Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQNCSBJFWNS8EHRS31HS34

The standing stones of Richmond Park looked different at night. Aurora Carter tightened her grip on the strap of her messenger bag, the canvas damp against her palm. She'd passed through these grounds a hundred times—daytime walks when the city felt too loud, afternoon shortcuts on her delivery runs—but never at midnight. Never like this. The oaks rose around her like sentinels, their trunks silvered by the moonlight that managed to penetrate the canopy. According to the note she'd received, the entrance to Isolde's grove lay somewhere beyond the third stone, visible only when the moon sat at its apex. She checked her phone: 12:02 AM. Perfect timing, assuming any of this was real. She touched the pendant through her shirt, feeling its warmth against her sternum. The deep crimson gemstone had been pulsing more insistently over the past week, a heartbeat beneath glass. Tonight it burned against her skin, and she didn't think it was from the cold. The third stone. There. She moved toward it, her boots crunching on frost-stiffened grass. The temperature had dropped sharply in the past hour, her breath pluming before her like smoke. November in London was never warm, but this cold felt deliberate. Intentional. She circled the ancient oak, running her fingers over bark that was smoother than it should have been. No roughness, no ridges. The texture reminded her of polished wood, something handled for generations. "Come on," she muttered. "Show me." The air shimmered. Rory staggered back as the space between two oaks seemed to fold inward, revealing a path that hadn't existed three seconds ago. Wildflowers bloomed along its edges—poppies and foxglove and flowers she couldn't name, their colors too vivid for moonlight, as if they carried their own luminescence from within. The note had said the grove would answer if her need was genuine. She stepped through. The silence hit her first. Richmond Park at night was never truly quiet—the distant hum of traffic, the rustle of nocturnal creatures, the general white noise of a city that never fully slept. But here, sound stopped at the boundary. No wind. No birds. No distant car engines. Just her own breathing, suddenly loud enough to fill the world. The clearing spread before her, larger than the space between the trees should have allowed. She'd expected something small, maybe twenty feet across. Instead, the grove stretched into darkness, the wildflowers continuing in drifting clusters that disappeared into shadow. The standing stones formed a loose circle around the perimeter, but she couldn't see where they ended. They simply faded into the dark, one by one, like teeth in a mouth that kept opening. Rory walked forward, her hand still pressed to her chest. The pendant's warmth had settled into a steady pulse now, almost comfortable. Almost. She had questions. That was why she'd come. Three weeks ago, she'd woken with this necklace around her throat and no memory of how it got there. Two weeks ago, she'd started seeing things at the edge of her vision—shapes that dissolved when she turned. One week ago, the note had appeared under her door, handwritten on paper that smelled of woodsmoke and something sweeter. The grove will answer what the heart cannot ask, it had said. Come alone. Come at moonrise. So here she was. Alone. The grass beneath her feet was soft, almost spongy, and she noticed with distant unease that it was warm. She knelt, pressing her palm flat against the earth. It pulsed faintly, like a sleeping animal's breath. She straightened quickly. Focus. She needed to focus. The note had mentioned a pool at the center of the grove, water that showed truth. If this place was connected to the Fae—and everything she'd researched suggested it was—then perhaps it could tell her what the pendant was. Who had given it to her. Why she kept waking at 3 AM with the taste of ash on her tongue and the sensation of fingers around her throat. She walked deeper into the clearing. The wildflowers grew thicker as she progressed, their blooms turning to watch her. Rory told herself she was imagining it. Flowers didn't have eyes. Flowers didn't track movement. But the foxglove swayed despite the stillness of the air, and the poppies seemed to tilt their faces toward her like small, hungry mouths. She heard something. A rustling, far behind her. She spun, her heart slamming against her ribs, but the path she'd taken looked the same as everything else—flowers and grass and shadow. The standing stones had vanished entirely now, lost in the dark. She was surrounded. "Hello?