Run: 2026-02-25-01KJ94GQ23H2YVT2093BK70ERM

The iron gates of Richmond Park had long been locked, but Aurora knew the places where the perimeter humped over ancient roots, creating gaps just wide enough for a woman who knew how to stay small. She stepped through the veil of shadow, her boots crunching on the frost-dusted grass. The air in London was usually a soup of bus exhaust and damp pavement, but here, the oxygen felt thin and sharp, like it had been filtered through a bed of needles. She wasn't supposed to be here. A delivery person for the Golden Empress didn’t usually find herself trekking into the dark heart of a royal park at two in the morning, but the Heartstone pendant tucked beneath her thermal shirt was demanding it. It pulsed against her sternum, a rhythmic, insistent heat that felt less like jewelry and more like a second heartbeat. It had started the moment she stepped off the red-eye bus near the park's edge—a low, thrumming vibration that resonated in her teeth. Aurora reached up, her fingers grazing the silver chain. She traced the thumbnail-sized gem through the fabric. It was warm, bordering on hot. Her father, the barrister back in Cardiff, would have called this trespassing. Her mother would have called it madness. But Aurora, who had spent the last year learning that the world was far wider and stranger than a law textbook could ever account for, simply called it a lead. The further she walked, the more the city behind her seemed to dissolve. The orange glow of the streetlights faded, replaced by a silver-black world of towering silhouettes. She pulled her coat tighter, her left hand instinctively rubbing the small, crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. It was a nervous habit, a relic of a childhood fall that she found herself returning to whenever the "cool-headed Rory" persona started to fray at the edges. She moved toward the coordinates she’d been given by the anonymous note tucked into her letterbox that morning. The path began to change. The manicured grass gave way to a floor of thick, tangled ivy and wildflowers that shouldn't have been blooming in the dead of a British winter. Foxgloves stood tall and turgid, their bells heavy with a nectar that smelled cloying and sweet—too sweet, like sugar left to rot in the sun. Then, she saw them: the ancient oaks. They didn't grow like normal trees. They stood in a perfect, staggering circle, their trunks massive and grey, resembling pillars of stone more than living timber. This was the Grove. As she crossed the threshold between the first pair of oaks, the sound of the world died. It didn't just fade; it was severed. The distant hum of the A3, the wind in the upper branches, the rustle of her own nylon jacket—all of it vanished into an absolute, pressurized silence. Aurora stopped. She took a breath, and the sound of her own inhalation felt deafening, a rasping intrusion on the stillness. She checked her watch. The second hand was twitching, vibrating in place, unable to tick forward. "Okay," she whispered. The word fell flat, swallowed by the mossy floor. "Not in London anymore." She focused on her breathing, the way she had learned to do back in Cardiff when the pressure of her father’s expectations felt like it might crush her ribs. She was intelligent. She was analytical. There was a logical explanation for time dilation and localized silence. Probably. The Heartstone flared. A deep, baleful crimson light bled through the weave of her shirt, casting her shadow long and distorted across the clearing. The pendant wasn't just warm now; it was burning. It was reacting to something nearby. A portal. A Hel portal. She looked around the clearing. The wildflowers were vibrant here, glowing with a faint, bioluminescent urgency. In the center of the Grove, the air seemed to shimmer, like heat rising off a summer road. But it wasn't heat. It was a ripple in the geometry of the space. A twig snapped. The sound was sharp, metallic. Aurora spun toward the perimeter of the oaks. Her blue eyes scanned the darkness between the trunks. Nothing moved. The trees stood like sentinels, their gnarled branches locked in a frozen dance. "Who's there?" she asked. Her voice sounded thin. No answer. Only the silence, which seemed to have grown heavier, pressing against her eardrums. She began to back away from the shimmering center of the Grove. Her instinct—the one that had kept her safe during the worst years with Evan, the one that told her when a situation was turning from bad to lethal—was screaming at her to leave. The Grove didn't want her here. Or perhaps it wanted her very much. She took another step back, and her heel caught on a root. She stumbled, catching herself, and her gaze dropped to the ground. There were