Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXW7K8NKZ19HAYZVX9AJQ3

The ancient oaks of Richmond Park gave way without ceremony. One moment, Aurora Carter felt the damp London chill on her cheeks; the next, she passed between two of the standing stones and the air turned crystalline and still. The distant hum of the city vanished, swallowed by a profound silence that was the Fae Grove’s first and most unsettling trick. Tonight, that silence felt different. It was not the peaceful quiet of a hidden place, but the held breath of a predator. Moonlight, thin and sharp as scraped bone, filtered through the canopy, painting the clearing in shades of silver and ash. The wildflowers, usually a riot of impossible, year-round colour, were limp and muted. Their heads drooped on bruised-looking stems, their scent not of honey and night-stock but of decay and cloying sweetness, like flowers left too long in a sickroom. Aurora’s boots sank into the turf with a soft, wet noise. The ground felt wrong, spongy and bloated. She moved towards the centre of the grove, her purpose a hard knot in her stomach. Her fingers went to the Heartstone Pendant at her throat. The silver chain was cold against her skin, but the crimson stone itself was a point of unpleasant heat. It did not pulse with its usual steady, comforting warmth. Instead, it throbbed, a frantic, feverish beat against her collarbone, a trapped bird fluttering against cage bars. She pulled her hand away as if stung. A sharp crack echoed from the treeline to her left. Aurora froze, her head snapping towards the sound. A fox, her mind supplied instantly. A badger. A deer straying from the main park. She catalogued the rational explanations, a familiar mental exercise. But no creature followed the noise. No rustle of undergrowth, no snuffling departure. The grove simply returned to its dead, waiting silence, now heavier than before. Her own breathing sounded like a storm in the stillness. She swept her gaze across the perimeter, scanning the monolithic stones that ringed the clearing. Their gnarled bark, carved by centuries of weather and things older than weather, seemed to twist in the spectral light. Grotesque faces leered from the wood grain, hollow eyes and gaping mouths that were not there a moment before. She blinked hard, and they were just patterns again. Her mind was making monsters from shadows. It had to be. The cold deepened, a sudden plunge that had nothing to do with the night air. It was a wet, penetrating chill that sank into her bones. Gooseflesh pebbled on her arms beneath her jacket. And with the cold came the feeling. A distinct, physical pressure on the back of her neck, the kind that raises hair and makes you certain unseen eyes are fixed upon you. She refused to turn around quickly. She made her movements slow, deliberate, a full, steady rotation. The clearing was empty. Nothing but dying flowers, silvered grass, and the silent, watching stones. A whisper slithered through the air. It was faint, barely there, a sibilant hiss like sand skittering over glass. There was no wind. The leaves on the skeletal branches above were motionless. The sound had no source; it was simply there, weaving through the stillness, curling around her ears. It was not a language she knew, yet the intent behind it felt unnervously clear. A beckoning. A promise of something rotten and secret. "Who's there?" Her voice was a trespass, loud and raw in the oppressive quiet. The only answer was the whisper, which seemed to chuckle and recede, dissolving back into the silence. Her hand strayed to the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist, a nervous habit she thought she had long since broken. The Heartstone hammered against her chest, its heat now a burning, insistent pain. She pulled out her phone, less for help—there was never a signal here—and more for the mundane reality of its light. She thumbed on the torch. A brilliant white beam cut a cone through the gloom. She played it over the trees, the standing stones, the matted grass at her feet. That’s when she saw it. A patch of turf near the base of the largest oak was dark, unnaturally so. It wasn’t a shadow. It was slick, viscous, catching the torchlight with a greasy sheen that drank the brightness rather than reflected it. It looked like spilled oil, or old blood. As she held the beam steady, its edges seemed to blur, to creep. A dark stain spreading through the grass, a slow, silent tide of blackness crawling from the base of the stone. It moved with a purpose that rooted her to the spot. She took a stumbling step back, her heel catching on a root. The whisper returned, louder this time. It was thicker, wetter. A chorus of guttural murmurs welled up from the ground, from the air itself. It was the sound of a swamp bubbling, of mud shifting over something long-drowned. Panic, cold and sharp, finally sliced through her composure. This place was tainted, infected. The grove was sick, and she had walked right into the heart of its fever. Her gaze remained locked on the spreading stain, but a flicker of motion at the edge of the torch beam snagged her attention. She jerked the light towards it, towards the standing stone on the far side of the clearing. A shadow clung to its base, deeper and more absolute than the others. It was wrong. It did not match the shape of the stone that cast it. As the light hit it, the shadow detached. It unfolded. Not like a person rising, but like a piece of paper crumpled and then smoothed, or an insect emerging from its chrysalis. Thin, spindly limbs elongated with a series of soft, wet pops and cracks. It straightened to a height that seemed impossible, a stick-figure drawn in pitch, its form a wavering distortion in the air. Where a head should have been, there was only a smooth, pale oval, featureless and luminous in her torch beam. It tilted that blankness towards her, a gesture of obscene curiosity. Then, with a slow, disjointed lurch, it took its first step out of the darkness.