Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQP5H5W20PPAZNDNRFD8B8

The oak standing stones appeared exactly where the alleyway had promised they would, half-swallowed by Richmond Park’s midnight undergrowth. Rory’s breath plumed in the October air, but when she stepped between the first two gnarled trunks—ancient things that looked more like petrified giants than trees—the temperature jumped ten degrees. The chill vanished, replaced by a cloying, humid warmth that smelled of honeysuckle and rotting jasmine. She stopped, her hand instinctively rising to the silver chain at her throat. The Heartstone pulsed. A slow, rhythmic throb against her sternum, like a second heartbeat waking up. She shouldn’t have been able to see the wildflowers. It was past two in the morning, the moon barely a sliver behind London’s perpetual sodium glare, yet the clearing bloomed with color. Bluebells carpeted the ground in defiance of the season, their petals luminescent, trembling without wind. Rory’s fingers found the crescent scar on her left wrist, tracing the familiar ridge of tissue through her jacket sleeve. A childhood accident, her mother had always said. A fall from a bicycle in Cardiff. But the scar ached now, a phantom pain that synchronized with the pendant’s warming glow. She had come because of the warmth. Three hours ago, while locking her bike outside Silas’ bar, the stone had flared so hot it nearly burned her skin. A crimson beacon thrumming against her collarbone, pulling her southwest toward the park. She’d told herself it was curiosity, that cool-headed intellect her professors had praised at Cardiff. Not compulsion. Not the same desperate, reflexive obedience she’d unlearned during the year with Evan. This was different. This was hers. The standing stones formed a broken circle, seven oaks with bark like scaled bronze. Between them, the air shimmered. Rory blinked, and the shimmer remained—a heat haze in freezing weather, a vertical distortion that made the trees beyond look stretched, wrong. She checked her phone. 2:17 AM. She looked up, counted to sixty, and checked again. 2:03 AM. Her mouth went dry. The Grove’s reputation had always been pub mythology—Isolde’s grove, the Richmond ghost story, a place where teenagers dared each other to spend Halloween night. Rory had dismissed it as urban legend until the pendant came into her possession two weeks ago, slipped into her delivery bag at Golden Empress with no note, no receipt. Just the stone, humming with a warmth that felt almost sentient. Now, standing in the clearing, she understood the stories hadn’t been ghost stories at all. They were warnings. A sound drifted from the stone circle. Not a snap of twigs or the rustle of urban foxes. This was wet. Organic. The sound of something pulling itself free from deep mud. Rory stepped back. Her trainers sank into the loam, which gave way with a spongy, yielding texture that felt disturbingly like flesh. The wildflowers brushed her jeans, and she realized they weren’t bluebells. The petals were too long, too jointed, bending toward her legs with the slow, deliberate motion of fingers uncurling. The pendant blazed. She grabbed it through her shirt, the silver chain biting into her nape, and the heat anchored her. Focused her. She was Aurora Carter, twenty-five years old, Pre-Law dropout, survivor of worse things than dark parks. She had navigated Evan’s mercurial rages, had learned to read the micro-tremors before the blows. She could read this. But the wrongness was building. The standing stones seemed closer together than they had a moment ago. The gaps between the oaks had narrowed, the spaces filling with darkness that absorbed the faint glow of her phone’s flashlight. She raised the beam, and it died at five feet, swallowed by the humid air. Another sound. Behind her. Rory spun. The path she’d taken into the clearing was gone. Brambles—thick, black, and moving with a sinuous, muscular ripple—had sealed the entrance. Not grown. Moved. They twisted in place, thorns clicking together like insect mandibles. “No,” she whispered. Her voice sounded flat, muffled, as if the clearing had been vacuum-sealed. The air pressure dropped. Her ears popped. The crimson gemstone at her chest began to glow, casting red shadows across the wildflowers that were definitely, absolutely reaching for her now. The stone pulsed in a pattern. Three beats. Pause. Three beats. A signal. A warning. She remembered the codex entry she’d found in the library archives, the one about Hel portals. The pendant had been warming when she neared them. But this wasn’t a portal. This was a membrane. A place where the Fae realm pressed against the skin of the world, thin enough to see through, thin enough to tear. Something walked between the standing stones. It wore the shape of a person, but the proportions elongated in her peripheral vision. When she looked directly, she saw only shadow. When she glanced away, she caught the impression of limbs too numerous, joints bending backward, a head that hung heavy and pendulous like a flower on a broken stem. It moved with the stop-motion