Run: 2026-02-25-01KJ952BMDNMSG8XFY8V5R33KJ

The metal kickstand of the delivery bike crunched into the gravel of the Richmond Park perimeter path, a sound that felt unnecessarily loud in the stillness of the autumn night. Rory Carter let out a long breath, her cowl of black hair shifting against her shoulders as she looked toward the dense treeline. She shouldn't have been here. Shift-manager Yu-Fei would have a fit if she knew Rory had diverted the Golden Empress scooter three miles off her route to Kingston, but the weight against her chest had become impossible to ignore. Underneath her zip-up hoodie, the Heartstone Pendant was alive. It wasn't moving, strictly speaking, but it was humming against her skin—a low, rhythmic warmth that mirrored a quickening pulse. It was the size of a thumbnail, a deep crimson gem she’d been gifted by a person whose face she couldn't quite remember, and for the last hour, it had been burning. She adjusted her grip on the flashlight and stepped off the gravel. The grass was long and damp, clinging to her boots. As she moved deeper into the park, the distant hum of London’s traffic began to dissolve, swallowed by the reaching sprawling arms of ancient oaks. Rory was a creature of the city, used to the yellow glare of streetlamps and the comforting white noise of the Underground. This silence was different. It wasn’t the absence of sound, but a heavy, expectant pressure, like the air in a room just before someone began to scream. She pushed through a thicket of ferns and stopped dead. The air changed. The temperature didn't drop so much as it shifted, turning from the crisp, London October chill to something humid and cloying, smelling of crushed honey and rot. Before her, the trees didn't just grow; they arched, forming a literal gateway of woven bark. She stepped through. The clearing beyond shouldn't have existed. It was a pocket of impossible spring in the dead of the year. Wildflowers—foxgloves, poppies, and pale, strange lilies Rory couldn't name—bloomed in a riot of color that seemed to glow under the moonlight. In the center of the clearing stood the stones. They weren't granite or basalt, but petrified oak, ancient and gnarled, standing like a circle of petrified giants. This was the Grove. She’d heard whispers of it in the back-alleys of the Cardiff courts where her father worked, and later in the hushed conversations of Silas’s regulars back at the bar. A Fae-touched place. A bridge. The Heartstone Pendant flared. The heat was sharp now, a warning. Rory reached into her collar and pulled the silver chain out, letting the gem dangle. It throbbed with a rhythmic, inner crimson light, casting long, jagged shadows across the wildflowers. It was pulsing in time with something beneath the earth. “Hello?” she called out. Her voice was flat, robbed of its echo by the surrounding trees. No one answered. But as she stood there, Rory realized the silence had changed again. The wind had died completely. Not a single leaf rustled. Yet, a few yards away, a patch of bluebells shivered. They bent low to the ground as if an invisible weight were pressing down on them, moving in a slow, circular path that spiraled toward her. Rory’s logical mind, the one that had served her so well during those grueling Pre-Law semesters, tried to find a reason. A draft? A fox? But the bluebells didn't just rustle; they stayed flat, crushed by a footfall that made no sound. She backed away, her thumb tracing the small crescent scar on her left wrist—a nervous habit that had stayed with her since childhood. Her boots hit the edge of one of the oak stones. Beneath her feet, the ground felt unstable, like thin ice over a black lake. She looked down at her watch. The second hand was vibrating, twitching back and forth over the twelve, unable to move forward. Time was stalling. An hour could be passing in the world outside, or perhaps only seconds. The thought of being trapped in this temporal amber sent a cold spike of adrenaline through her. A sound reached her then. It wasn't a voice, but a wet, rhythmic sliding. *Schlick. Schlick. Schlick.* It was coming from behind the largest standing stone. Rory swung her flashlight toward the noise. The beam cut through the dark, reflecting off the iridescent petals of the flowers, but the space behind the stone was empty. The sliding sound stopped. Then, from the darkness above her, a soft, dry rasp. “Rory.” She didn't look up. She couldn't. The voice sounded like her mother—Jennifer’s soft, Welsh lilt—but the cadence was wrong. It was too fast, the vowels stretched thin like pulled wire. “Rory, come see,” the voice whispered from the canopy. Rory tightened her grip on the flashlight. “You’re not her.” The air in the Grove thickened. The pendant around her neck began to burn with a heat so intense she had to drop it. It swung on its chain, a frantic red beacon. It wasn't just near a portal; the portal was opening. The space between the two central oak stones began to shimmer, the air distorting like heat haze over a summer road. A deep, vibrant violet hue bled into the clearing, clashing with the Heartstone’s crimson. Something was looking through the shimmer. RORY didn't see eyes, but she felt the gaze—a cold, ancient hunger that viewed her as nothing more than a flicker of light in a long, dark corridor. The flowers at her feet began to turn. They didn't just wilt; they rotted in seconds, their vibrant colors turning to a grey, liquid mush. The smell of honey was gone, replaced by the copper tang of old blood and the ozone of a coming storm. She turned to run, but her feet felt heavy, as if the ground were suddenly made of wet clay. Every step was a labor. Behind her, the sliding sound returned, louder now, accompanied by a chorus of voices. They were all her. They were her own voice at five, at fifteen, at twenty; a cacophony of Aurora Carters calling out for help, laughing, crying, screaming. “Don’t look back,” she hissed to herself, her breath coming in shallow, panicked stabs. “Don’t look back.” A hand—or something that felt like a hand—brushed the back of her neck. It was ice-cold and felt like it was made of many small, moving parts, like the legs of a thousand insects. Rory lunged forward, tripping over a root that hadn't been there a moment ago. She scrambled on her hands and knees through the wildflowers, which were now black and stinging like nettles. The Heartstone Pendant was swinging wildly, the silver chain slapping against her collarbone, its light now a frantic, strobing red. The boundary stones loomed ahead. The gateway she had entered through looked different now—sharper, the bark like jagged teeth. She heard a footfall directly behind her. Not an invisible one this time. A heavy, wet thud. Rory didn't think. She didn't calculate. She threw herself through the archway, her shoulder Clipping the rough bark. The sensation was like being plunged into freezing water. The pressure in her ears spiked, a deafening pop echoing in her skull, and then she was falling. She hit the grass of Richmond Park with a bone-jarring thud. The silence was gone. The distant roar of the A3, the wind in the dry autumn leaves, the hum of London—it all rushed back in an overwhelming wave of normalcy. Rory lay on her back, staring up at the moon. It was the same moon, but it looked different here. It was just a rock in the sky, not a pale eye watching from a pocket dimension. She sat up, her hands shaking so violently she had to tuck them under her arms. Her delivery jacket was torn, and when she pulled her hand away, it was stained with the grey, rotting slime of the Grove’s flowers. She reached for the pendant. It was cold. The deep crimson stone was dull once more, its inner fire extinguished. Rory looked back toward the treeline. There was no gateway. There were no flowers. There was only a dense stand of ordinary oaks, their branches swaying in the October wind. She checked her phone. The time read 2:14 AM. When she had stepped off her bike, the clock had been 8:30 PM. Nearly six hours had vanished in what felt like ten minutes. Rory stood up, her legs feeling like lead. She walked back to the scooter, her mind racing through the logic of what had happened, trying to find the legal precedent for a reality that could fold in on itself. But there was no law for this. As she gripped the handlebars, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the wing mirror. Behind her, deep in the dark of the park, a single patch of bluebells was blooming in the frost, their heads nodding in a wind that wasn't blowing. Rory didn't wait. She kicked the engine to life and sped away, the golden light of the city appearing like a sanctuary in the distance, while the Heartstone sat heavy and silent against her chest, waiting for the next pulse.