Run: 2026-07-09-01KX402SZYXQ0ZZYNJQA5EN3VA

Richmond Park had locked its gates three hours ago, but the map on Aurora’s phone insisted she had reached her destination. A blue dot trembled over a blank patch of green. No footpath. No landmark. Nothing except a location pin labelled with two words: FAE GROVE. Rory lowered the phone and faced the trees. Her borrowed bicycle lay against a fallen beech twenty yards behind her, chained more from habit than necessity. Nobody had followed her off the road. Nobody sane would have pushed through a gap in the boundary fence, crossed a ditch full of nettles and walked half a mile into an unlit park because a note had appeared beneath her flat door. Bring the Heartstone to the Richmond grove at midnight. Come alone if you want to know who sent it. No signature. No explanation. The handwriting had looked old-fashioned without resembling the ornamental scrawl used on wedding menus. Each letter had been cut into the paper by a nib pressed too hard. She had come because the pendant had been warm enough to wake her. It rested beneath her shirt now, the deep crimson stone no larger than her thumbnail. Its silver chain cooled the back of her neck, but the gem pulsed against her sternum: heat, pause, heat. Like a second heart with poor manners. Rory checked the time. 12:07. “You get five minutes.” The trees took her voice and returned nothing. No traffic reached this deep into the park. That made sense. The absence of aircraft did not. Heathrow’s flight path had stitched lights across the sky on her ride in, one plane following another through the low cloud. Since she had stepped beyond the fence, the heavens had remained empty. She lifted her phone. No signal. The map still showed the pin, though the blue dot had vanished. “Brilliant.” A twig cracked behind her. Rory turned. The path she had made through the bracken ran back between silver birches, pale stems packed close together. Ferns leaned into the gap. Their fronds still quivered where her jeans had brushed them. Nothing stood among the trunks. A few yards to her left, something pale slipped behind a birch. Her hand closed around the pendant through her shirt. “Deer.” The word helped less once spoken. Richmond Park had hundreds of deer. Deer moved through trees. Deer broke twigs. Deer had pale rumps that flashed in poor light. Deer also breathed, stamped, grazed and existed in bodies large enough to disturb foliage. The bracken remained still. Rory switched on her phone torch. White light washed the nearest trunks flat and colourless. Beyond them, darkness crowded between the trees in solid bands. She swept the beam left, then right. Two eyes caught the light. They hung at the height of her waist, blue-white and close together. Rory stopped breathing. The eyes did not blink. She tilted the phone. A crushed drinks can glinted beneath a thorn bush. Air escaped her nose. “Four minutes.” She turned towards the pin’s direction and pushed on. The ground sloped into a shallow hollow. Frost whitened the grass there, though October had brought rain and mild nights to London. Each blade shone beneath the torch. Her trainers left black prints that filled with water. Halfway down, a bell rang. One clear note. Small, bright, close enough to have hung from someone’s wrist. Rory froze with one foot above the next patch of grass. The note faded. She waited. Counted to ten. A second ring came from behind her. She spun, torch raised. Her footprints descended from the trees in a broken line. Nothing followed them. The frost around each mark lay smooth and untouched. Then the bell rang ahead. Not an echo. The pitch had changed, lower this time, and the sound carried a soft scrape beneath it, like metal dragged across bark. The Heartstone flared against her skin. Rory jerked the chain out from under her shirt. The gemstone cast a dim red stain across her fingers. It brightened, dulled, then warmed again. A Hel portal. That was what the pendant did near one. At least, that was what she had been told by people whose explanations tended to arrive after the danger. She looked back uphill. The way out had narrowed. Birches stood where the gap should have been, their white trunks forming a close palisade. She could still see her footprints, but they ended beneath the roots of the nearest tree. “No.” She climbed towards them and trained the torch on the