jerk of a film skipping frames, appearing first by the eastern stone, then the center, then directly beside the northern oak without traversing the space between. Rory’s hand trembled. The scar on her wrist burned. She backed toward the brambles—stupid, useless, but animal panic had hijacked the prefrontal cortex she’d once relied upon for contract law. The thing in the circle turned toward her. She felt its attention like a physical weight, a pressure against her temples, her teeth. The pendant screamed heat. She yanked it free of her shirt. The crimson stone blazed with an inner light, illuminating the clearing in shades of blood and rust. In that sudden, terrible illumination, she saw the truth of the standing stones. They weren’t oaks. They were ossified. They were bone. Ancient, petrified remains of something that had tried to claw its way through and failed, calcified mid-gesture, their branches actually fingers, their bark the rough texture of desiccated skin. The wildflowers were eyes. Hundreds of them, blinking open in the loam, staring upward with silver-white pupils. The figure in the center raised its head. Where its face should have been, there was only the same shimmering distortion Rory had seen earlier, but now it resolved into an image. A room she recognized. Her flat above Silas’ bar. The bed unmade, the window she always left cracked. And in the reflection of the window glass, she saw Evan. Not as he had been when she’d fled London six months ago, but transformed. Smiling with too many teeth, his fingers pressed against the glass from the inside, looking out. “Not real,” Rory said. Her voice steadied, though her hands shook. “You’re showing me what I fear. That’s not him. He’s in Cardiff. He’s gone.” The figure tilted its head. The temperature plummeted. The humid warmth vanished, replaced by a cold so absolute her breath crystallized in front of her face. The pendant’s glow flickered, struggling against the dark. Rory understood then. The time dilation. An hour inside could be minutes outside—or days. She had been here for ten minutes by her phone’s stuttering clock. Outside, in the real world, weeks might have passed. Or seconds. She was losing the anchor of linear time, and with it, the anchor of self. The Fae realm didn’t hunt with tooth and claw. It hunted with disorientation, with the slow erosion of certainty until you accepted its logic, stepped willingly into the circle, and became part of the architecture. The brambles parted behind her. A path opened, but it led deeper into the grove, not out. The standing stones had rearranged themselves while she’d been watching the apparition. Now they formed a corridor, inviting her toward a center that hadn’t existed before—a dais of black stone where the wildflowers grew thickest, their petals opening and closing with wet, hungry sounds. The figure gestured. Come. Rory looked at the pendant. It pulsed three times. Warm. Alive. A gift from an unknown benefactor who had known she would need light in this place. She closed her fist around the stone, feeling the silver chain cut into her palm, and thought of Evan’s hands around her throat, of the way she’d learned that survival wasn’t about fighting—it was about choosing when to run. She ran. Not toward the brambles, not toward the corridor of stones, but sideways, crashing through the wildflowers that shrieked as she trampled them, feeling roots snap like tendons beneath her boots. The figure behind her made a sound like tearing silk. The air thickened, trying to hold her, to slow her movements to the consistency of honey. The scar on her wrist flared with sudden, ice-cold pain. Rory vaulted over a fallen stone—no, a fallen finger, she realized with horror, the knuckle joints protruding like knots in wood—and the pendant’s heat became searing. She didn’t stop. She sprinted toward the place where the boundary had to be, where the air smelled of normal London autumn, of diesel and rain and dead leaves. The standing stones groaned. The ground buckled. Something grabbed her ankle—a vine, a hand, she didn’t look—and she kicked free, feeling fabric tear, skin abrade. Then the temperature dropped back to October cold. The sounds of the city returned: distant sirens, the rumble of a night bus, the rustle of actual, normal wind in actual, normal trees. Rory stumbled onto the paved path of Richmond Park, gasping, her lungs burning with clean air. She didn’t stop running until she reached the gate, until her hands were wrapped around the iron bars, until she could see the streetlights of London proper illuminating the pavement in familiar, sodium-orange pools. She opened her fist. The Heartstone still glowed, faint now, but steady. A comfort. A warning. Behind her, the park was silent. But when she touched her left wrist, the crescent scar was no longer smooth. It was raised, fresh, and when she brought her fingers away, they came back smeared with sap that smelled of honeysuckle and rot. She walked home. She did not look back. But the pendant remained warm against her chest all the way to Silas’ bar, pulsing its three-beat rhythm, counting down.