Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H5AVA95Z2ECA26SNY07M8W

The gates of Richmond Park locked at dusk. Rory climbed the wall instead, palms scraping mossy brick, and dropped into the black expanse of grass beyond. She'd told herself she wouldn't come after dark. She'd told Eva the same thing, twice, on the phone while packing her bag: it's just a look, I'll be in and out, the stones only mark the edge of the grove. But the Heartstone pendant had started pulsing against her collarbone the moment she'd stepped off the bus at Robin Hood Gate, and it hadn't stopped. A faint rhythm under her coat, like a second pulse that didn't quite match her own. Warm. Insistent. The grove lay a mile in, past the deer paddocks, past the old oak with the lightning scar. Her torch made a small yellow island in the dark and she kept it aimed at her feet, which was why she never saw the deer leave. She only noticed the silence they left behind. Richmond at night was never truly quiet—foxes screamed somewhere in the city, owls worked the tree lines—but the closer she walked to the standing stones, the more the sound thinned out, as if the park were holding its breath around her. The pendant beat faster. The oaks rose out of the fog first. Twelve of them in a rough circle, older than anything else in the park, their trunks twisted into shapes that looked less like growth and more like gripping. Between them, the wildflowers glowed pale in her torchlight, acres of them, blue and white and a red she didn't have a name for, blooming in November like it was midsummer. She stopped at the boundary. The last time she'd come here it had been mid-afternoon, with Isolde laughing beside her, and the grove had felt like stepping into a warm bath. Now it felt like standing at the edge of a mouth. "Okay." Her voice came out flat and small in the fog. "In, look around, out. Twenty minutes." The pendant pulsed so hard she felt it in her teeth. She crossed the line of stones. The temperature changed first—warmer, the way it had been before, and that wrongness alone made her skin crawl, because nothing here should be warm in November. Then the smell hit her: loam and honey and underneath it something older, something like the air in a house that had been shut up for a long time. Her torch beam didn't seem to reach as far as it should. The grove was bigger inside than it had appeared from the outside—she knew that, it was a fae thing, space bent in here—but tonight the far edge of the clearing was swallowed in a darkness her light gave up on four metres out. She swept the beam along it. The darkness didn't reflect anything back. No. Not nothing. There, at the very end of the light—a shimmer, like heat off tarmac, vertical and tall and thin as a door left ajar. The pendant burned against her sternum. "Right," she whispered. "That's a portal. That's a Hel portal. That's—fine. That's what I came to check." Her breath didn't fog in the warm air. She walked the circle instead of heading straight for it, the way her father taught her to walk a room before a case—get the shape of it first, know your exits. The stones passed on her left, one, two, three, and each one wore carvings she didn't remember from her daytime visits: spirals, and lower down, rows of small marks like tally strokes. She counted them without meaning to. One hundred and six. She didn't know what they counted. She decided, firmly, not to find out. On her fourth stone, she heard the humming. It came from behind her—soft, tuneless, a woman's voice carrying a melody with no edges. She spun, torch up. The clearing was empty. Wildflowers swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel. She hadn't imagined it. It had been right there, close, the way a voice is close when someone stands just behind your shoulder. "Isolde?" The name cracked on the way out. The humming stopped. In its place, silence pressed against her ears like water. She backed toward the gap in the stones where she'd entered. Her heel caught on something and she looked down. A fox lay in the flowers, curled neatly, as if asleep. Its chest didn't move. Its fur was dry. Around its body the wildflowers had grown up and through it, stems threading between its ribs, blooming in a perfect ring. It hadn't been there when she crossed the boundary. She was sure. She was almost sure. Don't run. Running in fae ground was a rule she'd absorbed without ever being taught it—running was an invitation, running was a scent. She made herself walk, counting the stones back, three, two, one, the torch beam shaking now despite her grip, and when she reached the last oak she looked up at the gap between it and its neighbour and the fog on the other side of it was the wrong colour. Grey-green. Deeper than night. The gap she'd come through was gone. The pendant hammered. Behind her, the shimmer in the dark distance brightened by a degree. Warmth rolled against her back like an open oven door, and with it came the smell again, and under the honey she caught the other smell properly now: copper. Old pennies. She turned, slow, torch raised. The portal hung in the dark like a split in a photograph—taller than she'd thought, taller than a person, edges trembling. Through it, something moved. Not through it. Behind it. Shapes crossing the shimmer the way fish pass under ice, unhurried, patient, and each time one passed her torchlight caught a wet gleam that might have been an eye. The humming started again. From everywhere now. From the flowers, from the stones, from behind her own teeth. Rory pressed her back against the standing oak and did not run. Her fingers found the pendant and closed around it, hot as a coal, and she made her voice work. "I'm just passing through." The humming stopped. Every wildflower in the clearing turned toward her at once.