Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX4CE1Y4544CHYFXR368CP

The iron gates of Richmond Park groaned as Aurora pushed through, the sound cutting through the midnight stillness like a wound. She paused, one hand still pressed against the cold metal, and listened. Nothing. Just the distant hum of London, muffled and irrelevant, a world away from where she stood. She shouldn't be here. The park closed at dusk, and the November air bit through her jacket with teeth she hadn't anticipated. But the text had been specific—midnight, the grove, come alone—and the number had belonged to someone she'd thought long dead. Her mother's number. Her mother's phone, supposedly buried with her three years ago. Rory's breath misted in front of her as she started down the path, the Heartstone pendant warm against her chest. Warmer than it should be. She'd grown accustomed to its subtle pulse, the way it seemed to respond to things she couldn't see, but tonight it thrummed with an urgency that made her skin prickle. The path wound through darkness. Streetlamps didn't reach this far into the park, and the moon hung behind a veil of clouds, offering only enough light to distinguish the shapes of trees from the shapes of shadows. Rory kept her phone's torch pointed at her feet, watching each step, trying not to think about how the beam seemed weaker than usual. How the darkness pressed against its edges like something hungry. A branch snapped somewhere to her left. She stopped. Turned. The torchlight caught nothing but empty air and the skeletal fingers of bare oaks reaching toward the sky. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. The word hung in the air for a moment, then the silence swallowed it whole. Rory swallowed too, forced her feet to move again. The standing stones weren't far now. She'd been to the grove twice before, both times in daylight, both times with Isolde's invitation threading through the air like visible gold. Tonight there was no invitation. No golden thread. Just the memory of her mother's voice on a message that had arrived at 11:47 PM, three hours after she'd already decided she wouldn't sleep. "Cariad," the message had said, using the Welsh endearment Jennifer Carter had whispered to her daughter since infancy. "I need to see you. Please. The grove at midnight. I'm so sorry." The voice had been perfect. The slight catch on "sorry," the way the vowels softened at the edges—all of it exactly as Rory remembered. Exactly as she'd spent three years trying to forget. She reached the edge of the tree line and stopped. The grove lay before her, bathed in that sourceless silver light that marked the boundary between worlds. Wildflowers swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel, their colors muted to grey in the darkness but still impossibly alive. The standing stones formed their ancient circle at the center, oak worn smooth by centuries of rain and touch and worship. Everything looked as it always had. Everything felt wrong. Rory stood at the threshold, her torch flickering once, twice, then dying completely. She shook it. Pressed the button. Nothing. The phone's screen had gone dark too, unresponsive to her increasingly frantic tapping. "Shit." The word helped. Grounded her in something real, something profane and human in this place that was neither. She shoved the useless phone into her pocket and stepped forward, into the grove proper. The air changed immediately. Thicker. Sweeter. The scent of flowers she couldn't name filled her lungs, and beneath it something else—something that reminded her of the way hospitals smelled when they were trying too hard to mask what hospitals really smelled like. The pendant flared hot against her skin. Rory pressed her hand against it through her shirt, feeling the pulse quicken. The crimson gem had never burned before. Never felt like anything more than gentle warmth. But now it beat against her palm like a second heart, racing. "Mum?" The word escaped before she could stop it. Childish. Desperate. She hadn't called anyone "Mum" since the funeral. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She spun, but there was nothing there. Just the stones. Just the flowers. Just the impossible silver light that cast no shadows because shadows required a source, required something to block, and this light came from everywhere and nowhere at once. "I know you're there." Braver now. Angry, almost. She'd walked half an hour through a closed park in the middle of the night because someone had used her grief as bait, and the least they could do was show themselves. A whisper answered. Not words, exactly—more like the memory of words, the impression of sound without the substance. It came from behind her. She turned. From her left. She turned again. From inside the circle of stones. Rory approached the standing stones slowly, her boots crushing