ground. Six wet impressions led up the slope. The seventh had become a dark crescent under a mat of frost. Beyond it, unbroken grass spread between the trunks. Rory crouched. She pressed two fingers into the sixth footprint. Water slicked her fingertips. Real. Fresh. Hers. She aimed the light between the birches. A face watched from the other side. Her pulse struck once, hard enough to blur her vision. The shape stood beyond the beam’s strongest reach: an oval patch of grey among black branches, with two deeper stains where eyes belonged. Too high for a person. Too still for an animal. Rory rose one inch at a time. “Who sent the note?” The pale oval slid behind a trunk without turning. No footsteps. No rustle. The torch flickered. “Don’t.” The light died. Darkness closed over her hand, the phone, the trees. The pendant’s inner glow remained, a red ember caged in her fingers. It gave enough light to show her knuckles and the crescent scar on her left wrist. Nothing else. She tapped the phone screen. Dead. The battery had shown eighty-one per cent at the fence. The bell rang beside her ear. Rory dropped low and swept one arm through the space behind her. Her hand met cold air. Something exhaled above her. The breath carried the smell of wet earth sealed beneath stone. She ran downhill. Frost snapped under her shoes. Branches caught her jacket and released it with dry little claws. She kept the pendant out, following its glow, one hand lifted before her face. The hollow levelled, then rose. She expected thorn, birch, a fence—anything that belonged in Richmond Park. Her shoulder struck wood. Rory recoiled and caught herself against a rough pillar thicker than her body. Red light crept across bark furrowed like split leather. It was an oak, but no oak grew in that shape. The trunk rose straight from the earth, stripped of branches, its top lost against the night. Another stood ten feet away. Then another. She raised the pendant. Ancient oak pillars ringed a clearing, each one planted upright like a stone in a burial circle. Beyond them, wildflowers covered the ground. Bluebells. Poppies. Primroses. Foxgloves. Flowers from different seasons lifted their heads beneath a starless sky. She had found the Grove. Rory stepped between the oak markers. The change arrived without wind or sound. Damp cold left her skin. Warmth touched her cheeks, soft as breath from an open oven, carrying pollen and crushed mint. The Heartstone’s glow strengthened until the veins inside the crimson gem became visible. Behind her, the oak pillars enclosed a wall of darkness. Ahead, moonlight silvered the clearing. There was no moon overhead. A narrow path curved through the flowers towards a low mound at the centre. Wild roses covered its sides, their white blooms open wide. A flat slab of black stone rested on top. Someone had placed a lantern there. Its flame burned blue. Rory remained at the boundary. “Midnight at the grove. Heartstone in hand. Alone.” She pitched her voice across the flowers. “I’ve followed the instructions. Now you can stop hiding.” The flowers nearest her turned. Not with the wind. Their stems bent together, blossoms angling towards her feet. A rustle travelled across the clearing in a widening arc. Poppies nodded. Foxgloves bowed. Bluebells shook their tiny cups without ringing. Then every bloom faced the mound. Rory watched the lantern. A shadow passed behind its blue flame. The clearing held no one. She took one step backwards. The oak pillars had shifted closer together. No gap remained between them. Their bark pressed edge to edge, sealing her inside the circle. “Of course.” Something moved along the outside of the wooden wall. She saw it only in pieces through narrow cracks: a pale strip, a bend too smooth for an elbow, fingers—or roots—sliding over bark. It circled her. Each oak gave a soft knock as the thing passed behind it. Knock. Pause. Knock. Pause. The sound travelled clockwise. Rory counted the pillars. Thirteen. At the ninth knock, the lantern flame stretched sideways. At the tenth, the flowers folded shut. At the eleventh, the air smelled of stagnant water. At the twelfth, the Heartstone grew hot enough to sting. The thirteenth knock did not come. Silence pressed against the clearing. Rory waited at the boundary, shoulders tight, eyes on the final oak. Her own breathing sounded coarse and intrusive. A whisper