Run: 2026-05-22-01KS86TEH20K6M5M428GY92ERT

The air inside the boundary of the ancient oak standing stones tasted like crushed mint and ozone. Rory paused, her boots sinking slightly into the damp earth of Richmond Park. It was well past midnight, yet the clearing ahead was bathed in a pale, sourceless luminescence. She pushed a strand of straight, shoulder-length black hair behind her ear and checked her phone. No signal. The clock read two fourteen in the morning, but the digital numbers flickered, blurring into a smudge before settling on three thirty. Time moved differently in the Fae Grove. She had known that before she crossed the threshold, but experiencing the temporal slip made her stomach tighten. She would much rather be asleep in her flat above Silas' bar, listening to the muffled thump of the bass and the clinking of glasses. She stepped fully into the clearing. Wildflowers bloomed in aggressive, impossible profusion despite the autumn chill. Pale foxglove and ghost-white yarrow swayed in a wind she could not feel. Rory rubbed the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit she had never quite managed to break. She was supposed to be the cool-headed one. Eva always said Rory could out-think a panic attack, could logic her way out of a burning building. But logic felt thin here, stretched taut over the yawning pocket between Earth and the Fae realm. At five foot six, she usually felt grounded, solid. Here, beneath the towering oaks, she felt entirely too small. She had come because of the pendant. The Heartstone rested against her collarbone, a thumbnail-sized tear of deep crimson on a silver chain. An unknown benefactor had left it for her at the Golden Empress, tucked inside a takeout order Yu-Fei Cheung had told her to deliver. Since then, it had been a dead weight. Until tonight. Tonight, it had begun to pull. Rory walked deeper into the grove, her eyes adjusting to the strange, flat light. Her bright blue eyes, usually so quick to pick up details in the dim alleys of London, struggled against the shadows pooling beneath the ferns. The silence was the first thing that felt truly wrong. Richmond Park was never entirely quiet. There should have been the distant hum of the A308, the cry of a night bird, the rustle of red deer in the bracken. Here, the silence was absolute. It was a heavy, suffocating blanket that pressed against her eardrums. Then, the pendant shifted. It started as a faint inner glow, a deep, arterial red seeping through the crimson gemstone. Rory stopped, looking down at her chest. The silver chain was growing warm. The codex of her mind supplied the rule she had deduced over the past three weeks of careful observation. The Heartstone pulsed with warmth when near a Hel portal. A portal to the underworld. She swallowed hard, the sound impossibly loud in the dead air. A twig snapped. Rory froze. The sound had come from her left, just beyond a cluster of silver birch trees that had not been there when she first entered the grove. She turned her head slowly, keeping her breathing shallow and even. Nothing moved. The pale flowers continued their windless swaying. She told herself it was a squirrel, or a fox, though she knew no animals crossed the oak stones. The magic of the grove kept the mundane world out. She took another step forward. The warmth against her sternum intensified, shifting from a comforting heat to a distinct, radiating burn. She slipped her fingers beneath her jacket, wrapping her hand around the gemstone to muffle its glow. The stone was hot, almost too hot to hold, vibrating with a low, sub-audible frequency that rattled her teeth. A whisper drifted through the clearing. It was not a word, just the sibilant friction of breath over teeth. Rory spun around, her boots crunching on the dry leaves. The clearing was empty. The ancient oak standing stones marked the boundary fifty yards away, their gnarled bark black against the pale sky. But the distance felt wrong. She had only walked twenty paces. The stones should have been right behind her. Focus, she told herself. Calculate. Observe. She picked up a smooth river stone from the dirt and tossed it toward the nearest oak. It landed with a dull thud, rolling into the ferns. The distance was real. The geometry of the grove was stretching, warping the space between her and the exit. The realization sent a cold spike of adrenaline through her veins, but she forced it down. Panic was a luxury she could not afford. Evan had taught her what happened when you panicked. You made mistakes. You got trapped. You ended up with a bruised rib and a locked door. She turned back toward the center of the grove, intending to find the epicenter of the portal and close it, or at least understand it. But as she moved, a shadow detached itself from the edge of her peripheral vision. It was a tall, impossibly thin silhouette, sliding behind the trunk of a massive elm. Rory stopped, her hand dropping to the pocket where she kept her delivery multi-tool. It was a pathetic weapon against the supernatural, but the familiar weight of the steel grounded her. Who is there, she called out. Her voice was steady, betraying none of the terror clawing at her throat. No answer. Just the oppressive silence, and the steady, rhythmic throbbing of the Heartstone against her palm. The glow was seeping through her fingers now, casting long, bloody shadows across the wildflowers. A soft, wet footstep sounded to her right. Rory pivoted. Nothing. Another step, this time behind her. She was being circled. The entity, whatever it was, was playing with her. It was testing the boundaries of her perception, slipping into the blind spots of her vision. She stood perfectly still, closing her eyes for a fraction of a second to map the sounds. The rustle of fabric. The faint, metallic scent of ozone and copper. The distinct feeling of displaced air. She opened her eyes and looked straight ahead. The air ten feet in front of her was rippling, like heat distortion over summer tarmac. The wildflowers beneath the distortion were withering, their pale petals turning brown and curling into ash. The Hel portal was opening. The heat from the pendant became searing. Rory gasped, dropping the stone. It hit the ground, and the crimson light flared, illuminating the clearing in a harsh, bloody glare. In that flash of red light, she saw it. It was not a monster of flesh and bone. It was an absence. A towering, jagged tear in the fabric of the grove, standing just behind the rippling air. And standing at the edge of the tear, partially obscured by the shifting shadows of the dying flowers, was a figure. The figure wore a heavy coat. It had the broad shoulders and the familiar, slouching posture of a man she had spent two years trying to forget. The figure turned its head, and though the face was obscured by the gloom, Rory saw the glint of a silver lighter flipping open and shut in its hand. Evan. The lighter snapped shut. The sound echoed like a gunshot. The crimson light of the Heartstone faded back to a faint, inner glow, plunging the grove back into its pale, sourceless luminescence. The figure was gone. The rippling air smoothed out. The withered flowers remained, a circle of black ash in the sea of white blooms. Rory stood alone in the silence. The pendant was cooling against her skin, but the phantom heat lingered. She looked at the ancient oak standing stones, which now seemed miles away, shrouded in a thick, creeping mist. She was not alone in the grove. She had never been alone. And as the soft, wet footstep sounded directly behind her, she realized the portal had not closed. It had only just begun to open.