Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQS60HMGQC299Q98A74H7Z

The oak stones rose from the dark like teeth, black faces rimed with lichen, ringed around the clearing like a slow, patient crowd. Aurora's breath came out in white little ghosts that dissolved into the cold; the city was a smear of distance behind her, a ribbon of streetlights swallowed by the trees. Richmond Park closed at night but the grove had no posted hours. The map Eva had slid into her hand two days ago had been a single line, three words: Isolde's grove, midnight. It had been written in blue ink the way Eva always underlined things she meant; practical as a nudge and as cryptic as a dare. Rory had gone because the pendant had started to hum in her palm every time she passed anything older than the bus shelter outside Silas' bar. She stopped at the outermost stone and let the silence settle around her like wool. The standing stones smelled of damp bark and old rain; when she pressed the pad of a finger against one, it was cool and slightly sticky with sap. The Heartstone hung against her sternum, a thumb-sized tear of deep crimson cradled in a silver chain. It had been given to her with no face attached to the gesture—an envelope slipped under her flat's door at two in the morning, a small velvet-lined box, a note: Keep it close. The gem pulsed faintly then, like a small heart, and had pulsed again all morning when Rory had climbed the narrow stairs to work and again when she had worn the coat Eva lent her. Now it warmed against her skin. It did that sometimes, a slow warmth under the bone of her clavicle that made her neck prickle. She told herself she was here to test that warmth, to see whether the pendant reacted to whatever a Hel portal might be. She told herself that out loud because telling herself something shaped it into a plan, and Rory was hard-wired for plans. Her hands were steady; she had left the kitchen timer for the Golden Empress on the bar, the bag of return orders sat heavy in the crook of her elbow. She took one step between the stones and the air narrowed, as if the clearing had been inhaling and now exhaled around her. The wildflowers were the first wrong thing. They should have been pressed with frost in this month; instead tiny stars of blue and white bobbed up from the grass, every bloom turned toward her as if moved by a single, deliberate wind. Their petals were wet with dew that did not steam; when she knelt to look, the droplets trembled in time with the pendant’s pulse. The closer she moved to the center, the stronger the warmth in her chest became. She wondered, briefly, whether she had misread Eva’s ink and the place had been a garden party all along. The thought made her lips ache with a laugh she kept small. There was sound, then, that could not be labeled. It arrived as a subtraction rather than an addition: the usual distant city hum was a bar of low, steady frequency that thinned until a single thin wire of noise remained. Her ears caught it as a kind of tightening—no. She caught an extra breath, the sound of someone taking one long, measured inhalation from somewhere off the path, a breath that did not belong to the trees. She turned. The clearing was ringed with darkness; beyond that darkness the oak trunks were blunt columns, immovable. No one stepped over the stones. No one made footprints in the moss that had not been there a minute before. “Hello?” The word left her as invitation and as test. Her voice was small. It did not echo. The sound of her own name—Rory, habitual, private—would have been the clearest thing to trust. Instead the clearing drew the sound thin, flattened it, and returned it as a silence that pressed at her ears. The pendant stiffened against her chest. Its inner glow shifted from comfortable warmth to something that felt like a clock hand moving over glass. She touched the crescent scar on her left wrist almost without thinking, the memory of how it had ached years ago in a different kind of dark. The motion steadied her. Scarred skin, cold chain, warm stone. She could list the facts; she could make them anchors. She liked lists. She liked anchors. A footstep to her right, soft, impossible. Not on leaf litter but on the very air, a sibilant touch of movement like fabric slipped from a chair. She turned her head and saw at the periphery of her vision a ribbon of darkness that did not match the tree line. It moved with a hesitant, minute attention, as though it were testing whether she would look. When she met it with direct gaze the ribbon collapsed back into shadow and the clearing exhaled. She smelled then—something metallic beneath the sap, the faint stale sweetness of old coins. She told herself it was the wind. She told herself the pendant made her imagine things. Rationality proceeded in thin, logical steps: check the perimeter, take photographs, call Eva. She took out her phone. The screen displayed 12:07. For a moment the numbers seemed to hang, the way the clearing seemed to hold its breath. She pressed the power button to wake it, and the time changed to 12:15. She blinked and tried again. 