Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNETN6VG534PPV8ZWGBEBN2

The pendant had led her here. Aurora told herself this as she locked her bicycle to a rack outside Richmond Park's western entrance, as she walked past the closed visitor center and into the tree line where the path dissolved into rough grass and shadow. The Heartstone pulsed against her chest—not the steady warmth she was used to, but something quicker, almost eager. Like it recognized something nearby. She hadn't asked for the pendant. Three weeks ago, it had simply appeared on her pillow, a thumb-sized crimson gem on a silver chain, with no note, no explanation. She'd meant to throw it away. Instead, she'd put it on, and ever since, she'd felt... directed. Drawn. Like a compass needle that pointed toward something she couldn't name. Tonight, the pulling had become impossible to ignore. The park was wrong at this hour. Too quiet. She understood that parks at night were quiet—that was the nature of darkness in cities—but this silence had texture. It pressed against her ears. Her footsteps on the gravel path seemed to swallow themselves, fading after only a few feet rather than carrying into the distance. The path curved left, and she followed it without conscious decision. The trees grew denser here, oaks and beeches that should have been indistinguishable in the dark but somehow resolved into shapes that felt deliberate. Organized. Like pillars in a building too vast to see. She found the standing stones first. They emerged from the darkness one by one—not carved, she realized as she drew closer, but grown. The oaks had been shaped over centuries, their trunks fused and twisted into rough pillars that rose ten feet high, their bark so dark it seemed to drink the moonlight. Seven of them, arranged in a rough circle, and as Aurora stepped between two of them, the temperature dropped. Not by much. A few degrees. But enough to notice. Enough to raise the hairs on her arms. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. The word fell flat, dampened, as if the air itself were thicker here. She waited. Nothing answered. The pendant pulsed again, stronger now, and she pressed her hand against it instinctively. The gem was warm—warmer than her skin, warmer than it had been outside the circle. A faint glow emanated from within, visible now that her eyes had adjusted, a deep red luminescence that cast strange shadows across the stones. That was when she noticed the flowers. They grew in the center of the circle, clustered around a raised mound of earth that might have been a burial mound or simply a hillock. Wildflowers—she recognized oxeye daisies, cornflowers, lavender—but they shouldn't have been here. It was October. These blooms should have died weeks ago. But they were alive. Thriving, even. Their petals caught the pendant's red glow and held it, reflecting it back in colors that shifted as she moved. Blue became violet. White became silver. The effect was beautiful, and for a moment, Aurora forgot to be afraid. Then she heard the sound. It came from somewhere beyond the stones—a whisper, or the suggestion of one. Not a voice, exactly. More like the memory of a voice, the shape of words formed without sound. She turned, scanning the darkness between the trees, but saw nothing. Probably the wind. Animals. The park had foxes, deer, any number of creatures that might make noise in the night. But there was no wind. The air was perfectly still, the leaves on the trees hanging motionless, and when she held her breath—as she suddenly, inexplicably wanted to—she could hear her own heartbeat and nothing else. No. Not nothing. There was a sound beneath the silence. A low hum, almost below the range of hearing, like the resonance of a bell long after it had been struck. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and when she focused on it, she could almost perceive a rhythm. A pattern. A heartbeat that wasn't hers. Aurora took a step backward, and her heel caught on a root that hadn't been there a moment before. She stumbled, caught herself against one of the standing stones, and the bark felt wrong beneath her palm. Too smooth. Too warm. She looked down and saw that the bark wasn't bark at all—or rather, it was bark that had been shaped to look like bark, but the lines were too regular. Too symmetrical. Like something pretending to be a tree. The pendant burned against her chest, and she realized it wasn't just pulsing now—it was throbbed in time with that other heartbeat. The one she could almost hear. The one that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, from the earth beneath her feet and the air above her head. She should leave. Every instinct told her to leave. But when she turned toward the gap in the stones where she'd entered, she saw that the path was gone. In its place was more darkness, denser than before, a black that seemed to breathe and shift and watch. "Hello?" She tried again, and this time her voice cracked. "Is anyone there?" The silence stretched. The flowers in the center of the circle swayed, though there was no wind, and for one terrible moment, Aurora thought she saw a shape among them. A figure, crouched low, utterly still. Human in outline but wrong in proportion, limbs too long, head tilted at an angle that suggested a neck that bent in too many places. She blinked. The figure was gone. Or had it ever been there? She couldn't be sure. That was the worst part—not the fear, but the doubt. The slow erosion of her certainty about what was real and what wasn't. She pressed her palm harder against the pendant, and its warmth was almost comforting, a small anchor in a night that had become a maelstrom of wrongness. Then the whispers started. They came from everywhere at once—or from nowhere, from inside her own skull, from the spaces between thoughts. They weren't words, not exactly. They were impressions. Meanings that arrived without language. Welcome, they seemed to say. We've been waiting. You've been here before. You'll be here again. You never left. Aurora's breath came faster now, shallow and sharp. She forced herself to breathe deeply, to think. She'd been in bad situations before. She'd left an abusive relationship, she'd moved cities, she'd started over from nothing. She knew how to handle fear. She knew how to outthink it. But this fear was different. It had weight. It had presence. It wasn't hers. She looked down at the pendant, at the crimson glow that had intensified until it lit her face and the stones around her in bloody light. The warmth was almost painful now, and she thought of what the old woman had said—the one who'd appeared in her flat three days ago, who'd spoken in a language Aurora didn't understand but somehow knew, who'd pressed a cup of tea into her hands and told her, in perfect English, that the pendant would show her the way. That she needed to see. That she needed to understand. That the grove had been waiting for her since before she was born. The whispers grew louder, and Aurora realized she could almost make out words now. Names. Her name, repeated in a voice that was not a voice, a chorus of syllables that scraped against the inside of her skull. "Rory." She closed her eyes—then forced them open. Closing her eyes in a place like this felt dangerous. Felt like an invitation. The flowers in the center of the circle had begun to move, not with the wind but with intention, their heads turning toward her in unison. And behind them, in the darkness that pooled at the center of the mound, something was rising. It had no face, but she knew it was looking at her. She could feel its attention like a physical weight, pressing down on her chest, squeezing the air from her lungs. It was vast. It was old. It had been here when the trees were seeds, when the stones were young, and it was looking at her now with something that might have been hunger or might have been joy or might have been a feeling that had no human name. The pendant pulsed once—a final, brilliant surge of warmth—and in that moment, Aurora understood. She wasn't alone. She had never been alone. And in the grove that existed between worlds, in the place where time folded back on itself and the flowers bloomed forever, something ancient had been waiting for her to finally arrive. The darkness folded around her like an embrace, and the whispers became a roar, and Aurora Carter stood in the heart of the fae grove and realized, too late, that some doors, once opened, could never be closed.