Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P32HWPW3VSPYAA4VYF

By the time Aurora slipped past the chained gate into Richmond Park, London had shrunk to a smear of orange behind her, a low, distant glow caught in the bare branches. The lock had looked impressive until she’d pressed the side gate and found it give under her palm. The cold metal creaked grudgingly, loud in the night. She froze, listening for a shout from a passing warden, a dog walker, anyone. Nothing. Just the faint rush of distant traffic and the dry rattle of winter twigs. She let the gate ease shut behind her and stood with her hand still on it, breathing steam into the dark. Her phone read 00:03. The note in her pocket crackled as she shifted her weight. Come to the Grove at midnight. Bring the pendant. I can explain everything. No name. No number. Just that neat, looping script, like something copied out of an old book. Everything. As if there weren’t a hundred different “everythings” hanging over her head these days. As if one midnight trip to a glade in Richmond could unravel them all. Still, she was here. Aurora tugged up the zip of her jacket and started along the path. The gravel crunched under her trainers in crisp, regular bites of sound. Above, the sky was clear, the stars cold and sharp. The sort of night that made her teeth ache with the brightness of it. She’d been to the Grove once before, in daylight, following an excitable trainee druid she’d met in the bar downstairs. “You have to see it,” he’d said, eyes bright. “You’ll feel it as soon as you step through.” She had. A slip in the air, like crossing an invisible curtain. A soft, constant chime just at the edge of hearing. Wildflowers in improbable colours, nodding under trees that had no right to be that old, that twisted, in the middle of a city park. She remembered sunlight slanting through branches then, children shouting somewhere far off, the smell of damp soil and fox musk and someone’s barbecue smoke drifting on the breeze. Now, the park felt hollowed out. No laughter, no hum of traffic rolling over the hills. Her footsteps sounded too loud. The darkness between trees looked thick, as if she could lean on it and leave fingerprints. The Heartstone pendant lay cold against her chest, a small weight under the layers of cotton and polyester. Her fingers found it through the fabric, pinched the outline of the thumbnail-sized stone, the loop of chain. Nothing unusual. No heat, no glow. Just the faintest solid reassurance that it was there. She followed the path as it curved, then slid off it onto the faint track that cut through the bracken. The last time, in daylight, the route had been obvious: a gap in the undergrowth, a line of subtle hollows where footsteps had compressed the soil. Now, the world was shades of black and grey, the ground a tangle of dead fern and slick mud. Branches clawed at her sleeves. A twig snagged her jeans and snapped with a sound like a neck breaking. She tensed, then swore under her breath at herself. You know where you’re going. It’s just a clearing in a park. You’re not twelve, you’re not lost in the woods, and nothing is— Something moved to her right, quick as a tossed stone, just at the edge of vision. Aurora turned, heart thumping. Between the trees the darkness was thick, layered; nothing but the messy verticals of trunks and the paler tangle of underbrush. She stood a moment longer, letting her eyes adjust fully. No movement now. No obvious threat or animal shape. “Fox,” she murmured, for the benefit of nobody at all. “Or deer. Or a serial killer. Nice options.” Her voice fell flat. The sound didn’t travel far. It was like talking inside a cupboard. She pushed on. The oaks that ringed the Grove rose slowly out of the dark, ancient trunks pale against the sky. They weren’t actually stones, of course, just trees so fat and gnarled they might as well have been carved. In the half-light they did look like monoliths, shouldering the night aside. A breath of cold air slid over her skin as she stepped toward them. Not the ordinary wind that hissed in the branches overhead, but a thinner, sharper draft, like the world exhaling through clenched teeth. Her next step felt…different. The faint crunch of frost underfoot went soft, muffled. The sound of her movement dulled. The symphony of the park—wind, distant train, the occasional nocturnal bird—pulled back, as though she’d closed a door between herself and the rest of London. The hair rose along her arms. She inhaled reflexively, and the air inside the ring of oaks tasted richer, as if someone had dissolved a spoonful of metal into it. Iron and wet earth and something sweet and rotting, like bruised fruit left too long in a bowl. She’d reached the boundary. The trees hunched overhead, their bare branches knitting together, black against the stars. Aurora stepped between two of the thicker trunks, into the Grove. Immediately, the temperature shifted. Not much; a degree, two at most. But she felt it in the way her breath no longer steamed white. Her ears began to ring very softly, a distant hum, like wind over the mouth of a bottle. Underfoot, wildflowers bloomed, small and delicate and impossible. Their petals caught what little starlight there was and almost seemed to give it back in muted blues and ghost-pale yellows. She recognised none of them properly—too many petals, leaves at the wrong angles, colours a shade off from anything she’d see in a garden centre. They shouldn’t be here in February. They shouldn’t be here at all. The centre of the Grove was a bare patch of earth, the soil dark and fine, as if it had been sifted. No grass, no flowers. Just a circle of open ground ringed by the silent oaks. This was where the note had told her to wait. She stepped into the bare circle and stopped. Nothing. Just her breath and the faint, constant ringing in her ears. Aurora checked her phone. 