Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQYJKA5E6VEZT0ZRVQ9N1B

The air inside the Fae Grove did not smell like Richmond Park. Outside the boundary of ancient oak standing stones, the London night would be thick with exhaust, damp earth, and the distant, rhythmic thrum of traffic on the A307. Here, the air was too sweet, cloying with the scent of wildflowers that had no business blooming in November. They pushed up through the grass in violent bursts of color—impossible blues and searing oranges that seemed to vibrate under the moonlight, their petals unfurled with a hunger that felt less botanical and more predatory. Aurora Carter stopped just inside the perimeter, her boots sinking into turf that felt spongy, almost like flesh. She wrapped her coat tighter around herself, though the chill wasn't from the temperature. It was a draft that seemed to originate from inside her own bones. She checked her watch, a reflex born of a life spent racing against delivery timers for the Golden Empress, but the hands were spinning lazily, uncoupled from any sense of forward motion. Time moved differently here; an hour inside could be minutes or days outside. The uncertainty of it made her stomach turn over. She had come for silence. That was the reason she had told herself, the logical justification her pre-law brain had constructed to explain why she was wandering into a pocket dimension at midnight instead of sleeping in the flat above Silas' bar. She needed to think, to untangle the knots Evan had left in her head before he'd been cut out of her life, to find a quiet space where the world couldn't reach her. But as she stepped deeper into the clearing, the silence she sought curdled into something heavy and expectant. The Heartstone pendant lay cold against her collarbone, a deep crimson tear suspended on a silver chain. Usually, it pulsed with a faint warmth when near a Hel portal, a gentle warning beacon. Tonight, it was inert, a dead weight that seemed to drain the heat from her skin. Aurora touched it with her thumb, tracing the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous tic she'd carried since childhood. The stone remained dark. That was wrong. If the Grove was a threshold, a place between Earth and the Fae realm, the artifact should have been singing. Its silence suggested that whatever rules governed this place had shifted, or that something else had moved in to take its place. A rustle came from her left. Aurora froze, her bright blue eyes scanning the line of wildflowers. The movement had been sharp, distinct—the snap of a twig or the brush of fabric. But when she turned, there was nothing but the swaying stems, bending in a wind she couldn't feel. "Hello?" she called out. Her voice sounded flat, absorbed instantly by the dense, perfumed air. It didn't echo. It just died. She forced herself to walk forward, her mind racing through probabilities. Was it an animal? A fox, perhaps, displaced by the weird physics of the Grove? No. Foxes didn't move like that. The sound hadn't been the scramble of claws; it had been deliberate. A step. She reached the center of the clearing, where the moonlight pooled brightest. The shadows here were wrong. They didn't stretch away from the light source; they pooled around the bases of the oak stones, thick and viscous, seeming to detach themselves from the objects that cast them. Aurora watched one such shadow near the largest stone. It rippled, independent of the breeze, and for a heartbeat, it looked like a hand reaching up from the ground before smoothing back into darkness. She blinked hard, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand. Stress. Lack of sleep. The lingering trauma of fleeing Cardiff, of starting over in London with nothing but the clothes on her back and a job delivering noodles to people who didn't know her name. Her brain was painting monsters on the canvas of the night because it was used to looking for threats. Then she heard the breathing. It wasn't hers. It was slow, wet, and rhythmic, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It matched the cadence of her own heart for three beats, then slipped out of sync, faster, shallower. Aurora spun around, her hands balling into fists. The wildflowers seemed to have grown taller in the few seconds she'd looked away. The blooms were turned toward her now, their faces open and gaping. Something moved at the edge of her vision, a blur of pale gray darting between the oaks. She whipped her head toward it, but the space was empty. Yet, the air displaced by the movement brushed against her cheek, carrying a scent that cut through the floral sweetness—the metallic tang of old blood and wet soil. "You're not alone," a voice whispered. It didn't come from the air; it vibrated directly against the back of her skull, intimate and invasive. It sounded like her own voice, but stripped of emotion, flattened into a monotone drone. "You never were." Aurora backed away, her heel catching on a root that hadn't been there a moment ago. She stumbled, catching herself on the rough bark of an oak standing stone. The wood felt warm, pulsing slightly under her palm, mimicking the rhythm of the breathing. She snatched her hand back as if burned. The shadows between the trees were lengthening, stretching across the grass like fingers testing the water. They weren't just absence of light anymore; they were substance. They coalesced, forming shapes that hinted at human proportions but lacked definition, blurring at the edges as if reality couldn't quite hold them together. One of them stood directly in her path, taller than her, its head tilted at an unnatural angle. Aurora's breath hitched. She wanted to run, to sprint for the boundary, to burst out into the cold, normal reality of Richmond Park where streetlights and cars offered safety. But her legs felt heavy, as if the gravity in the Grove had increased tenfold. The fear was a cold knot in her chest, tightening with every second she stood paralyzed. The figure in the shadow took a step. There was no sound of footfall, only a shift in the pressure of the air. The wildflowers around it wilted instantly, turning brown and crumbling to dust in a rapid decay that spread outward in a circle. "Who are you?" Aurora demanded, her voice trembling despite her effort to keep it steady. She was cool-headed; that was who she was. She solved problems. She navigated abusive exes and chaotic kitchens and legal briefs. She didn't freeze. But this was not a problem with a solution. This was a violation of the natural order. The shadow didn't answer. Instead, the breathing grew louder, a chorus now, overlapping whispers that murmured in a language she almost recognized, a distortion of Welsh and Irish, the tongues of her parents, twisted into something unrecognizable. The Heartstone pendant suddenly flared, not with warmth, but with an icy burn that seared her skin. The crimson gem glowed with a faint, sickly inner light, reacting not to a portal, but to the presence standing before her. The figure raised an arm, or what looked like an arm, a limb of solidified darkness that ended in jagged points. Aurora realized with a jolt of horror that the standing stones were no longer marking the boundary of the Grove. They were marking a cage. And she was inside with whatever hunted in the spaces between seconds. She forced her legs to move, pushing off the stone, turning to run toward the gap in the oaks where she had entered. But the path had changed. The wildflowers had woven themselves into a dense wall, thorns erupting from the stems with audible cracks. The exit was gone. The Grove had closed its mouth. Behind her, the whispering stopped. The silence returned, absolute and suffocating. In that quiet, Aurora heard the distinct sound of something smiling. She stood frozen in the center of the impossible garden, the crimson light of the pendant casting long, dancing shadows that looked too much like hands reaching for her throat, waiting for the first touch.