Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQSPPMV7RZZZSKWRE6EJY8

The last light bled from the sky as Aurora pushed through the undergrowth at the edge of Richmond Park. She'd waited until the rangers made their final rounds, watched the last dog-walker disappear toward the car park, and still she'd given it another twenty minutes before slipping past the gate. The pendant lay warm against her sternum, warmer than it should be, and that warmth had led her here three nights running. Tonight she'd finally worked up the nerve to follow it all the way. The ancient oaks rose around her like sentinels, their bark ridged and dark in the fading light. She knew these trees marked something—Silas had told her stories, late nights when the bar was empty and he'd had enough whiskey to loosen his tongue. Standing stones, he'd called them, though they'd never been stone at all. The oaks had simply grown into that purpose, roots drinking deep from soil that touched more than one world. Aurora found the gap between two of the largest trees and stepped through. The air changed immediately. It pressed against her skin like something alive, neither warm nor cold but present in a way air had no right to be. The clearing beyond stretched wider than it should have, given the density of the woods she'd just left. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in defiance of November, their petals pale and luminous in the darkness. No moon yet, but she could see them clearly. That should have been her first warning. She'd come because the pendant had been pulling her here for weeks. Because something had left it for her, and she needed to know what. Because the dreams had started—dreams of crimson light and a voice that spoke in languages she didn't know but somehow understood. The Heartstone pulsed against her chest, its rhythm quickening, and she pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket. "I'm here," she said quietly. Her voice fell flat, swallowed by the silence. Nothing answered. Aurora moved deeper into the grove, her boots soundless on the soft earth. The flowers bent away from her footsteps as if anticipating her path. Behind her, something rustled. She turned, too quickly, and saw only the pale blooms swaying in a breeze she couldn't feel. The wrongness crept in slowly. It started with the birds. Or rather, with their absence. Richmond Park was never truly silent—even at night, something always stirred. Owls. Foxes barking in the distance. The eternal background hum of London, that great machine breathing at the edge of every green space. Here there was nothing. The silence had weight, had texture. It pressed against her eardrums like deep water. Aurora's hand found the small crescent scar on her left wrist, a habit she'd never been able to break. She rubbed her thumb across the raised tissue, grounding herself. The childhood accident that had given her that mark seemed very far away now, a memory belonging to some other girl who had never stood in a clearing where the rules of the world grew thin. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She didn't turn this time. Didn't give it the satisfaction of her attention. Instead, she watched from the corner of her eye as a shape drifted between two oaks at the clearing's edge. Tall. Thin. Wrong in proportions she couldn't quite name. It was there for a heartbeat, and then the shadows swallowed it. The pendant flared hot against her skin. "I know you're there." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I'm not afraid of you." The lie hung in the air between them—her and whatever shared this space with her now. Aurora was afraid. She'd been afraid since Evan, since the night she'd finally run, since she'd learned what it meant to share a room with something that wanted to hurt her. But fear had never stopped her before. Fear was just another form of information. The wildflowers nearest to her left began to wilt. Not slowly, not the natural death of cut stems in a vase. They blackened from the center outward, petals curling like burning paper, and the decay spread in a widening circle that stopped precisely three feet from where she stood. Aurora held her ground. "The pendant." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, a sound like wind through dead leaves, like ice cracking on a winter pond. "You wear what was not given." "It was left for me. That's close enough to given." Silence. The dead flowers at the circle's edge crumbled to ash. "You do not know what you carry." The voice had direction now, coming from behind her. "You do not know what door you hold the key to." Aurora turned slowly. Nothing stood there but shadow, pooled thick between the oaks like something liquid. But the shadow had shape. Had depth. Had, she realized with a cold shock, eyes. They weren't eyes in any human sense. Two points of absolute darkness in a darkness that somehow seemed lighter by comparison. They watched her with an intelligence she could feel like pressure against her thoughts, probing, curious, hungry. "Then tell me," she said. "That's why I'm here. To understand." The shadow laughed. The sound scraped against her bones. "You came because the stone called you. You came because the blood in your veins remembers what your mind has forgotten." The darkness shifted, and for a moment she saw the suggestion of a form within it—limbs too long, joints that bent at angles that made her stomach lurch. "You came because you have no choice. You have never had a choice." The temperature dropped. Aurora's breath misted in front of her face, and frost began to creep across the wildflowers, following the path the decay had carved. The pendant burned now, hot enough to hurt, and she pressed her hand against it reflexively. "Whatever you think I am," she said, "you're wrong." "Am I?" The shadow drew closer. She could feel it now, a cold that went beyond temperature, a wrongness that prickled along every nerve. "Tell me, Aurora Carter, what do you see when you close your eyes? What whispers in the space between sleeping and waking? What name do you speak in dreams that vanishes like smoke when you wake?" She didn't answer. Couldn't answer. Because the truth was she did dream of a name, a word that felt like a wound in her mouth, and every morning it slipped away before she could grasp it. "You wear the Heartstone," the shadow continued, "and you do not even know whose heart it was cut from. You walk between worlds and call yourself human. You fled one cage only to stumble into another, and still you do not see the bars." "I see you." Aurora's voice cracked, but she didn't look away from those terrible eyes. "I see you just fine." Something changed in the darkness. The shadows drew back, just slightly, and she caught a glimpse of what hid within them—pale skin that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, a face that was almost human except for the proportions, the angles, the smile that held too many teeth. "Perhaps you do," it said. "Perhaps that is why the stone chose you." "The stone didn't choose anything. Someone left it for me." "Yes." The figure leaned closer, and she smelled something ancient, something that made her think of deep caves and older bones. "But who left it? And why do you think they knew where you would be, Aurora Carter? Why do you think they knew you would run to London, would work for the woman with the red door, would sleep above the bar where the old man keeps his secrets?" The questions hit her like physical blows. She'd never thought—never let herself think—about the pendant's appearance. It had simply been there one morning, in the flat, sitting on her pillow like something she'd always owned. She'd assumed it was Eva's, borrowed and forgotten. When Eva denied it, she'd assumed she'd bought it herself during one of those blackout nights after she'd first arrived, when the drinks had been free and the grief had been bottomless. But she hadn't. She knew that now with a certainty that settled in her stomach like a stone. "What do you want?" she asked. The shadow smiled. Behind her, she heard something moving—not footsteps exactly, but the suggestion of movement, the whisper of something large displacing air. The pendant screamed against her skin, and she realized with horror that it wasn't warning her of danger. It was calling to something. "I want nothing," the figure said. "I merely observe. The question, Aurora Carter, is what do you want? What did you want badly enough to step through the oak-gates into the space between? What were you hoping to find in the grove where time runs sideways and the veil wears thin?" The movement behind her grew closer. She could feel breath on her neck now—breath that stank of copper and rot, breath that came in stuttering rhythms that matched the pounding of her heart. "Answers," she said, and her voice was barely a whisper. "Then turn around." The shadow's smile widened. "Turn around and see what answers have found you." Aurora closed her eyes. The scar on her wrist throbbed with her pulse. The pendant burned like a brand. She turned.