Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFFAVBD0QGJF9E13SQ2EX4

The Heartstone pendant had been warm all day. Aurora noticed it first that morning, when the silver chain brushed against her collarbone as she swung out of bed. A faint pulse of heat, barely there, like holding a cup of tea not quite hot enough to burn. She'd touched the crimson gem with her fingertip, watching the inner glow flare for a moment before settling back to its usual dim radiance. Now, standing at the edge of Richmond Park in the blue hour between dusk and dark, the pendant blazed against her chest. She'd come because she had to. Three weeks of strange dreams—images she couldn't retain upon waking, only the feeling they left behind: a pull, a hook behind her ribs, a direction. And every night, the pendant grew warmer. Every night, the dreams grew more insistent. The trees swallowed her. The path she'd walked a dozen times during daylight deliveries vanished somewhere behind her, and Aurora kept one hand pressed against the pendant as if it were a compass needle. The glow was visible through her shirt now, a faint crimson luminescence that made her feel like she was carrying a small flame against her heart. Richmond Park at night was supposed to be locked. She remembered that much from conversations with other delivery drivers—cautions about being caught after hours, about the patrols, about the penalties. But the gate had been open. Not merely unlocked. Open, as if waiting for her, the rusted iron swinging without resistance as she'd stepped through. The grass was wrong. She noticed it after perhaps ten minutes of walking, her trainers damp with dew that shouldn't have existed—Rory had checked the weather that morning, no rain forecast, clear skies—and the realization crept over her slowly. The grass beneath her feet didn't crunch. It should have, this time of year, in November, when the first frosts had already silvered the city. But the ground was soft, almost spongy, and the blades bent beneath her weight without sound. And the flowers. They shouldn't have been there. She wasn't a botanist, couldn't have named them, but she knew flowers didn't bloom in November. Couldn't. Yet they pressed against her legs as she walked—small white ones, yellow ones, clusters of blue that caught what little light remained between the trees—and their sweetness hung in the air so thickly she could taste it on her tongue. The pendant pulsed. Aurora stopped. She'd been walking for what felt like twenty minutes, maybe thirty, but when she checked her phone, the screen showed only 9:47 PM. She'd entered the park at 9:15. That was right. That was— The screen flickered. Died. Came back to life showing 9:47, then flickered again, and this time when it stabilized, the numbers read 9:15. She stared at it. Took it away from her face. Looked again. 9:15. No. No, that wasn't possible. She'd been walking for— The trees to her left moved. Not the way trees moved. Not swaying, not groaning in the wind. They moved, and the wind wasn't blowing. A shape passed between two oaks, vast and dark, and when she turned her head to look directly at it, there was nothing there. Just the trunks. Just the shadows. But at the edge of her vision, where she'd turned away, something remained. A suggestion of mass. A wrongness in the shape of the darkness. Her hand found the pendant again, and it was hot now. Not painful, but present. Warning. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. The words disappeared into the grove without echo, swallowed by the density of the air. "Is anyone there?" The silence that answered was not empty. She understood that immediately. It was the silence of something listening. Something waiting. She kept walking. The standing stones appeared between one stride and the next—one moment there was only the press of trees and the whisper of flowers, and then there they were, a ring of ancient oak rising from the earth like the ribs of something long dead. They were taller than her, those pillars of wood, and their bark was silver in the darkness, or perhaps the light was playing tricks, or perhaps— They weren't bark. She was close enough now to see, close enough to reach out and touch, and what she saw made her stop breathing for three full seconds. The surfaces of the stones weren't rough or textured or natural. They were smooth. Polished. And carved into them, in patterns that hurt her eyes when she tried to focus on them directly, were faces. Not faces. Suggestions of faces. Foreheads, noses, mouths, all elongated and wrong, all facing inward toward the center of the ring. The pendant burned. Aurora reached up and tore it from her neck, holding it in her fist like a weapon, and the gem flared brilliant crimson, so bright she had to squint against it. The light touched the standing stones, and the faces carved into them seemed to shift. Seemed to turn. Seemed to— A sound behind her. She spun, pendant raised, and saw nothing. Just the darkness between the trees. Just the flowers nodding in a wind she couldn't feel. But there was something else now. A smell beneath the sweetness of the blooms. Something old. Something wet. The smell of moss and decay and deep water, of places where light had never reached. "Rory." Her name, spoken from everywhere and nowhere. Not a voice, exactly. More like the idea of a voice, pressed into her mind rather than carried on the air. She didn't answer. Couldn't. Her throat had closed around something cold, and her hand shook around the pendant, and the crimson glow was brighter now, pulsing in rhythm with something that wasn't her heartbeat. "You came." The words came from inside the ring. From the darkness between the wrong-faced stones. And as she watched, a figure began to resolve from that darkness—not walking, not emerging, just becoming, like fog gathering into form—and Aurora understood with terrible clarity that it had been there all along. Waiting. Waiting for her. The pendant's heat seared her palm, and she realized with a sick lurch that it wasn't protecting her. It was leading her. It had been leading her all along. She dropped it. The crimson gem struck the grass and didn't bounce. It sank, as if the ground had opened for it, and the light it gave off began to dim even as the figure in the ring solidified into something almost human. Almost woman. Almost beautiful, if beauty could be made of edges and angles and a smile that didn't reach the eyes that were too many and too bright. "You came," the thing said again, in her voice, in her mother's voice, in the voice of everyone she'd ever loved. "Just like she knew you would." Aurora ran. She didn't remember turning. Didn't remember the path appearing beneath her feet or the flowers tearing at her jeans or the standing stones passing on either side. She ran as she'd never run before, lungs burning, heart slamming against her ribs, and behind her—behind her was a sound that wasn't footsteps but was somehow following, was somehow gaining— The park gate. She saw it through the trees, rusted iron against the darker black of the night, and she threw herself toward it, and her hands found the bars, and they were cold and solid and real, and she shoved through, and she ran until her flat was beneath her, until the door to Silas' bar was behind her, until she was up the stairs and in her apartment and had locked everything that could be locked. The pendant was gone. She checked her neck. Her hand. The floor where she'd dropped it. Gone. But her palm still burned with its heat, and when she looked down, she saw that the light had transferred. That it was in her skin now, a faint crimson glow beneath the surface, pulsing softly with every beat of her heart. In the silence of her flat, in the safe darkness of her home, Aurora Carter finally allowed herself to breathe. And somewhere in Richmond Park, in the space between one world and another, something smiled with too many teeth and waited for the hour to turn.