Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X4VFE919QBCSDX20AJTYM

Richmond Park after dark did not belong to the living. Rory knew that. She'd known it each of the three times she'd visited the Grove in daylight, when the light came through the canopy in long pale columns and the wildflowers made the air smell like something between honey and rain. Daylight forgave the strangeness of the place. Night, she suspected, would not. She went anyway. The text had arrived at half past eleven, a blocked number, six words on a white screen: *The grove. Midnight. The pendant matters.* She'd stood in her kitchen holding her phone until the screen went dark, and then she'd pulled the Heartstone from beneath her collar and looked at it. The deep crimson stone sat still against her palm. Cold. She'd dressed, laced her boots, and left. The park gates were locked at dusk — she'd scaled the iron fence at the eastern edge, dropped down into the wet grass, and walked. Now the city behind her was a low amber smear against the clouds, and ahead there was nothing, just the shapes of trees blackening as the path curved inward. The torch on her phone threw a thin circle of white light across the ground. She kept it low, watching where she put her feet. She found the standing stones by feel as much as sight. The old oaks marked the boundary of the Grove in a rough semicircle, their trunks wider than she could reach around, bark ridged and ancient and dry even after a week of rain. She stopped at the threshold and listened. Wind through the canopy. The distant snarl of a fox somewhere to the north. She stepped through. The air changed immediately, the way air changes when you walk into a room where a window has been left open in winter. Not colder, exactly. Thinner. Like the atmosphere had been stretched over something larger than she could see. The wildflowers were there — she could make them out in the pale grass around her boots, impossible in February, small and white and open — and the clearing looked exactly as she remembered it. The flat stone at the centre. The ring of grass worn smooth around it. The oak branches overhead laced together so tightly no stars showed through. She crossed to the flat stone and sat on its edge. Checked her phone. Eleven fifty-eight. The Grove was quiet. Too quiet, she realised after a moment. Not peacefully quiet. The fox had stopped. The wind had stopped. The only sound was the blood in her own ears and the faint settling of her weight on the stone. She turned the Heartstone over in her fingers. Still cold. She'd half-expected it to pulse like it did near the Hel portals, that low steady warmth like holding a mug of tea, but there was nothing. Just smooth stone and the faint itch of the silver chain against the back of her neck. Midnight came and went, or she assumed it did. Time moved strangely here — she knew that too, in the abstract way she knew things about the Fae, the way you know the rules of a game you have never played. She kept her breathing even and watched the edge of the clearing. Something moved. She turned her head. The torch swept left, cutting across the base of the oak trees, and there was nothing there. Bark. Roots. The white blurs of wildflowers. She held the light steady for a count of five, then ten. Nothing. She lowered the phone. From somewhere to her right came a sound she couldn't quite name. Not a footstep. Not an animal. Something between the two — a soft, deliberate pressure against the ground, like a weight settled and lifted in a single practised motion. She turned slowly. The trees stood motionless. No branch swayed. No grass bent. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she intended. The Grove did not answer. She stood from the stone and turned a full circle, the torchlight moving with her. The clearing was empty. The standing oaks at the boundary were exactly where they'd always been, their trunks dark and solid and utterly still, and yet something about the way they stood had changed. She couldn't say how. Only that they now seemed less like trees marking a boundary and more like a fence. She took two steps toward the threshold. The Heartstone pulsed. She stopped. Pressed her fingers flat against her collarbone. The warmth was unmistakeable — a single beat of heat, like a coal glowing briefly back to life, and then nothing. No portal here. She'd never heard of a portal in the Grove. The sound came again. Closer. Behind the tree to her left, a slow press of weight against soft earth, and she turned and raised the torch in one movement and the light fell on a tree that was exactly as it should be and absolutely, entirely wrong. The bark was smooth where it should have been ridged. The roots were wrong, curving away from the trunk at angles that did not suit the ground. She took one step toward it. A smell hit her. Green and mineral, like a riverbed overturned. Like something dragged up from deep water. She stopped walking. The tree — the thing that stood where the tree had been — did not move. It made no sound. It simply stood at the boundary of the torchlight and waited with a patience that had no end in it, no hurry, no need. The emptiness of it was worse than anything that might have moved or spoken. It waited the way a stone waits. The way dark waits. Rory's fingers found the Heartstone and held it. The warmth had gone completely. The stone was cold as a tooth. She did not run. She stood very still and looked at the shape that wore the oak tree's outline, and she understood with a clarity that arrived complete and without drama that whoever had sent that message had not done so to help her.