Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXHBJ4QT9D494AAGZJYS51

The ancient oaks of Richmond Park stood silent against the October sky, their branches reaching like skeletal fingers into the darkness. Aurora pulled her jacket tighter as she stepped off the path, her breath misting in the cold air. The Heartstone pendant lay heavy against her chest, its usual faint warmth now pulsing with an urgency that had drawn her from her flat above Silas' bar. She'd been here before, of course. The Fae Grove existed somewhere between the mundane park and something else entirely, but finding it was never straightforward. The standing stones that marked its boundary only appeared when they wanted to be found. A twig snapped behind her. Aurora froze, listening. The sound came again, deliberate and measured, like footsteps matching her pace. She forced herself to keep walking, maintaining the same rhythm while her pulse hammered in her throat. The pendant grew warmer. "Just a deer," she whispered, though the words felt hollow. Richmond Park had plenty of deer, but they didn't follow people. They didn't walk with such careful precision. The darkness pressed closer as she moved deeper into the trees. Her phone's flashlight carved a narrow tunnel through the blackness, making the shadows beyond seem deeper by contrast. The familiar path looked wrong somehow—the oak she usually passed on the left now loomed on her right, and the fallen log she'd stepped over countless times was nowhere to be seen. The footsteps stopped. Aurora turned slowly, sweeping her light across the empty path behind her. Nothing. Just trees and darkness and her own ragged breathing. She waited, counting her heartbeats. One. Two. Three. The silence stretched taut as a wire. A branch creaked overhead. Not from wind—there was no wind tonight. The sound came again, a groan of wood under weight, as if something large had settled onto the limb. Her light jerked upward, catching only swaying leaves. The pendant burned against her skin. She pressed forward, abandoning caution for speed. The standing stones had to be close. They always appeared when she needed them most, when the barrier between worlds grew thin. But tonight the forest seemed to fold in on itself, paths doubling back, landmarks shifting when she wasn't looking directly at them. A whisper drifted through the trees, too soft to make out words but unmistakably a voice. Then another, and another, until the darkness hummed with barely audible conversation. The voices overlapped, some speaking in English, others in languages she didn't recognize, all of them wrong in a way that made her teeth ache. Aurora stumbled into a clearing she didn't remember. Moonlight filtered through the canopy, painting everything in shades of silver and shadow. The ground was carpeted with wildflowers—impossible given the season—their petals glowing faintly in the darkness. She recognized this wrongness. The Grove was bleeding through, but something had torn the careful boundaries that usually contained it. Movement flickered at the edge of her vision. She spun, catching a glimpse of something tall and wrong-jointed disappearing behind an oak. The whispers grew louder, more insistent, though the words remained maddeningly unclear. The pendant blazed now, hot enough to hurt. Aurora grabbed it through her shirt, gasping at the heat. This wasn't its normal warning about Hel portals. This was something else, something the artifact recognized as a threat beyond its usual purpose. She pressed on across the clearing, fighting the urge to run. Running would acknowledge the wrongness, would give it power. The flowers brushed against her jeans with a sound like fingernails on silk. A figure stood at the far edge of the clearing. Aurora's light caught it full on—a person, or something wearing the shape of one. It faced away from her, perfectly still, dressed in clothes that might have been modern or might have been centuries old. The fabric seemed to shift and blur when she tried to focus on it. "Hello?" The word came out as a croak. The figure didn't move. Didn't breathe. Aurora circled wide, keeping her distance while trying to see its face. The whispers rose to a crescendo, urgent now, almost angry. As she moved, she realized the figure was turning too, maintaining the same angle, never letting her see more than its back. Her foot caught on something soft. She looked down to find a jacket—modern, North Face, the kind hikers wore. Fresh mud clung to it. A few feet away lay a backpack, its contents scattered across the flowers. A wallet had fallen open, revealing a driver's license that gleamed in her phone light. The photo showed a young woman, smiling. The issue date was last month. The whispers stopped. In the sudden silence, Aurora heard breathing that wasn't her own. Slow, measured, coming from directly behind her. She closed her eyes, gripping the pendant hard enough to cut into her palm. The standing stones had to be close. They had to be. When she opened her eyes, the figure was gone. But the breathing continued, and now she could feel it, cold against the back of her neck. Something touched her shoulder—not quite a hand, the pressure all wrong, too many points of contact. The pendant flared with heat so intense she cried out, jerking away. Light exploded from the stone, crimson and blinding. The thing behind her made a sound like tearing metal, and the pressure vanished. Aurora ran.