Run: 2026-09-03-01M1KY9V8GW3VGX0J09N1PS31X

The gap between two ancient oak standing stones exhaled colder air than the park behind her, and Rory stepped through it. Frost glazed the grass in the clearing beyond, silver under a thin moon. Wildflowers pushed up through the frozen ground, white and blue and impossible for November, their petals open and facing her. She swept her straight black hair behind one ear, breath pluming in front of her bright blue eyes. The Heartstone Pendant rested against her collarbone, the silver chain cool, the crimson gem no bigger than her thumbnail and dark. "Midnight," she said. "I'm here, Eva. Just like you asked." Her voice came back too fast, as if the trees had caught it and thrown it back without bothering to carry it anywhere. She let the silence stretch. No footsteps answered. No tall, laughing woman stepped out from the oaks. Only the flowers nodded, though no wind stirred them. Rory's phone had buzzed at half past eleven with Eva's name on the screen. *Richmond Park. The Grove. Midnight. Come alone. Please.* She had read it four times, then swung her leg over her delivery e-bike and ridden through the dark until the park gates rose in front of her. She had chained the bike to the fence and walked. Now she was here, and Eva was not. "That's not funny," Rory said. "You text me after three days of silence, you beg me to come, and then you hide." The pendant warmed against her skin. She looked down. The crimson gem had caught a faint inner glow, pulsing in a slow rhythm, and the silver chain no longer felt cool. Warmth spread across her collarbone, then down her sternum. Rory knew the trick of the thing; an unknown benefactor had pressed it into her hand outside Golden Empress two weeks ago and told her only one rule. *It pulses when a Hel portal is near.* Hel portals belonged to old stories, not to Richmond Park in November. "Hel?" she whispered. "Here?" She turned in a slow circle. The clearing stayed empty. Twelve ancient oak standing stones ringed the space, their surfaces scarred and pale as bone, their roots swallowing the frost. Beyond them, the wildflowers kept their faces turned toward her. She counted the stones without meaning to, the way she counted the change in her tip jar, the way she counted the stairs up to her flat above Silas' bar. A glass clinked. Rory froze. The sound had come from her left, close enough that she could see the wet ring it left on the wood. Then a murmur of voices rose, the low Thursday-night crowd from the bar below her flat, and above it the familiar creak of the floorboard outside her bedroom door. Her skin went tight. She was six miles from Silas' bar. The floorboard creaked again, footsteps crossing her ceiling. "This isn't happening," she said. "I'm not hearing this." The murmur cut off mid-sentence. The clearing held its breath. Rory's phone read 12:03 a.m. and no signal, three bars of nothing, the time stark against the dark. She walked deeper into the grove. Five minutes passed. Maybe ten. The frost did not melt under her boots; the moon did not shift behind the oaks. She checked her phone again. 2:41 a.m. "What the hell?" She stopped walking. "I walked five minutes." The screen did not change. Two hours and thirty-eight minutes gone, and the cold bit the same, and the wildflowers bloomed as if time had not touched them. Rory pressed her thumb to the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, the old childhood mark, and felt the skin there ache. The Grove stole time. Eva's texts had never mentioned that part. "Eva!" Rory called. "It's Rory. I'm alone, like you wanted. Come out." The name came back a half-second late, thinned and wrong: *Rory.* Not an echo. Echoes did not change the shape of a voice. Echoes did not breathe. Rory turned toward the sound. A shape darted between two oaks at the edge of the clearing — tall, too thin, its arms and legs bending at angles that made her eyes water. It moved like a spider on fast-forward, there and gone between one blink and the next. The ferns shivered where it had passed. Nothing else moved. "I saw that," Rory said. "I don't know what you are, but I saw that." No answer. Her e-bike started. The engine coughed, caught, and settled into its familiar electric whine. Rory's head snapped toward the path back to the gate. She had left the bike chained to the fence a mile behind her, key in her pocket, battery half-dead. The whine idled closer, drifting through the standing stones, but the frost on the path lay unbroken. No tires. No shadow. The engine cut. Silence rushed back in, heavier than before. "I hear you," Rory said. "I hear you, and I'm not afraid of a noise." The lie tasted like copper. Her heart hammered against the Heartstone, and the gem pulsed faster, warmer, the crimson light flashing against her throat. She kept walking. A figure stood at the far side of the clearing. It had its back to her, human height, shoulders narrow under a dark jacket. Rory's mouth went dry. She knew that jacket. She had thrown that jacket into a charity bin in Cardiff six months ago, the night she packed a bag and fled Evan, the night she came to London because Eva had begged her to. "Evan?" The name scraped her throat. "That's not possible. You're in Cardiff." The figure's head turned. Its neck stretched, elongated, the spine clicking loud as knuckles cracking, and the head kept turning far past where a neck should stop until the face pointed backward at her. Then the oaks swallowed it. In its place stood a trunk with a knot like a screaming mouth. Rory backed up until the cold of a standing stone pressed between her shoulder blades. She counted the stones again. Twelve. She had counted twelve on the way in. Now her count stopped at thirteen. The extra stone stood a little apart from the ring, and it was no stone at all. A seam of crimson light split the air there, vertical as a doorway, wide enough for a person to step through. Heat rolled off it, dry and metallic, smelling of old iron and burnt hair. The Heartstone Pendant burned against her chest, pulsing in time with the seam, and Rory understood what her unknown benefactor had actually given her. "A Hel portal," she said. "In a Fae grove. Someone opened a door to Hel and left it lying about." The wildflowers nearest the seam turned to face it, dozens of pale faces drinking the light. Footsteps crunched the frost behind her. Rory stopped. The footsteps stopped. She took one step forward, and one step crunched behind her, matching her pace exactly, close enough that she felt the disturbance in the air at her back. She did not look. She kept her eyes on the crimson seam, on the impossible doorway, and the footsteps stayed with her, step for step, though the frost showed only her own prints. "I know you're there," Rory said. Something leaned in, close enough that the small hairs on her neck stood up and her breath fog mixed with breath that was not hers — warm, and wrong, and smelling of the same burnt iron as the seam. "You shouldn't have come alone, Rory," it said, in Eva's voice, in Eva's exact bright tone, the one she used when she was about to laugh. Rory turned. The space behind her stood empty. The frost had melted in the shape of footprints, pacing her own, leading away from her toward the dark between the oaks. The frost around them lay smooth and unbroken, and the footprints kept moving, one after another, though nothing stood in them to make them.