Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQMZ451HA7CV54KYSRNNV3

Aurora Carter had expected the stones to feel cold. They didn't. They radiated a subtle heat, like bread fresh from the oven, humming against her palms as she leaned against the nearest monolith to catch her breath. The standing stone was oak in shape only—ancient, gray, its surface ridged like bark but dense as granite. Her left wrist throbbed where the crescent scar sat, a childhood souvenir from a broken fence in Cardiff, and she pressed her thumb against it without thinking, a habit that surfaced when her pulse quickened. The grove opened before her, a throat of darkness between the trees of Richmond Park. She shouldn't have been able to find it. But the pendant against her sternum—a deep crimson gemstone no larger than a thumbnail, suspended on a delicate silver chain—had begun to pulse three hours ago, warmth spreading from its faceted heart in rhythmic waves that pulled her off the delivery route, away from the scooter she'd abandoned near the Pembroke Lodge car park, deep into bracken that shouldn't exist this far inside London. The Heartstone had never glowed so insistently. It had never led her anywhere. Now it hung still, cooling against her skin. Rory straightened, her fingers lingering on the stone. Silence pressed against her eardrums—not the hush of a city park at night, but a padded, deliberate absence. No traffic drone. No distant shouting from the pubs on Richmond Hill. Not even the rustle of the November wind she'd walked through to get here. She checked her phone. The screen flared to life, burning her retinas: 11:47 PM. She'd entered the tree line at eleven fifteen. Thirty-two minutes to walk three hundred yards through wet leaves. Impossible. She took a step forward. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing ahead, silver in the moonlight—snowdrops and bluebells and something that looked like foxglove, all blooming together, wrong for the season, wrong for the soil. They shouldn't exist in the dark. They shouldn't exist in November. Her shoes sank into moss that squelched with a sound too wet, too thick, like stepping into an open mouth. The wrongness settled into her spine. Rory wasn't prone to panic. She'd fled an abusive relationship with enough foresight to pack her documents in a waterproof bag; she'd navigated the labyrinthine immigration of London rental markets while working part-time for Yu-Fei, shuttling Sichuan cuisine through rain-slicked streets. She was practical. Methodical. But practicality required causality, and the air here had none. It tasted of copper and pollen, heaviness without humidity. When she exhaled, her breath didn't fog. She moved deeper. The oaks—real oaks, black and twisted—loomed at the clearing's edge, but their shadows didn't align with the moon overhead. They stretched toward her, elongated, as if the light source stood somewhere to her left, though the sky was clear. She turned her wrist, checking the old scar again, grounding herself in the memory of the injury: the rusty nail, her mother's scream, the hospital smell of antiseptic. Real things. Real time. A whisper scraped behind her. Not words. The sound of stone dragging against stone. Rory froze. Her hand drifted to the Heartstone. It was hot now, burning, the silver chain conducting heat into her collarbone. She didn't turn around. In the corner of her vision, the standing stones at the grove's boundary seemed... closer. The one she'd leaned against, the one with the heat, now stood twenty meters to her right. She'd walked in a straight line. She knew she had. Her breath came shallow. Stay logical. Check the environment. She reached for her phone again, but the screen displayed 11:46 PM. The minute had rolled backward. The battery, which had shown sixty percent moments ago, now blinked red at twelve percent. Outside, in the world where Evan couldn't find her and Silas's bar waited with its familiar yeasty smell, her flatmate would be sleeping, her shift would be starting in eight hours. Inside here, time was a muscle, flexing. The flowers rustled. No wind. Yet they swayed, silver heads bobbing in a synchronized motion that led her gaze toward the center of the clearing. There, between two of the ancient oak stones, the air shimmered. Not heat-haze. A tearing, a wrongness in the fabric of the dark, like a reflection in water disturbed by a finger. The Heartstone shuddered against her chest, matching the rhythm of her galloping heart. She took a step back. Her heel struck something soft. Rory didn't look down. She knew the texture of soil, of root, of the detritus that collected in city parks. This was neither. It yielded, then resisted, like pressing into a sleeping person's flank. The whisper came again, closer now, from everywhere and nowhere, and this time she recognized the timbre—not stone, but the approximation of stone, a voice attempting solidity without understanding how throats worked. The scar on her wrist ached. She ran. Or tried to. Her legs moved, but the grove stretched. The trees retreated at the same pace she advanced, maintaining a mocking perimeter. She was a needle on a record, scratching in place while the vinyl spun beneath. The standing stones multiplied in her peripheral vision, replicating like cells, oak-shaped silhouettes that shouldn't have cast shadows because there was no light behind them to speak of. The pendant went cold. That stopped her. A sudden, absolute zero against her skin, freezing the sweat on her chest. The warmth had been a warning; this was an arrival. Rory stood still, her black hair clinging to her cheeks, her bright eyes—usually so steady—scanning the silver wildflowers that now surrounded her in a perfect circle. They hadn't been there a moment ago. The clearing had shifted, or she had, deposited like a seed in the center of the grove. A figure stood between the stones ahead. It wore her height, her posture, the straight line of her shoulders. But where her hair was black, its was void, drinking the moonlight. Where her eyes were blue, its were the color of the Heartstone's glow—deep crimson, unblinking, fixed on her with an interest that felt ancient, patient, and terribly familiar. It didn't move. It didn't need to. It had already been waiting for her entire life, or perhaps she had only just arrived after decades of walking, the delivery route, the abuse, the escape, all a path leading to this circle of oak and stone. The figure raised its left hand. On the wrist, a crescent scar glimmered wetly. Rory reached for her pocket, for her phone, for something, anything, but her hand passed through air that had gone viscous, honey-thick. The standing stones began to hum, the sound vibrating in her teeth, her bones, the old injury on her wrist singing in sympathetic resonance. The flowers turned toward her, stems breaking, faces opening to reveal not pistils but teeth, small and white and perfectly human, all chewing a rhythm that matched the pendant's earlier pulse. She understood then why the Heartstone had led her here. Why the unknown benefactor—whoever they were—had given her a key marked in crimson. The grove wasn't a place. It was a boundary, and boundaries required tolls. The figure smiled with her mouth. The silence deepened, becoming a pressure against her eardrums, and Rory realized with a clarity that burned like ice that she couldn't remember if she had entered the grove minutes ago, or if she had always been here, waiting in the dark between the worlds, while outside, in London, the years spun forward without her. The standing stones were closer now, leaning in, oak-granite surfaces sweating that impossible heat, marking the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Her scar itched. The crimson eyes watched. The wildflowers waited. And the night went on.