Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTRE2SMF5QM6J8EDCBE73NK

The autumn moon cast long shadows through Richmond Park as Aurora made her way toward the ancient oak stones. Her footsteps crunched on fallen leaves, each sound seeming to echo in the unusual stillness of the night. The Heartstone pendant against her chest pulsed with a gentle warmth, growing stronger as she approached the Grove's boundary. "This is mad," she muttered, pulling her jacket tighter. The standing stones loomed ahead, their weathered surfaces catching the moonlight. She needed answers about the pendant's mysterious appearance on her doorstep, and the Grove was the only place she knew where the veil between worlds grew thin enough to possibly find them. Aurora slipped between two of the massive stones. The air changed immediately – thicker, heavier with an earthy sweetness that didn't belong to autumn. Wildflowers dotted the grass despite the late season, their colors muted in the darkness. The pendant's warmth intensified. Her phone's screen flickered and went dark. Aurora frowned, tapping it uselessly before shoving it back in her pocket. The grove's time-warping properties often played havoc with electronics, but something about tonight felt different. Wrong. A breeze whispered through the leaves, carrying what sounded like fragments of laughter. Aurora spun around. Nothing moved in the shadows between the trees. "Hello?" Her voice sounded flat, absorbed by the unnatural quiet. The wildflowers swayed, though the breeze had died. The pendant's warmth turned to an uncomfortable heat. Aurora pulled it out from beneath her shirt, the crimson stone's inner light pulsing like a tiny heartbeat. She'd never seen it glow this intensely before. Something skittered in her peripheral vision. When she turned, only darkness greeted her. But the darkness seemed to shift, to breathe. "I know someone's there." Her voice cracked slightly. "Show yourself." The laughter came again, closer now. Multiple voices, speaking in words she couldn't quite catch. The pendant burned against her palm. Aurora backed toward the standing stones, her heel catching on an exposed root. She stumbled, catching herself against rough bark. The tree felt warm beneath her fingers, like fever-hot skin. The shadows between the trees deepened, spreading like spilled ink. The wildflowers began to wilt before her eyes, their petals curling and blackening. That sweet earth smell turned sour, rotting. A figure moved between the trees – too tall, too fluid in its movements to be human. Another appeared to her left, and another to her right. The pendant's light cast strange patterns on their forms, revealing glimpses of things that shouldn't be: too many joints, fingers like twisted branches, faces that weren't faces at all. Aurora's back pressed against the standing stone. The rough surface no longer felt like stone at all, but something organic, pulsing in time with the pendant's light. Her childhood scar burned as if freshly cut. "What do you want?" she whispered. The figures drew closer. Their movements were wrong, like watching a film played backwards and slowed down. The air grew thick with the smell of decay and something older, something that had no place in the human world. The pendant's heat became unbearable. Aurora clutched it tightly despite the pain, its light the only thing holding back the pressing darkness. The figures circled her now, their not-quite-shapes bending and twisting in ways that made her eyes hurt. More laughter, but distorted now, like the sound of breaking glass played in reverse. The darkness between the trees began to move with purpose, reaching for her with tendrils of pure shadow. The pendant pulsed once, violently, and Aurora felt reality shift around her. The Grove was no longer the place she knew. Whatever barrier separated this pocket of space from other realms had grown dangerously thin, and what was seeping through had no interest in answering her questions.