Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXB409W48DMRKZDMZXR605

The wildflowers should not have been blooming. Rory noticed it the moment she stepped past the standing stones — those ancient oaks bent like old men into a ring, their bark grey as bone in the moonlight. Beyond them, the Grove opened into a clearing of impossible color: bluebells, foxgloves, ragged-robin, all of it lush and trembling though London had been locked in February frost not five minutes' walk behind her. The air here was warm. Soft. It smelled of crushed green and something sweeter underneath, something she couldn't name and didn't like. Eva had told her the place was safe. *Just go to the Grove. Wait by the third stone. He'll find you.* Eva had a habit of saying things like that as though they made sense, as though it were perfectly ordinary to send your best friend into a hidden clearing in the middle of Richmond Park at midnight to meet a man she'd never named. Rory pulled her coat tighter, though she wasn't cold. Old habit. Armor. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted, and the Grove seemed to swallow it whole. No echo. No answer. Just the faint hush of wind through grass that did not quite move. She found the third stone — taller than the others, leaning at a drunken angle, its surface carved with spirals worn nearly smooth — and she stood beside it and waited. The moon hung overhead, too large, too bright. She was certain it had been a sliver of a thing when she'd left the flat above Silas's bar. A waxing crescent, thin as a fingernail clipping. Now it sat fat and full and yellow as a cataract, and she did not remember it changing. *Time moves differently here.* That was the other thing Eva had said. Rory had thought it a figure of speech. She checked her phone. No signal, and the clock read 00:00 — not midnight, just zeros, four of them blinking patiently at her like something waiting to be fed. She turned it off and shoved it deep into her pocket. That was when she heard the first sound that shouldn't have been there. A child, laughing. It came from her left, somewhere beyond the tree line where the flowers gave way to darkness, and it was bright and delighted and absolutely wrong — the sound of a small child playing alone at midnight in a place no child could be. It rose, peaked, broke off mid-breath. Then silence, thick and total. Rory's heart slammed against her ribs. She kept very still. *Cool head*, she told herself. *Out-of-the-box. Think.* But there was no clever angle here, no problem to solve, only the cold certainty crawling up her spine that the laughter had not been for her. It had been *about* her. "Eva sent me," she said to the dark. Loud, this time. "I'm here to meet someone." The wildflowers nearest her bent in unison, all of them, leaning toward her as if pulled by a tide. There was no wind. She backed against the stone. Its surface was warm, unnervingly so, like skin, and she jerked away from it and stood with nothing at her back but open air, which was worse. The pendant stirred. She'd nearly forgotten it — the Heartstone, the gift from a benefactor she'd never met, a thumbnail of deep crimson glass on a fine silver chain that she'd taken to wearing because Eva had insisted and because, in some small superstitious corner of herself, she'd wanted to believe it meant something. Now it pulsed against her sternum, a slow throb of heat, like a second heartbeat keeping time with her own and then, horribly, beginning to outpace it. Warmer. Faster. The crimson at its heart kindled to a glow she could see through the weave of her shirt, a dull red coal pressed to her chest. *It pulses near a Hel portal.* Eva had told her that too, laughing, the way you'd describe a parlor trick. Rory hadn't asked what a Hel portal was. She had not wanted to know. She still didn't, but the knowing was coming for her regardless, rising from the dark beyond the trees the way the moon had risen — too fast, too full, too wrong. Movement, at the edge of her vision. She turned her head and there was nothing — only the swaying flowers, the patient oaks. But she'd seen it. A shape. Tall and thin and pale, standing among the trees where no shape had been a moment before, gone the instant she looked at it directly. The afterimage burned behind her eyes: a figure with its head tilted at an angle a neck should not allow, watching. The laughter came again. Closer now. From her right. Then a second laugh joined it, lower, an adult's voice mimicking the child's joy with none of its warmth, and a third from behind her, and a fourth, until the Grove rang with delight on every side, a chorus of pleasure that had nothing human at its center. The flowers thrashed. The warm air went cold all at once, and the sweet smell beneath the green resolved at last into what it had always been — meat, left too long, gone soft and dark. The pendant seared her skin. She clutched it through her shirt and felt it scald her palm and did not let go. "I changed my mind," she whispered. "I'm leaving." She turned for the standing stones, for the gap she'd come through, and her stomach dropped. The ring of oaks had closed. Where there had been a path, a way back into the cold ordinary park and the cold ordinary world, there was now only an unbroken wall of grey trunks, shoulder to shoulder, their carved spirals catching the bloated moonlight. She counted them. Twelve. There had been eleven. She was certain there had been eleven, certain the way she was certain of her own name, and the twelfth stood exactly where she had entered, taller than the rest, leaning at a drunken angle, watching her with a patience older than the city. Behind her, very softly, something began to walk through the flowers. Rory did not turn around. She fixed her eyes on the twelfth stone, on the dark seam beside it where the path had been, and she made herself breathe, and she made herself think, and the footsteps in the grass came closer, unhurried, and the laughter died away into a silence that listened. A voice spoke, just behind her shoulder. Warm. Pleased. Familiar in a way that turned her blood to ice. "There you are," it said. "We've been waiting."