Run: 2026-10-13-01M4V1YCGD1Y75ESTK5RZ9JDMY

The last delivery bag of the night still smelled faintly of Yu-Fei’s black bean sauce, a mundane, greasy anchor to the real world that Rory had foolishly left strapped to her scooter at the edge of Richmond Park. She wished she had it now. She wished she had anything that belonged to London, to Tuesday night, to the damp November chill that had been biting at her cheeks five minutes ago. Five minutes ago, or five hours. Rory paused between two of the boundary markers. The ancient oak standing stones—petrified wood turned hard and grey as granite over centuries—rose on either side of her like jagged teeth. The moment she stepped past them, the distant hum of the A3 died. It didn’t fade; it simply severed, as if someone had taken a pair of shears to the fabric of the night. In its place was a thick, suffocating hush, and the smell of summer. She swept the beam of her heavy-duty torch across the clearing. The Fae Grove was wide, a bowl of lush grass carpeted in wildflowers that had no business blooming in late autumn. Bluebells, foxgloves, and blood-red poppies stood stiffly in the dark, entirely motionless despite the breeze Rory still felt cooling the sweat at the nape of her neck. Her straight black hair stirred against her collarbones, lifted by a wind that didn't touch the flowers at her feet. That was the first wrong thing. Rory reached up with her left hand, her thumb automatically finding the small, crescent-shaped scar on her right wrist—no, she was rubbing her left wrist with her right thumb, an old nervous habit from her days in Cardiff when her father would cross-examine her over the dinner table, and later, when Evan’s keys would rattle in the front lock. *Stay cool,* she told herself, forcing her hands to her sides. *Observe. Assess. Don't panic.* She had come here because the note slipped under her door above Silas’s bar had been specific: *Midnight. Isolde’s grove. Bring the stone if you want to know who sent it.* Against her breastbone, tucked beneath her thermal shirt and her Golden Empress windbreaker, the Heartstone Pendant hung on its silver chain. Usually, the thumbnail-sized crimson gem was merely cool metal and glass-smooth mineral. Tonight, it felt heavy, like a lead weight dragging at her neck. "Alright," Rory said aloud. Her voice didn't carry. The air swallowed the syllables instantly, deadening the sound as if she were speaking inside a padded box. "I'm here." Nothing answered. She checked her cheap digital wristwatch. The LCD screen was blank. Not dead—the little backlight still worked when she pressed the side button, glowing a sickly green—but the numbers themselves were gone. Time in the Grove was always treacherous. An hour here could spit you back out into Richmond Park three minutes after you left, or three days later with twenty missed calls from Yu-Fei and Silas ready to file a missing persons report. She took ten measured paces toward the center of the clearing, keeping her torch beam low. The light washed over the poppies, leaching them of their color until they looked like blots of ink in the grass. *Snap.* Rory froze. The sound had come from behind her, near the boundary stones. It was the sharp crack of a dry winter twig breaking underfoot. Except there were no dry winter twigs inside the Grove. Everything here was soft, damp, perennial turf. Slowly, keeping her breathing shallow, Rory pivoted on her heel and raised the torch. The white beam cut through the dark, illuminating the two oak stones she had entered through. Nothing stood between them. Beyond them, the normal November woods of Richmond Park looked strangely flat, like a painted theatre backdrop hung just behind the monoliths. Then, just at the very edge of the flashlight’s spill, something pale slipped behind the left-hand stone. It wasn't a deer. The पार्क was full of deer, and Rory knew the awkward, spindly gait of a stag or a hind. This movement had been fluid, low to the ground, and far too fast, like a pale hand pulling back behind a curtain. "If this is a theatrical buildup," Rory called out, pitching her voice harder against the dead air, "you're wasting it. I have an early shift tomorrow." Her breastbone grew suddenly warm. Rory gasped, her hand flying to her throat. Beneath her layers of clothing, the Heartstone was heating up. She pulled the silver chain out from under her collar. The deep crimson gemstone was pulsing, a faint, rhythmic inner glow expanding and contracting like a slow heartbeat. *It only does that near a portal,* she thought, her stomach dropping. *Not a Fae boundary. A Hel portal.