Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXRY042DEV27MBN9ERB76D

The iron gates of Richmond Park groaned shut behind Aurora, their rusted hinges screaming into the October night. She shouldn't have been able to get in at all — the park closed at dusk this time of year — but the padlock had hung open on its chain, swinging gently as if someone had just passed through moments before. She stood motionless, listening. The city noise that had followed her from the tube station — distant sirens, the white noise hum of traffic on the A307 — seemed to drop away the moment the gates closed. Not fade. Drop. Like a curtain falling between acts. The Heartstone Pendant pulsed once against her sternum, a flutter of warmth that made her breath catch. She pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket, feeling the silver chain bite into her collarbone. The pendant had been doing this for three days now, growing warmer each time she passed the park on her delivery rounds. Tonight, it had practically burned through her shirt when the 65 bus crawled past the Petersham Road entrance. She had to know why. The path stretched ahead of her, pale gravel cutting through darkness so complete it seemed to have texture. No moon. No stars. The light pollution that usually painted London's sky a sickly orange had vanished entirely, and Aurora could see nothing beyond the first few meters of trail. Her phone's torch cut a weak cone through the black, illuminating frost-bitten grass and the skeletal fingers of dormant oaks. She walked. The gravel crunched beneath her trainers, each footstep impossibly loud in the silence. She counted them without meaning to — thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine — and somewhere around fifty she realized she couldn't hear anything else. No owls. No foxes. No wind through the ancient trees that she knew surrounded her, even if she couldn't see them. Just her breath and her heartbeat and the crunch-crunch-crunch of her soles against stone. The pendant warmed again, stronger this time. She adjusted her course slightly right, following some instinct she didn't fully trust. A deer stood in the middle of the path. Aurora froze, her torch beam catching the animal's eyes — two flat discs of reflected light that didn't blink, didn't move, didn't look away. The deer was wrong. She knew it immediately, the way you know in dreams that the person wearing your mother's face isn't your mother. Its proportions were slightly off, legs too long, neck at an angle that living spines shouldn't permit. It watched her with those flat, coin-bright eyes, and Aurora felt her mouth go dry. "Hello?" The word came out as a whisper. Stupid. Talking to a deer. But she needed to make a sound that wasn't her footsteps, needed to break whatever spell of silence had settled over this place. The deer turned its head — wrong, wrong, heads don't turn that far — and walked into the darkness without a sound. No hoofbeats. No rustle of undergrowth. Just there, and then not. Aurora stood rooted to the path, her phone trembling in her grip. The torch beam shivered across the ground, painting dancing shadows on the frost. Move, Rory. Move. She forced her feet forward. The pendant pulsed warm-cold-warm against her chest in a rhythm that didn't match her heartbeat, and she followed it like a compass needle, leaving the gravel path for the uneven ground of the park proper. Grass crackled beneath her feet, each blade rimmed with ice that shouldn't have formed — it hadn't been cold enough, she'd checked the weather before leaving her flat. The frost grew thicker as she walked, climbing up the bark of trees, glittering in her torchlight like crushed glass. Something moved in her peripheral vision. She spun, torch sweeping left, illuminating nothing but oak trunks and frozen bracken. Her heart hammered against her ribs. The darkness beyond her light's reach seemed to press closer, thick and watchful. She could feel it — eyes. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Fixed on the back of her neck with an attention that made her skin crawl. "Who's there?" No answer. But somewhere in the blackness, she heard breathing. Not her own. Slower. Deeper. The long, patient inhalation of something very large and very still. Aurora backed up a step. Her heel caught on a root, and she stumbled, nearly dropping her phone. The torch beam swept wildly across the trees, and in that fractured second of spinning light, she saw them. Faces. Pressed between the oak trunks. Pale and smooth and featureless except for dark holes where eyes should be. A dozen at least, clustered in the spaces between trees like fungi growing from deadwood. They weren't moving. They weren't doing