Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR9VBNM4T1VV1W35VCF5XW

Aurora felt wrongness the moment the city swallowed itself behind her. Richmond Park unfolded like a secret the moon didn't know how to keep—shallow paths, long grass, the dark bulk of the pines—but the grove was not on any map she had ever learned. The standing stones rose ahead, not carved monoliths but ancient oaks stood as slow, gnarled sentinels, their trunks grown into the impression of pillars. She had stood beneath them once before, in daylight, when curiosity had been a dare and the pendant had only twitched like a shy thing in her palm. Tonight the stones looked older, patient as bones, and the air that pooled between them smelled of wet earth and something else she couldn't name. She touched the Heartstone against the linen of her shirt. The silver chain whispered. The gem burned a tiny, steady warmth against her skin, a glow beneath her fingers like a heartbeat. She had trouble remembering who had given it to her—no face threaded clean through the memory, only the soft voice that said, Keep it safe—when you are near the place you should go. That voice had sent her out of the city at midnight, past the bars and the flats and the yellow pools of streetlight where the trains sighed through the dark. It was a voice she could not track and did not trust, but she was fifty steps inside the oaks now because its heat had grown from ember to ember in her palm until she could not ignore it. She checked her watch by habit. The display said two oh-three. She had no notion whether that meant anything here. Time, she had read somewhere in the margin of an old book she'd bought at a market, moved like a lazy animal inside places touched by the Fae. An hour here could be minutes outside. Minutes could be a lifetime. She felt the thready edge of that knowledge as a small, sharp fear under her ribs and shrugged it away like a draft. She was rational; she had argued cases in moot halls at Cardiff, had lived through evenings that turned to headaches and days that blurred into a single ledger of small, recoverable transactions. She could think clearly. She could leave if she needed to. She could—should—turn now. A blossom brushed her ankle. It did not tremble on any wind. The wildflowers in the grove were ridiculous and impossible, little suns and moons at her feet blooming in colors that remembered summers she'd never lived. They were alive in a way that made her step back, because they watched with their mouths closed. The pendant pulsed. Warmth, then a quickening like a small throat beginning to swallow. It was a measured beat that seemed to draw her forward between the pillars. The trees canted like listening men; the bark had folds like old faces. To her left, near a stone carved by nature into a hollow, something scraped—a sound like nails on a slate-covered roof—and stopped as if it had been surprised into silence. It was nothing, she told herself. Probably a fox. Probably a branch fallen by the weight of an owl. Probably—then a laugh threaded the air, thin as a string and too quick to be entirely human. It had the wrong tilt. It hung upward at the end the way a child's laugh did when a trick had been played on them and they had been allowed to keep their secret. Aurora should have been relieved; laughter meant presence. Instead she felt that wrongness tighten into an almost-solid shape in her chest. Someone was here who did not belong to the everyday world she carried under her coat. She moved deliberately, counting steps like a metronome. Twenty. Thirty. The grass crinkled under her boots; dew bit into the leather. The pendant warmed again, and with the warmth came a smell like iron and lavender and something older than either. The smell nudged at the scar at her left wrist, the small crescent left by a childhood fall; she found herself rubbing her thumb over it with the absent motion of a superstition. The scar was a map of risk she knew too well: this small crescent had meant stitches and stitches had meant a story to explain. Now the pendant's heat felt keyed to that scar, the skin there a compass needle. She rounded a low stone and saw, for a moment, a pairing of shadows that made her stop. Two figures—one taller, one short—stood between saplings, ankles obscured by flowers that bent to them like listeners. They were not quite human, or perhaps they were too human; their limbs were marked by small wrong angles, elbows that bent a heartbeat too far, a smile that lingered after the lips stopped moving. For half a breath they were visible: pale as rain, hair like wet grasses, eyes caught and reflecting the pendant's dim red. Aurora's mouth opened; she did not speak. Her mind, trained to pick apart inconsistency and motive, catalogued detail instead: the set of the shoulders, the way a finger twitched toward her as if remembering a motion it had once rehearsed on a different stage. When she blinked, the figures folded into darkness as if a curtain had been drawn. The