Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQYHGSPPY5CX5D4P9JRVKB

The oaks loomed against the night sky like skeletal sentries, their branches forming a lattice that filtered the moonlight into fractured silver coins on the forest floor. Rory pushed through the last curtain of low-hanging branches and stumbled into the clearing, her breath forming small clouds in the unseasonably cold air. The Grove looked different at night. Wrong, somehow. She'd been here three times before, always during daylight hours, always with Silas or Eva. They'd warned her about coming alone, warned her especially about coming after dark, but the text message had been clear: *midnight, the grove, come alone if you want answers about your mother*. Unsigned, from a blocked number, and probably a terrible idea to follow through on. But Jennifer Carter had disappeared six months ago without explanation, and Rory had run out of conventional leads. The standing stones formed their familiar ring around the clearing's perimeter, but the ancient oaks that comprised them seemed taller now, their bark darker and more deeply furrowed. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them — foxgloves and nightshade and things she couldn't name — blooming in defiance of October's chill. They swayed without wind, a gentle rustling like whispering voices. Rory checked her phone. 11:47. Still early. She moved to the center of the clearing, near the flat stone she'd seen Isolde use as a seat during her last visit. The Heartstone pendant beneath her shirt pulsed once against her skin, a brief flutter of warmth. Not the sustained heat that meant a Hel portal was near — just a single throb, like a heartbeat. The sensation made her press her palm against her sternum, feeling the hard outline of the gem through the fabric. A branch cracked somewhere behind her. Rory spun, hand dropping to her pocket where she kept the small knife Eva had insisted she carry. The trees stood motionless, their shadows pooling thick and impenetrable between the trunks. Nothing moved. The sound had been sharp and clear, the distinctive snap of wood under weight, but the forest had gone absolutely silent in its wake. No owls. No rustling of small creatures in the underbrush. Even the wind had died. "Hello?" Her voice sounded thin and foolish. She cleared her throat, tried again with more authority. "I got your message. I'm here." The wildflowers whispered among themselves. Or perhaps it was just her imagination, the way the stems brushed together creating the illusion of syllables. She strained to hear actual words in the susurration but caught only fragments: *...waiting... so long... finally...* 11:52. The clearing felt smaller than she remembered. The standing stones seemed to have drawn closer, tightening the circle. That was impossible, of course. They were trees, ancient ones, their roots going deep into the earth. They couldn't move. Couldn't they? Rory had seen enough impossible things in the past three months to know that her old definitions of reality no longer applied. She'd watched Silas shift into forms that shouldn't exist. She'd seen Eva manipulate shadows like they were silk scarves. She'd delivered food to customers who lived in buildings that didn't appear on any map and paid in coins that predated the Roman Empire. Another sound, this time from her left. Not a crack but a slow, deliberate scraping, like stone against stone. Or bark against bark. She turned toward it, her eyes searching the darkness between the trees, and thought she saw something shift in the shadows. A vertical line that hadn't been there before, perhaps, or maybe just the wind playing tricks with the moonlight. Except there was no wind. The Heartstone pulsed again, stronger this time. Two beats in quick succession. Rory pulled the pendant out from beneath her shirt, letting it hang visible against her dark jacket. The deep crimson gem caught the moonlight and seemed to hold it, glowing with a faint inner fire. Beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. 11:56. "I don't have all night," she said, aiming for confidence and landing somewhere closer to bravado. "If you want to talk, then—" The whispers stopped. The sudden silence was worse than the sound had been. Rory's heart kicked against her ribs, a rapid staccato that seemed obscenely loud in the stillness. She could hear her own breathing, the rustle of her jacket as she shifted her weight, the soft click as she flicked open the knife in her pocket without removing it. Something was watching her. She could feel it, a pressure against her skin like static electricity, raising the fine hairs on her arms and at the nape of her neck. Not just watching from one direction but from all around, from the spaces between the trees, from the shadows themselves. The moonlight dimmed. Rory looked up. Clouds were rolling in, thick and fast, swallowing the stars. But they moved wrong, swirling in a spiral pattern centered directly above the grove, as though the clearing itself were the drain and the sky was circling toward it. The temperature dropped another few degrees. Her breath came faster now, clouds of vapor punctuating the air. 11:58. A figure stood between two of the standing stones. It hadn't walked into view. It was simply there, as though it had always been there and her eyes had only now learned to see it. Tall and thin, wrapped in something that might have been a cloak or might have been shadows given form. She couldn't make out features, couldn't even be certain it had a face, but she knew with absolute certainty that it was looking at her. "You came." The voice arrived without direction, seeming to emanate from the ground and the trees and the air itself. Neither male nor female, neither young nor old. "The daughter came." "Where's my mother?" Rory kept her hand in her pocket, fingers wrapped around the knife's handle. "Your message said you had answers." The figure didn't move, but somehow it seemed closer. An impossible adjustment of distance without motion, as though the space between them had simply contracted. "Questions first have prices. Answers cost more still." Another figure materialized to her right. Then another to her left. They emerged from behind the standing stones or perhaps from within them, tall and strange and deeply wrong in ways her brain refused to fully process. Four of them now. Five. Seven. The Heartstone burned against her chest, no longer pulsing but radiating steady heat. Warning or protection, she couldn't tell which. "I didn't agree to any bargains," Rory said. Her mouth had gone dry. "I just want information." "You entered the Grove." The first figure's voice held something that might have been amusement. "You came alone. You came at midnight. You came when the veil grows thin. These are the oldest agreements, written before words were spoken. You have already bargained, daughter of Jennifer. The only question is whether you accept the price." The figures began to move, a slow circling that followed the line of standing stones. Not quite walking — their movement held the quality of shadows when the light source shifts, a gliding discontinuity that made her eyes ache to follow. Eleven fifty-nine. Rory's phone buzzed in her back pocket. Without taking her eyes off the circling figures, she pulled it out. A new message, same blocked number: *Run.* The phone's screen flickered and died. The clearing plunged into deeper darkness as the last of the moonlight disappeared behind the spiral of clouds. But the wildflowers began to glow, a soft bioluminescent blue that outlined the clearing in foxfire light, and in that eerie illumination she could finally see the figures clearly. She wished she hadn't. Midnight arrived with the sound of all the standing stones breathing in unison, and Rory realized with perfect, crystalline horror that she'd made a terrible mistake.