Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQENGP3NT97Q3H2GWGM4RV

The oak standing stones rose before Aurora like broken teeth, their bark silver in the moonlight. She'd been standing at the threshold of the Fae Grove for nearly five minutes, gathering nerve, watching the wildflowers sway in a breeze she couldn't feel. It was past midnight. The November air bit at her exposed skin—the black jeans and grey hoodie she'd thrown on weren't enough insulation, but then again, temperature had never been the real problem with this place. She touched the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone hung warm against her collarbone, pulsing with a steady, familiar rhythm. Not warning. Not yet. That was something, at least. The pendant had brought her here. Three days of faint warmth, building gradually from a gentle glow to an insistent pulse that made her fingers twitch toward it a hundred times a day. She'd learned early on that when the Heartstone called, ignoring it only made things worse. The last time she'd tried, she'd ended up with a nosebleed that wouldn't stop for an hour and a migraine that had kept her flat-bound for two days straight. So here she was. Alone. At the edge of a place where time didn't work right and things grew that shouldn't exist in November. Rory took a breath and stepped between the standing stones. The transition was always subtle. No flash of light, no dramatic shift in the world's color. Just a slight pressure change, the kind that made your ears want to pop, and then you were through. The air was warmer on this side—spring-warm, despite the calendar insisting it was late autumn. The wildflowers bloomed in impossible profusion: violets and cowslips and tiny white wood sorrels that shouldn't exist anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere this time of year. The clearing stretched out before her, its edges blurred by the darkness beneath the canopy of old oaks. The ground was soft moss beneath her trainers, damp and yielding. Somewhere in the grove, water ran—a stream or a brook, she could never quite pinpoint it, but the sound was always there, a gentle babble at the edge of perception. The Heartstone pulled her deeper. She moved without making a conscious decision to do so, her feet finding a path through the flowers. They parted before her like she was cutting through water, then brushed back together in her wake. The moonlight filtered down in silver shafts, and she noticed—as she always did—that the shadows here were wrong. They didn't fall quite where the light said they should. Ten minutes into the grove. Or was it five? Time was already getting slippery. She forced herself to check her phone—11:47 PM—but when she looked up from the screen, the light had shifted. The moon hung at a different angle. She'd lost maybe three minutes without noticing. The pulse of the pendant was stronger now, urgent. It pulled her toward the oldest part of the grove, where the oaks grew so massive and so close together that the moonlight barely penetrated. This was where she usually found them—the portals, the thin places between worlds. Thin places that the Heartstone seemed to know about, to navigate toward with a hunter's certainty. A sound made her stop. It was small, almost insignificant—like something shifting weight on the moss behind her. Rory turned slowly, her hand closing around the pendant. The warmth beneath her fingers was almost hot now. Nothing. Just trees and shadows and the endless carpet of flowers. She waited, her breath steady. The woods around her had gone very quiet. The babbling stream had stopped. Even the inevitable breeze of the grove—the one that made the flowers dance—had died. The silence was worse than the sound had been. Rory turned back toward the deep grove and kept walking. Her pulse was faster now, though she kept her movements measured and calm. This was nothing new. The grove was full of strange things. Things that moved at the edge of vision, that made sounds in the darkness, that had learned to watch the clearing like foxes watched a henhouse. Most of them left her alone. The pendant, she'd come to understand, was a kind of passport. Protection, maybe. Or a warning. Look, but don't touch. A second sound, this time from ahead of her. Different from the first. Not a shift of weight but something more deliberate. A cracking branch—which shouldn't have been possible, because the grove didn't seem to have dead branches that would break so cleanly. Rory's step faltered. The Heartstone beat against her chest like a second pulse, and when she looked down, she saw that it was glowing now. Not the faint shimmer it usually displayed, but a proper glow—deep crimson light that seemed to pulse from somewhere deep inside the stone itself. She raised her gaze to the darkness ahead. There was something there. She was certain of it now. Not quite visible, not quite solid, but present in the way that you could sense a person in a dark room even without seeing them. A displacement in the air, a gathering of shadow that was too deliberate to be natural. "Hello?" Her voice came out rougher than she would have liked. The thing didn't answer. But it moved. She saw the flowers disturb as something passed through them, moving laterally across her path. Still not quite visible, but present. Definitely present. The Heartstone went warm enough to hurt. Rory forced herself to keep walking, though every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to run, to get out of this place and back into the real world where things stayed where you could see them. But she'd learned the hard way that running from the grove made it worse. The grove had rules, and running was how you broke them. The path opened into a small clearing—she hadn't seen this one before, though she'd walked these grounds dozens of times now. At its center stood what looked like a ring of stones, each one worn smooth by time beyond measure. The moss was thicker here, and the wildflowers had given way to something else: tall plants with silvery leaves that seemed to reflect what little light there was. The portal was here. She could feel it without seeing it—that particular wrongness in the air that marked a thin place, a seam between worlds. She wasn't alone in the clearing. The thing that had been following her—or leading her, she couldn't quite tell—had stopped at the far edge. She still couldn't see it properly. It was like trying to focus on something just past the edge of your peripheral vision. Every time she tried to look directly at it, it slipped away. But when she let her eyes unfocus, she could almost make out a shape. Humanoid, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The Heartstone had stopped glowing. The warmth had faded. The pendant hung neutral against her skin, and in that sudden silence—in that sudden ordinariness—Rory understood. She wasn't here to find a portal. She was the portal. The thing across the clearing moved closer, and this time she caught a glimpse—just a flash—of something with too many joints, too much flexibility in its limbs. A smell came with it, like ozone and turned earth, like something that had been buried in the dark for a very long time. The Heartstone began to warm again, slowly, deliberately, like it was opening a door inside her chest. And Rory understood, with a cold, creeping certainty, that she'd made a terrible mistake. The pendant hadn't been calling her here to observe the portals. It had been calling her to become one.