Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR7N9SGWVA8S94ZEMG3RDN

# The Fae Grove at Midnight Rory slipped between the ancient oak stones as her watch ticked past midnight, the Heartstone pendant heavy against her collarbone. The silver chain caught on her jacket zipper—she freed it with practiced fingers, her bright blue eyes already adjusted to the darkness beyond the boundary. The standing stones marked the edge of the Grove the way prison bars marked a cell, except she wasn't sure which side she'd chosen to be locked inside. The pendant pulsed warm against her sternum. That was why she'd come. Three days of warmth, three days of pulses that grew stronger each evening, until tonight it burned like a coal pressed to her skin. She needed answers. Needed to know what it meant. Inside the Grove, the air changed texture. It became thicker, almost oily against her face despite the chill. The wildflowers—impossible in November, but the Grove didn't follow autumn's rules—seemed to glow faintly in the darkness, their colors muted but present. Purples bled into deep blues. Whites appeared almost translucent. She counted three small clearings before the one she recognized, the one where she'd been brought weeks ago and told things that had rewritten her understanding of reality. The night sounds stopped. Not gradually. There was no fade, no slow dimming of the distant London traffic and the rustling of the park beyond the stones. The sounds simply ceased, as if someone had muted the world. The absence was so complete that Rory's breath became loud to her own ears—the careful in-and-out of a woman trained to stay calm in tight spaces. She'd learned that in childhood, before her mother's voice grew sharp and her father stopped coming home to Cardiff on weekends. You control your breath, you control the panic. A branch snapped somewhere to her left. Rory stopped walking. The pendant's warmth intensified, a steady throb that matched her heartbeat. She looked toward the sound—nothing but purple shadows and the impossible wildflowers, their petals seeming to drink in what little light existed in the Grove. The branches here were thin, birch and hazel mostly, not the kind that snapped under pressure. They bent. They didn't break. Unless something large had stepped on it. She turned slowly, scanning the perimeter of her small clearing. The standing stones were invisible now, swallowed by the deeper dark. That hadn't been true the last time she'd been in the Grove. Last time she'd been able to see them, a distant promise of a way out. Last time she hadn't been alone. Another sound, this one behind her. Closer. The shuffle-slide of something moving through the wildflowers without hurrying. Without fear of discovery. Rory's hand went to her jacket pocket where she kept a knife—not large, barely four inches, but sharp enough. She'd started carrying it after Evan, after London felt too big and too hostile. After she'd learned to be afraid in ways that stayed with you like a stain. "Whoever you are," she called out, "I've got a blade and I know how to use it." Her voice cracked on the second sentence. Stupid. A successful bluff required conviction. But the shuffling sound stopped, and for a moment she thought her words had worked, that whatever was in the dark with her respected the principle of armed humans the way most animals did. Then she heard it from the other side of the clearing. The same sound. The same shuffle-slide through the wildflowers. The same absolute lack of hurry. Except now there were two separate sources of the sound, two things moving in a loose circle around her. Rory pulled the knife free and turned in a slow circle, trying to keep both sounds in her peripheral vision. The technique was useless in darkness this complete. Peripheral vision needed light. All she had was the pendant's warmth and the soft glow of flowers that seemed to pulse in rhythm with her racing heart. "I came here because of the pendant," she said, louder this time. Addressing the dark like it was a person who could listen. "If you want it, take it. But I need to know what it means first. I need to know what I'm carrying." The shuffling sounds continued, unconcerned with her bargaining. They moved closer. She could smell something now, something underneath the wildflowers' sweet night-blooming perfume. Rot, maybe. The specific decay-smell of something that had been dead for a long time and was only now being found. She'd smelled it once before, when she was eight, when the neighbors' cat had expired behind the garden shed and it took three weeks for anyone to locate it. The knife felt very small in her hand. Something moved at the edge of her vision—not just darkness, but a shape moving through darkness, distinguishable from it by texture and intention. She spun toward it, blade raised, and saw nothing. Just flowers and shadow and the way her own breath misted slightly in the cold air. "Show yourself," she whispered. The pendant went hot. Not just warm anymore, not the steady pulse it had maintained since arriving. Hot like a brand, like it was trying to burn through the silver chain and embed itself in her flesh. Rory pulled it free of her shirt and held it up to the darkness, half-expecting it to illuminate like a lantern. Instead, the wildflowers reacted. They brightened. All at once, as if someone had adjusted a dimmer switch, the colors became vivid and real. Reds and golds and those impossible blues that didn't exist in the normal world. And in that new light, Rory finally saw what had been circling her. Shadows with shapes. Shadows with edges. Shadows with eyes that were darker still, pupil-black in the darkness, but present. Visible. The creatures—if creatures was the right word—didn't have forms that matched any animal she knew. They seemed to shift at the corners of her perception, never quite the same configuration when she looked directly at them. One moment the outline suggested something canine. The next it suggested something with too many joints, too many ways of bending. There were more than two. She counted five. Maybe six. The geometry was hard to hold in her mind, like looking at an Escher drawing and trying to make sense of the stairs. "What are you?" Her voice was steadier now, the shock having burned away into something colder and clearer. A survival instinct that had been waiting for a situation that matched its specifications. One of them moved closer. Not the fast pounce of a predator, but the deliberate, inexorable approach of something that knew it had her cornered. The pendant blazed in her hand, so hot she nearly dropped it. Her skin under the silver chain burned. They were afraid of it. She understood that with a sudden certainty that bypassed logic and went straight to her bones. Whatever these things were, whatever they were doing here in the Grove in the hours after midnight, the Heartstone was a threat to them. "Did someone send you?" she asked. "Is that why the pendant—" The sound that came from all of them at once wasn't a growl or a roar. It was something like a bell, a pure note of discordant frequency that made her teeth ache and her vision blur. The wildflowers bent away from the sound, as if even they were trying to escape it. Rory ran. She chose a direction at random and ran, the knife still clenched in her hand, the pendant burning bright enough now to cast her shadow long and strange across the impossible flowers. Behind her, the sound continued, and the shadows gave chase, not moving quickly but moving with an absolute certainty that they would catch her eventually. In the Grove, where time moved differently and distance worked by rules she didn't understand, eventually might come very soon indeed.