs. She turned to run and came face-to-face with another. This one was closer, just ten feet away. It was smaller, more hunched. She could see details now in the hellish flower-light: fingers that were too long, twitching at its sides; a head that lolled on a thin neck. It made a wet, clicking sound in the back of its throat. They were herding her. The whispers coalesced into a single, clear sentence that echoed inside her skull, not through her ears. *“Stay with us, Aurora. Time is so… flexible here.”* The central clearing, where the flowers glowed brightest, was now a stage. And in its center, the air was beginning to warp. It shimmered like heat haze on a summer road, but cold radiated from it. The space within the shimmer darkened, not into black, but into a color that hurt her eyes to look at—a bruised, impossible purple-black. The Hel portal. The pendant was a furnace against her skin, its glow so bright it cast her own shadow, stark and human, against the glowing ground. The tall figure was behind her. The clicking one was to her left. The right was blocked by a stone that had definitely not been there before. The only open path led toward the swirling, darkening rip in the world. Rory’s mind, trained for debate and quick pivots, raced. They wanted her to go through. Or they wanted her to panic and run into their arms. The pendant was reacting to the portal. Was it a key? Or was it a shield? There was no way to know. But doing nothing was a decision too. With a cry that was more defiance than fear, she didn’t run toward the portal or away from the figures. She spun and sprinted directly at the smaller, clicking creature. It reared back, its long fingers splaying in surprise—she had guessed they were predators, used to prey that fled. She ducked under its grasping arm, feeling a wave of nauseating cold wash over her, and threw herself into the space between two standing stones that felt, in her gut, the least tainted. The world twisted. The glowing flowers, the whispering, the freezing cold—all of it vanished. She stumbled onto ordinary grass, under ordinary moonlight, the sounds of distant traffic a sweet symphony in her ears. She was back in Richmond Park, just outside the ring of ordinary-looking oak trees. Gasping, she clutched the pendant. It was cooling rapidly, its inner light fading to a dull ember. Her hands were shaking. Her scar ached fiercely. She looked back at the Grove. It was just a darker patch of woodland, silent and still. Nothing moved. But as she turned to flee the park, to run all the way back to the flat above Silas’s bar, she heard one last whisper, carried on a wind that touched nothing else. *“Next time.”*