Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXN5JPV8R2THFMDMVFYSE2

The taxi had dumped her at the Richmond Park gates with a skeptical look and the engine still running, as if the driver hoped she'd change her mind and climb back in. Aurora had paid him in cash—the only way he'd accept the fare to this godforsaken corner of the city at half past midnight—and watched his taillights disappear down the dark country lane before turning toward the trees. The pendant lay cold against her chest. It had been warm since she'd left her flat above Silas' bar, a steady pulse that matched no heartbeat she recognized. Yu-Fei had warned her about the thing when she'd found it tucked in the restaurant's storage room three weeks ago. Dangerous, he'd said. Old. Don't trust it. But the pendant had led her here, to this place in the park that her phone's GPS refused to acknowledge, past the iron lampposts and into the shadow of the ancient oaks where the city lights couldn't reach. The entrance to the Fae Grove revealed itself the way the old stories promised—not as a door or a gap in the foliage, but as a knowing. One moment the woods pressed close and claustrophobic, and the next she stood in a clearing that hadn't existed a heartbeat before. Moonlight turned the wildflowers silver. The standing stones rose in a rough circle, ancient oaks petrified into shapes that almost resembled figures, almost resembled watchers. Aurora stepped forward and the grass beneath her boots made no sound. She noticed that immediately—the soft whisper of movement that should have accompanied each step, the quiet compression of dew-soaked earth. Nothing. She might as well have been walking on air. "I know why I'm here," she said aloud, her voice strange in the silence. The pendant pulsed warmer. She waited for an answer. None came. The grove stretched larger than it should have, given the boundaries of Richmond Park. Aurora walked its perimeter, counting the standing stones—there were thirteen, she was certain of that, though her count kept shifting when she looked away and back again. The oaks that marked the edge didn't grow in a natural pattern. They stood too perfectly spaced, too deliberately placed, as if someone had arranged them with intention. Something moved at the corner of her vision. She spun around. Nothing. The wildflowers swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel, their heads bent toward a moon that hung too large and too close in the dark sky. Aurora pressed her hand against her chest, feeling the pendant's warmth through her jacket, and forced herself to breathe. Get a grip. You came here for answers. The reason sat heavy in her chest. Eva had been missing for six days. No call, no text, no word at the flat they used to share. The police had taken her statement with the polite disinterest reserved for adults who chose to disappear. But Aurora knew better. Eva wouldn't leave without telling her. Eva had been the one to pull her out of Cardiff, out of Evan's shadow, out of the careful trap of a life that looked normal from the outside. Eva didn't abandon people. The pendant had started warming the night Eva vanished. Aurora had dismissed it as coincidence, then as the heat of her own body, then as imagination. But the warmth had led her here—to a place that shouldn't exist, in a park she'd visited only once before, years ago, when she'd first arrived in London and Eva had wanted to show her the "pretty bit with the old trees." She'd thought it was a clearing then. Just a clearing with unusual stones and flowers that bloomed out of season. She'd barely remembered it until the pendant started pulling her toward it like a compass needle toward north. The wrongness crept in slowly. First it was the silence—not the absence of sound, but something more active. A listening quality to the quiet, as if the grove held its breath and waited. Then it was the shadows. They didn't move with the moon. They moved against it, sliding along the ground like dark water, pooling in places that should have been bright. Aurora watched one stretch and contract against the base of a standing stone, and she made herself look away before her mind could make shapes in it. A sound came from somewhere behind her. A footstep, maybe. The soft displacement of grass. She spun again. Nothing. The clearing lay empty and silver and still. "Hello?" Her voice didn't echo. It fell flat, absorbed by the flowers and the stones and the unnatural dark beyond the tree line. "I know someone's there." No answer. The pendant burned against her skin now, hot enough that she wondered if it would leave a mark. She pulled it out from under her shirt and stared at it in the moonlight. The deep crimson gemstone glowed from within, a faint luminescence that had nothing to do with reflected light. It was beautiful and terrible and absolutely, impossibly wrong. The footsteps came again. Closer this time. Aurora whirled and saw only the empty clearing, the swaying flowers, the watching stones. But the grass—she stared at the ground—had moved. A trail of bent stems led from the tree line to within ten feet of where she stood, ending in a perfect circle of disturbed earth. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She thought of Evan's hands, of the bruises that bloomed purple and yellow along her arms, of the careful way he'd isolated her from everyone who might help. She'd escaped that. She'd built a life in London with a job she didn't hate and a flat above a bar and a friend who made her laugh until she forgot the sound of her own name crying behind a locked door. She wouldn't break now. Not here. Not when Eva needed her. Aurora walked toward the center of the clearing, toward the largest of the standing stones. She didn't know what she expected to find—a door, a symbol, some kind of answer—but she knew in her bones that this was why she'd come. The pendant pulsed faster as she approached, the light inside it growing brighter, casting crimson shadows across the ancient oak. The stone was warm to the touch. Not sun-warmed, not the residual heat of a summer day. Warm like skin. Warm like something alive. "You shouldn't have come." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn't loud, but it filled the clearing, pressed against her eardrums, settled into her chest like a second heartbeat. Aurora stepped back from the stone and scanned the darkness beyond the tree line. "I know," she said, because she did. She'd known from the moment the pendant started pulling her toward this place that she was walking into something beyond her understanding. "But my friend is here. Eva. You have her." Silence. The flowers stopped swaying. The shadows stopped sliding. The entire grove held itself in perfect, terrible stillness. Then the darkness between the trees began to move. It didn't emerge from anywhere. It simply became, coalescing from the spaces between spaces into something that had weight and height and the vague suggestion of a shape. It stood just beyond the circle of stones, taller than the ancient oaks, broader than the clearing itself. Aurora couldn't see its face because it didn't have one—or because the moonlight refused to touch it, or because her mind refused to process what looked back at her. The pendant went cold. Not cooling. Not returning to normal temperature. Cold like ice, cold like death, cold like the space between stars. Aurora's fingers burned with the shock of it, but she couldn't let go. The pendant was the only thing anchoring her to this clearing, to this moment, to the world she'd come from. "You came for the girl," the voice said, and now it came from the thing in the darkness, from everywhere the shadows touched. "They always come for someone. That's what makes the door open. That's what makes you walk in." "Give her back." A sound that might have been laughter rippled through the grove. The wildflowers bent away from it, as if recoiling from a physical force. "She's not ours to give. She opened a door. She spoke a name she shouldn't have spoken. The grove took what was offered." Aurora's throat tightened. Eva had always been curious about the old stories, the fairy tales that weren't really tales at all. She'd researched them for fun, collected them like other people collected stamps. She hadn't believed they were real. Neither had Aurora, until tonight. "Show me," Aurora said. Her voice didn't shake. She was proud of that, later, when she had time to think about it. "Show me she's alive. Please." The darkness shifted. The shadows slid back toward the tree line, revealing gaps between the trunks that hadn't been there before. Beyond them, in a space that existed between one heartbeat and the next, a figure moved. Eva stood in a clearing of her own, surrounded by flowers that bloomed in impossible colors. She looked up, as if she could feel Aurora's gaze through whatever barrier separated them. Her mouth moved. No sound came through, but Aurora could read the words. Run.