Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQYVCNW6TNYR5REZGXVDWT

The air in Richmond Park was always different at night, cooler and thick with the scent of damp earth and sleeping trees. But as Rory pushed through the final curtain of bramble and hawthorn, the air changed again. It became still, heavy, and strangely scentless, as if the grove had swallowed every smell from the world outside. She stood at the edge of the clearing, her breath pluming in the moonlight. The Fae Grove. It was exactly as described, a perfect circle of wildflowers blooming in impossible defiance of the season, their colours—violet, gold, blood-red—seeming to drink the pale light from the sky. At the compass points stood the ancient oaks, carved into rough-hewn monoliths that marked the boundary. They looked like tired old men hunched in conference. Rory was here for a reason, a frantic, half-formed theory that had brought her out of her warm flat above Silas’s bar and into the cold embrace of the park. The pendant. The deep crimson stone resting against her sternum had been growing warm for days, a faint, insistent pulse that seemed to sync with a low thrumming at the edge of her hearing. It was a warning, she was sure of it. And warnings, in her experience, were best investigated before they became emergencies. She took a step into the clearing, her boot sinking silently into the soft, mossy ground. The silence was the first thing that felt wrong. Not a peaceful silence, but a dead one. No crickets. No rustle of a vole in the undergrowth. No distant hum of the M4. It was a vacuum, and the pressure of it made her ears ache. Her cool-headed intelligence, the trait that had seen her through Pre-Law and a messy escape from Evan, tried to rationalize. It’s a natural acoustics phenomenon, a bowl-shaped depression that traps sound. But even as she thought it, she knew it was a lie. This place felt deliberate. Manicured by something other than nature. The wildflowers were too perfect. Their petals were unblemished, their stems straight and strong. As she walked deeper, she noticed they didn’t move. Not even a tremor in the still air. They were fixed, like a painted backdrop. A sickly-sweet cloying scent, like nectar left to ferment in the sun, began to prickle at her nose. It was the smell of things trapped in amber. She reached the centre of the grove, a point where the moonlight fell brightest, and stopped. The pendant was definitely hotter now, a distinct, uncomfortable warmth spreading through her shirt. She pulled it out, the silver chain cool against her fingers. The Heartstone, usually a deep, placid crimson, now held a faint inner glow, a smouldering ember in the dark. It was beautiful and terrifying. A twig snapped. Rory’s head whipped around, her bright blue eyes wide, scanning the treeline she’d just entered. Nothing. The standing stones remained as they were, silent sentinels. A deer, she told herself. A fox. It’s a park. But the sound hadn’t been crisp, like a breaking branch. It had been dull, wet. Like bone cracking. She took a slow breath, her hand unconsciously tracing the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit she’d never broken. "Get a grip, Carter," she whispered, the sound swallowed by the oppressive quiet. Another sound. A soft, dragging scrape, coming from her left, from the dense shadows between two of the monoliths. It was the sound of something heavy being pulled through dirt and roots. It was slow, rhythmic. *Scrape… pause… scrape.* Her heart began to beat a frantic, heavy rhythm against her ribs. This was wrong. This was all wrong. She fumbled in her pocket for her phone, her fingers clumsy. No signal, of course. But the time. The screen lit up her face, casting stark shadows. 11:17 PM. She’d checked it before entering the grove. It had been 10:45 PM. An hour and a half? It couldn’t have been. It felt like ten minutes, maybe fifteen at most. Or had it felt like days? The disorientation was dizzying, a vertigo that had nothing to do with balance. The dragging sound stopped. The silence that rushed in to fill the void was worse, a presence in itself. It was a listening silence. Rory felt exposed, a single point of warmth in a world of cold, watching darkness. She backed away slowly, her eyes fixed on the space between the stones where the sound had originated. That’s when she saw it. Movement at the very edge of her vision. A flicker of shadow that was darker than the night around it, detaching itself from the base of a standing stone. She snapped her head to look, but there was nothing. Just the impossibly still wildflowers and the ancient, gnarled oak. Her breath hitched. She was being hunted. The pendant grew hotter, almost painful now. The crimson glow intensified, casting a bloody, wavering light on the ground at her feet. It was a beacon. A lighthouse for something that swam in these dark seas. *Scrape… scrape… scrape.* The sound was closer now, coming from a different direction. It was circling her. A low, guttural chittering accompanied it, a sound like stones being ground together, mixed with a wet, clicking noise. It was a language without words, a sound of pure appetite. The wildflowers began to move. Not in a breeze, but individually, their stems bending, their heads turning away from a path that cut through the centre of the grove. They recoiled from something moving among them, something she couldn’t see. The air grew frigid, a cold that seeped through her jacket and made the fine hairs on her arms stand on end, a stark contrast to the searing heat of the pendant against her skin. She had to run. The thought was a lightning bolt of pure clarity, cutting through her fear. This wasn’t a place to investigate. It was a place to escape. The pendant wasn’t a clue; it was an alarm bell screaming in her soul. She turned, her decision made, and that was when she saw it. It wasn’t a full shape, just a glimpse, a fragment of horror etched against the moonlit stone. A hand, long and pale as bone, snaked around the edge of the nearest monolith. It had too many joints, the fingers bending at impossible angles, each one tipped with a black, chitinous claw. It flexed, testing the air, and the chittering sound grew louder, more excited. Rory didn’t scream. She didn’t have the air for it. Every ounce of her being, every instinct honed by a lifetime of navigating threats, both human and otherwise, funneled into a single, desperate action. She ran. She fled the way she had come, crashing through the bracken, not daring to look back. The guttural clicks rose behind her, a cacophony of pursuit, and the cold of the grove seemed to follow her, nipping at her heels. The Heartstone blazed against her chest, a furious, burning coal, and she knew with a certainty that chilled her more than any supernatural cold: she hadn’t just stumbled into a monster’s lair. She had been seen. And she had been marked.