Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX31YM9TRTMHM9KPFV228Z

The flashlight beam cut through the darkness like a pale finger, illuminating the ancient oaks that marked the boundary of the Grove. Aurora—Rory to everyone who mattered—stepped between two of the massive trunks and felt the shift immediately. The air behind her had been damp, carrying the autumn chill of late October in Richmond Park. This air was different. Thinner. Sweet, almost, with an undercurrent of something floral she couldn't name. She checked her phone. No signal, of course. She'd expected that. What she hadn't expected was the time: 9:47 PM. She'd entered the tree line at 9:15, walked maybe ten minutes to find the standing stones. But the glowing face of her screen insisted only a few seconds had passed. The pendant at her chest pulsed once. Warmth spread through her sternum, faint but unmistakable. Rory had come because of that warmth. Three nights now, it had stirred while she worked her delivery route, pointing her north toward Richmond Park. The first night, she'd dismissed it. The second, she'd blamed the radiator in the delivery van. Tonight, she'd clocked out early, told Yu-Fei she was sick, and taken the Underground with a growing certainty she couldn't explain. The Grove spread before her in the flashlight's reach. Wildflowers she'd never seen before carpeted the ground—blossoms in colors that seemed to shift under the beam, blue to purple to something that wasn't quite any color at all. The standing stones rose around her in a rough circle, ancient oaks grown so thick they might as well have been carved by hand. "Hello?" Her voice fell flat, absorbed by the trees. No echo. That bothered her more than it should have. She walked forward, keeping the flashlight sweeping left and right. The ground was soft beneath her boots, almost spongy, and with each step she expected to hear the crunch of dead leaves or the rustle of forest floor debris. Nothing. Her footfalls made no sound at all. The realization came slowly, like a weight settling. She stopped. Listened. Nothing. Not the distant hum of traffic from the road half a mile away. Not the nocturnal chirping of insects. Not even wind in the branches above. Silence, but not the absence of sound. More like the presence of listening. Rory forced herself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. She'd left Evan because she'd learned to trust her instincts, and her instincts were screaming now. But she'd also learned not to panic. Panic made her weak. Panic made her small. She kept walking. The pendant pulsed again, stronger this time. It pulled at her chest like a compass needle seeking north, and she followed its guidance deeper into the clearing. The trees thinned. Ahead, something caught the light—a pool of water, still as glass, perhaps twenty feet across. As she approached, Rory realized it wasn't a pool. The surface was too dark, too reflective. It looked like obsidian, like the surface of a mirror laid flat in the earth. She could see the stars above reflected in it, more stars than should have been visible through the light pollution of London. Then she noticed she could only see the stars in the mirror. When she looked up, the sky was blank. Cloud-covered. Pitch black. Her breath caught. The pendant burned now, hot against her skin, and she grabbed it through her shirt, pressing it against her chest like a talisman. A sound behind her. Soft. Wet. Rory spun, flashlight beam swinging wildly across the trees. Nothing. The oaks stood in their ancient circle, bark dark and ridged, branches reaching toward the starless sky like clutching fingers. She waited. Counted ten heartbeats. Then twenty. When nothing happened, she turned back to the mirror-pool— And saw her own reflection standing at its edge. Not standing behind her. Standing at the edge, looking up at her from the glassy surface, wearing her face and her clothes and her expression of slowly mounting terror. But she was looking down at it. She was looking at herself looking up. The reflection smiled. She was not smiling. Rory stumbled backward, yanking the pendant free from her shirt. The crimson gemstone blazed now, bright as an eye, casting red light across the clearing. In that hellish glow, she saw the reflection still smiling, still standing at the pool's edge, even as her physical body backed away. The reflection raised one hand and pressed a finger to its lips. Behind her—behind the reflection, at the far side of the pool—a shape rose from the glass surface. Tall. Thin. Features that were almost human but arranged wrong, like a face drawn by someone who had only heard descriptions of what a face should be. It had no eyes. It had no mouth. It had a slit where both should have been, a horizontal crease in the pale-gray flesh of its face. Rory ran. She didn't scream. Screaming was for people who had time to waste. She ran, flashlight clutched in one hand, pendant clutched in the other, red light strobing across the ancient oaks as she sprinted for the boundary. The trees weren't moving. She told herself the trees weren't moving. The branches didn't reach for her. They only seemed to, in her peripheral vision, where she couldn't quite see them clearly enough to be sure. Something crashed through the undergrowth to her left. She didn't look. She ran harder. The boundary was ahead. The two great oaks that marked the entrance, their trunks wide enough to hide a car between them. She could see the darkness beyond them, ordinary darkness, the normal black of a London park at night. Her foot caught on something. Root, maybe. Rock. She pitched forward, flashlight skittering away into the dark, and hit the ground hard enough to drive the breath from her lungs. She rolled onto her back. The thing from the pool stood over her. It was taller than she'd thought. Eight feet, maybe nine. Its limbs were too long, jointed in too many places, and its skin—if you could call it skin—was the gray of old ash, cracked in places to show something redder underneath. The slit that served as its face was opening. Widening. Peeling back in layers, revealing wet pink tissue beneath, revealing— Rory screamed then. She couldn't help it. The sound tore out of her throat and vanished into the silent Grove, swallowed by the listening dark. The thing made no sound at all. Its hand—long-fingered, too many fingers—reached down toward her chest. Toward the pendant. The Heartstone blazed bright as a coal, brighter than she'd ever seen it, and the thing paused. Its head tilted, that lipless slit flexing in what might have been curiosity. In what might have been recognition. Then it closed its hand around the pendant's chain and pulled. The silver links snapped like thread. The crimson gemstone came away in its grip, and the thing held it up to the non-face, examining the light that pulsed from within. Rory scrambled backward on her hands and heels, leaves and dirt scattering beneath her, her throat raw from screaming, her heart slamming against her ribs. The thing tucked the pendant into the crack where its chest met its abdomen and looked down at her again. It took a step forward. And the scene ended there, in the red glow of the stolen Heartstone and the silent, starless dark of the Fae Grove.