flowers that should have crunched but made no sound at all. The wrongness she'd felt at the gate had crystallized into certainty. This wasn't the grove she remembered. The dimensions were the same, the stones in their proper positions, but something had changed. Something had hollowed this place out and crawled inside wearing its skin. She reached the nearest stone and pressed her palm against it. Cold. The oak had always felt warm before, alive in a way that ordinary wood wasn't. But now her fingers met ice, and frost crept across the bark in the wake of her touch, spreading outward like infection. She jerked her hand back. The whispers stopped. The silence that followed was worse. Complete. Absolute. The kind of silence that shouldn't exist, that couldn't exist, because even in the quietest places there was always something—wind, breath, the pulse of blood in one's own ears. But Rory heard nothing. Not even her own heartbeat. She opened her mouth to speak and found she couldn't remember how. Something stood at the center of the circle. She hadn't seen it arrive. Hadn't heard it move. One moment the space between the stones was empty, and the next it wasn't, and Rory's mind refused to process the transition. Just a gap in perception, a missing frame, a moment when she'd blinked and the world had changed. The figure was tall. Thin. Draped in something that might have been fabric or might have been shadow or might have been nothing at all, just the shape of an absence where a person should be. It stood with its back to her—if it had a back, if the concepts of front and back applied to something that seemed to exist in more dimensions than Rory could count. "Who are you?" Her voice worked again. Small mercy. The words came out cracked and hoarse, but they came out. The figure didn't turn. Didn't speak. But the whispers returned, coiling around Rory's ankles like smoke, crawling up her legs, her spine, settling behind her eyes where they pulsed in time with the pendant at her chest. Not words. Images. Sensations. Her mother's hands, soft and cool, pressing a damp cloth to Rory's forehead during a childhood fever. The taste of her mother's cooking, lamb and rosemary and something sweet she'd never been able to identify. The sound of her mother's voice, reading aloud from books too advanced for a seven-year-old but perfect nonetheless, because the words didn't matter as much as the tone. Rory felt tears sliding down her cheeks before she realized she was crying. "Stop it." The images continued. The scar on her left wrist throbbed, that small crescent moon she'd earned at age nine when she'd fallen from the garden wall and her mother had held her and whispered "cariad" and promised everything would be okay. "Stop it!" The figure turned. It didn't have a face. It didn't not have a face, either. There was simply a place where a face should have been, and Rory's eyes refused to look at it directly, sliding off like water on oil, her brain desperately trying to fill in details from memory and coming up with nothing but static. "You came." The voice was her mother's. Exactly her mother's. But it came from everywhere at once, from the stones and the flowers and the impossible light, from inside Rory's own skull, from the pendant that had gone so hot she could smell her shirt beginning to singe. "You're not her." A sound that might have been laughter. Might have been weeping. Might have been something else entirely, something that had no human equivalent and shouldn't have been attempting one. "I am what she left behind. I am the shape of her absence. I am the door she opened when she died." Rory's hands were shaking. She couldn't feel them anymore, couldn't feel anything except the burning at her chest and the ice spreading through her veins. "What do you want?" The figure moved closer. Didn't walk. Just was suddenly nearer, that same missing-frame sensation, that same gap in reality. Rory stumbled backward and found herself pressed against one of the standing stones, the cold seeping through her jacket, through her skin, into her bones. "I want what everyone wants, cariad." The endearment sounded obscene in that voice. A violation. "I want to come home." The pendant screamed. Rory didn't know how else to describe it—a sound that wasn't a sound, a vibration that traveled through her chest and into her throat and emerged as something between a gasp and a prayer. The crimson gem blazed through her shirt, and for one impossible moment she could see it through the fabric, through her own flesh, a light that illuminated the cage of her ribs and the terrified racing of her heart. The figure recoiled. Not much. Just a fraction. But enough. Enough for Rory to understand that whatever the pendant was, whatever power it carried, the thing wearing her mother's voice was afraid of it. She pressed her hand against the burning gem and held on.