Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNEWEGP1V6ED5PHS53Q6TN8

The air in Richmond Park had turned sharp with the coming night, the kind of cold that seeped through denim and settled deep in the bones. Aurora Carter—Rory to almost no one these days—pulled her jacket tighter, the worn leather creaking in protest. Her breath plumed in the twilight, a ghostly signal in the gathering dark. She shouldn’t be here. The rational part of her brain, the part that had gotten her through pre-law, through Evan, through the messy business of building a new life in a city that didn’t care, screamed that this was a profoundly stupid idea. But the pendant against her chest, the Heartstone, was a steady, warm weight, a silent, insistent pull that had led her here. It had been pulsing with a low, rhythmic heat all afternoon, a sensation that was neither unpleasant nor entirely comfortable, like a second, quieter heartbeat. It had guided her away from the well-trodden paths of the park, through thickets that snagged at her sleeves, until she found them: the standing stones. They were older than anything she’d ever seen, not the neat, tourist-friendly monoliths from history books, but gnarled, ancient oaks that seemed to have grown into these impossible, upright shapes. They formed a rough circle, a gateway of twisted bark and grasping branches. As she stepped between two of them, the air changed. The sounds of distant London traffic—the ever-present hum of the A316—simply vanished, replaced by an absolute, ringing silence. The temperature shifted, too, from the chill of an English autumn to something milder, almost damp, like the air inside a greenhouse. She was in the Fae Grove. Wildflowers carpeted the ground, their colours impossibly vivid in the fading light: deep purples, fiery oranges, a white so pure it seemed to glow from within. They bloomed with a defiance that spoke of a different season, a different world. It was beautiful. It was wrong. The silence was the first clue. In a park this size, there should have been the rustle of a hedgehog, the call of an owl, the scuttling of some unseen creature in the undergrowth. Here, there was nothing. It was a vacuum. Rory took a hesitant step forward, the crunch of leaves under her boots sounding obscenely loud. The pendant pulsed again, a little warmer this time. She’d come because she needed answers. Since the night it had been pressed into her hand by a shadowy figure in an alley behind the Golden Empress, her life had been tilting off its axis. Strange figures glimpsed in crowds, whispers from corners of empty rooms, and this… this thing around her neck that seemed to have a mind of its own. The Grove was mentioned in the fragment of a manuscript she’d found tucked into a library book, a place where the veil was thin. A place of truth. She walked slowly towards the center of the clearing, her senses straining. The light was fading fast, the deep blue of twilight giving way to a velvety, starless black. Yet, the flowers themselves seemed to provide their own illumination, casting soft, shifting shadows that danced at the edge of her vision. She kept turning her head, trying to catch them, but they were always just gone when she looked directly at them. A sound. She froze, one foot hovering above a patch of luminous blue blossoms. It was a faint, crystalline chime, like a single droplet of water falling into a perfect pool. It came from her left. She turned slowly, heart hammering against her ribs. Nothing. Just the silent, watchful stones and the oppressive blanket of flowers. She took another step. And another. The center of the Grove was a flat, moss-covered stone, an altar waiting for a sacrifice. The thought skittered, unwelcome, through her mind. The pendant was practically humming now, its warmth a constant presence against her skin. There was another sound. Not a chime this time. A rustle. Not the dry shuffle of leaves, but something softer, wetter. Like something moving through dense, damp vegetation. It was behind her. She whirled around, her hand going instinctively to the pendant, her fingers closing around the smooth, warm crimson stone. The silver chain felt cold by comparison. The clearing was empty. But the feeling was undeniable now. She was not alone. The air, once still, now carried a subtle current, a movement that brushed against her cheek like a sigh. It didn’t smell like flowers anymore. It smelled of loam, of deep, turned earth, and something else underneath—something metallic and old. A flicker of movement, high in the branches of one of the stone-oaks. She snapped her gaze upward, but saw only the intricate, skeletal patterns of the branches against the dark sky. Her mind, the one she prided on its cool-headed, out-of-the-box thinking, was starting to fray at the edges. *It’s the wind,* it insisted. *It’s your imagination, hyped up on fear and folklore.* But the Grove had no wind. The rustling came again, closer now, from multiple directions. A soft, sliding sound to her right, a dry scrape to her left. They were circling her. She stood her ground by the mossy stone, her back to it, trying to watch every direction at once. Her breath was coming in short, sharp gasps, the sound ragged in the perfect silence. Then, a whisper. It wasn't a word, not in any language she knew. It was a sibilant exhalation that seemed to come from everywhere at once, weaving through the flowers, dripping from the branches. It was a sound that promised nothing good. The small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a relic of a fall from a tree when she was eight, began to prickle with a strange, sympathetic heat. Another whisper, this one from directly behind her. She jerked away from the altar stone, stumbling into a patch of flowers. Their glow seemed to intensify where her feet crushed them, leaking a faint, sickly-sweet sap. *You should not be here.* The thought slammed into her mind, clear and cold and entirely not her own. It was a statement of fact, devoid of malice, and that made it infinitely more terrifying than any threat could be. It was the simple, awful truth from something that knew the rules of this place and knew she was breaking every one of them. The shadows at the base of the standing stones began to deepen, to coalesce. They didn’t form shapes she could understand—no figures, no faces. They were just concentrations of a deeper darkness, pools of absolute nothing that were beginning to move, to flow toward her across the flower-strewn ground. The Heartstone pendant suddenly flared with a searing heat, so intense she cried out and released it, the crimson gem now glowing like a live coal from within. Its light, a bloody, pulsing radiance, pushed back against the advancing shadows, holding them at bay just a few feet away. They seethed at the edge of the light, amorphous and hungry. The whispers became a chorus, a cacophony of hissing, clicking, sighing sounds that clawed at the edges of her sanity. They were all around her now, held back only by the fragile light of the stone. She was trapped in a shrinking circle of protection, the things in the dark waiting for the light to fail. Terror, cold and absolute, washed over her. This wasn’t answers. This was a trap. The pendant hadn’t led her to truth; it had led her to this—a meal. She had walked herself right into the larder. She could feel them pressing in, not physically, but psychically, a pressure against her mind, a thousand alien thoughts trying to find a crack in her consciousness. Her cool-headedness was gone, incinerated by primal fear. There was no out-of-the-box thinking here. There was only the box, and it was closing in around her, and the things outside wanted in. The glow of the Heartstone flickered. A fresh wave of whispers erupted, this time tinged with something new. Not hunger. Not curiosity. Anticipation. And in that moment, standing alone in a grove that was not of her world, Aurora Carter knew with a certainty that froze the blood in her veins that she was not getting out of here alive.