Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXTA355PC18ZBDHR3V00Y2

The taxi's headlights swept across the Richmond Park gates before disappearing into the London night, leaving Aurora alone with the metallic click of her boots on wet pavement. She pulled her jacket tighter and checked her phone—no signal. Perfect. The Heartstone pendant beneath her shirt pulsed with that familiar warmth, the reason she'd dragged herself out here at half past eleven on a Tuesday. The gates stood locked, as expected, but she'd come prepared. Years of delivering takeaways to every corner of London had taught her which security cameras had blind spots and where maintenance crews left convenient gaps in fencing. The park's perimeter held fewer secrets than most people imagined. Twenty minutes of careful navigation brought her to the grove's edge. Ancient oak standing stones rose like dark sentinels, their bark scarred with symbols that seemed to shift when she wasn't looking directly at them. Between them, wildflowers bloomed in impossible colours—violet petals that caught moonlight like silk, white blossoms that glowed with their own cold luminescence. The pendant's warmth intensified. Aurora stepped between the stones. The air changed instantly, becoming thicker, sweeter, carrying the scent of flowers that shouldn't exist in October. Her footsteps, which had crunched clearly on fallen leaves moments before, now fell silent on soft grass that felt wrong beneath her feet—too springy, too alive. She'd been here twice before, both times during daylight hours. The grove had felt otherworldly then too, but in a way that suggested magic rather than menace. Butterflies had danced between impossible blooms while golden sunlight filtered through leaves that rustled with voices speaking languages she almost understood. Tonight felt different. Aurora pulled out her phone's torch, but the beam seemed to die just feet from her position, swallowed by darkness that pressed against the light like a living thing. The pendant grew warmer still, almost hot now against her skin. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She spun toward the movement, but found only flowers swaying in windless air. The grove stretched before her, perhaps fifty metres across, bordered by more standing stones that formed a rough circle. In daylight, she'd counted twelve of them. Now, sweeping her dying torch beam around the perimeter, she counted fourteen. Then sixteen. The numbers didn't make sense. Standing stones didn't multiply. They were anchored in earth, roots deep as any tree. Aurora forced herself to breathe slowly, to think. Time moved differently here—she'd experienced that before, stepping in for what felt like minutes only to emerge hours later. Perhaps the distortion affected more than duration. A sound drifted from somewhere behind the trees. Not wind through leaves or the settling of ancient wood. Something else. Something that might have been breathing, if breathing could carry that much hunger. Aurora's hand found the pendant through her shirt. The crimson stone pulsed with heat that bordered on painful now. She'd come here because it had been pulling her, growing warmer each night for a week until she couldn't ignore its summons. But standing alone in this flower-scented darkness, she began to question the wisdom of following mysterious magical artifacts into isolated places. The breathing sound came again, closer now. Definitely breathing, but wrong somehow—too deep, too wet, like air passing through something that wasn't quite lungs. She backed toward the centre of the grove, keeping her failing torch beam moving in slow arcs. The wildflowers seemed to turn as she passed, their faces following her movement like sunflowers tracking daylight. But these flowers had no faces, just petals and stems and that unnatural luminescence that made her skin crawl. The standing stones were definitely multiplying. She could see twenty of them now, maybe more, their dark forms rising from grass that hadn't been there when she'd entered. The grove was expanding, stretching outward in all directions, and she was trapped at its heart like prey in a web. Something rustled in the flowers to her left. This time she didn't turn toward the sound—she'd learned that looking directly at whatever moved there only made it disappear. Instead, she let her peripheral vision catch glimpses of motion. Something pale. Something that moved with too many joints. The pendant had grown so hot it felt like a brand against her chest. Through her shirt, she could see its crimson glow, pulsing in rhythm with her accelerated heartbeat. It had led her here, but to what? The grove showed no signs of any portal to Hel, no tears in reality that might explain the pendant's reaction. Only flowers. Only stones. Only the sound of breathing that came from everywhere and nowhere. Aurora's torch flickered once, twice, then died completely. Darkness rushed in like water filling a broken dam, absolute except for the faint glow of impossible flowers and the angry red pulse of the pendant against her skin. She stood perfectly still, listening. The breathing had stopped. In its place came something worse—the soft whisper of many feet moving through grass. Bare feet, by the sound, padding silently in a wide circle around her position. How many? Impossible to tell. The footsteps blended together like rain on leaves, creating a susurrus of movement that made her skin crawl. They were hunting. She could feel it in the way they moved, patient and deliberate, tightening their circle with predatory precision. Whatever they were, they weren't human. The gaits were wrong, too fluid, suggesting forms that bent in ways human bodies couldn't manage. Aurora reached for her phone, knowing before she looked that the screen would show no signal. The device felt cold and dead in her hands, its battery drained by whatever force permeated this place. She was alone, truly alone, with things that moved like hunters in the dark. The pendant's heat had become unbearable. She wanted to tear it off, to throw it as far as she could into the surrounding darkness, but something held her back. It had brought her here for a reason. Even if that reason was becoming clearer with each passing second—and none of those reasons were good.