Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQMWQY6MYRS0FAV3V8YY0V

The standing stones rose black against the sodium-orange glow of distant London, their ancient oak surfaces twisted into shapes that looked almost deliberate. Almost like fingers. Aurora told herself that was ridiculous—oak didn't grow in fingers—but the thought stuck anyway, lodging somewhere between her rational mind and the primitive part of her brain that had been screaming at her since she'd climbed the fence into Richmond Park forty minutes ago. She shouldn't be here. The rational part of her brain kept circling back to that simple fact, turning it over and over like a stone in her pocket. The park closed at dusk. There were signs everywhere, bright and cheerful and absolutely clear about the consequences of trespassing. But the pendant had burned against her sternum for three straight days, its faint warmth growing steadily hotter until she'd started catching herself rubbing her chest in the middle of deliveries, Yu-Fei's voice trailing off mid-sentence as he watched her press her palm against the gemstone through her jacket. *Go to the grove.* The instruction had come without words, a certainty that felt almost borrowed, as if someone had slipped a thought into her head while she wasn't looking. She'd tried ignoring it. She'd tried telling herself that magical pendants didn't give navigational directions, that she was stressed and tired and imagining things. On the fourth day, she'd stopped arguing. Now she was here, standing at the edge of a clearing that shouldn't exist, watching her breath fog in air that smelled faintly of wildflowers despite the late October chill. The temperature difference was the first thing she'd noticed—the way the night went soft and shallow the moment she passed between two of the standing stones, winter's sharp bite dissolving into something that felt more like early spring. Wrong, her mind supplied. That's wrong. That's very wrong. But she kept walking. The clearing stretched wider than it should have. Richmond Park was big, yes—she'd looked up the numbers once, something about twenty-five hundred acres of enclosed space—but this felt different. Bigger on the inside, her mind whispered in a voice that sounded too much like a children's story. The wildflowers were the second wrong thing: pale things with petals that caught the starlight and seemed to glow from within, nodding in a breeze she couldn't feel. They grew in clusters along the ground, between the trees, climbing the bases of stones that looked older than anything had a right to look in a London park. And it was quiet. Not the quiet of an empty street or a closed building. Not even the quiet of the countryside at night, which was never truly silent—always something rustling, calling, breathing. This was absence. As if someone had taken a razor to the fabric of the world and carved out a space where sound went to die. Her boots crunched against dead leaves, but the noise seemed to stop at her ankles, swallowed by the air before it could travel more than a few feet. Rory pressed her palm against her chest, feeling the Heartstone's warmth through her jacket. It pulsed steadily now, a heartbeat rhythm that had nothing to do with her own pulse, which was racing along at a pace that made her feel vaguely sick. "Why am I here?" she said aloud, and her voice came out strange—thin and papery, like words spoken through a wall. The pendant flared hot against her skin. She walked deeper into the grove. The trees here were different. Not oaks, not anymore—though she couldn't have said what they were instead. Their bark was too smooth, their branches too straight, reaching up toward a sky that seemed to have more stars than it should. She'd grown up in Cardiff, spent plenty of nights in the Welsh countryside where the dark was proper dark and the stars came out in force, but this was different. The constellations looked wrong. Tilted. As if someone had picked up the night sky and given it a quarter turn. She stopped walking. The sound came from behind her—something moving through the wildflowers, a soft rustling that shouldn't have been possible in air this still. Rory turned, her hand coming up instinctively, and saw nothing. Just pale petals and dark trees and the distant shape of the standing stones, already further away than they should have been. "Hello?" she called. The word died in the air, flattening out into nothing. She turned back around, and there was something standing between the trees. Not a person. Not quite. It was too tall for a person, too thin, its limbs stretching out at angles that made her stomach clench. It wasn't moving—just standing there, half-hidden by shadow and branches, watching her with something that might have been eyes. The darkness around it seemed denser somehow, as if it carried its own private night. Rory's hand found the pendant without thinking, her fingers closing around the warm silver chain. The gemstone pulsed against her palm, steady and bright, and she could feel it now—the direction it was pulling her in. Not toward the thing. Away from it. Toward the center of the grove, where the starlight was strongest and the wildflowers grew thickest. She didn't run. Running felt like a bad idea, though she couldn't have explained why. Instead she walked backward, keeping her eyes on the shape between the trees, watching for any movement. It didn't follow. It just stood there, still as a photograph, and let her go. The wildflowers crunched beneath her heels. Petals scattered. Another sound—from the left this time. Something that might have been a footstep, might have been a branch breaking, might have been nothing at all. She couldn't tell anymore. The silence was playing tricks on her, filling in gaps with imagined noises, making her jump at the beat of her own heart. She reached the center of the clearing without looking away from the trees, and her shoulders hit something solid. Rory spun. It was a stone—not one of the standing stones, but something smaller, roughly her height, covered in carvings she couldn't quite make out. The symbols shifted when she tried to focus on them, sliding around the surface like oil on water, never quite resolving into anything readable. The pendant burned against her chest, and she gasped at the sudden heat, tearing her jacket open to see the gemstone glowing bright crimson through her shirt. "Okay," she breathed. "Okay. This is—this is something. This is definitely something." The air around her was getting colder. She could feel it now, a creeping chill that had nothing to do with October, seeping up through the ground and into her bones. The wildflowers had stopped nodding. Everything was frozen, caught in a moment of terrible stillness, and she realized with sudden awful clarity that the silence had deepened—that even the sound of her own breathing had faded to almost nothing. The shapes were moving between the trees now. There were more of them. Three, four—she couldn't count them, couldn't look directly at them without her eyes sliding away. They walked with a horrible liquid grace, their too-long limbs folding and unfolding as they moved through the shadows. They weren't rushing. They didn't need to rush. They were herding her, she understood. Driving her toward the center, toward the stone, toward something she couldn't see but could feel building in the air like static before a storm. Rory pressed her back against the carved surface and held the pendant out in front of her, the chain wrapped tight around her fist. The gemstone's light cast strange shadows across the wildflowers, painting everything in shades of red and black. "I don't know what you want," she said, and her voice came out stronger than she expected. "But I'm not—" One of the shapes lunged. She saw it in fragments—too-pale skin stretched over angular bones, a face that was almost human but wrong in ways she couldn't name, fingers that ended in something sharper than nails. The pendant flared brilliant scarlet, and the thing recoiled with a sound that wasn't quite a scream, wasn't quite a hiss, was something in between that scraped against the inside of her skull like broken glass. The light from the gemstone spread outward in a ring, passing through the wildflowers and into the earth, and for a moment—just a moment—the carvings on the stone behind her blazed gold. Then everything went dark. Rory stood alone in the silence, her heart hammering against her ribs, and tried to remember how to breathe. The shapes were gone. The trees were just trees again, ordinary oaks in an ordinary park, and the stars overhead had rearranged themselves into familiar constellations. The cold was just cold now, the kind that crept through her jacket and made her shiver. But the wildflowers at her feet were dead, their pale petals black and withered, and when she looked down at the pendant, the gemstone had cracked down the middle. She didn't remember leaving the grove. One moment she was standing by the stone, the next she was climbing the fence back onto the main path, her hands steady and her mind very far away. The night felt thin around her, stretched and brittle, and she kept expecting to hear something moving in the darkness behind her. She never did. But she didn't stop walking until she reached the lights of the city, and she didn't look back, and she didn't let go of the pendant once.