Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD6NRER12F4W6XTNVKVRH4F

The air in Richmond Park after midnight was too still. Rory cut her bike's light and wheeled it off the path, into the bracken. The Golden Empress delivery bag was still slung over her shoulder, empty now, smelling faintly of chilli oil and damp canvas. The last drop had been at the edge of Roehampton, a flat where no one answered until she'd knocked for a full minute. She'd checked her phone. No signal. Then a text came through anyway. *Richmond grove. Now. Bring it.* No number. No name. But the pendant against her collarbone had been warm all evening, a low, insistent heat that she had first mistaken for sweat. She shouldn't have come. That was the first thought, clear and rational and entirely Rory. The second thought, cooler and faster, was that if someone was messing with her, she wanted to see their face. The oak standing stones rose out of the dark without her ever seeing them approach. One moment there was just trees, the next they were there, great hunched shoulders of bark and moss. The boundary. Beyond them the trees thinned and the ground opened into Isolde's grove. Rory had only been here in daylight. In daylight it was stupidly pretty, the kind of place that made London feel like a lie. Wildflowers, even in November, white and yellow heads turning to a sun that wasn't quite the same sun as outside. Now there was no sun. There was a moon that was too low and too full and cast no shadows in the right direction. She stepped between two of the stones. The air changed. Sound dropped out first. The distant hum of the A3, the planes coming into Heathrow, the rustle of the park itself — all of it went muffled, as if someone had pressed a hand over her ears. Then the cold hit. Not winter cold. A clean, thin cold that smelled of green things crushed underfoot. The flowers were still blooming. That was wrong. She could see them in the moonlight, buttercups and wild orchids and things she didn't have names for, their petals open wide to drink moon that shouldn't be able to keep them alive. The light caught the black of her hair and threw it over her shoulders as she moved forward, one hand going automatically to the pendant. It was pulsing. Deep crimson, roughly the size of her thumbnail on its silver chain, the Heartstone had always had a faint inner glow if you looked hard enough. Now it was beating against her skin, faintly warm, faintly tight, like a second, smaller heart trying to sync with hers and failing. She'd been told what that meant only once, and in passing, and she hadn't wanted to believe it. Near a Hel portal. She stopped in the middle of the clearing. Her breath showed. "Hello?" she called. Her voice didn't carry. It fell flat after two feet, swallowed by the trees that were too close together. No answer. Nothing moved. Rory's cool-headedness was not fearlessness. It was a process. She catalogued. Five foot six in trainers that were soaked through now from the long grass. Crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist catching the moon as she pushed her sleeve up to check the time on her dead phone. Delivery bag empty. Bike left outside the stones. Grove empty, night, no wind. Flowers open. Silence too deep. And then — a sound that shouldn't be there. Behind her, to the left, a twig snapped. Loud. Definite. She turned fast. Nothing. Just the standing stones, their bark black and wet-looking, and beyond them the dark of Richmond Park that she should still be able to see through the gap. Only she couldn't. The gap between the stones showed more clearing. More flowers. More trees where there should have been open parkland. The way out was gone. Her pulse kicked once, hard, against the Heartstone. She swallowed and forced her breathing to stay even. Out-of-the-box thinking, her friends had always called it. In Cardiff her father used to call it contrariness. It was just refusing to accept the first shape of a problem. Okay. Door closed. That meant this was not a prank. Or it was a prank using something that could fold space. She reached back and touched the standing stone nearest her. It was warm. Oaks should not be warm in November. The second sound came from above. A rustle, high up, though there was no wind to move the branches. Then a faint patterning, like soft feet on bark. Not dropping, moving laterally, around the crown of the clearing. Rory looked up. The canopy was thick. The moon was visible through it in pieces, and for a second she thought she saw a shape up there that blotted out more than it should have. Long. Too many joints. She looked down again quickly. The flowers at her feet were trembling. Not all of them. Just a ring of them, about ten feet out, as if something standing in the grass had brushed them and they were still settling. The Heartstone gave a hard throb, hot enough that she flinched. The chain bit her neck. "Isolde?" she tried. Her own voice sounded stupid to her now, too small and too human. "If that's you, this isn't funny." Isolde had never been cruel. But the fae had a different metric. Something moved at the edge of her vision, low to the ground on the far side of the clearing. Rory snapped her head toward it. Nothing. Then again, on the other side, a flicker of movement that her eyes couldn't track, just a suggestion that the line of wildflowers had been displaced for half a second longer than the eye could properly report. She wasn't alone. The certainty settled not as a fear but as a fact, heavy in her stomach. She started to walk the perimeter, hand still on the pendant, the other out to the side for balance though the ground was flat. Bright blue eyes, her mother's eyes, narrowed as she scanned the treeline that was too dark now, too close. Her black hair stuck to her damp neck. "You're circling," she whispered to it. To whatever it was. It was circling. She could hear it now, not in steps but in the absence of steps — a travelling pocket of quiet that moved through the unnatural quiet, a hush inside the hush. The wildflowers bent away from it as it passed. She could see the path. Her throat was dry. The pendant was almost too hot to hold. Rory stopped with her back against one of the ancient oaks. Bark dug through her t-shirt. This was idiotic. All of it. Eva telling her to get out of Cardiff, her dad's barrister voice on the phone about wasted potential, the man named Evan who had once told her that her cleverness would get her killed — all of it funnelled to this moment where she stood alone in a place where an hour could be minutes or days outside. Time moves differently. She thought of that now and felt cold in a new way. The circling stopped directly in front of her. The flowers in front of her did not spring back up. There was something standing there, in the space where there was apparently nothing. She could tell by the way the moonlight wasn't landing. There was a taller shape, roughly person-shaped but wrong at the shoulders, wrong at the neck, bending the light around it the way heat bends air over summer tarmac. And it was looking at the small, warm, crimson pulse beating against her chest. Rory did not scream. She thought very fast. The portal. It was near a Hel portal because this thing was near a Hel portal, or this thing *was* the indication. The pendant pulsed when near a Hel portal. It had been given to her by an unknown benefactor. What if it wasn't a warning? What if it was a key? The not-light shape took a step forward. The flowers under its feet didn't crush. They went dark, just for a second, as if they forgot how to be flowers. She did the only out-of-the-box thing she could think of. She took the silver chain in both hands and yanked it off and held it out, away from her body, the deep crimson stone swinging and flaring brighter, hotter. "Take it," she said, and her voice was steady, though her left wrist was aching where the old scar pulled. The shape stopped. Rory could feel its attention shift from her face to the stone. The air between them stretched. Then, from somewhere beyond the trees that were no longer trees, from far and deep, there was a sound like a door opening very slowly on rusted hinges. A Hel portal, opening because the Heartstone was calling it, because it was warm and pulsing and finally close enough. The cold in the clearing redoubled. Her breath came out in ragged clouds now. And the shape that had been watching her suddenly wasn't looking at her at all. It turned its too-long neck. Toward that sound. Toward the opening dark behind her. Rory didn't look. She dropped the pendant into the flowers — it hissed where it landed, melting frost that hadn't been there — and ran. She ran at the standing stones that were no longer there, at the gap that was no longer a gap, at the memory of where the boundary had been, shoulder-length black hair whipping behind her, expecting at any second to feel not-hands close around her shoulders. She didn't stop until her trainers hit bracken and concrete path and the roar of the distant A3 came back like someone turning the volume back up. She looked back. There were just oak trees, dark and ordinary. No clearing. No flowers. The stones were stones. In her palm, the Heartstone pendant was gone, but the skin of her chest where it had rested was marked with a small, perfect, crimson-coloured burn, still faintly warm.