Run: 2026-09-23-01M37P4J8RR6MGZHP13G83N4FW

The park gates had been locked for hours, but the note in her pocket said the stones would open for her. Rory had read it eleven times on the night bus from Hammersmith, until the words had worn smooth as river pebbles: *The Grove remembers what was taken. Come alone. Come before the frost takes the last of the flowers. — A friend.* No signature. No return address. Just a slip of cream paper that had been waiting under her door that morning, and a small drawing of an oak leaf pressed beneath the wax seal. She climbed the railing where the fence sagged behind the Isabella Plantation, dropped into the wet grass, and stood listening to the dark. Richmond Park at night was a different animal than the one she cycled through on her deliveries. By day it was families and deer and ice cream vans. Now it breathed around her, vast and unlit, the city glow swallowed by the treeline. "Right," she murmured to the empty air, because silence that thick needed puncturing. "Stones. Find the stones." The Heartstone pendant hung cold against her sternum. She'd taken to wearing it under her jumper ever since the thing had started warming up on its own — a faint, rhythmic heat like a sleeping animal curled against her skin. Tonight it lay still. That was something. That meant she was walking toward nothing worse than a strange note in a dark park. She walked. The grass gave way to bracken, then to a path that wasn't on any map she'd ever seen, bordered by oaks older than the city itself. Her breath hung in front of her face. December had stripped the branches bare, and yet, the further she walked, the more the ground beneath her feet softened and greened, until she was stepping on moss so thick it swallowed the sound of her boots. That was the first wrong thing. Not the moss. The *quiet*. No cars, no planes, no distant hum of London. Her own footsteps had gone missing. She stopped. Lifted one boot. Set it down again. Nothing. "Okay," she said, and her voice came out flattened, like she'd spoken into a pillow. "Okay, that's — that's new." The second wrong thing was the smell. Honey and cut grass, thick as June, in air cold enough to sting her lungs. She rounded a gnarled oak and stopped dead. The standing stones rose out of the clearing ahead, seven of them, oak-dark and rough, arranged in a loose crescent. And between them, carpeting the whole grove in the dead of winter, wildflowers. White ones, blue ones, tiny gold ones she had no names for, all nodding gently in a wind she couldn't feel. She checked over her shoulder. Behind her, the path was gone. Just trees, and the trees, and darkness between the trees. "Nope," she told the flowers. "Absolutely not. This is exactly the sort of thing that gets people in horror films, and I have *seen* horror films, I know how this goes —" The pendant flared hot against her chest. She froze, one hand pressed over her jumper. The gemstone pulsed — a slow, deep crimson beat, then another, quicker now, like something waking up. Like something with a pulse of its own. "That's a Hel portal," she whispered. "That's a Hel portal, you stupid glowing rock, that's what you do, you're *telling* me there's a portal here, which means —" A flower stem snapped somewhere to her left. Her head snapped toward the sound. Nothing. Flowers, stones, moonlight pooling in the clearing like spilt milk. She turned a slow circle, and the turning helped nothing, because the grove was round, and every direction looked the same, and the darkness under the stones was deep enough to hide anything at all. She made herself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Evan's voice slithered up from the old dark place in her memory — *you're overreacting, Rory, nobody's there, you're imagining things, you always imagine things* — and she ground it down under her heel the way she'd learned to, and she made her feet move. Toward the stones. Because the note had said the Grove remembered, and because whoever had left the pendant under her door two months ago had known things they shouldn't, and because some stubborn, furious part of her was done with doors that closed and answers she wasn't given. The gap between the two nearest stones was wide enough to walk through. She paused at the threshold. The flowers inside the crescent leaned toward her, all of them, in unison, like a field of small faces turning to watch. "Right," she breathed. "Good evening to you too." She stepped through. The cold vanished. Not warmed — vanished, like a coat lifted off her shoulders. The grove inside the stones was summer-warm and smelled of honey and rain, and the moon overhead was wrong, too large, too close, its craters plain as a thumbprint. Somewhere, faint and impossible, she could hear a river. Richmond Park had no rivers. Her phone was dead in her pocket. She'd charged it on the bus. "Rory." Her whole body locked. The voice had come from behind the farthest stone — a woman's voice, low and pleasant, and it had known her name. Not Aurora. Rory. The name only her friends used. "Hello?" Her voice cracked on it. She cleared her throat. "Hello? Who's there? You left the note — is this you?" Silence. Then, from her right this time, closer, the same voice, gentle as a mother's: "Rory." She spun. Nothing. Flowers. Stones. The huge patient moon. "You're moving," she said, and her heart was slamming now, her hands cold despite the summer warmth. "You're moving around me. That's — fine. That's fine, I can — I'm going to stand very still, and you're going to stop being a coward and *show yourself*." The pendant burned. Not warm — hot, hot enough that she hissed and pulled it out of her collar, and the gemstone was glowing through her fingers, its crimson light spilling between them like she'd cupped a coal. It pulsed faster. Faster. A heartbeat racing toward something. The flowers had gone still. Every last one of them. The wind she'd never felt had stopped pretending to exist, and the grove hung in a silence so complete she could hear the blood in her own ears. Then, from the darkness between two stones — a darkness deeper than any moonlit shadow had a right to be — something breathed in. A long, wet, appreciative breath. The sound of something savouring air it had waited a long time to taste. Rory didn't run. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to, but the note had said *come alone*, and the pendant had dragged her here glowing like a lit fuse, and she was so tired of being the one things happened *to*. She closed her fist around the burning gem and held her ground. "I know you're there," she called, and was horrified to hear how steady her voice came out. "I don't know what you want, but this was an invitation, so — so let's have it." The darkness between the stones unfolded. It didn't step out. It *unfolded*, joint after joint after joint, more joints than anything living should own, and it stood half-in-shadow with its head — if the smooth pale oval atop it was a head — tilted at an angle that made her stomach drop through the floor of her. "Little Carter," it said, in the pleasant woman's voice, in a dozen other voices layered beneath it, hers among them — her own voice, saying her own name, from somewhere deep inside its chest. "You brought my heart back to me." The pendant flared white-hot in her fist, and Rory understood, in one cold clean flash, that the note and the gift had never come from the same hand.