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Is someone there?" Nothing answered. Of course nothing answered. She was talking to flowers in a magic grove at midnight, and she expected rational responses. She turned back around. The pool was there. It hadn't been there ten seconds ago. Rory was certain of that. She would have seen the glint of water, would have heard the sound of ripples. But there it sat, twenty feet ahead, a perfect circle of black water that reflected nothing—not the moon, not the stars, not her own face as she approached. She stopped at its edge. The water was utterly still, a mirror made of obsidian, and when she knelt beside it, she saw only darkness staring back. "Show me," she said, and her voice cracked. "Please. I need to understand." The pendant flared hot against her skin. In the water, something moved. Not a reflection. Not a ripple from above. The motion came from below, deep in the black, something shifting in the depths. Rory leaned closer, her bright blue eyes straining to make out shape in the void. A face rose toward the surface. She scrambled backward, her boots slipping on the warm grass, because the face was hers. But wrong. The features were her features—the black hair, the sharp chin, the mouth that looked too thin when she wasn't forcing it into a smile—but the eyes were different. The eyes were black from lid to lid, no white, no blue, just endless dark, and they were looking at her. The face in the water smiled. Rory's hand flew to her own mouth, checking without thinking. She wasn't smiling. She was terrified. But the thing with her face kept grinning, rising closer to the surface, and now she could see that it wasn't alone. Other shapes moved behind it in the water. Dozens. Hundreds. All of them drifting upward, all of them wearing faces she recognized. Eva, her childhood friend who had helped her flee London. Silas, the bartender whose kindness had felt like safety. Her mother, her father, her professors from Cardiff. Evan. Evan's face floated closest to the surface, his dark eyes open and watching, his lips moving silently. Rory couldn't hear the words, but she didn't need to. She knew that mouth. She'd spent two years learning to read it, to anticipate its demands, to survive what came when she failed. She forced herself to stand. Her legs shook. The pendant was burning now, painful against her sternum, and she realized the warmth had spread—down her arms, into her hands, through her stomach. She felt filled with it, flooded with something that wasn't quite heat and wasn't quite light. The faces in the water kept rising. She heard the rustling again. Closer now. All around her. The wildflowers were moving. Not swaying but walking, uprooting themselves, drifting across the grass on pale tendrils that might have been roots and might have been legs. They approached slowly, without urgency, as if they knew she had nowhere to go. Rory turned in a circle, searching for the path she'd taken, but the darkness was complete now. The standing stones were gone. The moon had vanished. The only light came from the pendant beneath her shirt, glowing crimson through the fabric. She was not alone. She had never been alone. The certainty settled into her bones, cold and absolute. Something had been watching her from the moment she'd entered, something had walked beside her in the space between her footsteps, and now it was closing in. The faces in the water broke the surface. They didn't splash. They rose like the water was air, floating upward, turning their hollow eyes toward her. Evan's face drifted closest, and when he spoke, his voice came from everywhere at once. "You didn't think you could leave, did you?" Rory's hand found the pendant. She gripped it through her shirt, the gem burning against her palm, and she thought of her flat above the bar. She thought of Silas's ridiculous collection of coasters. She thought of Eva's voice on the phone, telling her she was safe now, she was free. The pendant pulsed once, twice, and then— Light. Crimson light exploded outward from her chest, and the faces screamed. The sound wasn't human—it was the shriek of bending metal, of shattering glass, of something fundamental breaking apart. The wildflowers withered and fell. The water in the pool boiled and went dark. Rory ran. She didn't know where she was going. She couldn't see the path, couldn't find the stones, but she ran anyway, her boots pounding against the warm earth, her breath tearing in and out of her lungs. Behind her, she heard something following. Not walking. Not running. Following in the way that night follows day, inevitable and patient. She burst through the boundary between two oaks and stumbled onto the frozen grass of Richmond Park. The noise of the city rushed back—traffic, wind, the distant bark of a dog. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Her hands were shaking. Her heart was hammering. She looked back at the standing stones. They were just trees. Ancient oaks, nothing more, their bark rough and weathered, their roots spreading through ordinary soil. The path was gone. The wildflowers were gone. But when she pulled the pendant from beneath her shirt, she saw that the deep crimson gem had cracked down the center, and in the fracture, something dark was moving.