Run: 2026-10-05-01M46BK9AYVECBW8JFDA95AR12

The gate into Richmond Park stood open. Rory stopped with her hand on the latch. She had expected to climb it. She had brought gloves for the ironwork and worn trainers with decent grip, and now the small inconvenience she had prepared for was missing. Beyond the gate, the path shone pale beneath the moon. No traffic hissed behind her. She turned to check the road. Empty. It was late. Empty was reasonable. She took out her phone. 11:42. The message was still there, though the number above it had vanished. If you want to know who gave you the Heartstone, come to the grove before midnight. Bring it. Come alone. Below the message sat a photograph of the crescent scar on her left wrist. Not a similar scar. Hers. She could see the loose thread on the cuff of the jumper she had worn yesterday. That was why she had come. Not curiosity, whatever she had told herself on the bus. Someone had been close enough to take that photograph, and she wanted to meet them somewhere other than the corridor outside her flat. She checked the little torch in her coat pocket, then the restaurant’s heavy metal door wedge in the other. Yu-Fei would want that back. “Ten minutes,” she said. Her voice went no farther than the gate. She walked in. The path to the grove ought to have been difficult to find at night. In daylight, she had needed to watch for the split trunk of a fallen tree and a patch of bracken shaped roughly like a hand. Tonight the turn was obvious. The bracken lay flat, its stems pressed into the mud as though something broad had dragged itself through. She followed it. Within a dozen steps, the path behind her disappeared. That happened here. She knew it happened here. The grove occupied a pocket between places, and ordinary distances did not always survive the crossing. Time was worse. An hour beneath those trees might cost her minutes outside, or days. She had left a note on her kitchen table. Richmond Park. If I’m not back by morning, ask about the grove. Now she wished she had been more specific about whom to ask. The standing stones appeared ahead, pale columns under ancient oaks. In the dark, their weathered surfaces looked less like stone than trunks stripped of bark. Her torch picked out grooves running vertically through them, deep as seams. She counted six. There had been seven before. Rory stopped. Her memory was not a survey. She had visited in daylight, had looked at the flowers rather than the boundary, had been distracted. Six stones could be perfectly ordinary. She counted again. Seven. The last stood directly behind the first. She had shifted her weight, changed the angle. That was all. Inside the ring, wildflowers crowded the grass: buttercups, bluebells, small white blossoms she could not name. They bloomed here whatever the season. Moonlight flattened their colours, leaving pale heads suspended over black stems. The clearing was empty. “Hello?” Nothing answered. She crossed between the nearest stones. The air warmed abruptly. Not summer warmth. The close, used warmth of a room after everyone had left it. Under her jumper, the pendant stirred against her sternum. She pulled it free. The crimson stone, no bigger than her thumbnail, glowed faintly within its silver setting. A pulse of heat passed into her fingertips. Rory stood still until she felt another. She knew what that meant. A Hel portal, somewhere close. “No,” she said softly. Whoever had sent the message had left out a rather important detail. She backed towards the gap between the stones, keeping her torch pointed into the clearing. A bird called overhead. Three notes, thin and mechanical. She knew the sound. The pedestrian crossing outside the Golden Empress made it when the green man came on. The call came again, from farther inside the trees. Rory turned her torch upwards. Branches crossed the beam. No bird. The pendant warmed. She moved backwards another step and struck something solid with her heel. A stone. She looked behind her. The gap had closed. Two boundary stones stood shoulder to shoulder, almost touching, with a third beyond them. The narrow strip of grass she had crossed was gone. For a moment she simply stared, trying to make the view resolve into something sensible. Then she swept the torch around the ring. Seven stones. Seven gaps. She could not tell which one she had used. Her phone showed 11:42. She watched it for several seconds. The battery symbol was full. It had been at thirty-one per cent when she entered the park. She put it away. There were rules for places like this. She did not know enough of them. That was the first problem. The second was that panic would make her invent rules and trust them. She crouched beside the nearest stone and set the metal door wedge in the grass, its bright edge pointing towards the gap. There. A marker. Something from outside. She stepped through. The clearing opened in front of her. Same flowers. Same moon. The wedge lay at her feet, pointing away from her. Rory swallowed. “All right.” The words sounded composed. She was grateful for that. From somewhere behind the trees came the faint chink of cutlery. She held her breath. A plate scraped over a table. Water ran briefly, then stopped. She could picture the Golden Empress kitchen without wanting to: wet steel counters, the steam above the dishwasher, Yu-Fei lifting a bowl from the shelf. The sound was wrong in a way silence had not been. Silence belonged to woods. Those noises belonged to a room she knew, with people who should have been miles away. “Rory?” Yu-Fei’s voice. Irritated, distracted. “Order’s getting cold.” She did not answer. The flowers closest to her had turned towards the trees. She watched one small white blossom rotate on its stem. Slowly. Deliberately. The leaves did not move. Her mouth dried. “Rory,” the voice called again. Not from the trees this time. From behind the stone beside her. She swung the torch around it. Lichen. A shallow hollow at its base. Nothing else. “Who sent the message?” she asked. The grove went quiet. Even the small movements of her coat seemed loud. She regretted speaking before the question had finished leaving her mouth. A twig snapped at the opposite edge of the clearing. A shape stood between two oaks. Her first impression was of someone in a long coat, head tilted down. The torch reached it and showed only overlapping trunks, with a narrow