Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNF0QN2K0R09A12XSJMZWAT

The path that had seemed so clear in the late afternoon had vanished somewhere between one step and the next. Aurora stopped, her trainers crunching on something that wasn't gravel anymore but a soft, yielding moss that hadn't been there moments before. She raised her phone, but the flashlight revealed nothing but trees - old ones, older than the park's managed woods, their trunks thick as ancient pillars and their canopy so dense it blocked out the stars. She checked the time. 9:47 PM. She'd left the flat at eight, following the route Silas had described when she'd asked about the grove - past the Isabella plantation, through the gap in the fence, down the deer trail to the standing stones. Simple. But she'd walked for what felt like twenty minutes and the stones weren't here. Instead, there was only this: a clearing she didn't recognize, ringed by oaks that watched her with the patience of things that had been watching for centuries. The pendant against her chest pulsed. Warm, then warmer. She hadn't meant to come tonight. Hadn't meant to come at all, really - not after what Eva had said about the place, not after the stories Silas wouldn't quite tell. But the Heartstone had been pulling at her since yesterday, a faint rhythmic warmth against her sternum that had grown impossible to ignore. Like a heartbeat that wasn't hers, calling her forward. So she'd come. Foolish, maybe. But Rory had never been the type to let a mystery fester. She walked further into the clearing, and the trees shifted with her, maintaining their distance, keeping her in a ring of open ground. Her footsteps were the only sound - until they weren't. A branch snapped. Then another. Somewhere to her left, in the dark between two oaks, something moved. She turned her phone toward the sound, but the light only revealed more shadows, layered and deep, and within them - or perhaps her mind was playing tricks - the suggestion of a shape. Tall. Thin. Not quite still. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. The shadows didn't answer. Rory forced herself to breathe. There were explanations for all of this - animals, her eyes adjusting, the way unfamiliar places distorted perception. She'd studied enough criminal law to know how witness testimony failed, how the brain invented patterns to fill in gaps. This was just that. Gaps. Nothing more. She kept walking, slower now, and the pendant pulsed faster. Warmer. The faint inner glow was visible even through her shirt, a crimson shimmer that painted her chest in arterial red. The standing stones appeared at the center of the clearing. They were taller than she'd expected - eight feet at least, maybe more - and arranged in a loose circle that seemed to hold the very air in place. The bark that covered them was ancient, gnarled, but she could feel the oaks beneath rather than see them, a presence that pressed against her awareness like a hand against glass. The boundary. She'd found the boundary. But she wasn't alone here. The certainty arrived without evidence, sinking into her bones with a weight that made her breath catch. She wasn't alone, and she hadn't been since she'd entered the clearing. Something had been watching her since the path vanished, something that moved when she wasn't looking and stayed still when she was. She turned in a slow circle, phone raised, but the darkness gave nothing back. Just trees. Just shadows. Just the sense of being observed by a patience so vast it made her chest ache. The flowers should have been impossible at this hour, at this time of year, but they were everywhere - wildflowers she couldn't name, pale and luminous in the dark, their petals open as if drinking the moonlight. Except there was no moonlight tonight. She'd checked the weather before leaving. Cloudy, with rain expected by midnight. Yet the flowers glowed. Faint. Soft. The color of forgotten things. And then she heard the music. It came from everywhere and nowhere, a melody that wasn't quite music - more like the memory of music, played on instruments that had never existed in the human world. Flutes that sounded like wind through hollow bones, strings that hummed with the resonance of something long dead. It wrapped around her, through her, and her legs wanted to move toward it, toward the center of the circle where the stones stood closest together and the flowers grew thickest. Rory bit down on her tongue, hard, and the pain gave her a second of clarity. She forced herself to step backward, away from the center, and the pendant screamed against her chest - not warm anymore but burning, a brand of heat that made her gasp and double over. When she looked up, the shadows had grown closer. They stood at the edge of the light her phone cast, four of them, five, more - shapes that were almost human but wrong in the proportions, too long and too thin, their faces featureless or perhaps simply turned away. They didn't move. They didn't need to. They simply watched, and their watching was a weight that pressed against her skull from the inside. "This isn't real," she whispered, but her voice came out strange, flattened, as if the air itself was eating the sound. "This isn't—" One of the shapes tilted its head. An acknowledgment. A mocking of the gesture. She ran. Not toward the path she'd come from - there was no path now, only darkness - but toward the gap between two of the standing stones, toward the far side of the clearing where the trees thinned and the glow of the city might be visible through the canopy. Her legs carried her fast, faster than she'd known she could move, and the music rose around her, through her, trying to sink its notes into her brain and make her stop, make her turn, make her walk into the center of the circle and wait for whatever waited there. The pendant cracked. She felt it - a fissure running through the artifact, a break in whatever ancient magic had kept it whole. And with that crack came a sound, a vibration that wasn't quite a word but carried meaning nonetheless: a warning. A name. Not hers. Hel. The word sank into her like a blade, and suddenly she understood why she'd been drawn here - not by curiosity, not by the pendant alone, but by something that had been waiting for her, something that had planted the desire in her mind and watched her walk into its trap with the patience of centuries. She burst through the standing stones and into a wall of cold. Not air - something else. Something that pushed against her like frozen water, like the breath of a grave, and then released her, and she was running through ordinary trees, ordinary darkness, ordinary silence broken only by her own ragged breathing and the distant hum of traffic from the road. She didn't stop until she reached the fence. Didn't stop until she was through it and on the path and halfway up the hill toward the car park, her legs shaking, her hands trembling so badly she could barely hold her phone. Behind her, the grove was invisible. A fold in the world, closed to her now but not gone. Never gone. The pendant was dark. The crack had killed its glow, and when she pressed her fingers to the gemstone, it was cold - cold like the thing that had pushed against her, cold like the word that had sunk into her mind. Hel. She didn't know what it meant. Not yet. But she knew it wasn't over. The walk back to the flat took twenty minutes, and by the time she reached the door, the sky had begun to lighten with the first grey suggestion of dawn. She had been in the grove for hours. Or minutes. Time moved differently there - she'd felt that, felt the way it stretched and compressed around her like taffy, like something being pulled and shaped by hands she couldn't see. Rory stood on the doorstep, her key in her hand, and made herself a promise. She would find out what had called her. What had almost had her. And she would make it stop. But not tonight. Tonight, she would sleep, and try not to dream of flowers that glowed in the dark, and shapes that watched from the edge of impossible light. Tonight, she would rest. And tomorrow, the hunt would begin.