Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY0ZS1TW93AJXFVZSTP4N7

Aurora's trainers crushed dead leaves beneath her feet as she pushed through the towering oaks that marked the boundary of the Grove. The ancient standing stones rose like weathered sentinels on either side of the path, their surfaces slick with midnight dew. She'd come at night on purpose. The Heartstone Pendant pressed warm against her collarbone, its pulse matching her heartbeat—or maybe her heartbeat matched its pulse. She'd never been certain which direction the connection flowed. The pendant had been pulling harder all week. Not the usual gentle tug that led her to minor Fae dealings, but something insistent. Something that made her teeth ache. Beyond the stones, the clearing opened before her like a held breath. Richmond Park lay quiet somewhere beyond the Grove's boundary, but here—here was different. The wildflowers that never respected seasons bloomed in impossible profusion, their colours too vivid in the darkness. Purples that should have looked black instead burned like bruises. Whites gleamed with their own faint luminescence. No moon reached this place, yet somehow Aurora could see clearly enough to make out the individual petals. She stopped at the clearing's edge and waited. Listening. A habit born from two years of navigating spaces that didn't follow Earth's rules. The air hung thick and still. Not peaceful. Still in the way a held breath was still—full of pressure, anticipation. The wildflowers released their scent in waves, sweet and cloying, nothing like the fresh smell of an actual garden. This was perfume distilled, concentrated, almost chemical in its purity. Aurora stepped into the clearing proper. The pendant warmed further, nearly uncomfortable against her skin now. She pulled her delivery company hoodie tighter around herself—a stupid gesture, since cold wasn't the problem. The night air felt warm, almost feverish. Her breath should have misted in front of her face, but it didn't. Time moved differently here. Everyone knew that. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. Eva had warned her about that constantly when they'd first discovered the Grove together. Stay aware. Set a timer. Don't trust your perception of duration. Aurora had followed those rules religiously at first, but it'd been two years now. She'd learned to navigate the strangeness. This felt different though. A sound reached her ears—distant, ambiguous. Not quite a bird call. Not quite wind through branches. Something in between, or something that mimicked both imperfectly. Aurora turned toward it, eyes scanning the darkness at the clearing's far edge where the trees reasserted themselves. Nothing moved. She walked deeper into the wildflowers, and they parted before her without rustling, as if politely stepping aside. The pendant's warmth spread across her chest now, creeping up her neck. She'd never felt it behave this way before. Cautious, she reached up and gripped it through the fabric of her shirt. The stone was almost hot enough to burn. Another sound. This time unmistakably closer. A rustling. Deliberate. Something moving through the undergrowth at the clearing's perimeter, parallel to her position, keeping pace. Aurora stopped walking. "Hello?" The rustling ceased immediately. The silence that followed held a different quality than before. The silence of listening. Of attention turned toward her with deliberate focus. "I know you're there," Aurora said. Her voice sounded smaller out here, swallowed by the purple and white flowers that surrounded her. She'd come prepared to negotiate, to offer something, to make a deal. That was how the Fae worked. But nobody had told her what to expect when the pendant burned like this. Nobody had warned her about this particular flavor of wrong. The rustling resumed, but now it came from multiple directions. Three points around the clearing's edge. Then four. The sounds didn't sync with each other—one would start while another stopped, creating an impression of circling without any actual movement Aurora could detect when she looked directly at where the noise originated. She reached into her jacket pocket and found the iron ring she always carried. Cold iron, the only thing the Fae universally respected or feared. Her fingers closed around it, and immediately—as if in response—the pendant's pulse accelerated. Now it didn't match her heartbeat anymore. It raced ahead of it, faster and faster, until the stone felt like it was vibrating against her chest. The rustling stopped. All four of them. Simultaneously. Silence crashed in like something physical, like pressure changing depth. Aurora's skin prickled. She forced herself to take a breath, then another. The flowers around her had stopped moving—if they'd ever been moving at all. Now they stood absolutely rigid, every petal arrested mid-sway. "Show yourself," she called out. "No games." Something laughed. Not from one location but from all of them at once, the sound layered and overlapping, creating an echo that seemed to come from inside her own skull. It wasn't the laughter she'd heard from Fae before—not musical or mocking or cruel in any way she recognised. This laughter sounded like it was learning the concept, practicing the mechanics of it without truly understanding the emotion underneath. Like a bird mimicking speech after hearing a single word. The trees at the clearing's edge began to lean inward. Not swaying. Not bending in response to wind. Leaning. Deliberately. Fundamentally. The trunks, massive and ancient, tilted toward her as if the earth beneath them had shifted, had reoriented itself so that "down" now pointed toward the center of the clearing where Aurora stood. She moved backward, away from the encroaching trees. The flowers crushed beneath her trainers, finally breaking their rigid stillness with a sound like snapping bone. The pendant burned now. Actively burned. Hot enough that Aurora yanked it out from beneath her shirt and stared at it. The deep crimson stone pulsed with something brighter than its usual glow—veins of gold or yellow light threaded through its depths, moving like living things, like blood circulating through tissue. The leaning trees halted. They hung suspended at disturbing angles, their trunks forming a cage around her, their branches interweaving to block out what little sky she could see. What little anything. But they'd stopped when she pulled out the pendant. That mattered. Aurora gripped it tighter, the chain biting into her palm. "I'm here because the Heartstone called me," she said. Her voice stayed steady, or at least appeared to. "I came willingly. I'm not trespassing. I'm not hunting." The rustling resumed, but now it came from the sky. Overhead, among the branches of the impossibly leaning trees, something moved. Not birds. The movements were too fluid, too coordinated. Multiple somethings, or one something divided into pieces. Aurora couldn't make her eyes focus on any individual point long enough to comprehend what she was seeing. It was like trying to look at stars. The moment she concentrated on finding one, it vanished from her perception. The laughter came again, that terrible learning-sound, but quieter now. Closer. Surrounding her not as an echo but as a presence. The air itself seemed to laugh, seemed to shift and change and become something other than air. Aurora held the Heartstone pendant up higher, like a shield, like an offering. The stone burned brighter in response. Veins of light spread further through its depths, reaching toward every visible edge of the crimson gem. Above, the movement stopped. The branches froze mid-sway. Even the flowers—she realised now they had been moving, had been moving the entire time, bending and straightening in patterns that no flower should follow—fell perfectly still. The pendant pulsed. Steady now. Rhythmic. Purposeful. And in that moment of suspension, hanging between the leaning trees and the frozen flowers and the countless unseen presences suspended in the branches above, Aurora heard something else entirely. Not a sound, exactly. More like the absence of sound given voice. Like silence made audible. It whispered her name. Not Rory. Not Laila, the name she'd used when she'd first come to the Fae Grove two years ago. But Aurora. Her real name. The one nobody in London used. The one she'd never told anyone in the Grove.