hush that followed felt deliberate—as if sound, too, was being stewarded here. She told herself she had seen flickers of hallucination before, after too many late shifts, after arguments that left her muscles braided with adrenaline. The pendant's beat was a patient justification: follow. The warmth under her palm became more insistent, a steady pressure persuading her toward the center of the grove. She walked on. Between the trunks, the light shifted, and with it the sense of direction. Her watch read two-oh-eight. Her phone had long ago gone quiet; she had left it tellingly turned off to avoid anyone tracking her, a small rebellion against patterns more invasive than strangers' eyes. Now the silence of the phone felt like a tether cut. She would not be able to call for help if she wanted to. That thought made rational arguments—no signal, wasted breath—slide under her skin like a cool damp. There were noises around her that the brain could not organize. Footsteps that did not rustle the grass. A scraping as of many tiny fingernails across stone. Distant, a chorus of voices that might be children and might be wind through metal, speaking with the sound of words but refusing to line up into language she could understand. The air shivered with small movements at the ends of her vision: petals turning in slow, deliberate nods; a rabbit's ear that did not belong to any rabbit she knew; a piece of bark that winked open like an eyelid. She slowed, because rushing felt like capitulation. Slow let her think. Slow let her see. The world narrowed to the pendant's glow and the shallow play of light beneath her shoes. The stones were arranged in a rough circle; beyond them the night quilted itself into bland commonness. Inside, everything was too sharp. The pendant brightened with a small, persistent insistence. The light it gave was not white but the color of a throat, of a fruit under pressure. It painted the nearest oak in crimson where bark might once have been gray. A shadow moved across that red bark like water. She looked up and realized the grove's canopy had knit together into a roof of leaves so dense the moon had been smothered. The only light came from the Heartstone and, beyond it, a collection of points that might have been eyes. She wanted to turn back. That wish was practical and uncomplicated and it folded into the plain folds of her usual life—shift work at the Golden Empress, the dry, safe edges of legal argumentation, the flat above Silas' bar where the curtains never let the sun in at the right angle. But she had come this far because something had nudged her elbow and whispered a secret she could not now un-hear. The pendant's pulse felt like a finger on the hollow of her throat: keep going. She took three steps, then four, then another, each echoing like a footfall in a cave. The foot that followed did not belong to her. The sound arrived from behind and to the right, soft as a breath. She did not turn at once. Turning risked looking into whatever watched; looking might anchor it, might anger it. From the corner of her eye, a row of wildflowers lifted their faces. They did not face the moon. They faced her. A voice said, close enough now that she could have counted the syllables, "Why have you come?" It was not spoken in words she recognized. The syntax was wrong; it came like two people answering at once, like two plants beginning to blenchedly unfurl. Her skin prickled. She opened her mouth to say a single, sensible thing—Lawyers are very good at saying sensible things—but the sentence that came was smaller. "I—" Her own voice was a foreign thing. It sounded wrong in the space, thin as a thread. "I don't know." That may have been the first honest thing she had said all night. The pendant's warmth flared so bright for an instant that spots of color exploded behind her eyes. In the brightness she saw them fully—a ring of shapes standing between the trunks, not blocking her but standing like plants around a hill. Some were lithe and silvered, faces like pool reflections. Others were small, with too many knees, as if a child's doll had been remade by someone who misremembered what a child looked like. None were ordinary. None seemed set to harm with claws or teeth. They smiled as if they were remembering a joke told to them years ago and were finally reaching the punchline. In the center of their circle the ground sank. A small dip in the turf glowed blue-white for a pulse, then went dark. The pendant thrummed against her sternum with a sound she felt more than heard. She did not want to step into that hollow. She could see, through the small round of light, a depth like the inside of a throat where roots made a pattern that might have been letters. Her law courses told her to document, to record, to get facts. Her lungs told her to run. Her feet moved of their own accord. She put her hand into the hollow. The grass was cool. The earth smelled like a library that had been left wet. The pendant's warmth flooded into the soil, and