footprints in the soft earth. Small, barefoot indentations that started nowhere and ended at the edge of the clearing. They weren't hers. They were too narrow, the toes elongated. And they were fresh. As she watched, the grass began to slowly rise back up from one of the prints, as if whatever had made it had only just passed. Aurora’s heart hammered a frantic rhythm against the glowing Heartstone. She looked up and saw a flash of white at the edge of her vision. Something pale and lithe had ducked behind the third oak. "I see you," she lied, her voice steady despite the ice water flooding her veins. She turned her head slowly, keeping her peripheral vision open. To her left, something shifted. A shadow that didn't belong to a tree stretched out toward her. It was tall, impossibly thin, with limbs that seemed to have too many joints. When she looked at it directly, it was gone. When she blinked, it was closer. The sense of being watched intensified into a physical weight. It felt like dozens of eyes were opening in the bark of the trees, peering out from the folds of the wood. The air grew colder, but the smell of the flowers intensified, becoming a suffocating, funeral perfume. She reached into her pocket and gripped her keys, the metal cold against her palm. It was a pathetic weapon, but it was something. She began to retreat toward the entrance of the Grove, but the standing stones seemed further away than they had been seconds ago. The path was stretching, the oaks drifting apart like ships at sea. From the darkness behind her came a sound—a soft, wet slither, like a snake moving over velvet. Then, a voice. "Aurora..." It wasn't a human voice. It was a perfect, crystalline mimicry of her mother’s voice, but the cadence was wrong. It was too rhythmic, too hollow. It came from the trees, from the ground, from the air itself. "Rory... stay a while. The sun hasn't risen here in a hundred years." She didn't look back. She knew that in stories, the moment you looked back was the moment you were lost. She fixed her eyes on the gap between the two largest oaks—the way out. She ran. Her boots thudded silently on the moss. She felt the Heartstone searing her skin, a brand of crimson heat. The pale thing at the edge of her vision was keeping pace with her now, a blur of white skin and dark, empty sockets. It didn't run; it drifted, its feet never quite touching the flowers. As she neared the exit, the air thickened. It felt like running through waist-deep water. The silence began to vibrate, a low-frequency hum that made her nose bleed. She could feel a hand—or something like a hand—reaching out for the back of her jacket. The fingers were long, tipped with something that clicked like bone. "Go," she hissed through gritted teeth, her lawyer’s mind reaching for a command, a boundary, a law of the physical world to hold onto. "I am not yours. This isn't your realm." She lunged for the gap between the oaks. For a terrifying heartbeat, the space seemed to shrink, the trees closing like giant teeth. She threw herself forward, her shoulder clipping the rough bark of the stone-like wood. The transition was violent. The silence shattered. Suddenly, the roar of London rushed back in—the distant whine of a police siren, the hum of the city, the wind whistling through the dry winter branches of Richmond Park. Aurora tumbled onto the frozen grass, gasping for air that didn't taste like sugar and rot. She scrambled to her feet, spinning around. The Grove was gone. Behind her stood only a stand of normal, skeletal oaks, their branches bare and indifferent. There were no wildflowers. No glowing foxgloves. No shimmering air. Just the dark, cold expanse of the park. Aurora stood shaking, her breath coming in ragged white plumes. She reached into her shirt and pulled out the Heartstone. It was cold now. The deep crimson gem was dark, its inner fire extinguished. She looked down at her left wrist. The crescent-shaped scar was glowing with a faint, pale light that faded even as she watched it. She checked her watch. The second hand was ticking normally again. But as she looked at the time, her blood ran cold. When she had entered the Grove, it had been 2:15 AM. The watch now read 5:48 AM. She had been in the clearing for less than five minutes. Or so she thought. Aurora Carter turned and began to walk, then run, toward the park gates. She didn't stop until she saw the first glow of the N29 bus cresting the hill, its mundane, electric light the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. But even as she climbed aboard, the cloying scent of foxgloves lingered in her hair, and she couldn't shake the feeling that something from the Grove had followed her out, tucked neatly into the shadow she cast upon the bus floor.