Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H59PHKJQQGNYVNRBYJWKG4

The grove was exactly where Eva had said it would be, which was the first wrong thing. Nothing in Richmond Park was ever exactly anywhere. Rory had walked these paths half a hundred times in daylight, delivering for the Golden Empress, cutting through on her way home to the flat above Silas' bar, and the park was a sprawl of deer and dog-walkers and joggers who all blurred together. But tonight, past midnight, the map Eva had sketched on a napkin led her to a place she had never once stumbled across: a ring of ancient oaks, trunks wide as doorways, standing in a loose circle like the stones of some buried temple. Wildflowers bloomed beneath them in riotous color. In November. She checked her phone. 12:14 a.m. No signal, of course, but the clock was enough. Eva's text — *go at midnight, don't be late, it matters* — had arrived at 11:02, which meant she'd made good time. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside, Eva had told her once, drunk on cheap cider, laughing about it like it was folklore. Rory hadn't believed her then. She was beginning to believe her now, because the moment she stepped between the twin oaks, the cold changed. It wasn't the cold of a November night. It was older, patient, like the air inside a locked church. The Heartstone Pendant shifted against her sternum, warm through her coat. It had been doing that since she'd entered the park — a faint pulse, like a second heartbeat tucked behind her own. Near a Hel portal, Dymas had said. She hadn't understood what that meant until now, standing in a circle of impossible flowers with warmth spreading from the crimson gem like a held breath. "Eva?" Her voice came out smaller than she intended. The grove answered with silence. Not empty silence — attentive silence. The silence of a room where someone has just stopped moving. She turned slowly. The oaks' bark was deeply furrowed, and in the moonlight the grooves looked almost like script, row after row of characters she almost — almost — recognized. She blinked, and they were only bark again. Moonlight. Wait. Richmond Park was awash in cloud cover all evening; she'd navigated the bridle paths by torchlight. She looked up. Above the canopy, a fat silver moon hung low and close, exactly where no moon should be at this hour, in this sky, on a night that had been overcast. The pendant pulsed. Once. Twice. Then it settled into a rhythm, and Rory realized with a slow slide of dread that the rhythm matched her own pulse exactly. Not near it. Exactly. As if it weren't echoing her heart, but driving it. Stop, she told herself. Cool head. There was a reason she was here. Eva had gone missing nine days ago, and the last place her phone had pinged was a tower two hundred meters from this clearing. The police had shrugged. Silas had gone pale when she'd mentioned the grove, and had only said, *If you must go, go before dawn, and don't answer anything that calls your name.* Then he'd wiped the same glass for ten minutes and refused to say more. So: find what there was to find, and leave before dawn. Simple. Except dawn didn't seem to exist here. The moon hadn't moved since she'd noticed it. She'd been in the grove, by her watch, for eleven minutes. It felt like an hour. It felt like it had always felt like an hour. She knelt by a patch of white flowers — snowdrops, out of season and seasonless now — and saw the second wrong thing. Broken stems. A trail of them, snapped cleanly, leading from the center of the grove toward the eastern stones. Something had walked through here, dragging or dropping, and recently enough that the sap still gleamed wet on the broken ends. She should have turned back then. She knew that. Instead she followed the trail, one hand closed around the pendant, and told herself that the warmth in the stone was a compass, not a lure. The center of the grove was bare earth, a perfect circle of it, and the earth was soft. Freshly turned. Not a grave — she made herself look, made herself confirm — no mound, no markers, just a shallow depression like something had lain here a long time and recently risen. Or something had lain here, waiting, and recently been covered. The soil was scattered with silver. Not coins. Chains. Dozens of fine silver chains, all snapped, all draped over the turned earth like tinsel on a terrible tree. Rory's hand went to her own pendant. Still there. Still warm. Still beating with her. Her pulse, she noticed, was not racing. It should have been. Her mind was screaming and her body had gone calm, professionally calm, the way it did when Evan used to come home in one of his moods and she'd learned to make herself a cup of tea instead of running. It was not calm. It was the calm of a rabbit that has decided the fox has already seen it. From the eastern stones came a sound. Not a footstep. A settling, like a house breathing at night, like wood expanding in damp. Then, faintly, a second sound: humming. A tune she knew. A Welsh lullaby her mother used to sing, half-remembered, the melody sagging in the wrong places, notes stretched too long, as if the singer had learned it from a description of the song rather than the song itself. "Eva?" she said again, and hated herself for it. The humming stopped. In the silence that followed, Rory became aware of all the other sounds at once: the slow creak of branches overhead, bending though there was no wind; the papery rustle of flowers turning, all of them, every bloom in the grove, rotating on their stems to face her; and beneath it all, a wet, rhythmic sound from the eastern stones, like breathing through cloth. She moved to the western gap between the oaks. It was gone. Not closed — gone. Where she'd entered there was now unbroken wall of oak and hawthorn, dense and black, and the twin door-trees were simply two among many. The grove had no doors. The grove had no outside. Her watch said 12:31. It had said 12:31 four times now, each time she'd checked. She stopped checking. *Don't answer anything that calls your name.* "Aurora." The voice came from behind her, from the center of the grove, and it was Eva's voice, exactly Eva's voice, warm and a little hoarse, the way it always was in the morning. Rory stared straight ahead at the wall of oak. Her eyes burned. Her teeth were locked together so hard her jaw ached. "Aurora Carter. You came. I knew you'd come." Say nothing. Think. She was the clever one; everyone always said so; Eva used to joke that Rory could think her way out of a paper bag with no holes. So think. Time was broken here. The pendant was a compass for portals, which meant portals existed, which meant exits existed; she only had to find the seam. Her eyes tracked the wall of oak, looking for the place where the moonlight bent wrong, where the air shimmered faintly, where the temperature shifted from old-cold to November-cold. "Aurora." Closer now. It had not crossed the grove; there had been no footsteps; and yet it was close enough that she could smell it, and that was the worst thing yet, because it smelled like Eva's flat, like coffee and lavender soap, with underneath it something like turned earth and old chains. "Turn around, Rory." The pendant went hot against her chest. Not warm — hot, urgent, a burn like a struck match, and Rory understood it at last not as a lure but as an alarm, a fire bell ringing in the one place she was not supposed to be, and above her the branches creaked and bent lower, and every flower in the grove had turned its white face toward her like a congregation of small, waiting moons. She ran for the place where the light bent wrong.