Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR4MD5MCCDG29HFQZXJ9H9

The gravel crunched under her boots in a way that felt conspicuously loud, a drumbeat of her own isolation in the vast, velvet dark of Richmond Park. It was late, well past midnight, and the moon hung low and sickly, painting the old oaks in shades of bruised silver. Aurora Carter—known to anyone who bothered to ask as Rory—checked her phone again. The screen was dim, the time stubbornly stuck at 01:14. The battery was full, but the signal bar was a stubborn ghost of nothing. She had lost it somewhere around the Long Walk, probably after an ill-advised detour toward the remote northern reaches. She wasn't supposed to be out here, of course. The London traffic was a gridlocked nightmare, and the apartment above Silas’ bar felt less like a sanctuary and more like a too-small cage. But the darkness had a lure. A darkness that, strangely, didn't smell like car exhaust and rain. She remembered hearing whispers about the standing stones, rumors of tourists getting lost and wandering back to civilization days later, wearing grown-out beards and vacant smiles. She sought that solitude, the quiet that allowed her mind to untangle the knot of Evan’s ghost that had been haunting her thoughts for months. She needed to reset. Just an hour. The ancient oak stones emerged from the shadows like the teeth of some subterranean beast. They were moss-covered, leaning in toward one another in a conspiratorial huddle. The air around them felt different—a sudden drop in temperature that seeped through the thin fabric of her jacket. She pulled her collar up, the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist itching under her sleeve. She ignored it. "You're being paranoid, Carter," she murmured to herself, her voice barely a breath against the night. She stepped through the gap between the two tallest monoliths. The transition wasn't violent. It was a tearing of the air, a sensation like diving into cold water. The roar of London—the distant, muffled traffic, the hum of power lines—vanished instantly. In its place was silence. But it wasn't the empty silence of the country. It was a heavy, suffocating silence, the kind that suggests listening. Aurora stopped, her heart giving a nervous flutter. She was standing in a clearing. It was rectangular, bordered by trees so thick their branches intertwined overhead to form a tunnel. The ground was carpeted in something that looked like moss, but it was shifting slightly, undulating like water under a stone. But it was the color that unsettled her most. In Richmond Park, the earth was brown, the grass dry and bleached by the winter. Here, the moss was a vibrant, impossible green. It glittered. She stepped forward, the vegetation yielding slightly beneath her boots. She was looking for the center, a space she assumed would open up into a meadow, but the trees just continued, marching in perfect, geometric lines. There were no paths. No footprints leading in. Only her own, vanishing into the green. She fished the Heartstone Pendant from her pocket. The silver chain was cold, but the crimson gem resting in the center felt instantly warm against her palm, a pulsing beat that matched the frantic rhythm of her own pulse. She hadn't taken it off since the incident at the restaurant—since Yu-Fei Cheung had warned her about the strange tremors in the city’s ley lines that week. The pendant glowed with a faint, internal light, deep and red. It pulsed. *Thump. Thump.* It was rhythmic. Syncopated. Rory held it closer to her chest. "What are you doing?" she whispered. The temperature plummeted. It wasn't just cold; it was a drying cold, the kind that sucked the moisture from her eyes and made her skin crawl. She rubbed her arms, shivering, and for the first time, noticed that her breath wasn't misting in the air. The air was still. She took out her phone to check the GPS, to get her bearings, to confirm she wasn't hallucinating. The map app shimmered and distorted, the blue grid lines stretching and warping like melting wax. She tried to force the screen, but it went black. The phone was dead. Or rather, it was refusing to communicate with *this* world. She was alone. Well, not entirely. The wrongness pressed in on her from all sides. It was a feeling of observation. She heard a sound then. A soft, wet tearing sound, like flesh ripping apart. But there was no wind. The trees were perfectly still. She froze, her hands going up instinctively. *Stop. Move slow. Rationalize it.* It came again. A scraping sound, like a stone dragging across bone. It was coming from the left. Rory looked into the darkness between the trees. Her eyes, sharp and trained from years of reading and observation, strained to pierce the gloom. "Hello?" she called out. Her voice didn't echo. The clearing was absorbing the sound. There was no rebound, no "hello" coming back to her. She waited. Her hands were trembling now, not with cold, but with the primal urge to run. But she was a Carter. Brendans and Jennifers’ daughter. She didn't run from empty spaces. She watched the edge of her vision. In her peripheral vision, shadows seemed to elongate, to detach themselves from the trunks of the trees. They moved when she looked directly at them, frozen when she turned her head. It was a trick of the lighting, she told herself. The uneven moonlight, the dense canopy. It was a trick of the eye, a phenomenon known as the Troxler effect. The pendant grew hot against her skin. The crimson glow flared, a beacon in the dark. It wasn't a warmth of comfort; it was the heat of energy, of raw power. It was pulling. Tugging at her wrist, demanding she turn left. "Right," she said firmly, forcing her feet to remain planted. "Don't be stupid. Don't be a fae lure." If she moved toward the pull, she might find a portal, a way out. But the instinct telling her to run was screaming that this pull was a noose. *Scritch. Scratch.