* Why would there be a Hel rift inside Isolde’s grove? The two realms didn't mix; the Fae guarded their pockets of Earth with vicious territoriality. And yet, the stone in her palm gave another distinct, feverish throb, warming her fingers against the chill. From the far right side of the clearing came a sound. It was a laugh, high and thin, like a child’s, except it ended on a wet, clicking inhalation that no human throat could produce. Rory whipped the torch toward the sound. The beam caught the tall foxgloves at the edge of the clearing. They were swaying now—violently, as if something large had just barrelled through them—though the bluebells two feet to the left remained carved out of stone. She backed up a step, trying to keep the entrance stones in her peripheral vision. Her mind raced, cataloguing options, angles, exits. If she ran straight back between the oak markers, she’d be in the park. Five hundred yards to the perimeter wall, over the gate, onto the scooter. Easy. Logical. She glanced over her shoulder to gauge the distance to the stones. There were four stones behind her now. Rory’s breath hitched. She shone the light directly at them. Four ancient, grey-petrified oak pillars stood in a tight semicircle, spaced barely a foot apart. The painted-backdrop view of Richmond Park beyond them was gone, replaced by a dense, impenetrable wall of black brambles. The Grove had closed its mouth. *Think,* she ordered herself, biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper. Panic was a luxury for people who had someone coming to save them. Evan had taught her that nobody was coming; she had gotten herself out of Cardiff, and she would get herself out of here. *The layout hasn't changed. It's an illusion. Fae glamour plays with sight and sound.* If she couldn't trust her eyes, she had to trust geometry. She hadn't turned fully around since she walked ten paces in. If she walked ten paces directly backward from her original line of approach, she would hit the gap, whether it looked like brambles or not. She looked down at the grass to find her own footprints, the crushed wildflowers where her boots had trodden. The grass in front of her was undisturbed. Every poppy, every bluebell stood upright and pristine. Instead, a trail of flattened, blackened stems led from the center of the clearing directly toward her heels. Whatever had made the tracks didn't have feet; the grass was pressed down in a wide, continuous trough, as if a heavy sack of wet sand were being dragged across the meadow. And the trail stopped less than a yard from the toes of her boots. The Heartstone flared against her palm, hot enough now to sting. Right beside her left ear—so close she felt the displacement of stagnant air against her cheek—something exhaled. It smelled of turned earth, rusted iron, and lilies rotting in a vase. Rory didn't look left. She didn't scream. She threw herself sideways to the right, rolling through the tall grass and coming up on one knee, the torch held out like a weapon. The light hit empty air where she had been standing a second ago. Wait—not empty. The air itself was wrong there. A vertical seam of darkness, darker than the night around it, hung suspended above the wildflowers, weeping a thin, oily vapour that curled into the grass and turned the petals black. The Heartstone was burning against her skin now, its crimson glow casting bloody shadows across her knuckles. From the trees surrounding the clearing, the clicking started again. Not from one direction, and not from one throat. It came from the canopy above, from the brambles behind the false stones, from the tall foxgloves ten feet away. A chorus of dry, rhythmic clicks, like dozens of beetles tapping their mandibles against dry wood, slowly closing the circle. Rory switched off the torch. Plunging herself into total darkness went against every screaming survival instinct in her body, instantly blinding her bright blue eyes, til the world was nothing but velvet black. Beside her, the heavy dragging sound in the grass paused. The clicking faltered, confused by the sudden loss of the light source. In the pitch dark, only two things were visible: the faint, weeping seam of the Hel rift, and the pulsing crimson ember of the Heartstone in her hand. Rory wrapped her fingers tightly around the burning gem, hiding its glow inside her fist, and began to crawl backward through the unmoving flowers, guided only by the memory of the cold November wind that had stopped touching her skin an eternity ago.