Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQFJPG80XZ0KPATVS0HP3X

The air changed the moment Aurora pushed past the final curtain of ivy. One step and the distant, muted growl of London vanished, swallowed by a silence so absolute it felt like a pressure against her eardrums. She paused, letting her eyes adjust to the deep, velvet dark of the Grove, her hand unconsciously rising to the Heartstone pendant at her throat. The silver chain was cold against her skin, a stark contrast to the faint, persistent warmth of the crimson stone nestled in its setting. Moonlight, thin and sterile, filtered through the canopy of ancient, interlocking branches, painting the clearing in shades of silver and impenetrable black. The boundary was marked by two towering oaks, their trunks gnarled into the semblance of old men, their bark like deeply furrowed skin. They were the standing stones of this place, the silent sentinels. She stepped between them, and the world behind her ceased to exist. This was the Fae Grove. Isolde’s Grove. And it was waiting. She came here for answers, for a path she couldn’t find in the waking world of exhaust fumes and spreadsheets. But the easy peace she’d felt on her last visit—a sun-drenched afternoon that felt like a dream—was gone. The night had sharpened the edges of this place, honed them. The very air, thick with the cloying sweetness of year-round bluebells and damp earth, felt watchful. Rory took a cautious step forward, the soft loam of the forest floor muffling her bootfall. She scanned the clearing. Everything was too still. The ferns were perfect, unmoving lace. The wildflowers glowed with an unnatural luminescence, their colors—deep violets, impossible blues—too vibrant for the pale light. Nothing rustled in the undergrowth. No owls, no nightjars, not even the scuttling of a beetle. It was a perfect, lifeless diorama, and she was the only living thing to spoil it. *Crack.* The sound was sharp, definitive. A snapped twig, just to her left. Rory froze, every muscle tensed. Her gaze darted towards the noise, finding only a thicket of thorn bushes, their barbs glistening like silver needles. A fox, probably. A badger. Richmond Park was full of them. She forced the air from her lungs in a slow, measured breath, her fingers tracing the tiny, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. An old habit for a new fear. “Get a grip, Carter,” she whispered, the sound of her own voice shocking in the profound quiet. She pressed on, deeper into the woods, following a path that was more memory than reality. The trees closed in, their branches weaving a dense ceiling that blotted out the moon. She was plunged into a deeper darkness, navigating by the feel of the ground under her feet and the faint, ruby glow of her pendant, which cast just enough light to illuminate the space a foot in front of her face. It painted her hands in a soft, bloody light. A flicker of movement at the edge of her vision. She snapped her head to the right. Nothing. Just the hulking silhouette of another ancient oak, its lower branches hanging like tattered arms. She stared, challenging the shadow to move again. It remained stubbornly still. It was just a trick of the light, her brain filling in the blanks of the darkness with imagined threats. She was an intelligent, cool-headed woman. She knew how fear worked. It was a primal, irrational thing, and she would not be ruled by it. She took another step, and a soft, dragging sound started in tandem with her own. *Shhhhufff-drrrag.* Like heavy wool being pulled over a floor of dead leaves. Rory stopped. The sound stopped. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird beating its wings in a cage. She held her breath, listening, straining to hear past the blood roaring in her ears. The silence pressed in again, heavier than before. Weighted. Expectant. She took a slow, deliberate step. *Shhhhufff-drrrag.* It was behind her now. To her right. It was pacing her, staying just out of sight in the suffocating dark. This wasn't a fox. A fox was silent. This was deliberate. A cold knot formed in her stomach. The urge to run, to bolt blindly through the trees, was a physical force. She fought it down, her knuckles white where she gripped the strap of her satchel. Running was a mistake. Running was for prey. Her out-of-the-box thinking, the quality her friends always praised, offered nothing. There was no box here. There were only the trees, and the dark, and the sound that followed her. The air grew colder, a sudden, damp chill that had nothing to do with the night. Gooseflesh prickled on her arms. The sweet scent of the flowers was gone, replaced by the smell of wet stone and cold, turned earth, like an open grave. She glanced down at the pendant. Its crimson light seemed dimmer now, struggling against the encroaching black. She had lost the path. Or the path had lost her. The trees seemed to have shifted, closing ranks. They were all the same, indistinguishable giants of bark and shadow, and she was hopelessly, terrifyingly lost. Disorientation washed over her, a dizzying sensation of being untethered from time and space. How long had she been in here? Minutes? An hour? The time-dilation of the Grove, once a curious anecdote, was now a source of mounting panic. A whisper slithered through the air. It was not the wind; the air was as still as a tomb. It was a sound without a source, a high, sibilant hiss that coiled around her, seeming to come from everywhere at once. It wasn't a word, not a language she could comprehend, but the intent behind it was unmistakable. Malice. Ancient and patient. This was wrong. She had to get out. She turned, trying to retrace her steps, but the forest was a fluid, changing maze. She stumbled into a small clearing, a circle of unnaturally bare earth ringed by stooping hawthorns. The moonlight found a hole in the canopy here, illuminating the space in a stark, theatrical spotlight. And in the center of that light, she knew she was no longer just being followed. She was being watched. It was a physical sensation, a pressure on the back of her neck, a crawl of insects up her spine. The feeling of eyes on her was so intense, so focused, she felt pinned in place. Her breathing became a shallow, ragged thing. Slowly, her body rigid with a terror that felt like paralysis, she forced herself to turn, to scan the impenetrable wall of the surrounding treeline. Her gaze swept over the dark, tangled undergrowth, the gnarled roots, the impossibly deep shadows between the trunks. Nothing. Nothing but trees. Her own mind was betraying her, amplifying every fear, every childhood nightmare of the dark. It had to be. The whisper came again, closer this time, a cold breath against her ear. It coalesced into a sound, a parody of a sound. *A-ror-a.* Her name. Stretched and broken. Her eyes snapped to the base of the largest oak, directly opposite her. To a patch of shadow that was wrong. It was darker than the others, a void in the night where the moonlight seemed to bend and be consumed. It was a hole in the world. And from the heart of that absolute black, two pinpricks of light ignited. They were not the reflective green-gold of an animal’s eyes caught in the light. They were a cold, pale silver, like distant, dead stars. They were self-luminous, intelligent. And they were fixed on her. They did not blink. They did not move. They simply watched. The shuffling sound started again, a slow, inexorable drag from the base of that tree. It wasn't circling her anymore. It was coming for her. Her scream died in her throat, a strangled gasp for air that wouldn't come. Her feet were fused to the cold earth. Her cool head, her quick thinking—they were useless artifacts from another world. Here, in the heart of the Grove, there was only the watcher in the dark, the ancient, patient thing emerging from the shadows, and the bone-deep, marrow-freezing certainty that she was about to die.