Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQRGT9FHZS6ZRXDX9T32RR

Aurora Carter should have felt ridiculous. Standing alone beneath a sky so black the stars were brittle points, she had every reasonable reason to laugh at herself and take the bus home. She had reached for the kind of proof she trusted—directions scribbled on a damp scrap of card that a stranger had shoved into her palm at the Golden Empress, a single time and place and the promise of answers. She liked answers. Pre-law had trained her to prefer facts to feeling, to catalog inconsistencies and cross-examine them until they were tidy. That, at least, stopped the part of her that still had Evan's face folded into the back of her throat. The grove did not welcome her with tidy facts. It began with a wrongness so small she almost missed it: the wildflowers. Richmond Park in October should have been a skeleton of bracken and mud. Instead small heads of blue and white peppered the dark, bell-shaped blooms cupped around a moon that did not hang higher but seemed—somehow—to make the flowers glow from within. Aurora took a step off the worn path and felt the soles of her sneakers press into soil that smelled sweet, like cut grass and tea. The ancient oaks that marked the boundary—stones the size of men, gnarled trunks that locals called Isolde's because it sounded less insane than "the stones"—had a faint, sap-sweet sheen, as if light had pooled on them and refused to run off. Her watch read 00:12. Her phone said 00:13. Walking into the clearing felt like the place had shifted its watch to a different time zone. She told herself it was nothing: clocks desynchronized, a slight lag between signal towers in the park. She told herself this until something warm pressed against the hollow at the base of her throat and made her chest lift reflexively. The Heartstone did not belong to her in any way that made sense. It hung on a thin chain at the hollow of her collarbone, a thumbnail-sized gem the color of dried blood. Someone had given it to her at the restaurant three nights ago, a man who smelled of rain and soap and something older that had nothing to do with wardrobes. He had said one sentence—Find the Grove at midnight—and left without looking back. The stone had been quiet on the walk over. Now it pulsed with a faint, inner warmth as if it had been waiting with its hand on a stove. She kept her palm flat over it because it settled her to touch things she could measure. The skin of her hand felt cooler than the gem. The warmth did not burn. It thudded, almost heartlike, and with every thump the hairs along her wrists prickled as if an unseen wind were sliding down her arms. She had a small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist from a childhood accident; she traced it without thinking and made a legal list in her head: one, evidence—phone, watch, pendant; two, motive—unknown; three, location—isolated. Keep the head in the head. She repeated the litany until she could still her breathing. There was sound in the grove that shouldn't have belonged to the night. A clock somewhere—small, insistent—ticked out of phase with the trees. It was not the normal human tick of a distant house. The tick was smooth, metallic, and when she crouched to listen it went quiet as if offended by her curiosity. Laughter threaded through the oaks, high and quick and not quite child nor adult. It ran along the edge of her hearing like a river that has forgotten which bank belongs to which country. When she followed it, the ground slipped away from under her feet—not physically, but in perception, like the universe had narrowed and might peel a layer. She fought the impulse to run and cataloged instead: the soil was firm, footsteps were her own, there was no sudden drop. At the edge of the clearing a fox sat on its haunches, small and red as a penny. It appeared and vanished as though someone were snipping frames from a film. The first time she saw it she swore its eyes were human; the second time its muzzle puffed smoke and it was gone. When she looked directly, nothing moved. When she let her eyes soften, shapes slid between trunks, so subtle they might have been the night thinking rather than beings. A shadow leaned. A tree breathed. In the periphery, someone—something—took a step and the air filled with the sound of J-shaped spoons clinking together. She tried to turn the scene into testimony. A body must be somewhere. There must be footprints, cigarette butts, a discarded jacket. Her training wanted physical proofs so it could interrogate them for motive and timeline. Instead, the grasses undid her footprints as she stole a glance back. Her shoes left only a faint disruption that the moonlight smoothed over like a hand smoothing fabric. The pendant warmed again. Not a pulse this time but a slow, deliberate heat that traveled from the gem to her sternum and settled like a coin. Aurora's breath hitched. She had been told nothing about Hel; she had read barely enough folklore in evenings with Eva to know the word was a boundary—cold, rock-faced, where names came naked. That the Heartstone pulsed near a Hel portal was a detail she could file under "worse things." Her fingers went to the chain as if to snuff a candle. The silver had an almost liquid glide against her skin, like a second throat. Night made the grove small. Her flashlight threw a white, hand-width cone that made the trees into tall men, and outside the circle the dark thickened into velvet. In the beam, the stones leaned inward, their rings like closed eyes watching a sleeping child. The light clawed