Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQSTC08KZG9ZC08SNQQH7D

The last light bled from the sky as Aurora pushed through the gap in the hedgerow, her jacket snagging on thorns she couldn't quite see. Richmond Park had closed an hour ago, but she'd found the gap Eva had mentioned — the one near the Isabella Plantation that the groundskeepers never seemed to notice or repair. She shouldn't be here. The thought surfaced and she pushed it down, the same way she'd been pushing it down since she'd found the note tucked under her door that morning. *The Grove. Midnight. Answers about who sent the pendant.* The Heartstone hung against her chest, a warm weight beneath her jumper. It had been pulsing all day, faint but insistent, like a second heartbeat slightly out of sync with her own. She'd tried to ignore it. Tried to convince herself it was psychosomatic, that she was imagining the way it seemed to grow warmer when she thought about the Grove. But she couldn't ignore the note. Couldn't ignore the handwriting that looked almost like her own. The ancient oaks rose around her as she walked deeper into the park, their branches bare despite the mild autumn they'd been having. Wrong. The word whispered through her mind. The trees in the park still held most of their leaves — she'd noticed them on her walk from the station, russet and gold against the grey sky. But here, the branches twisted overhead like grasping fingers, stark and black against the darkening purple of twilight. Aurora stopped walking. Listened. The park should have been full of sound — the distant rumble of traffic from the A307, the rustle of deer moving through the undergrowth, the last calls of birds settling in for the night. Instead, the silence pressed against her ears like cotton wool, thick and suffocating. She pulled out her phone. No signal. The battery, which had been at sixty percent when she'd left the flat above Silas's bar, now showed twelve percent. The screen flickered once, twice, then steadied. *Keep moving*, she told herself. *You came here for a reason.* The clearing appeared between one step and the next, as if it had been waiting for her. Stone formations rose from the earth in a rough circle — not standing stones, exactly, but ancient oaks that had somehow petrified, their bark transformed to grey-white stone that gleamed faintly in the last dregs of light. Wildflowers carpeted the ground despite the season, their colors muted in the dimness but still impossibly present. Blues and purples and deep crimson that reminded her, uncomfortably, of the pendant against her skin. Aurora stepped between two of the stone oaks and felt the world shift. The sensation was subtle — a pressure change, like descending in a fast lift, or the moment before a storm breaks. Her ears popped. The pendant flared hot against her chest, then subsided to its steady pulse. She turned to look back the way she'd come. The gap between the stones showed only darkness. Not the darkness of a park at night, with its gradations of shadow and the distant orange glow of London's light pollution. This was absolute. Complete. A darkness that seemed to have texture, depth, weight. "Right," she said aloud, and her voice came out strange and flat, swallowed by the silence before it could echo. "That's fine. That's completely fine." She turned back to face the center of the clearing. The flowers had moved. Not much. Not obviously. But she could have sworn the patch of crimson blooms had been to her left when she'd entered, and now they clustered directly ahead, forming a rough path toward the center of the circle. Toward something she couldn't quite see in the gathering dark. The pendant pulsed. Warmth spread across her chest, down her arms, to her fingertips. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist — the one from the accident she could never quite remember — began to itch. *Don't scratch it*, some part of her whispered. *Don't draw attention to it.* She didn't know where that thought had come from. A sound reached her ears. Not quite a voice. Not quite the wind. Something between the two, a susurration that might have been words if she could only strain her hearing enough to catch them. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from the stone oaks and the impossible flowers and the dark space between one breath and the next. Aurora realized she'd been holding her breath. She let it out slowly, watching the cloud of her exhalation hang in the air far too long before dissipating. It hadn't been this cold a moment ago. She checked her phone again. Two percent battery. The screen showed 23:47, but she couldn't shake the feeling that the numbers were wrong. She'd left Silas's at ten. The walk to the station, the train to Richmond, the hike through the park — it shouldn't have taken nearly two hours. It had felt like forty minutes at most. *Time moves differently here*, a voice said in her memory. Eva's voice, from one of their late-night conversations about the old stories, the ones Eva's grandmother had brought with her from Cornwall. *A day in the hollow hills might be a year outside. Or a hundred years. Or just a moment.* She hadn't thought Eva had meant it literally. Movement flickered at the edge of her vision. Aurora spun toward it, her heart hammering against her ribs, but there was nothing there. Just the stone oaks standing sentinel. Just the flowers swaying in a breeze she couldn't feel. But one of the stones was closer than it had been before. She was certain of it. The one to her right, the one with the twisted shape that almost looked like a reaching arm — it had been at least ten meters away when she'd entered the clearing. Now it stood perhaps five meters off, its stone surface gleaming faintly with what might have been moisture. Or might have been something else. "I got your note," she said to the empty air, and hated the way her voice shook. "I'm here. Whatever answers you have about the pendant, about who sent it to me — I'm ready to hear them." The silence stretched. Thickened. Became something almost physical, pressing against her skin like cold hands. Then, from somewhere behind her — from the darkness that had swallowed the gap between the stones — came a sound. Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. The crunch of frost-rimed grass that hadn't been frosted a moment before. Aurora turned, but the darkness revealed nothing. She could feel eyes on her, though. Could feel the weight of attention, vast and patient and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with appetite. The pendant flared hot, almost burning, and for just a moment she saw something in that deep crimson glow. A shape in the darkness. Tall. Wrong. Its proportions shifted even as she tried to focus on them, never quite resolving into anything her mind could accept. Then the light faded, and she was alone again. Alone in the darkness. Alone with the sound of footsteps growing closer. Her phone screen flickered one final time and went dark.