Run: 2026-09-03-01M1M11A57B7PH2FH3TG4P6X4W

Rory pushed through the last of the gorse and stopped dead. Wildflowers spread around her, a carpet of white and yellow and bruised purple, bright as spilled paint under the torch beam. In the last week of October, they shouldn’t have existed. The air held the warm, green smell of a greenhouse, not a London park at midnight. Ahead, ancient oaks stood in a ragged ring, trunks thick as car doors, bark bleached bone-pale. The standing stones of the old stories. Her breath fogged. She’d found the Fae Grove. The Heartstone Pendant burned against her chest. She pulled it free from under her jacket. The silver chain caught the torchlight; the crimson gem, thumbnail-sized, held a faint inner glow. Warmth pulsed from the stone into her fingers, steady, like a second heartbeat. It had started an hour ago in the flat above Silas’ bar. One minute she’d been stacking takeaway cartons for Yu-Fei, the next the pendant had heated until she swore and dropped it on the counter. It had arrived in the post three weeks ago, no return address, no note, only the chain and the stone. It had cooled when she picked it up, then warmed again, tugging her down the stairs, onto the delivery scooter, through the empty streets to Richmond Park. She’d ditched the scooter at the gate and walked the rest. Now the thing thrummed like a live wire. “Come on, you bloody thing. You dragged me all the way out here.” Her voice sounded loud. She rubbed the crescent scar on her left wrist, the way she did when a puzzle refused to fit. “You’re supposed to wake up near a Hel portal, not a bunch of old oaks in Richmond.” The gem pulsed faster. She’d never known it to react to anything except the nearness of a Hel portal, and this was a Fae-touched clearing in the middle of a royal park. Two different flavours of wrong. She checked her phone. No signal. The screen glared 22:48. She’d left the bar at 22:30. The ride across London, the walk through the dark park, the push through brambles—all of it had taken her the best part of an hour. Yet the clock on the lock screen read twenty-two forty-eight. Eighteen minutes. She looked at the oaks, the silent flowers. Her legs ached. Her feet hurt. Eighteen minutes hadn’t passed. Nowhere near. A swing creaked. Rory’s head snapped up. The sound came from the left, beyond the ring of oaks. A chain groaned, metal on metal, the steady push of someone swinging. No playground stood within two miles of this spot. She knew the park. She’d delivered enough late-night orders out this way to know every path, every gate. There was no swing set here. A child laughed, high and bright. The sound cut off mid-note. She swept the torch beam across the darkness between the trees. Wildflowers trembled, though no wind stirred the air. The beam caught nothing but trunks and shadows and the pale gleam of petals. Her nape prickled, the way it did when a punter watched her from the dark corner of the bar. “Hello?” Her voice cracked on the word. She hated the crack. “Who’s there?” No answer. The pendant pulsed harder, hot to sting through her shirt. She let it drop back against her skin and moved toward the oaks, picking her way over the flowers. The ground sloped down to a narrow stream, the water black and silent. At the edge of the torchlight, a shape darted between two trunks. Pale. Fast. Gone before she could focus on it. She stopped. Counted her breaths. Forced her shoulders down. “Don’t be thick, Rory. Foxes. Deer. It’s a park.” The words didn’t land. Deer didn’t wear red. She’d caught a flutter of red fabric, bright as blood, behind the oak on her right. She swung the beam that way. Nothing. Just bark and shadow and the faint, impossible warmth of the flowers. She reached the first oak and stopped. Twelve trees made the ring. She knew the stories—twelve oaks, a boundary between worlds. She pressed her palm to the trunk, found a lightning scar in the bark, and snapped a twig from a low branch. She wedged the twig into the split wood. A marker. Then she walked, counting each tree as she passed. One. Two. Three. The bark shifted under her fingers, rough and cold. Her trainer caught on a root; she staggered, righted herself. The pendant swung free and bumped her sternum, warm, warmer. Four. Five. Six. The stream chattered, a low rush of water where before there had been silence. She hadn’t reached the stream yet. She knew she hadn’t. But the sound came from beside her, close enough to spray her jeans. She jerked the torch down. Black water slid over stones. The narrow stream ran at her feet. She hadn’t walked far. She’d counted six trees. The stream sat on the far side of the grove, beyond the twelfth oak. Seven. Eight. Nine. Her mouth dried. The air tasted of copper. She passed a trunk twice the width of her shoulders, its bark split into a shape like a screaming mouth. Ten. Eleven. She stopped. The lightning-struck oak stood in front of her. The snapped twig jutted from the split bark, where she’d left it. She’d counted eleven trees. She’d walked the entire ring and come back to the start, and there had only ever been eleven. But she had counted twelve when she first looked from the gorse. The grove had shifted. The ring had folded in on itself, or she had walked in a circle inside a straight line. Time and space, bending like wet paper. Twelve, she thought. Or thirteen. Or none of them made sense. She turned, torch raised. The beam jittered across the clearing. Something moved at the edge of the light. A figure stood between two oaks, tall and thin, its outline wrong, the limbs strange and long. The torch beam passed over it and kept going, and when she dragged the light back, the space stood empty. No shadow lay behind it on the grass. Nothing bent the wildflowers where it had stood. Rory backed up. Her heel caught a root; she stayed upright through luck and stubbornness. The heat of the pendant spread across her collarbone, a brand against her skin. She fumbled it free with her left hand, the crescent scar pulling as she stretched. The gem glowed a deep, sullen red, pulsing in time with something that wasn’t her heart. She crouched by the stream. The mud along the bank held prints. Her own trainer tread, size six, clear in the soft ground. And beside it, a smaller print. Bare feet. The toes pointed inward, the arch high, the heel pressed deep as if the owner had carried weight. Water seeped into the hollow, fresh, the edges still crumbling. She hadn’t stepped there. She hadn’t seen a soul since the gate. “Okay.” She stood, torch gripped tight. “Okay, you want to play? I’m done. I’m not Evan’s to scare, you hear me? I didn’t walk away from him to jump at shadows in a field.” Her voice shook. She let it shake. The name hung in the warm air, and the silence pressed against her ears. Then she heard it. A breath. Warm and damp, behind her left ear. Not hers. The torch beam fell on the wildflowers at her feet, and the shadow that fell across them wasn’t hers. It stretched long and thin from behind, cast by something the light hadn’t touched. The pendant burned, a hot, hard pulse against her chest, and Rory knew, with a cold certainty that settled in her gut, that she wasn’t alone.