Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD7M7CYEJ1JA58AT895MJY0

The path through Richmond Park had closed hours ago, but Aurora had climbed the fence near the gate with the ease of long practice, delivery bag slung across her back and torch between her teeth. Yu-Fei's note had been specific. *The grove. Midnight. Come alone.* She'd stopped asking why Yu-Fei's suppliers kept strange hours months ago. The pay was too good, and the questions only ever earned her that flat, unreadable stare from behind the restaurant counter. She found the standing stones the way she always did, by the oaks that leaned towards each other like conspirators. The pendant beneath her shirt gave a faint pulse of warmth as she ducked between them. It always did that here. She'd stopped finding it strange, which perhaps should have worried her more than it did. The clearing opened ahead, wildflowers silvered under the moon. No Yu-Fei. No anyone. "Hello?" Her voice died against the dark. She checked her phone. 11:58. Two minutes early, then. She lowered the bag and settled onto the flat stone at the clearing's centre, the one warm even in winter, and waited. The warmth of the stone bled up through her jeans. Too warm. She shifted, and that was when she noticed the silence. Richmond Park never went fully silent. Even at this hour there should have been something — a fox, an owl, the distant hum of the road beyond the trees. Instead the quiet sat against her eardrums with actual pressure, the way silence did in a soundproofed room. Her phone read 11:58 still. She watched it. Counted her own heartbeats, sixty of them, then a hundred. The digits didn't move. She pressed the side button, let the screen go dark, woke it again. 11:58. "Very funny," she muttered, though nobody had played a joke on her, and the words fell flat as dropped coins. A sound came from the treeline then. Not footsteps. Something slower. A long, patient scrape, like a branch drawn along bark, except it stopped whenever she turned towards it and resumed only in the corner of her hearing. She swept the torch across the oaks. Light slid over trunks, over the black gaps between them. Nothing. She held the beam steady and forced herself to keep breathing evenly, the way she used to in Evan's flat, counting tiles on the kitchen wall until the shouting stopped. The scrape came again. Closer. From the left this time, though nothing in the treeline had moved. She stood. The delivery bag felt suddenly absurd, so she left it on the stone and walked towards the standing stones with the torch raised, telling herself she'd simply wait at the boundary, that Yu-Fei could find her there, that this was all some atmospheric nonsense the grove did at night and she'd laugh about it tomorrow over dumplings. At the boundary she stopped. Between the two nearest stones, something hung in the air. She saw it only because the moonlight bent around it, a vertical seam of wrongness, like heat shimmer in a windless cold. The pendant against her sternum pulsed hard enough that she felt it through her shirt, once, twice, in a rhythm that wasn't hers. "That's new," she said, and her voice came out steadier than her hands. She knew what it was. Yu-Fei had used the word once, half-drunk on plum wine, then refused to repeat it. A Hel portal. A door to somewhere that wasn't anywhere good. Aurora took one step back, then another, eyes fixed on the seam. The shimmer widened by the width of a finger. Cold bled out of it, cold that smelled of wet earth and something underneath, something sweet and spoiled, like flowers rotting in stagnant water. Behind her, in the clearing, something exhaled. She did not turn. Every instinct she owned said turn, run, scream, but the cold at her back was worse than the cold in front, and some old animal part of her brain understood that the seam between the stones had stopped widening. It was waiting. The thing in the clearing was not. "Aurora." Her name, spoken in her mother's voice. Jennifer Carter's soft Welsh lilt, precise and warm, exactly as it had sounded calling her in from the garden when she was nine. Her mother was alive and well in Cardiff and would never, ever be standing in a Fae-touched grove at midnight. "Aurora, cariad, come here a moment." She stared at the seam and didn't turn. Her hands had gone numb around the torch. The voice came again, closer now, patient, coaxing, and beneath the lilt there was something wrong in the acoustics of it, an echo arriving a half-beat late, as if the words were being spoken twice by two mouths standing at different distances. "You're not her." "I could be." Her mother's voice, thoughtful now, the echo sharpening into something with edges. "I could be anyone. Turn around and see." The pendant flared hot against her skin, hot enough to sting, and the seam between the stones shuddered and pulled itself shut like a wound closing. The cold vanished. In its absence the night rushed back — wind, a distant owl, the road-hum — as if someone had lifted a bell jar off the world. Behind her, nothing breathed. She turned. The clearing stood empty. Moonlight lay across the wildflowers in ordinary silver. Her delivery bag sat untouched on the flat stone. The torch beam trembled across grass and found no footprints but her own, no mark, no sign that anything had stood there at all. Her phone buzzed. 12:47. A message from Yu-Fei: *Change of plan. Tomorrow. Do not go tonight.* Aurora looked at the timestamp, then at the standing stones, then down at her wrist, where the small crescent scar had gone white against flushed skin. She picked up the bag. She walked to the fence without running, because running felt like an invitation, and she did not look back until the gate was locked behind her and the orange glow of the streetlamps stood between her and the trees. When she finally looked, the park was only a park. Dark, ordinary, patient. She walked home the long way, under every light she could find, and she did not once stop shaking.