Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ01D1BHF6K0WKHFVRCWCFKT

The standing stones rose from the earth like broken teeth. Rory paused at the edge of the clearing, her breath misting in front of her face. She hadn't expected the grove to feel so different at night. During her first visit, midday sun had filtered through the canopy in golden shafts, illuminating the wildflowers that shouldn't have been blooming in October. The stones had seemed ancient then, yes, but peaceful. Guardians of a threshold rather than wardens of a prison. Now, with the moon hidden behind slow-moving clouds, the oaks looked like hunched figures frozen mid-turn. The wildflowers had closed their petals against the dark, and what remained were pale stems that caught the scant light and held it like thousands of tiny, watching eyes. She touched the Heartstone at her throat. The crimson gem pulsed once against her collarbone, a single heartbeat of warmth that flowed through her chest and faded. It had been doing that for the past hour, growing stronger as she'd made her way through Richmond Park. Stronger, and more urgent. That was why she'd come. The pendant didn't pulse without reason—it led her to things, or rather, it warned her away from them. The Hel portals, Yu-Fei called them. Tears in the fabric between worlds where things that shouldn't exist could press through like fingers pushing through wet paper. Something was opening nearby. The pendant had dragged her from sleep, its heat insistent against her skin until she'd given up pretending she could ignore it. She should have called someone. Silas, or Yu-Fei, or anyone with more experience than a twenty-five-year-old delivery driver who'd learned about the existence of other realms approximately three weeks ago. But it was nearly two in the morning, and the pendant's urgency had felt localized, specific. Close. She'd told herself she was only going to look. Only going to find the source so she could report back with something more useful than "it felt weird near the park." Now she wasn't sure she could find her way back out. The grove looked wrong after dark. The standing stones stood in their familiar ring, but the spaces between them seemed to ripple if she didn't focus directly on them. The wildflowers that should have been dormant rustled in a breeze she couldn't feel. And the air itself carried a sweetness that didn't belong to any flower she knew—thick and cloying, like rotting fruit masked with honey. Rory stepped past the boundary stone, and the sound of London vanished. That wasn't right. She remembered this from before, the way the grove existed in a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm, but the silence was absolute. No distant traffic. No aircraft tracking across the sky. No ambient hum of a city that never fully slept. Just the ragged sound of her own breathing and the soft crunch of dead leaves beneath her boots. She'd worn practical clothes. Black jumper, dark jeans, the sturdy boots she used for cycling deliveries in bad weather. The crescent scar on her left wrist stood out pale against her skin as she adjusted the pendant's silver chain, and she shoved her hand into her pocket to hide it, feeling foolish. The grove stretched ahead, larger than it should be. She remembered the clearing as perhaps fifty feet across, bounded by the standing stones and the ancient oaks that grew so close together their branches wove into a living wall. But the path ahead of her wound between trees that hadn't been there before, and the standing stones at her back seemed much farther away than they should. The Heartstone pulsed again. Steady now, rhythmic, like a second heart had taken up residence in her chest. She pressed forward. The wrongness had a source, and finding it felt less dangerous than turning her back on the grove. The trees pressed closer, their bark pale and smooth in the darkness, stripped of the gnarled texture that English oaks should possess. These weren't quite oaks anymore. They were something that remembered being oaks, or something that was pretending very carefully. A sound to her left. Rory froze. Her breath caught in her throat as she strained her ears, listening for movement, for footfalls, for the brush of fabric against bark. The silence returned, thicker than before, pressing against her eardrums until she could hear her own pulse in the delicate bones inside her skull. Then: a flower opening. The noise was wet, organic, the sound of petals unfurling in accelerated time. She turned slowly, her body rigid, and found a wildflower blooming three feet to her right. Its petals were white, luminous in the darkness, and they spread wide to reveal a center the color of old blood. The blossom turned toward her. Rory stepped back. Her boot found a root that hadn't been there a moment ago, and she stumbled, catching herself against one of the pale trees. The bark was warm beneath her palm—warm the way skin was warm—and she yanked her hand away with a sharp inhale. More flowers were opening. Not just one, but dozens, spreading outward from the path in a ripple of unfolding petals. Each one turned its dark heart toward her, tracking her movements like a field of tiny faces. The sweet smell thickened until she could taste it at the back of her throat, cloying and intimate, like breath against her cheek. She moved faster. The path twisted ahead, and she followed it because there was nothing else to follow, nothing but the pale trees and the watching flowers and the Heartstone that beat against her chest like a trapped bird. Her shoulder-length black hair caught on a low-hanging branch, and she tore herself free without stopping, ignoring the strands that caught and pulled. The grove had been a clearing. The grove had been bounded, finite, a place she could see across from edge to edge. This path went nowhere she recognized, and the stones at its entrance had vanished into the darkness behind her. A laugh echoed through the trees. It was high and sweet and utterly wrong—the way a child's laugh was wrong when it came from something that wasn't a child. It carried no direction, no source, just an amplitude that rose and fell like breathing. Rory pressed her back against the nearest tree and held herself still, her bright blue eyes scanning the darkness for movement. The Heartstone burned. Not pulsed—burned. Heat flooded through the silver chain and into her skin, and she gasped, her hand flying to her throat. The crimson gem blazed with inner light, and for a moment she could see the clearing in stark red relief: the pale trees, the watching flowers, the standing stones that had reappeared at the edge of her vision. And between two of the stones, something stood. It was shaped like a person. That was the worst part—the almost. The proportions were wrong, the limbs too long, the joints bending at angles that made her stomach lurch even from this distance. Its head was turned toward her, or she thought it was, because the thing had no features she could recognize. Just a smooth expanse of darkness where a face should be, watching her with the same terrible attention as the flowers at her feet. The laugh came again, closer now, and the thing between the stones moved. Not walked. Not stepped. Shifted, like a still frame stuttering forward, suddenly ten feet closer without the intervening motion. The flowers bent toward it, their petals spreading wider, and Rory realized with a sick lurch of understanding that they weren't turning toward the thing. They were turning away from her, toward the direction she needed to run. She ran. The path looped and spiraled, and the trees pressed close enough that their warmth brushed her arms as she passed. The Heartstone swung against her chest, searing and constant, and the crimson light bounced off pale bark and dark petals and the shapes that moved between the trees just outside her field of vision. Not one shape now—several, shifting and stuttering, always at the edge of perception. The standing stones appeared ahead of her, and beyond them, the faint orange glow of streetlights bleeding through the Richmond Park trees. The entrance to the grove, the boundary between this pocket of wrongness and the world she knew, and it was so close, so terribly close— A hand closed around her wrist. It was warm, like the trees, like the flowers, like the breath against her cheek that she'd pretended wasn't there. The fingers wrapped around her scar, pressing the crescent shape into her skin with deliberate precision, and the touch was so achingly human that she nearly stopped running. Nearly. Rory twisted hard, wrenching her arm free, and the fingers slipped away like water. She threw herself between the standing stones, and the grove spat her out onto the cold grass of Richmond Park. The streetlights buzzed overhead. A car engine rumbled somewhere distant. A plane blinked red across the sky. She lay on the frost-bitten grass and gasped, her breath ragged in the cold October air. The Heartstone had cooled to a gentle warmth against her chest, its pulse slowing, calming, as if it had never burned at all. Behind her, the standing stones stood in their ring, ancient and silent. No pale trees. No watching flowers. No path that led nowhere. But on her wrist, circling the old crescent scar, five marks pressed into her skin like fresh bruises. Five fingers. Five points of contact. And in the darkness between the stones, something that remembered being a person was learning how to laugh.