Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXFA614MBGHRAK7NM8E6X1

The air in The Fae Grove smelled too sweet, like rotting fruit and honey. Rory’s boot sank into damp moss as she stepped past the ancient standing stones, the boundary that should have felt like a threshold but instead just felt like a trap. Above, the sky was a bruised purple, starless—an hour ago, in Richmond Park, it had been a clear, cold night. Time moved differently here, the note had warned her. The note she’d found slipped under her door, unsigned, written in an elegant, looping script: *If you want the truth about the pendant, come to the Grove at moonrise.* She unzipped her jacket, the silver chain of the Heartstone cold against her collarbone. The pendant itself, that deep crimson stone the size of a thumbnail, lay still. No pulse. No warmth. Just a piece of jewellery given to her by a stranger in a rain-slicked alley two weeks ago, a man with eyes that held no light who had pressed it into her palm and vanished. Since then, her life had felt like a radio tuned slightly off-station, all static and distortion. The grove was a perfect circle of manicured wildness. Flowers she couldn’t name bloomed in violent purples and bloody reds, their colours unreal in the dim, sourceless light. The ancient oaks formed a tight wall around the clearing, their branches weaving a ceiling that blocked out the world. It was quiet. Not a peaceful quiet. A held-breath quiet. The kind that comes before a scream. She walked toward the center, her footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of moss and fallen petals. Her reason for being here felt flimsier by the second. The truth about the pendant. What truth? That it was stolen? Cursed? That the man who gave it to her was something not entirely human? She touched the small crescent scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit from childhood. A twig snapped to her left. Rory froze, her head whipping around. The trees were?” Her voice was too loud, swallowed by the oppressive silence almost instantly. No answer. Just the gentle, wrong sigh of wind through leaves that shouldn’t have been there—the trees were too dense for any real breeze to penetrate. She took another step. And heard it again. Not a tw time distortion. It’s messing with your head.* She repeated the rationalizations like a mantra, the same ones she’d used when Evan would stand outside her door for hours, not knocking, just waiting. This felt the same. A predatory patience. She reached the center of the grove, a slight depression where the moss was a darker green. This was where the note had told her to wait. She checked her phone. No signal, of course. The screen flashed 11:47 PM. She’d entered the park at 11:30. How long had she been in here? It felt like ten minutes. It could have been ten hours. A low hum began, so deep it was more a vibration in her teeth than a sound. The Heartstone against her skin grew warm. Not a gentle warmth. A sudden, feverish heat. She looked down. The crimson gem was glowing, a faint pulse of light from deep within its core, beating in time with the hum. Thump. Thump. Thump. Like a heart. The scraping sound came again, closer now. Not from one direction, but from all around her, a slow, deliberate circle being drawn around the clearing’s edge. Rory backed up, turning in a slow circle, her breath coming in shallow pants that clouded in the strangely cold air. Shadows pooled and thickened between the trees. They didn’t behave right. They stretched and contracted independent of any light source, sliding over the ground like oil. One of them, long and thin, detached itself from the base of an oak and slithered behind the next tree. She blinked, hard. Nothing there. “I know you’re there,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. Cool-headed. Intelligent. That was her. Out-of-the-box thinking. Right now, the box was a tightening circle of wrongness, and she was stuck in the center of it. A whisper rustled through the leaves above. Not wind. It formed a word. *Laila.* She went rigid. No one called her that. Not since she was a child. Her mother’s pet name for her, abandoned a lifetime ago. The humming intensified, the vibrations moving up from her jaw into her skull. The pendant was hot, almost burning. Its glow cast a faint red light on the ground around her feet. Another whisper, from her right this time. It was a dry, papery sound, the voice of dead leaves. *He’s looking for you.* Evan. It had to be. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through her. How could it know? This thing, whatever it was, knew the shape of her fears. “Who are you?” she demanded, fists clenched at her sides. “Show yourself!” Laughter answered. Soft, melodic, and utterly without warmth. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing off the trees, dripping from the flowers. It was the sound of broken bells. Something moved in her peripheral vision. She snapped her head to the side. For a fraction of a second, she saw it. A figure, tall and impossibly slender, standing between two trees. Its outline was wrong, limbs too long, head tilted at an unnatural angle. It was made of shifting, solid shadow. Then it was gone. The scraping was right behind her. Rory didn’t think. She ran. Not toward the stone boundary—that felt miles away—but diagonally across the clearing, toward what she hoped was a thinner part of the tree line. The air resisted her, thick and syrupy. The glowing pendant bounced against her chest, its red pulse throwing frantic, jumping shadows that made the trees seem to reach for her. The laughter followed, keeping pace with her, a cruel and playful sound. The whispers chased her, a chorus now. *Cardiff...* *The law books gathering dust...* *The way he used to grip your arm...* It knew everything. It was pulling her apart, memory by memory. She burst through a curtain of weeping willow-like branches she hadn’t seen before and stumbled into a smaller, darker clearing within the grove. The humming was deafening here, a physical pressure in the air. The source of the scraping noise was revealed. In the center of the small clearing was a hole. Not dug, but *rotted* into the earth, about three feet wide. The edges were blackened and splintered, like burnt wood. And from within the absolute darkness of that hole came the sound—a dry, relentless scrape, scrape, scrape, as if something were trying to claw its way up. The Heartstone blazed on her chest, searing hot. Its light painted the hole in lurid shades of red. The scraping stopped. The laughter ceased. The whispering died. The silence that fell was absolute and more terrifying than any noise. Rory stood frozen, every muscle taut, staring into the abyss of that hole. A hand shot out. It was long and bone-white, fingers too thin and too numerous, ending in black, cracked nails. It gripped the edge of the pit, the sound of splintering earth unnaturally loud. Another hand, identical, joined it. They strained, pulling. A crown of matted, black hair emerged, then a face. It had no eyes, just smooth, stretched skin where they should be. Its mouth was a wide, dark gash, and it was smiling. It opened that mouth, and the voice that came out was a perfect mimic of her mother’s, sweet and warm and horribly out of place. “Laila,” it crooned, heaving its shoulders out of the hole. “We’ve been waiting for you.”