anything. Just watching her with those empty sockets, heads tilted at curious angles. The light steadied. The faces were gone. Only bark and shadow and the glitter of ice. Aurora ran. She didn't know where she was going — had lost the path completely — but the pendant burned hot against her chest now, hot enough to hurt, and she followed that pain through the frozen dark. Branches whipped at her face. Her lungs screamed for air she couldn't seem to draw. Behind her, she heard footsteps. Not the crunch of frost. Something softer. Padding. Multiple somethings, moving in perfect unison like a single organism with too many legs. She burst through a wall of bracken and found herself in a clearing. The standing stones rose from the frost like broken teeth, ancient oaks that had somehow petrified into smooth grey rock. Wildflowers bloomed at their base — bluebells and foxglove and flowers she didn't recognize, impossible in October, their petals dusted with frost that didn't seem to touch them. The air inside the ring felt different. Thicker. Charged with something that made the fine hairs on her arms stand rigid. The Fae Grove. She'd found it. The pendant went cold against her chest — not warm, not pulsing, but ice-cold and utterly still, as if it had died. Aurora stepped between two of the stone oaks and felt the world shift around her. The darkness outside the ring seemed to deepen, solidify, become a wall of black so absolute it hurt to look at. The footsteps stopped. The breathing stopped. Everything stopped. She stood alone in the circle, surrounded by impossible flowers and ancient stone, and she understood with terrible clarity that she had walked into a trap. The flowers were dying. She watched it happen in slow motion — petals curling inward, blackening at the edges, frost creeping up stems like a disease spreading through veins. One by one, the bluebells drooped and fell. The foxglove withered. Whatever magic kept the grove blooming was failing, draining away into the frozen earth. And in the space between the standing stones, the darkness began to move. It didn't have a shape — not exactly. It flowed like water, pooled like shadow, gathered itself into something almost humanoid but not quite. Taller than a person. Thinner. With angles where curves should be and a head that seemed to rotate independently of its shoulders. Aurora backed toward the center of the ring, her torch useless against something that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it. The shape moved closer. She could see through it — see the dying flowers beyond, the frozen ground, the wall of night pressing in — but she could also see something else. Something inside it. A face, maybe. Or the memory of one. Pale. Smooth. Empty-eyed. It raised what might have been an arm. The pendant blazed hot against Aurora's chest, and she screamed — genuine pain now, searing heat that felt like it would burn straight through her ribs. She tore at her collar, trying to get the chain off, but her fingers fumbled on frozen metal that seemed fused to her skin. The shadow creature stopped. Its head tilted — that same wrong angle, the same inhuman curiosity she'd seen in the faces between the trees. It regarded her with empty sockets, and Aurora felt something probe at the edges of her mind. Not words. Not images. Just pressure. Ancient and patient and utterly without warmth. The pendant's heat faded to a steady throb. The burning stopped. Aurora stood gasping in the center of the dying grove, one hand pressed to the crimson stone beneath her shirt, and watched the shadow creature watch her. It was waiting for something. She could feel that, somehow. Feel its attention focused on the pendant rather than on her. Whatever she carried around her neck, it recognized. Whatever the Heartstone was, wherever it had come from, this thing knew it. And it was afraid of it. The realization hit her like cold water. Not afraid of her. Not afraid of the light. Afraid of the small, pulsing stone that an unknown benefactor had pressed into her hands three weeks ago with no explanation and no instructions beyond wear it always. Aurora straightened her spine. The shadow creature shifted — not back, not away, just shifted, its outline blurring and reforming as if uncertain how to proceed. The darkness beyond the standing stones pressed closer, and she could hear the breathing again. Louder now. Hungrier. She was surrounded. Trapped in a dying grove with a creature made of night and a pendant she didn't understand. And somewhere in the park behind her, other things were gathering. Watching. Waiting to see what would happen next. The pendant pulsed once, steady and warm, and Aurora closed her hand around it through her shirt.