12:13. The minutes were elastic, tugged unevenly between the stones. Her throat tightened. Something moved in the pool of shadow by the largest oak stone—the one carved not by weather but by hands older than the city. Movement that was not a rustle of leaves but the precise rearrangement of space: a small, impossible smoothing as if someone had brushed a finger over fabric. It is not a person, she thought. The thought came with the mechanical comfort of observation: not a person. The difference mattered. A person was discrete; a thing in between had no joints. “Eva,” she said, and the name broke like a glass that is too thin. The clearing answered with a sigh that was not in any tone Eva had ever used when she insisted on moral certainties. Then the sound of a child’s laughter, bright as a coin, chimed in the air to the left—too close, too sweet. Rory's eyes darted there. Nothing but flowers, their faces turned like listening mouths. The cedar-scented air held another noise: something scraping gently, rhythmically, underfoot. She knelt to the moss like a thief and examined it. Under the moss the ground was compact and unnaturally bright, like a path trodden this hour and yet older than memory. There were no footprints. A strip of the grass showed a faint impression where nothing yet had weight enough to make a mark. The pendant against her sternum beat a second faster. She imagined she could feel a pressure behind the stones, as if the grove itself were leaning in to watch. Aurora reached for the stone nearest her and pressed her palm to the lichen. The Heartstone flared so hot beneath her collarbone that heat licked along the tendons of her neck. For one stupid moment she imagined the pendant trying to climb free, to run into the dark. She pulled back as if burned. Her breath thudded in her ears. She told herself, again, she had a plan: name the thing. Name it and it would be a thing she could handle. It answered—the name—softly, in a voice like pages turning. It said, “Rory,” and added something else that slipped right past her comprehension. It had a timbre like Eva’s and not like Eva’s at all; it was a mimic that knew the cadence of her friend’s sentences but not the life in them. The sound curled around the stones, wormed into the dew, and drew the wildflowers toward where her knees pressed grass. When they tilted nearer they smelled faintly of lavender and old library dust. She rose on unsteady legs. The clearing felt suddenly smaller, the stones crowding close. Behind one of them, a shadow framed itself in the angle where trunk met moss; it was only shadow but it had edges, like a silhouette cut from paper by someone with an exacting hand. It stood so still that for a second she convinced herself it was a trick of her eyes. Then it shifted. The motion was minuscule: a shoulder adjusting as if to carry an invisible weight. The wrongness accumulated like small coins pressed into the soles of her shoes. A cicada's buzz staccato for a heartbeat and then silence. The scent of bread—fresh crust—at the edge of her nose when no bakery could be more than the city, miles away. A footfall that landed exactly where her toe would be a heartbeat later; the clearing laid out its movements to match her, like a mirror with cupboard doors. The Heartstone's glow deepened, a candle held to the back of a throat. “Who are you?” she asked. It was the simplest question both practical and absurd. If a person answered, she would negotiate. If an animal, she would retreat. If something else, she would keep moving and mark her path. The voice that moved across the grass did not answer directly. It hummed instead, a note like the inside of a throat opened to sing and then closed. The humming shaped itself into a sound that matched the rhythm of her scar tapping against her palm: a crescent beat, measured and intimate. The pendant pulsed in time, a heartbeat within a heartbeat. She had never felt so thoroughly matched to a thing before. A small movement at the perimeter caught her eye: a moth, the size of her palm, but with too many antennae, too many eyes. It landed on the nearest stone and cocked its head in a way that felt like appraisal. Its wings were not winged but petaled, like leftover flowers. When it brushed the lichen the lichen shuddered and sighed. For a moment her mind supplied a name—messenger, scout—and for a stubborn, human moment she hoped the messenger would be curious, not predatory. The moth folded its wings like a book and the clearing made a sound that could be a laugh or the crunch of ice. The voice—voices?