Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCVFV0Z25326YKSH92G4FKK

Rory pushed through the oak boundary of Richmond Park, boots crushing frost that had no business in late spring. The Fae Grove swallowed her whole. Ancient oaks ringed the clearing, their bark etched with spirals older than Cardiff's streets, older than her father's law books. Wildflowers blazed in impossible colour—bluebells in October, foxgloves in winter—each bloom unmoving, painted onto air. The pendant hung cold against her collarbone, a deep crimson heartstone no larger than her thumbnail, its silver chain knotted twice. It should have pulsed. Near a Hel portal, the benefactor's note said, it warmed like a second heartbeat. Tonight it stayed dead. That wrongness dug under her ribs sharper than any knife. She came for Eva. Or for the letter that led her here—unsigned, inked in a hand she almost recognised. The clearing opened like a mouth. No wind moved the flowers. Still, they rustled. Rory stopped. Her shoulder-length black hair stuck to her neck. Bright blue eyes scanned the dark. Five foot six of wasted London delivery shifts meant she knew how to move quiet, how to read an empty street. This wasn't empty. The air tasted of iron and rotting sweetness. A twig snapped behind her left shoulder. She turned. The standing stones watched. Between them, the wildflowers bent as if something heavy passed through, though nothing was there. "Show yourself," she said. Her voice sounded thin, swallowed by the pocket between Earth and the Fae realm. No answer. The rustling spread, a slow circle closing in. Rory touched the crescent scar on her left wrist, a childhood accident from a Cardiff playground, a crescent she traced when terrified. The Heartstone stayed silent, its faint inner glow dimmed to nothing. Not near a portal, then. Or worse—something had already opened. Shadows pooled wrong. They stretched toward her boots like fingers of tar. She stepped back. Her heel struck root. The ground gave a dull thud, hollow. Time stuttered. The park outside Richmond should have held traffic noise, plane trails, the hum of the city. Here, only silence thickened, pressing her eardrums until she heard her own pulse, frantic, too loud. Something moved at the edge of vision. Fast. Too fast for shape. A smear of black against black, then gone. Rory's breath shook. She kept her hands low, delivery-bike calluses rough, ready. The flat above Silas' bar felt years away. Her father Brendan's barrister logic failed here; her mother Jennifer's classroom patience meant nothing to this grove. Another sound—closer. A wet drag across moss. She circled left, back to the stones. The flowers turned their heads. Not literally—she forced that thought down—but they seemed to lean, to watch with colours too bright, too hungry. The pendant warmed. One faint pulse. Rory clutched it. "Eva?" The name hung useless. From the centre of the clearing, where no path should exist, a shape unfolded. Not walking—arranging itself from darkness, from the rustle of flowers that now bent away in revulsion. Tall. Too thin. Its face remained hidden behind a veil of moving shadow, but Rory saw the tilt of its head, studying her like a specimen. She did not run. Running made it real. She stood her ground, cool-headed intelligence burning through the fear that tried to lock her knees. "You're not Eva," Rory said. The shape made no sound, but the wildflowers screamed in silent motion, every stem bowing toward it. Rory's heart hammered. The Heartstone pulsed faster, crimson deepening, silver chain biting her skin. Near a portal. The wrongness had a source. She took one step back. The shape matched it, gliding closer without feet. The rustling stopped. In the absolute quiet, Rory heard it breathing—not air, but absence, pulling the grove's stillness into itself. Her bright blue eyes fixed on the hidden face, searching for humanity, for Eva, for anyone she knew. There was none. The crescent scar on her wrist throbbed in time with the pendant. The grove held its breath. The shape reached out—no hand visible, only darkness shaped like a hand—and Rory realised she had come not to find Eva, but to be found. The Heartstone blazed. Warmth spread up her neck, terrifying in its life. The portal was open, and she stood in it, alone, in the wrong place, with nothing but quick thinking and a dead delivery job between her and whatever had just finished arranging itself from the dark.<|end_message|>