Run: 2026-09-03-01M1KZ20HTA0CQMB9ZV963NSNT

Rory ducked under the low branch of an oak and straightened in the gap between two standing stones. The ancient bark felt slick under her palm, not damp but polished, like the handle of a door that got used every day. Behind her, the park path had vanished. Ahead, the trees opened into a clearing. Wildflowers spread in a pale drift, their faces turned to a moon that hung too large over Richmond Park. They bloomed in a ring around the oaks, colourless in the dark but for the faint blue tinge of moonlight on their petals. The air held the trapped warmth of a greenhouse, and the smell of the flowers came sweet and funereal, like lilies left too long in a closed room. Every sound from London—the rumble of the A3, the wail of a siren, the endless hum of traffic—had been cut off. The silence had weight. It pressed against her eardrums. She hefted the Golden Empress bag. "Delivery for Isolde? Golden Empress. Sweet and sour chicken, large prawn crackers. You order, you collect." Her voice went nowhere. The words dropped at her feet. No door opened. No porch light flicked on among the oaks. She waited. Thirty seconds stretched. The screen of her phone read 10:52, the same time it had shown when she'd locked the scooter at the park gate. By her legs, by the burn in her thighs and the snagged tear in her left sleeve, she had climbed through brambles for twenty minutes. The phone disagreed. "Right. That's not right." She thumbed the screen and refreshed the map. The blue dot sat at the edge of a blank space the app marked as private land. No path. No grove. She looked up. The moon had not moved. The Heartstone Pendant lay cold against her collarbone. She touched it. The silver chain bit with chill; the crimson gem, no bigger than her thumbnail, held a faint inner glow, like an ember sealed in glass. Two hours ago, riding past the park wall, the stone had pulsed with sudden warmth, hot enough to make her gasp and jerk the scooter to the curb. It only ever did that near a Hel portal. Some faceless benefactor had hung it around her neck with no explanation, and she had learned the hard way that heat meant the dead realm was close. She had followed the pull off the road, through the trees, using the bogus order as an excuse to chase the wrongness down. Now, in the clearing, the stone gave off no heat at all. "Twenty minutes ago you were branding me. Now you're a bloody nightlight?" She turned in a slow circle, bright blue eyes narrowed. The wildflowers trembled, though no wind stirred the oaks. A stalk bent, then another, as if something pushed through them, circling wide. She caught the movement at the edge of her vision and snapped her head toward it. Nothing. Only flowers and shadow. A twig cracked behind her. She spun. The clearing lay empty. She swept the phone's torch beam across the loam. The light caught a set of footprints. Bare feet, human in shape, but the toes stretched too long, the arches too high, and they led from the tree line to the middle of the clearing and stopped. No return prints. No scuff of departure. Like whatever had walked here had sunk into the ground or risen into the air. Rory's pulse knocked in her throat. She drew a breath through her nose and held it, the way she had in the old Cardiff flat when Evan's key scraped the lock, when she'd needed her hands steady and her mind cold. She let the breath out. Fear was a signal, not a master. She had come here because she wanted answers, because the pendant had pulled her like a hook in the lip, and because the tip on the order had been big enough to cover rent and then some. She wasn't leaving with an empty bag and a head full of static. The silence changed. A new sound threaded through it: the creak of a swing set, metal chains groaning, though no swing stood in the grove. Then a child's laugh, bright and close, right behind her left ear. She jerked away, the beam slashing across the oaks. The shadows between the trunks leaned out, long and jointed, and withdrew. "Alright. Who's out there? I can hear you breathing." Nothing answered. The laugh didn't repeat. The wildflowers shivered in a line, moving toward her, the way grass moves when a dog runs through it. She backed up until her shoulders hit the standing stone. The bark was warm now, warmer than the air, and the carved surface seemed to shift under her jacket. She pushed off it, kept the bag in front of her like a shield. Something stepped into the ring of moonlight. It looked like a deer at first. Then the proportions resolved and her stomach turned. The legs were too long, the neck too thick, the head hung low and swaying. Its eyes were black glass, and they held no reflection of the moon or the torch or her. It didn't breathe out frost. It didn't chew. It watched her with a stillness that felt like a held knife. "Okay. You're not a deer." The thing tilted its head. The motion was wrong, too fluid, the neck bending farther than any bone should allow. Behind it, another shape rose from the flowers, taller, narrower, its edges blurring at the corners of her eyes. She didn't wait to see it clearly. She moved. She ran for the gap in the stones. The opening was gone. The two oaks stood shoulder to shoulder, bark knit together in a seamless wall. She slapped her palm against it. Warm. Pliant. Like skin over muscle. The grove had closed its mouth. Behind her, the flowers rustled. A voice spoke her name, not a deer's click or a child's laugh, but a woman's voice, rough with worry, the voice of someone who had once pulled her out of a bad flat in Cardiff. "Rory." Eva wasn't here. Eva was in London, asleep two miles away, or so she had said. Rory kept her back to the stone. "I came for a delivery. That's all. Take the bag. I don't want any trouble." The voice didn't answer. The torch beam jittered across the clearing. In its light, the wildflowers had turned toward her, every pale face tracking her movement, though no wind blew. The deer-thing took one step, then another, its hooves making no sound. The second shape stayed at the tree line, a tall smear of darker dark. Rory's fingers found the pendant. The gem still glowed, faint and steady, no warmth. She pressed her thumb to the crescent scar on her left wrist, grounding herself in the old ache. Cool head. Quick hands. She flipped the phone to the camera, kept the torch on, and aimed it at the clearing, recording. She would show this to someone. If she got out. The screen showed the clearing, the flowers, the empty loam. No deer. No tall shape. No footprints. Only the bag by the oak, and her own reflection in the black glass of the phone: bright blue eyes, black hair, the crimson spark at her throat. Then the reflection blinked a half-second after she did. A hot pulse thumped against her collarbone. The pendant burned. Not the faint warmth of a distant Hel portal, but a hard, insistent heat, the kind that meant the portal was right here, right now, opening in a grove that belonged to the Fae. Rory spun toward the centre of the clearing, torch beam stabbing the dark. The air above the wildflowers tore open in a thin silver seam, and something on the other side breathed her name.