00:12. She stayed standing, for lack of anything else to do. The silence pressed in, thick as cloth. After a while she realised what was wrong with it. There were no insects. No whine of a mosquito near her ear, no midges freckling the air in front of her, no click of beetles in the undergrowth when she shifted her weight. At night in a place like this, there should have been some small, constant noise of life. Instead, the quiet lay over the Grove like snow. The pendant against her chest warmed, slightly. Her fingers moved of their own accord, pressing it through the fabric. The heat was subtle, more suggestion than sensation, like someone thinking about lighting a match nearby. “Right on cue,” she muttered. Again, her voice felt wrong here. Not echoing, exactly—if anything, the opposite. The sound fell short, as if the air swallowed it whole a few inches from her lips. Someone could be standing between the trees, ten metres away, and she’d have no idea until they stepped into the open. Aurora turned slowly, scanning the dark shapes of the oaks. They stood motionless, massive shadows. Between them, the faint gleam of those impossible flowers, pale dots in the undergrowth. Nothing else moved. You’re early, she told herself, glancing at her phone again. 00:12, the display insisted. She frowned. She could have sworn it had been 00:12 already. She’d only looked away for thirty seconds, a minute at most. She locked the screen, unlocked it. 00:11. “Don’t,” she told the Grove, or the phone, or herself. “That’s not funny.” She tucked the device back into her pocket, resisting the urge to check it again immediately, to prod at the wrongness and see how deep it went. A twig snapped lightly in the darkness beyond the oaks. Aurora’s head came up. The sound had been small, but utterly clear. One sharp break, as if a foot—human-sized, by the tone of it—had come down on a fallen branch. She turned toward it. The trees loomed, black cut-outs. Between two trunks she thought she saw the suggestion of movement, a darker patch of dark, like a coat or a person shifting their weight. “Hello?” She pitched her voice steady, practical. “If this is some kind of initiation ritual, I’m not impressed.” Silence, then. The pendant pulsed once with warmth, a tiny heartbeat against her breastbone. The dark patch between the trees did not resolve into anything definite. Stare as she might, her eyes slid off it, watering. It was like trying to focus on dust in front of a bright light. It gave her a headache just looking. Aurora blinked hard and looked away, the weird ache in her temples easing. When she looked back, the patch of dark was gone. She let out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. “Okay,” she said. “Strike one for ‘definitely not normal weird park air’.” A sound drifted across the clearing. Rory. Her name, soft as breath. A whisper, just loud enough to be distinct, not loud enough to trust. She turned toward it slowly, every muscle tight. No one. Nothing. Just the circle of oaks, the lean lace of their branches, the glimmer of flowers. The voice had sounded like Eva. A little hoarse, like she’d been shouting at a gig, but otherwise perfect. Except for the way the last syllable had dragged, the way the rr had thickened, clung to the air, like something stuck in the speaker’s throat. “Eva?” she tried, hating the hope she heard in her own voice. No answer. Wind stirred the canopy overhead with a dry rush. Leaves scratched together, the sound unnervingly like quiet laughter. She waited. Nothing came through the trees. No figure, no friendly silhouette moving with easy, human assurance. Just that growing sense of being watched from somewhere just beyond the edge of what she could see. The pendant grew warmer. A slow, creeping heat, as if a small coal had been pressed against her skin. She pulled it out from under her shirt on reflex, letting the chain slide across her collarbone. The crimson stone lay in her palm, dull in the darkness. At first it didn’t seem to glow at all. Then, as she cupped it in her hand, the faintest inner light flickered in its depths, like a red eye half-opening. She swallowed. The pendant had warmed before, near Silas’ back room door, that night the shadows had looked a bit too deep. Near the alley behind the Golden Empress, when Yu-Fei had told her, too casually, not to linger by the dumpsters. Near places that felt like they should be more than they were. Near a portal, Silas