Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRAPSRB64ECEX0G56B09J8

The oak standing stones loomed against the starless sky like broken teeth, their gnarled bark darker than the night surrounding them. Aurora climbed through the gap between two of the massive trunks, her breath misting in air that felt several degrees colder than the Richmond Park path she'd abandoned behind her. The pendant at her throat pulsed—faint and warm against her skin, a rhythm like a second heartbeat. She'd come to the Grove because the pendant had insisted on it. Not through words—she wasn't mad enough to imagine that—but through a pull so persistent it had dragged her out of the flat above Silas' bar at half past midnight, made her dress in the dark without waking Eva, and sent her on the Northern Line to Richmond. The warmth had intensified with every step closer to the park, until crossing the boundary of standing stones felt like rupturing a membrane. Inside, the air tasted different. Sweeter. There was no other word for it—like honey mixed with something floral and vaguely metallic. The Grove opened before her in a sudden clearing, the transition sharp enough to make her stumble. One moment trees, the next: open sky. Except it wasn't really the sky. The darkness above held no stars, but it wasn't empty. It was the quality of emptiness that bothered her—the absence of things that should be there, leaving a void that her eyes kept trying to fill and failing. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing despite the November chill. Impossible. Aurora crouched, running her fingers over petals that felt warm to the touch. Violet-blue blooms she didn't recognize, their scent sharp and almost medical beneath the honey-sweetness. She straightened, brushing her hand against her jeans, trying to steady her breathing. The pendant had quieted. The pulsing had stopped the moment her feet crossed into the Grove, leaving only a steady, gentle warmth. Not comforting. The absence of its guidance made everything worse. You came here for a reason, she reminded herself. That was what you did when things got strange—you looked them in the face. It was the same thinking that had gotten her to London and away from Evan, the same trait that made her good at seeing patterns others missed. She was cool-headed. Intelligent. She'd figure out why the pendant had dragged her to this place that existed between worlds. A sound stopped her mid-breath. Not a sound, exactly. A vibration in the air, low enough that she felt it in her molars before her ears registered it. Like distant machinery, or the hum before an electrical storm. Aurora's fingers found the pendant, wrapping around it like it might anchor her to something real. The humming ceased. The silence that followed was worse. It wasn't natural silence—the absence of sound in a sleeping forest. It was active silence, the kind that comes when something stops mid-sound because it's noticed it's being listened to. Aurora forced herself to breathe slowly through her nose. The metallic taste intensified on her tongue. Across the clearing, something moved at the edge of her vision. She snapped her head toward it. Nothing. Just wildflowers and the suggestion of more trees beyond them, though the boundary of the Grove seemed to shift depending on where she looked. When she stared directly at it, the edge became vague, uncertain. Only in her peripheral vision did it seem solid. A breeze touched the back of her neck. There was no wind in the Grove—she'd noticed that immediately, the stillness of the air despite the open sky above. She spun around. Nothing. The clearing was empty. The flowers stirred slightly, betraying the passage of something through them, but whatever had moved was now out of sight behind her again. She forced herself not to turn immediately, counting to five before looking. The flowers had stopped moving. They settled back into their uncanny stillness. Aurora's heart had picked up its pace. She controlled it with effort, the same way she'd controlled her fear when facing down Evan's anger, when she'd realized she had to leave Cardiff, when Eva had shown up at the flat with the offer of a new life in London. You didn't run from fear. You walked through it with your eyes open. She moved toward the center of the clearing, where the wildflowers grew most densely. The pendant warmed slightly, enough that she almost missed it. Almost. Her fingers had learned to trust the tiny shifts in its temperature. There was information in that warmth if she could just figure out how to read it. Another sound. This time unmistakably real. A crack, like a branch breaking, from somewhere behind the tree line to her left. Then another, closer. Something large moving through the forest that ringed the Grove. Aurora stopped walking. The cracking sounds continued, deliberate and methodical, circling. Not approaching directly—circumnavigating the perimeter of the clearing, staying just inside the boundary where the trees were thickest. Studying her, she thought. The certainty was absolute and ice-cold: she was not alone in the Grove. She was being evaluated. "Hello?" The word felt stupid as soon as it left her mouth. Useless. Whatever was in the trees wouldn't respond to human civility. But silence felt worse than stupidity, so she pushed: "I'm looking for answers. About this." She raised the pendant slightly, let the faint inner glow catch what little light existed in the Grove. The cracking sounds stopped. In the sudden silence, she heard breathing. Not hers—she'd held her breath without realizing it. Someone else's respiration, deliberate and deep, coming from multiple directions at once. Her mind tried to process the geometry of it and failed. The flowers beneath her feet began to wilt. She noticed it first as a discoloration, the bright violet fading to a sickly gray. As she watched, the petals curled inward, brittle, the stems drooping like they were being drained of water in real-time. The wrongness of it cascaded outward from her position, a wave of decay spreading across the clearing in all directions. The darkness above began to move. Not clouds—it had no clouds. But the emptiness itself seemed to be condensing, growing denser, taking on a texture like oil spreading across water. Aurora's breath came faster. She backed away from the dying flowers, but the decay moved with her, originating from wherever she stood. She was poisoning it. The Grove's emptiness coalesced further, and now she could almost see shapes within it. Not clearly—they remained at the edge of perception, suggestions rather than forms—but they were there. Watching. Waiting. The thing in the trees cracked a branch again, closer this time. Aurora ran. She plunged through the wildflowers—now withering and gray—toward what she hoped was the boundary of standing stones. The pendant burned against her chest, almost hot enough to hurt. The shapes in the darkness above moved with her, tracking. She could feel their attention like weight, pressing down from the sky and rising from the ground beneath her feet. There. The ancient oaks loomed ahead, their silhouettes cutting against the slightly less empty void beyond. She shoved herself through the gap, felt something snag her sleeve, heard a sound like fabric tearing or perhaps something else entirely— And then she was through. Richmond Park's cold November air hit her like a slap. Real air, with normal dampness and nothing of that honey-metallic sweetness. Behind her, the standing stones had already begun to fade into darkness, the Grove sealing itself away. Aurora didn't stop running until the lights of the car park came into view. Only then did she risk a look back. The pendant had stopped burning. It lay against her skin, cool and quiet, its tiny glow extinguished.