at their surfaces and found nothing but the ancient knotwork of bark and lichen. At the margin, the wildflowers’ petals drank in the flashlight and did not reflect it, as if they refused the currency of light. When she moved, things at the periphery moved a fraction after, as if the grove had to think before it could mimic her. There was a sound she knew intimately: breathing measured, steady. Not her breath—she could feel that in her ribs—but another cadence against her skin. It matched the pace of the pendant, and for a slick second she wondered whether the gem's warmth had a voice and whether that voice had learned to pretend to be lungs. She did what rational people do when confronted by the irrational: she tuned to the pattern. Counted. One-two-three, in the way one times a pulse. One-two-three. Steps answered from the other side of the standing stones. Nothing like footsteps properly measured—no heel, no scuff—but the soft sound of cloth on leaf litter, a rhythm of living things that avoided the path. Aurora's throat tightened. She stood entirely still, the way you do when you think sound measured you by mistake and may not notice you moved. The sound folded around a tree and came back to her as if it had a mouth shaped to speak from the horizon. Her name breathed out of the moss: Aurora. Not the gravel of a radio or the clarity of a human voice. It was the sound of someone saying a beloved thing and meaning menace. She took one small step toward the center of the clearing and the air curved, like heat off tarmac. The pendant's warmth became a pressure, a small fist of expectation pressed up against her breastbone. She felt, absurdly, like someone had placed a palm there and was testing the species of her heartbeat. She wrapped both hands around the stone as if to steady it, the chain warm and slick through her fingers. "Who are you?" she asked, the voice hardly leaving her teeth. The answer was not a recorded voice but a chorus of tiny noises—leaves brushing leaves—not quite arranged into vowels. It might have been an answer and might have been a wind. It became a pattern anyway, and her whole life of being told to trust the rational felt like a thin shirt against a cold she couldn't quantify. "You're the reasonable one," she said aloud, because speaking anything always pulled her center back in. The grove offered no reply in language but a rustle that sounded, for a shocking second, like a sigh of recognition. Her phone pulsed with a message. She fumbled it, fingers numb with the cold that the grove wasn't giving but that had decided to borrow. The screen read: 00:42. The message came from an unknown number. Only one line: We have been waiting. She blinked and the message blurred. When she refocused there was no signal bar, no network indicator, only the small battery icon draining bright and suddenly fat, as if entire hours were being siphoned by something invisible. The idea that she had been deceived should have been black and sharp and easy to act upon. Instead it felt like a bruise, slow to surface and impossible to map. At the very edge of sight something tilted—an angle in a tree where no branch should have, a suggestion of knees in the silhouette of leaves. The shape stepped into the flashlight and did not complete itself. It was mostly negative space, the absence of things arranged with such pretense that the human brain wanted to finish the picture and keep finishing it until it made a face. Aurora's skin crawled. "Come out," she said. Men she had cross-examined in court gave answers to that tone; men who had hidden told her where they were. The grove did not answer. The trees swallowed the sound like cups. She paced until the ground turned familiar in its failure to leave a trace. Her legal brain tried other tricks: measure, triangulate, set a marker. She took off a glove, tied it to a twig, and pointed it toward the nearest standing stone. It sat there like a beacon for adolescents and law students everywhere, and when she turned back it had been taken down. The twig was on the other side of the clearing, a clean slice through the grass, as if someone had walked carefully around it and set it somewhere that made no sense. The pendant flared. The warmth rose, intolerable for a fraction of a second, and she felt vertigo as if someone played a hand through her memory and tousled it. A sweet smell—baked bread, warm and yeasty—rolled in on the night and snagged at the small, sensible memory of her mother's hands folding pastry. It felt like leverage. She did not flinch. She was not, at root, a superstitious woman. She was neat and precise. But the thing a body remembers when a mind decides to be rational is not always a litigable fact. It was only later—years or minutes—that she would be able to say whether she saw the figure clearly or whether she was making it up out of anxiety. In the moment, something stepped into the halo of her flashlight and stopped. It had shoulders like a person but those shoulders sat wrong, as if the angle at which they met the collarbone did not belong to human architecture. Where a face would be was a blur, as though someone had smeared wet paint across paper and left the features to drip. It tilted its head in a way that read as interest rather than threat. You could tell a great deal by a tilt of the head in court: apology or arrogance, feigned ignorance, contrition. This tilt was neither. It was cataloging. Aurora's hand tightened on the pendant until the silver bit into the skin of her palm. She found her voice and used it like a weapon forged by repeating the facts into a