had said, offhand, while drying glasses. To…well. To somewhere else. Somewhere worse. Aurora’s fingers tightened around the Heartstone. The warmth flared, then settled into a steady throb, a rhythm that didn’t match her own heartbeat. Something brushed past the corner of her vision again, quicker this time. She whipped her head around, jaw clenched. For a moment, between two oaks, she thought she saw a shape: tall, too thin, with a head that rose higher than it should, antlered or branch-crowned, edges indistinct. The impression of a pale face, all wrong angles, eyes like pits. The next blink, the shape was gone. Only branch and shadow, like it had been all along. She was alone. She was absolutely not alone. “A friend,” she said aloud, thinking of the neat handwriting on the note. “Sure. Of course.” Her skin prickled. The back of her neck felt exposed, the weight of unseen eyes resting on it. Rory. The whisper again, behind her now. This time the voice sounded like her mother’s, the lilt of Welsh vowels unmistakable. She turned too fast, the world tilting, her balance catching up a half-second later. Nothing. The trees. The flowers. The empty ring of earth beneath her feet. “Stop it,” she snapped. “If you want something, bloody say so.” For a heartbeat, the silence seemed to listen. Then another sound came. Not a voice this time, but a soft, wet little chuckle, right by her left ear. She flinched and swung her arm through empty air, her hand slicing through nothingness. There was no one. But her ear burned, as if someone had breathed on the skin there. The pendant seared her palm, sudden and fierce. She hissed and dropped it. It fell in what felt like slow motion, spinning once before landing in the bare dirt with a soft thud. The crimson stone did not bounce. It struck and stayed, as if the earth had given way to receive it. Its inner glow brightened, a blood-warm ember against the dark. The hum in her ears intensified, rising in pitch. It was coming from the pendant now, she realised—no, not from it, but around it. The very air above the stone seemed to vibrate, the space distorting slightly, a faint shimmer like heat on a road. Except the night here had grown colder, not warmer. The hairs on her arms stood up in a fine, uniform line, responding to something she could not see. Aurora’s breath shortened. Her mind, traitorous thing, supplied the word: portal. She had come because someone promised to explain. What if that someone had only needed one thing from her: the key she wore around her neck, and the idiot willingness to stand here at midnight and use it? “No,” she said, out loud, to the empty Grove. “No, you don’t.” The shimmer above the pendant thickened, darkening at the edges. It was like looking at the surface of water at night—the faint impression of depth where there should be none, the suggestion that if she reached out, her hand might not come back the same. From within that not-quite-there space came a sound. Not a voice, not words. A thin, ragged whispering, like thousands of dry leaves being turned all at once. Beneath it, a deeper note, so low she felt it in her bones rather than heard it, a slow, patient pulse. Her phone vibrated in her pocket, making her jump. She snatched it out with fingers that didn’t feel entirely steady. 03:33, the lockscreen read. She had not been here three hours. She would have bet her life on it. Her thumb hovered over the screen, then dropped back to her side uselessly. Who exactly was she going to call? “Hi, emergency services? There’s a…funny light in a magic glade and I think time is trying to make a fool of me.” Behind her, to her left, another twig broke. Closer this time. Rory. This voice was lower, darker. Not Eva or her mother now. It brushed across memories she didn’t want to pull up, tapping on old bruises. “Don’t,” she said again, quieter. Aurora kept her eyes on the Heartstone, on the way the air above it buckled slightly, folding inward. The sense of presence on the other side of that thinning membrane thickened. It didn’t feel like anything that belonged in leaves and soil and wildflowers. It felt like pressure, like a tide pushing against a wall. The note had said I can explain everything. Standing there, palm throbbing from where the pendant had burned her, every nerve ending alight with the wrongness of the moment, she decided she didn’t care about explanations anymore. She cared about going home. Back to her flat above Silas’ bar, with its chipped paint and buzzing fridge, its very boring, very human problems. She crouched, slowly, reaching toward the pendant. As her hand neared the stone, the air around it felt cold—not the blunt, honest cold of winter, but a numbing, inward chill, as if her fingertips were being soaked in something that wasn’t exactly temperature at all. Her skin crawled. Her heart pounded in her throat. She pushed through the sensation and closed her fingers around the Heartstone. Pain lanced up her hand, sharp and white, like grabbing a live wire. Her vision went momentarily flat and grey around the edges. The humming leapt in pitch, the sound going thin and shrill. She clenched harder. “Shut,” she said through her