* The sound was closer. Now it was behind her. Rory spun around, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. The space behind her was empty. Just trees. She exhaled, a shaky breath that felt more like a sob. She was losing her mind. The stress of the last six months, the fallout from Evan, the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of fear—it was manifesting in these woods. The Green Man, they called them. The old gods of the damp. They took travelers who weren't meant to be there. "Okay," she said, her voice trembling. "Okay. Just walk back to the stones. Step by step." She turned her back on the darkness, facing the way she came. But as she began to take a step, her boot crunched down on something else. Not the spongy moss. Something dry. Something brittle. She looked down. It was a bone. It was white, weathered, and jagged. It looked like a deer bone, though the shape was wrong. A tibia, perhaps, but flattened, widened at the ends like a bone used for... leverage. She looked around. There was only more moss. More flowers. The flowers here were different too. They weren't the usual wildflowers of the park. They were large, alien things—petals shaped like tiny hearts, blooming in impossible clusters of crimson and violet. They smelled sweet, cloyingly sweet. Like rotting fruit left out in the sun for too long. She stepped over the bone. The ground felt harder here, rocky. The trees were growing closer now, their roots twisting out of the ground like gnarled fingers reaching up for purchase. *Thump. Thump.* The pendant screamed now. It was burning. The heat was intense, enough to blister the skin on her wrist if she didn't pull it away. But she couldn't. It was magnetic. It was leading her deeper into the clearing, toward a small mound of earth in the center, covered in those weird, heart-shaped flowers. She approached it, compelled. Every instinct screamed at her to turn back. *Don't go there. It's a hole. It's a grave.* She reached the mound. In the center of the flowers, partially buried in the earth, was a circle of flattened stones. No, not stones. *Skulls.* Dozens of them. Small, human skulls, their eye sockets staring up at the sky. They were worn smooth, covered in the same sweet-smelling moss. Rory gagged, a sharp, acid taste in her mouth. Her stomach turned over. This wasn't a tourist trap. This wasn't a place where you got lost and shaved your head. This was a sanctuary. Something moved beneath the mound. It was subtle, a displacement of the soil, a shifting of the moss. Then another shift. *Click. Click.* The sound of a tongue against the roof of a mouth. The heat from the pendant intensified, freezing her in place. She looked down at the skulls. They seemed to watch her. *Thump. Thump.* The sound came from *inside* the mound. Rory realized with a sinking horror that she wasn't being stalked by an animal. She was being stalked by a being that considered this clearing its home. The wrongness she had felt earlier—the stillness, the lack of echo, the impossible flora—it was all infrastructure. A biological machine designed to sustain something that fed on the passage of time. The mound shifted again. A hand, pale as milk and long-fingered, pushed aside the dirt. Then another. Then a face. It was a woman, ancient and wrinkled, her hair a mat of silver roots and flowers. She didn't have eyes, only smooth, skin-like lids. She looked up at Aurora, and Rory felt the cold air of the Fae realm seep into her lungs. "Visitor," the thing croaked. The voice was wet, gurgling. "You are early." Rory took a step back, her boot slipping on the bone. She heard the snap of a twig behind her. *Two steps.* One on the mound. One on the perimeter. "You shouldn't have come," the creature said, its lips not moving, the sound echoing directly from her skull. The pendant flared one last time, blindingly bright crimson, and then went cold. Dead weight in her hand. The heat of the portal was gone. The connection to the Hel realm that the pendant was sensitive to wasn't an exit; it was a beacon. A coldness spread from her feet upward. She looked at the trees. They were no longer trees. They were tall, willowy figures watching her with wooden faces. The moss was no longer moss; it was hair. The flowers were teeth. She was the meal. Rory turned and ran. She didn't run toward the stones, because the stones had moved. They were forming a ring around her, trapping her in. She ran blindly into the darkness, her breath hitching in her throat, her heart bursting against her ribs. She heard the creature on the mound laugh, a sound like stones grinding together, and she heard the heavy, wet thud of footsteps moving from the shadows to block her path.