—began to overlap, a tapestry of syllables that looped and then dissolved, the timbre of familiar people braided with wild things: Eva, the delivery man from Golden Empress who always hummed when he wheeled sauce crates, her mother, names she had not thought aloud for months. The grove was competent at replication. It could stitch the warmth of her mother's hands into the wind and leave her wanting. Rory did not run. She had never been the kind to run from a problem that required deciding. She felt, instead, a slow, insistent pressure behind her ribs that asked for not bravery but witness. She took out the phone again and trained the lens on the largest stone, the one with a shallow hollow at its base where time pooled like oil. The camera screen showed her face and the stone and, for a heartbeat, a reflection of something that moved in opposition: where she expected the clearing to be, there was instead a silvered darkness that answered her expression with a slow, blank smile. A sound like a ledger slamming shut made her flinch. When the thing at the stone moved this time, it did so with purpose. It stepped—or the shadow stepped—so that the hollow in the stone framed its shape. It had shoulders but no chest, hands but not fingers, a width and height the range of a person with the wrong axis. It moved toward her, each movement delicate and deliberate. Rory felt the center of the clearing like a sun she'd been orbiting. The Heartstone now burned in earnest. It was not heat she could attribute to Earth's air but to some deeper thing tugging from beneath. The voice braided into a single word she knew and did not know, and from the word the flowers leaned until they brushed her calves like soft, cold fingers. She could run. She could leap the circle of stones and be in the park with its regular hours and the lamp-posts and the stupid mundane cafe that stayed open twenty-four and served bad coffee and better advice. The thought of the lamp-posts, the bustle, steadied her briefly. But the pendant against her sternum beat its little conspiracy and as she listened she realized that leaving without confronting the sound of that laugh, without naming what matched her, would be to hand the clearing a victory she would not allow. “Whoever you are,” she said, voice even enough that she could not hear the tremor, “you can stop.” The shadow paused, as if it were listening for an instruction. The clearing held its breath. The Heartstone pulsed once, hard, like a knuckle on glass. A whisper, closer than her own skin, said, “We are waiting.” Rory swallowed. She thought of Evan's stern jaw and the way fear had choked hope into corners; she had fled then for the simplicity of air and motion. Fear now did not push her to run so much as sharpen her. She pressed her palm to the scar on her wrist and felt the moon-slick of the world tilt into a new angle. The pendant warmed until it ached. She stepped forward. Not into the hollow's shadow, but a foot into the center of the clearing where the wildflowers bowed their heads to her. The act was small and reckless—an assertion of presence in a place that insisted on erasure. When she stood there, the grove arranged itself around her, attentive and hungry. Something like a face formed where none should be, made of the negative spaces between branches. It did not smile; it did not need to. The Heartstone beat against her bones. The thing that watched lifted one paper-hand, a motion that was almost human, almost polite. “We are waiting,” it said again. No longer a copy of someone she loved. No longer a lure. The words were straightforward, free of malice. Waiting for time, for a misstep, for a bargain perhaps older than a day. Aurora exhaled, a small, pragmatic sound. The world tilted and what she saw at the edge of her vision was not more horrifying than the idea that waiting meant choice. She was not a child. She had left a flat above a bar, left warm light and the smell of soy in the sink, left Eva's bright underlined note and walked to a ring of stones in the park at midnight. She would not leave without turning the situation into something named. “What do you want?” Her voice, when it came, was a thing of exactness. The clearing listened. The wildflowers lifted their faces like a congregation leaning toward an altar. A long pause, the kind that counts time in moments rather than minutes. Then the thing said, with a patience that felt like gravity, “You have a heart within you. We would know it.” The words were both simple and monstrously complex. It meant curiosity; it meant hunger; it meant both. Rory felt the pendant burn. She felt the scar pulse at the rim of feeling. She understood, with a gut's certainty, that the grove measured things by the willingness of hearts. She also understood that if she left now the pendant would throb at her back until she returned. She had always measured life in calculations and small acts of courage. Tonight, her calculation came down to this: stay, ask the question, watch the thing that watched her and hold her own face steady in its mirror. She squared her shoulders and spoke into the clearing, into whatever waited, “Then know it.” Her voice was steady. The pendant flared a final bright, awful warmth that threaded through her like a bell. The Grove leaned in with all its ancient patience. The wrongness did not explode; it settled, layered, like an expectation that would not let go. Somewhere beyond the stones the city clock chimed three times. Time on her phone flicked back and forth as if deciding. The moth folded its wings and vanished. The smile in the shadow remained, unreadable. Aurora—the woman the world knew as Rory, the person who had fled and rebuilt her life in small practical acts—waited back. The clearing waited, and the night wrapped around them both the way a secret wraps itself around a truth.