teeth. “You open, you shut. That’s how doors work.” Ridiculous, addressing an artefact like a recalcitrant child. But the stone under her fingers flared, the heat cresting into something just shy of unbearable. Behind her, something big moved. She felt it rather than heard it: the displaced air, the way the flowers at the edge of her vision bent in a ripple, as if something invisible had brushed through them in a slow circle around the clearing. It closed in, unseen, a pressure at her back, at her sides, as if the night itself were drawing closer. The whispering from the forming portal hit a jagged pitch, shrill, almost panicked. A different sound curled through it now—a rasping voice, layered, climbing over itself. Aurora. It spoke her whole name this time, every syllable dragged out. Aurora. The rr thickened, the vowels warped. It sounded like Evan and not like him at all, as if someone had taken his voice apart and reassembled it wrong. She shut her eyes. “You don’t get to talk,” she said, quietly. “You don’t get to have that.” She pictured a door in her mind, something solid and familiar: her parents’ front door back in Cardiff, peeling blue paint, the brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. She pictured it slamming shut. Bolt sliding, chain rattling into place. Loud. Final. She poured every scrap of wanting into that mental sound. Not just fear, but refusal; not just terror, but the stubborn, mulish streak that had made her walk out of Evan’s flat with a duffel bag and a black eye and never go back. Close. The pendant answered. The heat spiked, then snapped. The humming cut off mid-note, as if someone had yanked the plug on an amp. Air rushed inward, cold and sudden, filling a vacuum she hadn’t realised was there. The pressure at her back vanished. The flowers around the clearing trembled, then stilled. Aurora opened her eyes. The shimmer above the Heartstone was gone. The air was clear. The crimson stone lay dark and dull in her hand, the inner light extinguished. Sound crept back into the world in cautious increments. A distant fox barked, sharp and real. A plane droned somewhere far overhead. Wind moved in the branches with honest restless noise. Her phone screen, still clutched in her other hand, now read 00:29. She stood carefully, every joint complaining. The Grove looked the same as when she’d stepped into it: old oaks, impossible flowers, the bare circle of earth. But whatever had been pressing against the skin of reality a moment before was no longer there. Or it had simply moved a little further out of reach. Aurora slipped the pendant back over her neck, wincing as the cooled metal touched the tender skin where it had burned her. The chain settled against her collarbone, deceptively ordinary. The feeling of being watched hadn’t entirely left, but it had retreated, like eyes backing away into deeper shade. She walked toward the gap she’d come through between the trees. For one horrible instant, she could not locate it—the oaks all looked identical, their trunks a repeating pattern of silver-grey in the dark. Then her gaze snagged on a familiar twist of bark, a low knot that looked disturbingly like a face if she stared too long. She’d noticed it on the way in. There. That was the exit. She stepped between the oaks. Again, that soft slide in the air, like pushing through an invisible curtain. The hum in her ears thinned, dropped an octave, then became indistinguishable from ordinary tinnitus. Outside the Grove, the night felt raw and open, full of the small sounds she’d missed before: the rustle and skitter of unseen things in the undergrowth, the muffled roar of the A316 in the distance, the faint whoop of someone too drunk heading home along some far path. Normal, she thought, and nearly laughed at the word. On impulse, she looked back over her shoulder. The Grove sat behind her, peaceful, solitary. From here it was only a stand of old oaks in a hollow, shadows braided together. Nothing glowed. Nothing moved. Aurora walked anyway, not trusting what her eyes showed her. She kept her pace measured, resisting the urge to break into a run. Running would admit something she wasn’t ready to give language to. At the boundary gate, the chain glinted dully. She slipped through and swung it back into place. As the metal clinked softly, the sounds of the city swelled around her: sirens wailing somewhere far off, late-night laughter floating on the air. Her hand throbbed. When she finally looked at it under the sodium streetlight beyond the park—just for a second, just long enough to check—it bore no blisters, no reddened burns. The skin looked unmarked. The pain, though, was real enough, a phantom ache in the shape of the stone. She curled her fingers, feeling the ghost of the heat, the closeness of that other presence. Everything, the note had promised. Tonight, the Grove had taught her one thing: whatever everything was, it wanted her involved, whether she liked it or not. She tucked her hand into her pocket, feeling the crinkle of the note beneath her fingers, and walked toward the faint, familiar glow of the bus stop, the dark behind her heavy with trees and old, patient eyes.