the hush that had held the grove up loosened, like fingers withdrawing from a string instrument. The figures smiled wider, and the smallest of them—an outline that resolved into the impression of a child though it had no eyes she could find—took a single, slow step toward her. Aurora's rational mind supplied plausible explanations as if to comfort a child: luminescent fungus, a prankster on the internet laying out LED candles, a lucid dream. None of those felt true. There was a quality to the movement around her that made it less like being observed by animals and more like being inspected by the parts of a thing that knew you would never be recorded properly. She felt not fear, precisely—fear was at least honest, a clear physical line. This was wrongness with manners, curiosity with teeth she could not see. The pendant beat faster. The air hummed and folded; her watch blinked two-oh-nine, then two-oh-nine again, as if a minute refused to arrive. Before she could pull her hand out, something brushed the inside of her wrist—a touch that mapped itself against the small crescent scar. It mirrored the scar's curve, warm and deliberate, and for a breath Aurora had the sensation of being recognized at some deep, private seam. Someone else had left a mark the same as hers, or had read it like a book and was tracing the letters. In the moment the touch lingered she felt understood in a way that made her throat ache: not the raw understanding of being known intimately by someone who loved her, but the cold, exact knowing a predator has of prey. The touch did not yank. It catalogued. She yanked her hand back. The circle tightened. They did not shove her. They simply stepped inward and held the space with faces that looked like promises and threats at once. The Voice—voices—folded around the trees again, asking questions without shaping themselves into language she could file. The pendant sank into her palm like a pulse she could hold. Aurora began to laugh, a short dry sound that she tried to make sharp like a scalpel. Laughter was a tool she had used before to deflect and to steady. It cut through the air, and for an instant the circle of figures twitched, as if at a cut string. One of them reached a hand toward her and in that reach there was no malice she could isolate. It was a probing, like a scientist touching glass. Its fingers were cool, tipped with the translucent sheen of leaves. Her training told her to back away. Her life had taught her to run when love turned to violence, to pack and leave in the night and not look back. The pendant's heat told her another truth: if she left now, she might never know who had given it to her, or why. The grove had been patient enough to pull her to its center. It might be patient again, but patience could devastate as easily as a tidal pull. She took one step forward. The figures did not move as a herd. They shifted their weight the way someone turns a page. In the hush that fell, she heard, with the ridiculous clarity of an awakening, the sound of her own pulse pressing against the silver chain. It sang to them, and they listened as if listening to the only music left in the world. The pendant pulsed once, twice, and with each beat the glow expanded until for a second the grove was lit not by moon or star but by a small red wound at her heart. When the light receded, the hollow at her feet had grown deeper by a hair. A breeze ran through the leaves above, the first wind she had noticed since she came into the circle, and with it the scent of lavender and iron. Somewhere outside, the city continued its indifferent noise. Inside the standing stones, something had turned to look at her for a long time and was still looking when she blinked. Aurora stood very still and let the night examine her. She catalogued each detail with the practiced attention that had once made her a good student and then almost got her into the law: the feel of the chain against the bones of her neck, the way her scar’s crescent seemed to hum; the small, impossible bloom of flowers that leaned toward her knees; the circle of shapes that watched without speaking. In her mouth the taste of metal came back, of blood she had not bled. A voice, close as breath and far as a canyon, said, this one belongs here. She did not answer. She could not tell if it was a sentence of fate or an observation of fact. The pendant warmed until it was too hot to keep wrapped against her palm. She wanted to leave. She wanted to run until the city swallowed her again and the flat above Silas' bar felt like a cliff to cling to. Instead she let herself be examined. If they took anything, it would not be visible scars or the shape of her bones. If they gave anything, she did not know what it might be. The grove hummed around her, a choir of things that could not yet be named, and the Heartstone beat like a compass against a world that had shifted its north. Outside the circle the night continued in its innocent ways; inside, time had already begun to tilt.