rose from the flowers at her feet. “Laila.” She stepped away from them. The name had not come from one voice. Dozens had shaped it, each breath caught inside a separate blossom. “Wrong person.” The flowers opened. Black centres stared up from every bloom. “Laila,” they whispered again. Rory’s thumb pressed into the pendant’s silver setting. Unknown benefactor. Unknown purpose. A summons addressed to nobody. She had assumed the note meant her because it had been pushed under her door. An assumption was only a decision made without enough bruises. “Who’s Laila?” The blue lantern went out. Moonlight remained over the flowers, yet the mound darkened as if a shape had risen before it. Rory narrowed her eyes. The roses on the slope shuddered one by one, stems parting around an invisible descent. Something walked down from the stone slab. No body appeared. Only the path of its passage: flattened grass, bent roses, shallow hollows pressed into the earth. It came towards her. Rory moved sideways. The unseen footsteps altered course. “You wanted the stone?” The pendant burned in her fist. The footsteps stopped. She extended her arm, letting the Heartstone hang from its chain. Red light dripped over the nearest flowers. Their black centres contracted. A shape surfaced in the glow. Not flesh. An absence. The pendant outlined shoulders too narrow for their height, arms hanging past where knees should have been, and a head tilted hard to one side. It stood fifteen feet away. The bell rang from inside its chest. Rory kept the pendant raised. “That’s close enough.” Its head tilted the other way. A voice came from behind her. “Give it back.” She refused to turn. The invisible figure remained in front of her, its outline pulsing red with each beat of the stone. “What did you call me?” “Give it back, Laila.” “I’m Aurora Carter.” The figure took one step. Flowers flattened beneath a long, narrow foot. Rory looped the chain around her fingers. “If this belonged to you, you’d know who I was.” The shape stopped again. From beyond the oak wall came a scratching sound. Not random. Deliberate strokes bit into the bark behind her, paused, then repeated. Three short. Three long. Three short. SOS. Rory’s eyes flicked towards the nearest pillar. The invisible thing lunged. She whipped the pendant forwards. Crimson light burst across the clearing, sharp enough to cut shadows beneath each petal. The figure recoiled, its limbs folding into angles that belonged to broken umbrellas and drowned insects. A shriek rose—not from it, but from the oak ring. Every trunk screamed through its grain. Rory ran for the mound. The creature crossed behind her without footsteps. Cold dragged over her back. She reached the black slab and planted both hands on its edge. Carved letters covered the surface. The same handwriting as the note. LAILA, WE COULD NOT KEEP THE DOOR SHUT. Below it, a narrow groove had been cut into the stone. Thumbnail-sized. Pendant-shaped. The Heartstone throbbed in her hand. The bell rang at the foot of the mound. Rory turned. The red glow found the creature climbing towards her, roses collapsing beneath limbs she could not see. Beyond it, between two oak pillars that had begun to draw apart, someone pressed a hand through the gap. A human hand. Mud blackened the nails. A silver ring circled the index finger. The fingers opened and closed in frantic silence as the trunks squeezed the wrist. Three scratches appeared on the inner bark. Then three longer ones. Rory looked from the waiting groove to the trapped hand. “Which one of you sent the note?” The creature halted midway up the mound. The hand beyond the oaks clenched into a fist. The flowers whispered her borrowed name. “Laila.” Rory lifted the Heartstone over the slot but did not lower it. Heat crawled through the chain, raising a red welt across her palm. The groove seemed to widen beneath the pendant, stone flexing like a mouth. “Answer me.” The blue flame returned inside the lantern. This time, it illuminated a figure trapped within the glass. A woman no taller than Rory’s thumb hammered both fists against the lantern pane. Straight black hair struck her cheeks. Her bright blue eyes fixed on Rory, and when she thrust up her left wrist, a small crescent scar marked the skin. Rory’s hand jerked away from the groove. Inside the lantern, the tiny woman mouthed two words. Don’t listen.