Run: 2026-09-01-01M1EMM7ZNXFEC6QVZQQ29P8ZX

Rory pushed through the ancient oak standing stones at Richmond Park’s hidden edge, and the air changed immediately. Not cold, not warm—thicker, textured, like drawing breath through wet silk that clung to the back of her throat. By night the Grove sat hidden in a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm, a clearing where wildflowers bloomed year-round despite the season, but she knew the boundary better than she knew her own flat above Silas’ bar. She kept her straight black hair pinned back with a clip she had borrowed from Eva’s flat, though sweat already clung to her bright blue eyes, reflecting a moon that sat wrong in the sky. Inside this clearing, the lunar light turned yellow, bruised, and the oak stones seemed taller than they had been at noon, their bark sharpening into ridges that looked almost like faces in the dark. She moved deeper. Time inside the Grove moved differently; an hour here could be minutes or days outside. She did not check her phone because there was no signal, and she did not check her watch because she knew, with the cold precision that had survived Cardiff University’s pre-law lectures and the long nights delivering noodles for Yu-Fei Cheung’s Golden Empress, that she had already lost minutes she could never reclaim. The delivery bags sat untouched in her kitchen, stacked beside her father Brendan Carter’s old barrister books, and her mother Jennifer Ellis’s Welsh poetry, and by now Eva would be pacing the Shoreditch flat, furious and terrified, wondering if Rory had run from Evan only to vanish completely. The Heartstone Pendant hung against her collarbone, silver chain biting into her skin, deep crimson gem roughly the size of a thumbnail glowing with a faint inner pulse. It had been given to her by an unknown benefactor, but she knew its origin. Dymas. Hel portals. The warmth sharpened when she crossed the oak stones, a warning she refused to ignore, and now it throbbed faster, frantic, matched to nothing in her chest. “I came because you pulled,” Rory said, her voice flat against the stillness, loud enough to feel ridiculous, low enough to stay private. No answer came from the wildflowers. They did not bend with wind because there was none. Crimson and pearl blossoms brushed her knees, releasing a scent that smelled of copper and old rain, of something buried for years in wet earth. She walked on, her 5’6” frame casting a shadow too long for the bruised moon above. The standing stones circled the clearing, rough-barked and ancient, marking a boundary older than her father’s Irish lineage, older than the Welsh hills where her mother had taught children to read, older than the childhood accident that had left a small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. Rory scratched it with her thumb, feeling the familiar ridge, the proof that her body was real, that pain was real, that she had survived an abusive ex named Evan and the law school she had abandoned. A sound arrived. Not a bird. Wet. Clicking, like someone working a tongue against teeth, and then a silence that swallowed the echo before it could reach her ears. Rory stopped. She turned her bright blue eyes toward the black trunks of the oaks. “That’s not real.” But the sound came again, closer, and this time it held a rhythm. Breath. Wet. Human in shape but wrong in timing, as if the creature that owned it had forgotten how lungs worked. She spoke again, quieter, though her voice carried nowhere but to the petals that turned to watch her. “You don’t get to be this loud without a body.” The pendant’s glow thickened. She pulled it from her shirt, silver chain biting cold into her fingers, crimson gem thrumming like a second heart that knew secrets. “You came from Dymas. You came with no name.” Her pre-law mind worked quickly, out-of-the-box, calculating angles, exits, legal precedents for reality, but the Grove had no corners—only the circle of stones, and the center where she stood, and the dark that breathed back. The wildflowers shifted. Not metaphorically. The stems bent, the crimson heads pivoting, tracking her steps with a patience that made her stomach tighten without her allowing fear to name itself, because fear was a luxury she had not paid for when she fled to London. She walked toward them anyway. Smart. Cool-headed. Quick-thinking was her armor, but armor did not stop wrongness. She reached the edge of the clearing where the moss grew too soft, too green, and the air tasted of copper and salt, of blood without wounds. A figure stood at the far stone. Not human, not quite—tall, wrong-jointed, with a head that turned too slowly. But Rory’s intelligence did not flinch. She spoke to it, and to herself, because the Grove demanded honesty, and she had learned that dialogue was the only weapon she had left, and it had to continue the action, never stall, never add fluff. “I know what this is. I’m not imaginary.” The figure did not answer. It only watched, and behind it, the wildflowers opened like mouths, crimson petals curling back to expose center flesh that shimmered with dew. Rory’s fingers found the scar on her left wrist again. The childhood accident had taught her that bodies failed, but she had survived, and she spoke now with the steadiness her father had drilled into her at Cardiff, with the argument she had made to Eva, with the refusal she had shown Evan. “I came alone,” she said. “No one followed. No one knows I crossed the boundary.” The figure leaned. A branch snapped under weight that should have been hollow, but the sound was wet, heavy, wrong, and the wildflowers turned away from her, bowing toward the dark with a surrender that felt demanded. Rory stepped back. Her black hair pulled by the wind that had not existed seconds before, her bright blue eyes fixed on the stone where the figure had been, now empty but for the footprint, too wide, too deep, as if something had stepped out of the earth rather than onto it. She spoke once more, because she was alone in a strange, isolated place at night, and she had come for a reason, and something felt off from the moment she arrived, and she needed to name it, to fight it with sound. “I want out. I want the time back.” The pendant’s glow sharpened, not with warmth now, but with a flush of warning, pulsing faster, an alarm against the Hel portal she was standing inside, and the Grove answered with a sound like a door opening—not with a hinge, but with an absence, with the air rushing out of a chamber that had been sealed for centuries. She turned her back to the figure. She walked to the boundary. But the oak stones had moved. She stopped. The crescent scar burned. The Heartstone throbbed against her collarbone like a live thing. The Grove was not done. She turned, and spoke to the darkness, her voice carrying across the wildflowers that had not stopped turning, that leaned closer now, pressing petals against her ankles. “You want me here?” The answer came not in words, but in the blooming of wildflowers, in the turning of heads, in the single, wet click of a tongue against teeth, and Rory Carter, once Rory, once Laila, once Aurora, looked at the empty stone and knew—in her cool, intelligent, quick-thinking heart—that she was not wrong. She was not wrong. She was not alone. The figure did not speak; the Grove spoke for it, with the wrongness of time turning, with the wildflowers turning, with the pulse of the crimson gem against her throat, and Rory saw, with a clarity that cut through the dark, that she had been wrong about only one thing. She had never been alone. She had crossed the boundary alone. And now the Grove had her.