Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNETGYSB053KQB8F45HPYP4

The gravel crunched beneath her boots as Aurora stopped at the edge of Richmond Park. The pathway behind her—the one she'd walked a hundred times delivering orders from Golden Empress—had vanished. She turned, half-expecting to see the familiar lamp posts of the parking lot, the iron railings that marked the pedestrian entrance. Nothing. Only trees. Only the dark. She checked her phone. No signal, of course. The battery icon showed seventy-three percent, but the screen had that flat, dead quality of a device cut off from the world. She shoved it back into her jacket pocket and tried to remember why she'd come here. The pendant. That was why. The Heartstone had started pulsing sometime around nine o'clock—a slow, warm throb against her sternum that she'd learned to recognize during her first weeks in London. Whenever Dymas stirred, whenever some door between worlds cracked open, the small crimson gem came alive. She'd felt it the night she'd fled Evan's flat, felt it lead her to Silas's bar where Eva was already waiting with a spare key and a new name. She'd felt it three months later, pulsing softly beneath the floorboards of Golden Empress's storage room, guiding her to a torn page in a language she couldn't read. But this was different. Tonight the pulse had sharpened into something urgent, a heartbeat that wasn't hers, pulling her out of bed and down the stairs and through the back door of Silas's place like a dog on a leash. She'd walked for twenty minutes—maybe longer—through streets that seemed to rearrange themselves, past buildings whose windows showed rooms she didn't recognize, until the path deposited her here. At the edge of the grove. The Fae Grove. She'd heard about it in fragments. Silas mentioning it once, over drinks, a story about a girl who wandered into Richmond Park and came out three days later with silver in her hair and no memory of her own name. Eva had laughed it off. But Rory had listened. Rory always listened, even when she wished she hadn't. The standing stones rose ahead of her, pale shapes against the darker dark of the trees. She knew she should turn back. The sensible thing would be to turn back. But the pendant was blazing now, a coal of heat against her skin, and she could feel the pull like a hook behind her navel. One look. She'd just take one look. The stones were taller than she remembered from Silas's description. Six of them, arranged in a rough circle, their surfaces carved with symbols that seemed to shift when she didn't look at them directly. The wildflowers Silas had mentioned grew in abundance—foxglove and moonpetals and something blue that didn't match any flower she knew—but they were wrong somehow. Too bright. Too still. Like paintings of flowers rather than the real thing. She stepped into the circle. The temperature dropped. Not dramatically, not like stepping into a freezer, but a subtle shift, as though the air itself had become older. Colder. She pulled her jacket tighter and listened. Nothing. No. Not nothing. That was worse. There should have been the distant murmur of traffic from the road, the hoot of an owl, the rustle of foxes in the underbrush. Richmond Park never went truly quiet. But here, in this clearing, the silence was total. Complete. It pressed against her eardrums like water, and she could hear her own pulse loud in her ears, and beneath it— Footsteps. Not hers. Behind her, to the left, somewhere among the trees. A single footfall, measured and deliberate, then nothing. She spun around. The trees stood silent. The stones watched. The flowers swayed, though there was no wind. "Hello?" Her voice came out thin. Stupid. A mouse-squeak in the vastness. She cleared her throat and tried again. "I know someone's there." Silence. The kind of silence that laughs at you. She forced herself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The pendant pulsed, slower now, almost as if it were calming her. Or warning her. She couldn't tell anymore. The footsteps came again. Closer this time—or was that her imagination? She couldn't trust her imagination right now. The shadows between the trees seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting in a rhythm that matched no heartbeat she knew. She watched them, and one of them watched her back. She was certain of it. A shape that wasn't quite a shape, a darkness that was darker than the darkness around it. She took a step toward the stones. Just one step. The ground beneath her feet was soft, too soft, and when she looked down, the wildflowers had grown up around her boots, stems wrapping around her ankles in a gentle, almost tender embrace. She shook them loose, heart hammering, and stepped forward again. The footsteps stopped. So did she. The silence stretched. It stretched until it became a living thing, a presence in the grove that pressed against her from all sides. She could feel it now—the wrongness. It had been there from the beginning, she realized, buried beneath the strangeness of the path and the beauty of the flowers and the allure of the pulsing stone. But now it surfaced, unmistakable. This place was not empty. It had never been empty. Something was here. Something had always been here. She thought of the girl with silver hair. Three days in the grove, Silas had said. Three days, and she'd walked out not knowing her own name. What had walked in? What had walked out? The darkness between the trees moved again. Closer now. She could see it properly now—or rather, she could see the space it occupied, a void in the shape of something that might once have been human. It had no features she could name, no face to meet her eyes, but she felt its attention like a hand on the back of her neck. Cold. Patient. Hungry. She ran. Not toward the path—she'd already seen that it was gone—but toward the stones, toward the far side of the circle where the trees thinned and the darkness was thinner too. The pendant was screaming now, a white-hot blaze of warning, and she understood with terrible clarity that she'd made a mistake. Coming here had been a mistake. Following the pull had been a mistake. The Heartstone hadn't led her to something. It had led something to her. Her foot caught on a root—she was certain it hadn't been there a moment ago—and she stumbled, catching herself on one of the ancient oaks. The bark was cold beneath her palm, colder than it should have been, and she felt something like a heartbeat thrumming through it. The tree was alive. They were all alive. The whole grove was alive, and it was watching her fall, and the thing behind her was drawing closer with every second she wasted. She hauled herself upright and ran again. The stones loomed ahead. She冲出 their circle, expecting—to what? She didn't know. For the world to snap back into place, for the path to reappear, for her phone to buzz with a notification and her life to resume its boring, manageable shape. Instead, she found herself in a second clearing. Smaller than the first, bordered by trees that grew so close together their branches intertwined overhead, forming a ceiling of leaves that blotted out the sky. In the center of this clearing was a well. No. Not a well. A door. It was made of stone, too, carved with the same shifting symbols as the standing stones, and it was open. Just a crack. Just a sliver of darkness beneath, but that darkness was absolute, and it breathed, and from somewhere far below she heard a sound that might have been wind or might have been voices or might have been something else entirely. The Heartstone Pendant went cold. Not cool. Not lukewarm. Cold, like a chip of ice against her chest, and in that cold she felt something that froze her in place more effectively than any chain. Recognition. The door wasn't random. The door wasn't accidental. The door was a threshold, and it knew her, and it had been waiting for her to find it. From behind her, the footsteps resumed. And this time, they were not alone.