Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY9NP97AN6WTDJP3N39R4N

The boundary of Richmond Park dissolved into a screen of mist between two gnarled oaks. Aurora pushed through the chill, a curtain parting between one world and the next. The air changed. It shed the city’s damp exhaust for the scent of night-blooming jasmine and wet earth. Here, in the Fae Grove, the moon was a sharper, brighter thing, a silver-plated coin in a sky choked with stars. She came here for answers. The Grove was a place of balance, a hinge between worlds, and she needed perspective that the smog and noise of London could not offer. Tonight, the balance felt broken. The usual hum of the place, a thrumming energy that vibrated just beneath the soil, was gone. A profound silence pressed in from all sides, so heavy it felt like a physical weight on her shoulders. The wildflowers that carpeted the clearing were lurid in the moonlight, their colours too saturated, their petals opened too wide, like mouths gasping for air. She ran her fingers over the smooth, crimson Heartstone Pendant at her throat. It remained cool against her skin. No hell-spawn, then. The thought offered no comfort. Aurora walked toward the centre of the clearing, her boots sinking slightly into the soft turf. Each footstep sounded deafeningly loud in the stillness. A cluster of standing stones, their surfaces coated in moss and time, loomed ahead. They were her destination. They held the Grove’s oldest magic. But tonight, they didn’t look like ancient guardians. They were monolithic teeth in a gaping jaw. Their shadows stretched long and skeletal across the grass, twisting into shapes that her mind refused to hold. *Snap.* The sound was sharp, definitive. The crack of a dry twig under a heavy foot. It came from the wood line, just beyond the edge of the clearing. Aurora froze, her body rigid. She scanned the wall of interwoven branches and deep shadow. A fox, perhaps. A badger. The park was full of them. But the sound had a deliberate quality, a measured pressure she could not associate with a foraging animal. She waited, listening. The thick silence swallowed the echo, leaving nothing behind. Her heart beat a slow, heavy rhythm against her ribs. She forced herself to move again, her steps more cautious. She kept her eyes on the trees as she approached the central stone, a great menhir that felt warmer than the night air. She placed a hand on its rough surface, hoping to feel the familiar thrum of the place, a connection to its life. Nothing. The stone was just a stone, cold and inert. The life of the Grove had retreated, gone into hiding. A whisper slithered through the air, close to her ear. It was not a voice, but the shape of one, a dry, rustling sound like dead leaves skittering across pavement. She spun around. Nothing. The air was perfectly still. Not a single blade of the long, silvered grass trembled. The cold that had been seeping into her bones intensified, a damp chill that had nothing to do with the night’s temperature. Her breath plumed in a white cloud before her. She pulled her jacket tighter, her knuckles brushing the small, crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. The familiar imperfection was a strange anchor in a place that had become alien. She began to circle the clearing, abandoning the dead stones. She walked the perimeter, her gaze sweeping from the unnaturally vibrant flowers to the dark maw of the woods. The feeling started as a prickle at the base of her neck, the ancient instinct of being prey. The feeling of eyes on her. Unseen. Unblinking. The whispers followed her, always just behind her, a sibilant chorus that vanished whenever she tried to pinpoint its source. Something moved. To her left, at the far edge of her vision. A flicker. A piece of shadow detaching itself from the greater darkness beneath an oak. She snapped her head toward it, her breath catching in her throat. There was only the tree, its bark a road map of deep crevasses, its leaves a motionless canopy against the star-dusted sky. A trick of the moonlight. A smudge on the canvas of the night. Her rational mind supplied these excuses, but they felt thin, worn-out. She picked up her pace, her walk becoming a brisk, silent patrol. The silence was the worst part. It was a vacuum, and the whispers and snaps and flickers of movement were the only things that rushed in to fill it. They were proof that this was not an empty place. It was a watchful one. The pendant at her neck remained placid, a cool weight of silver and stone. Whatever was here, it was not from Hel. It was something other. Something that belonged to the deep, silent woods, to the places where time frayed and the moon shone with a different light. She stopped again near the entrance, near the two oaks that formed the gate. The way out. The thought of London’s mundane reality, of streetlights and the drone of late-night traffic, was a desperate comfort. She could leave. She could turn and push back through the veil and forget the Grove’s sudden hostility. But a cold knot of defiance tightened in her gut. She had come for a reason, and she would not be chased away by shadows. That’s when she saw it clearly. It stepped from behind the furthest standing stone, a pillar of rock nearly swallowed by the darkness. It was not a trick of the light. It was a shape, tall and impossibly thin, its limbs too long for its body. It moved with a disjointed grace, an uncoiling of blackness against the lesser dark. For a single, horrifying second, it passed through a bar of moonlight. She saw no face, no features, only a smooth, pale oval where a face should be. It had no substance, like a figure cut from smoke. It took one silent, gliding step into the clearing, its form wavering, before it receded back into the absolute shadow of the stone. The air punched out of Aurora’s lungs. The silence was no longer empty; it was full of the creature’s presence. The whispers were not the wind; they were its breath. Her blood turned to ice in her veins. Every rational explanation evaporated, burned away by the certainty of what she had seen. She was not alone. And the thing watching her from the darkness was patient.