Run: 2026-05-22-01KS868KC7V1B3903WG632D7F6

Richmond Park was supposed to be locked at this hour, but the heavy iron gates had been left ajar, just as the anonymous note had promised. Aurora Carter slipped through the narrow gap, her boots sinking into the damp, decaying leaves of late autumn. She pulled her jacket tighter against the biting November chill. At twenty-five, she had learned to trust her instincts, and right now, every nerve ending in her body was screaming at her to turn back and return to the safety of her flat above the bar. She pushed a strand of straight, shoulder-length black hair behind her ear and kept walking. She needed to know why the pendant had led her out here. The main path quickly gave way to a narrow, overgrown trail choked by thorny brambles. Rory navigated the darkness with careful steps until she breached the dense tree line and stepped into the Fae Grove. The transition was always jarring, a sudden shift in reality that made her stomach drop. Outside the grove, the London night was barren, cold, and entirely mundane. Inside the ring of ancient oak standing stones, the air was unnervingly still and smelled heavily of crushed pollen and damp earth. Wildflowers bloomed in the dark, their pale petals catching the weak, silver moonlight. Snowdrops, bluebells, and foxgloves carpeted the ground in a dense, unnatural tapestry of year-round life. Rory checked her wristwatch. The second hand was ticking backward, sweeping counterclockwise with a smooth, silent motion. Time moved differently in this hidden pocket between Earth and the Fae realm, a fact she had learned the hard way during her first visit. An hour spent inside the grove could mean a mere minute in the outside world, or it could mean a week. She had to be quick. She reached beneath her collar and pulled out the Heartstone pendant. The deep crimson gemstone, roughly the size of her thumbnail, hung from a delicate silver chain. It was completely inert. There was no faint inner glow, no pulse of warmth against her skin. Her unknown benefactor had explicitly told her it would react when brought near a Hel portal, but tonight, it felt like nothing more than a piece of cold, dead glass. She rubbed the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit she had never quite managed to break since childhood. If there was no portal, and no active magic, why had she felt such an overwhelming compulsion to come to the grove tonight? The absolute silence of the clearing broke. It was not a loud noise, just the soft, wet tear of a thick root snapping beneath the soil. Rory froze. Her mind, usually quick to categorize and dismiss anomalies, offered a dozen logical explanations. A badger foraging in the dark. A fox passing through. The natural shifting and settling of the ancient oaks. But the sound came again, much closer this time, accompanied by a low, rhythmic scraping. It sounded like heavy bone dragging slowly across rough stone. She turned in a slow circle, her bright blue eyes scanning the perimeter of the standing stones. The shadows between the massive, gnarled oak trunks seemed thicker than they should be, pooling and stretching in ways that defied the ambient moonlight. Something moved at the far edge of her vision. It was a tall, spindly shape, impossibly thin, that vanished into the darkness the exact moment she turned her head to look directly at it. Rory forced her breathing to slow, drawing the cold air deep into her lungs. Panic was a luxury she could not afford. She had survived an abusive ex, she had fled Cardiff, and she had rebuilt her life in London from nothing. She was cool-headed. She was smart. She took a deliberate, measured step backward toward the entrance of the grove, keeping her eyes fixed on the tree line. The wildflowers at her feet rustled, though the air remained perfectly dead and still. She looked down. The pale blooms were slowly rotating on their stems. Hundreds of tiny, delicate flowers were turning their faces away from the center of the clearing and pointing directly toward the tree line. Pointing at whatever was standing in the shadows. The scraping sound stopped. The silence that followed was heavy and pressurized, like the suffocating air right before a violent lightning strike. The temperature in the grove began to plummet, the unnatural warmth of the Fae pocket rapidly decaying into a deep, bone-aching frost. Ice crept up the bark of the ancient oaks, glistening in the moonlight. Then, the silver chain against her collarbone grew warm. Rory looked down. The Heartstone pendant was glowing. A faint, bloody light pulsed from deep within the crimson gem, casting long, eerie shadows across the front of her jacket. With every pulse, a wave of unnatural heat washed over her skin, stark and terrifying against the freezing air. It was reacting. A Hel portal was opening nearby. The realization hit her with the force of a physical blow. She was not just being watched. She was being hunted, and the thing in the shadows had brought a doorway to the underworld with it. She turned and ran for the gap in the ancient oak standing stones. Her boots pounded the soft, flower-covered earth, but the entrance seemed to be receding. The massive trees were stretching, the distance warping and elongating as the time distortion seized the grove in a desperate attempt to keep her inside. The heat from the pendant flared into a burning sting against her chest, pulsing faster and faster like a frantic heartbeat. The air directly behind her dropped to a freezing, tomb-like cold. She could hear it now, no longer just the scraping of bone, but a wet, rattling breath, impossibly close, right at the nape of her neck. The smell of rotting earth and old copper washed over her. She did not look back. She just ran blindly into the dark, the crimson glow of the stone lighting her desperate path into the unnatural, endless night.