Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQY25EXSF9V1JK7MGVXM62

The last light bled from the sky as Aurora stepped off the path and into the undergrowth. Richmond Park had emptied hours ago, the gates long since locked, but she knew the gap in the fence near the Pembroke Lodge car park—had used it twice before when Isolde summoned her after dark. Tonight, though, no summons had come. Tonight she'd come on her own. The Heartstone pendant lay warm against her collarbone, a steady pulse like a second heartbeat. It had been doing that for three days now. Faint at first, easy to dismiss as imagination or the radiator in her flat kicking on. But the warmth had grown persistent, insistent, and when she'd passed through Richmond on a delivery run that afternoon, the pendant had flared so hot she'd nearly crashed Yu-Fei's scooter into a parked van. Something was wrong at the grove. She needed to know what. The oak trees rose around her like sentinels, their branches stripped bare by November's teeth. Frost crunched beneath her trainers. She'd dressed for this—dark jeans, her warmest coat, a torch she kept clicking on and off because somehow the beam made the shadows worse, not better. Made them move. She left the torch off. The standing stones emerged from the darkness gradually, their shapes resolving from the general murk of the wood like figures stepping forward from a crowd. Ancient oaks, but not oaks anymore—petrified somehow, calcified into something that was neither wood nor stone but held the memory of both. Aurora had asked Isolde about them once. The fae woman had smiled that knife-edge smile of hers and said only that they remembered, and that was enough. Aurora stopped at the boundary. The grove looked wrong. She couldn't say why at first. The clearing beyond the standing stones was dark, yes, darker than it should have been with the moon rising fat and nearly full above the treeline. The wildflowers that bloomed year-round in Isolde's domain—she couldn't see them. Couldn't see much of anything past the first few feet beyond the boundary stones. But that wasn't what made her hesitate. What made her hesitate was the silence. The Fae Grove was never silent. Even in the depths of winter, even in the small hours when the boundary between worlds grew thin as tissue paper, there was always something. The whisper of grass that grew without wind. The distant, sourceless music that made her think of her grandmother's stories about the fair folk. The soft breathing of a place that was, in some fashion she didn't fully understand, alive. Now there was nothing. The silence was so complete it had weight, had texture. It pressed against her eardrums like deep water. The pendant pulsed. Warm. Warmer. Almost hot now, the crimson gemstone throwing a faint glow against the hollow of her throat. Aurora touched the silver chain, and her fingers came away damp. Not with sweat. With something thicker. In the dim light, it looked black. She wiped her hand on her jeans without looking at it. One step forward. Then another. The boundary stones loomed on either side of her, and she had the sudden, irrational certainty that they were leaning in. Bending toward her. Reaching. She crossed into the grove. The cold hit her first—a cold that had nothing to do with November, that sank through her coat and her jumper and her skin and settled somewhere in the marrow of her bones. Aurora's breath clouded in front of her face, thick and white, and in the strange half-light of the grove she could see that it wasn't dispersing. It hung there, suspended, a ghost of exhalation that refused to fade. The wildflowers were dead. That was wrong. That was deeply, fundamentally wrong. She'd been here in the height of a July heatwave and seen snowdrops blooming alongside summer roses, bluebells pushing up through carpets of autumn leaves. Isolde's magic kept this place outside of time, outside of seasons. The flowers couldn't die here. But they had. They lay flat against the frozen ground, their petals blackened as if by fire, their stems collapsed and rotting. The smell hit her a moment later—sweet and cloying, the perfume of decay. Aurora pressed the back of her hand against her nose and breathed through her mouth. She should leave. She knew she should leave. But her feet carried her forward anyway, deeper into the clearing, toward the great oak that stood at its heart. The oak where Isolde held her court. The oak that was— Gone. Aurora stopped dead. The oak was gone. In its place stood a wound in the world—a ragged vertical tear in the fabric of the air itself, perhaps eight feet tall and three feet wide. Its edges flickered and writhed, and through the gap she could see... nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. An absence so complete her mind refused to process it, sliding off the sight like water off oil. The pendant blazed against her skin, hot enough now to leave a mark, and Aurora understood with sudden terrible clarity what that warmth had been warning her about. Not a Hel portal. Not exactly. But something adjacent to one, something that used the same terrible geometry, the same violation of the boundaries between worlds. Something had torn its way into the grove. Or out of it. A sound broke the silence. Quiet at first, so quiet she might have imagined it. A wet sound. A rhythmic sound. Like something breathing, but wrong—too many beats, too irregular, as if whatever made it had never learned the pattern of inhale and exhale and was merely approximating. Aurora turned slowly, very slowly, toward the sound. Nothing. Just the dead flowers and the frozen ground and the standing stones at the boundary, silhouetted against the deeper dark of the woods beyond. But one of the stones had moved. She was certain of it. Absolutely certain. She'd entered between the two largest, the ones that flanked what passed for the grove's entrance, and they'd been perhaps ten feet apart. Now they were closer. Eight feet, maybe. Seven. Close enough that she'd have to turn sideways to slip between them on her way out. The wet breathing sound came again. Closer now. Behind her. Aurora did not turn around. Instead, she started walking. Steady, measured steps toward the boundary. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she could feel it in her throat, could hear the blood rushing in her ears. The pendant had gone cold—suddenly, shockingly cold, as if all its warmth had been leached away by proximity to something that should not exist. The stones were closer. Six feet apart now. Five. She could feel it behind her. Could feel the displacement of air as something massive moved through space that shouldn't have been able to contain it. Could smell it too, under the sweetness of the rotting flowers—a mineral smell, old and cold and deep, like the air at the bottom of a cave that had never known sunlight. Don't run, she told herself. Don't run don't run don't run because if you run it will know you're prey and it will chase and you can't outrun it you know you can't— A hand touched the back of her neck. Cold. So cold. Fingers too long, too thin, with too many joints, tracing the bumps of her spine like a pianist exploring keys. The touch was almost gentle. Curious. The way a cat might examine a mouse before deciding whether to play or simply bite. Aurora stopped breathing. The fingers moved up, over the curve of her skull, into her hair. She could feel them against her scalp, probing, searching. Looking for something. The pendant lay dead and cold against her chest, offering no warmth, no warning, nothing. The fingers found her left ear. Traced its shell. Paused. The breathing behind her changed. Quickened. Excited. And then the fingers withdrew. Aurora didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't think. She stood perfectly still as the presence behind her receded—not walking, not moving the way anything with mass and weight should move. Simply becoming more distant, as if space itself were stretching to accommodate its departure. The wet breathing faded. The cold lifted, degree by degree. The standing stones were still there when she finally looked at them again, still impossibly close, but they'd stopped moving. She was alone. Aurora ran. She didn't remember crossing the boundary. Didn't remember the woods, the fence, the empty streets of Richmond in the small hours. Didn't remember the night bus or the walk from the stop to Silas's bar or the endless flights of stairs up to her flat. She remembered locking the door. Checking the windows. Sitting on the edge of her bed with every light on and her phone in her hand, trying to remember how to breathe. She remembered looking at the pendant. The crimson gemstone was cracked down the center, a fracture that hadn't been there before. Through the crack, something dark pulsed—slow and steady and patient. Like a heartbeat. Like something waiting.