sentence. "Who gave you my name?" she demanded. "Who told you to meet me?" The being—if it could be called that—made a sound like paper turning over in a very quiet library. It reached a limb forward. Not a hand exactly but a suggestion of fingers that ended in a light more like the prickle of a winter light than anything warm. They closed around a space where the world thinned and the air smelled suddenly of iron and old coins. When it touched the air, the pendant burned. The gem's inner glow flared to a light as bright and small as a match. Aurora felt the heat crawl up her neck and catch for an instant at the scar on her wrist, an ancient child's crescent, and the sensation was so precise she almost thought someone had laid a fingertip there. The thing withdrew its limb as if stung, and this time there was a sound she recognized in the bundle of noises: a laugh that was too wet and too close, like someone who had been crying learning to laugh again. It made no sense and yet fit. It made her skin leak cold droplets. She wanted to move. She found her feet clumsy as if her shoes had borrowed someone else's gait. The grove had altered time without permission. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside; she could not trust the watch, the phone, or even her pulse. All she could trust were the tiny, stubborn facts her body allowed her—her hands, the scar, the pendant—and the one rational tool that helped her most: refusal. She refused to be carried. She refused to be an answer like a neatly folded handkerchief. The thing stepped again. The light where its face should be gathered, as if it were trying to give her something—an object, a memory, a truth. She could not see it clearly. When her brain tried to finish the picture it slid and smeared. She did not reach for it, though every bone in her called for grasping at any possible proof. "You're not alone," she said to the empty space because somewhere in the cracking under the floor of her rational mind something agreed. The laugh answered like an echo that knew her name and had been practicing it. The pendant's warmth became insistence. Aurora felt the field of it push outward, a small sphere of heat that made the hair along her arms stand up and the flowers at her feet bow. The trees watched. The stones recorded things in rings that did not align with calendars. Somewhere beyond the rim of the clearing, time gathered itself like a garment and waited for her to put it on. She stepped backward. Her heel slid in a wet place that had not been there when she made the first step into the clearing. The grove made room for her exit and then closed its fingers around the path like an animal remembering how a door feels from inside. Behind her the things that moved at the edge of vision adjusted their positions by the fraction of a breath that takes to think of an alternate route. When she turned, slow and certain and almost as if she were offering herself as evidence, the thing in the clearing mirrored her move with a displaced timing, like an actor fashioning a mimicry of life. Its head tilted again. The light in the center of its face did something that was not a smile and not a frown but the possibility of either. Aurora did not scream. She was not a woman of melodrama. She let her eyes rest on the pendant hanging at her throat and, for an instant the length of a bright match-strike, the inner crimson of the Heartstone thudded in time with the creature's silent breath. She felt no wish to be rescued. She felt, instead, an old legal question taking root in a place they call guts: Whose story am I in? The grove answered with the rustle of leaves and a breath that was not hers but moved against the hair at the back of her neck. It did not step closer. It had no need to. The certainty that she was not alone settled into her like a verdict and, for the first time that night, she allowed herself to be a little afraid in the small, honest way people find practical: fear that is useful, calibrating. "One minute," she said, to no courtroom and to no jury, but to herself. The pendant pulsed, a simple affirmative. She would give the grove its minute—one breathing-room minute to show her its proof. She straightened her shoulders until her spine clicked in simple, civil ceremony. When the minute was almost up, something in the dark beyond the standing stones exhaled, and the exhale sounded like paper and old coins and someone saying your name in a place that is not designed to hold it. The pendant flared, warmer than it had any business being, and Aurora caught, in the flare, the suggestion of a hand reaching—not for her, not yet, but for the air where her history lived. The grove waited, patient, and the wrongness swelled into a decision. She turned slowly toward the source of the sound, toward the place where the veil between the world and the other had thinned enough for the Heartstone to notice. The thing did not hide. It stepped out as if stepping into light, and the light was not sunlight but the inner burn of crimson and memory and unshared names. She could not tell whether she was walking into a meeting she had chosen or into a sentence someone else had written for her. The pendant burned like a small, borrowed sun. Behind her, the stones watched and the wildflowers kept blooming, indifferent and patient and endless. When she reached the place where the being waited, the world folded like dry paper. The last thing she heard before the air closed over sound was her own name said very softly, perfectly, as if the universe had been practicing the pronunciation for centuries.