band of darkness between them. She moved the beam away. The shape was there again. She returned the light. Trees. Rory lowered the torch until it lit the grass. She would not keep looking up. Whatever was happening at the edge of her vision, she did not need to encourage it. The pendant pulsed twice in quick succession. She tucked it beneath her jumper. The heat remained, a small hot thumb pressed against her chest. She took out the phone and opened the message again. The photograph had changed. Her wrist still filled the frame, scar pale beneath the skin. But the jumper cuff was different now. It was the coat she was wearing. Behind her hand lay a patch of white flowers. She looked down at her wrist. The angle was right. Whoever had taken the photograph would have been standing just over her left shoulder. Rory turned. Nothing. The phone vibrated once. You came alone. She read it, then locked the screen without replying. Somewhere to her left, someone breathed in. It was an ordinary breath. Slightly congested. Close enough that she should have felt it against her hair. She stepped away and put a stone at her back. “Show yourself.” A pause. Then, in her own voice: “Show yourself.” Not an echo. The words had the same flatness she used when she was trying not to sound afraid, but the breath behind them lasted too long. She pressed her lips together. The door wedge was still visible, five paces away. That mattered. It had not vanished. Whatever else this place was doing, it had kept one small object where she could see it. She concentrated on that. At work, a jammed door was a physical problem. You found where the pressure sat. You put something beneath it. You made space. Here, the problem was a boundary. The stones marked it. She had crossed between them and returned. But she had not tried crossing over one. The thought was almost stupid enough to be useful. Rory glanced at the nearest stone. Its top stood just above her head. Rough grooves scored its sides. She could get a foot into one, perhaps haul herself up using an oak branch that stretched across it. A slow scrape came from the far side. Something was dragging a fingernail down the stone. She moved to the next. “Love?” Her mother’s voice. Rory’s hand stopped on the cold surface. “Why haven’t you answered your phone?” There was a tiny catch in the voice, the one her mother got when worry had exhausted her patience. Rory had heard it after missed trains, late nights, the first week in London. “Your dad’s been trying you.” She kept her hand where it was. Beyond the stone, something rustled. A coat sleeve, perhaps. Someone shifting their weight. “I know you’re there.” Rory’s eyes burned with a sudden, humiliating need to believe it. Her mother would have come looking. Of course she would. Days might have passed outside. The note might have been found. But her mother would not be standing alone in this place, speaking as if Rory had locked herself in a bedroom. Rory bent and picked up the wedge. The voice dropped. “Aurora. Don’t make this difficult.” She knew that tone too. Not her mother’s. Her fingers closed hard around the metal. For one moment she was back in a hallway with Evan between her and the door, calculating how much room she needed to get past him. The same cold arrived in her hands. The same dreadful urge to explain herself clearly enough that he would let her leave. She drove the narrow end of the wedge into a groove in the stone. Metal rang. Every flower in the clearing turned towards her. She climbed. Her trainers slipped on the first attempt. She came down hard on one knee, bit back a cry, and tried again. This time the wedge held. She pulled on the low oak branch and got her weight above it. Behind her, the grass whispered. Not footfalls. Something being drawn across thousands of small stems. She did not look. Her chest scraped the stone. The pendant burned through her jumper. She hooked an elbow over the top and hauled herself up until she straddled it. The clearing lay on both sides. On one side, her torch rested where she had dropped it, casting a white bar through the flowers. On the other, her torch rested where she had dropped it, casting a white bar through the flowers. Both beams pointed towards the same empty patch of grass. Rory’s breath came fast through her nose. No. She had changed something. There had to be a difference. She searched the two clearings. Same stones. Same oaks. Same white flowers. Then she saw the wedge. On her left, it was lodged beneath her foot. On her right, another wedge lay in the grass, pointing towards a gap. She stared at that second object. It was clean. No mud on the edge. No damp grass caught under it. She had made the mark. The grove had copied it. Below, her own voice said, “There you are.” Something stood in the light from the torch. She could see its shoes without looking directly at it. Black trainers. One untied lace. Hers. She turned towards the side with the dirty wedge and lowered herself down the outside of the stone. A hand closed over the top beside her. She saw four fingers. Pale knuckles. The small crescent scar, placed on the back of the wrist. Wrong side. Rory let go. She dropped into bracken. The impact drove the air out of her. For a few seconds she could do nothing but lie with her cheek against wet earth, trying to breathe. Cold air entered her mouth. Cold, ordinary air. She pushed herself up. Behind her stood an oak tree. No stone. No flowers. The grove had gone. Her torch was gone with it. She limped towards the pale line of the path, one hand pressed over the pendant. It had cooled. Through the fabric she could feel its small, definite shape. A pedestrian crossing sounded somewhere in the distance. She stopped. Then headlights moved beyond the trees, accompanied by the wash of tyres on a road. The sound grew louder and faded naturally. Rory kept walking. At the gate, her phone showed 11:43. Its battery was at thirty per cent. She stood beneath a streetlamp and opened Eva’s number. Her thumb shook badly enough that she touched the wrong name twice. Before she could call, a message arrived. It came from her own number. She did not open it. The preview was enough. Don’t go home yet. I’m still finding the way. Rory looked back through the gate. Far down the path, beyond the reach of the streetlamp, a small white light rose from the ground. Her torch. Someone turned it off.