Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYDSDMX87N9Q25YATEDHJ6

"This had better be worth it." She lowered herself between two standing oaks and the air changed. The leaves stopped clattering. The wildflowers shone like small fires, each petal clear against the dark. She felt the silence as a weight against her ears, the way the world outside the Grove usually fit around sound like a glove. Here, sound hung loose and waited. Aurora slipped the pendant from beneath her shirt and cupped it in her palm. The silver chain whispered across her knuckles. The gem, a thumb-sized depth of crimson, breathed warmth into the hollow of her hand. Not hot. Not even quite warm. It pulsed like a heartbeat that belonged to someone else. "Come on," she muttered, thumb finding the crescent scar on her left wrist and tracing it without thinking. "Tell me you're not lying." She walked. The standing stones ringed her like teeth. The path that had been a ribbon of trampled grass through the middle of the clearing opened under her boots. Moonlight pooled between the roots. The pendant thudded softer. With every step it grew clearer, the faint inner glow like blood behind skin. A sound cut through the silence: a twig snapped two yards to her left. She stopped. The sound was wrong; not the sharp, honest break of a twig, but something blunt and wet, like a foot finding something it shouldn’t. "Hello?" Her voice looked uncertain on the way out. She did not expect an answer. She expected nothing. The answer was wind, or a thing pretending to be wind. It moved through the oaks low and deliberate, a paper-husky rasp. A rustle slid along the grass and became a whisper. Words tried to form and fell apart like animals in a trap. Aurora kept walking. The pendant grew warmer. She followed the warmth, an instinct she could not have named before the object had pressed itself into her life. It was a compass that had no bearing but a direction. "You'll tell me where to go, yeah?" she said to the pendant. Her breath fogged; the night pinched at her lungs though the air tasted neither cold nor warm. "This is where it stopped pulsing when I left the flat. And then it started again three nights ago. At the market. In Eva's shop. If you're a joke, it's not funny." A flower leaned toward her and did not straighten when she passed. Tiny blue petals clung to her sleeve like damp coins. Something moved beyond the trees. Not a silhouette, but a suggestion: a bulge of shadow that didn't belong to any of the trunks, a slow curvature, like someone shifting weight from one foot to another. She turned but saw nothing. The pendant thrummed. It had the rhythm of a thing expecting applause. "Fine," she said. "Lead, and I'll follow. But only for a bit." She kept her hand open. The gem's glow threw a smear of red across the knuckle of her thumb. The sound followed, small things at the edge of hearing — a chirp too high for a songbird, a laugh that started as a cough and then tried to arrange itself into syllables. Each sound retreated when she focused on it. When she chased it with her gaze, the laugh folded into the hum of leaves, the chirp became a beetle's tiny wing, the cough a falling seed. Time slid sideways. She checked her watch once, then again. The hands had not moved enough to account for the sick, slow drop that had started in her stomach. On the second check the hands blinked forward and then back, like a hiccup in the day. She swallowed. The Grove did not care for minutes. "Okay," she said. "This is not a normal place." She found a stone that leaned at a wrong angle and sat. Her back met moss and a cool thickness of loam. She hooked the pendant over her finger and let the chain dangle until the gem hung at the edge of her palm. Its warmth felt closer; the pulse under her skin quickened in answer. A sound grazed the clearing: the squeal of metal on metal, small and sibling to the park gate she used to deliver to in the daytime, but this one had no distance. It rang between the oaks as though someone had scraped a pocketknife across a knife’s back. Her throat tightened. "You don't get to creep up on me," she said. "I've been in more dangerous flats than this." She heard herself smile at a memory that had teeth. It steadied her for a breath. The pendant brightened once, as if pleased by the lie. The flowers rippled. Not in the wind, but like a crowd turning its head. Something tall had moved among them. The shadow at the edge of vision resolved itself into an absence: a narrow, elongated spot where the flowers refused to bloom. The ground there was darker, as if the light avoided it. A child's voice—too small, too slick to be a child—said her name. It had the clarity of a bell scraped by a fingernail. "Laila." She flinched. Her name was private. It lived in mouths that had earned the right to call it. This voice did not belong to any of them. "Who's there?" she asked. Her hand tightened around the stone until the pendant threatened to slip. The answer was a rustle, near enough that it left the hairs on her arm standing. Leaves sighed. Across the clearing, a runner—a shaft of moon—answered from behind a tree and then evaporated. Light bent itself away like a slighting. Aurora slid back so her shoulder met bark. She kept her back to the stone, not because she believed it would protect her, but because the bark offered a thing to press against, a border the Grove recognized. Her fingers scratched the crescent on her wrist with a nervous rhythm. It helped keep the world in focus. "Listen," she said. "I came because this pendant warmed when I passed a place on Richmond High Street. It pulsed in the market. It pulsed at the clocktower. Now it’s leading me here. If you want something from me, ask." Silence gathered like a cloak. The Grove considered. Then, in a voice that smeared between the leaves, a sound answered her: not words so much as a pressure in her head, a fingertip at the base of the skull. You do not ask. The feeling had the cadence of a threat wrapped in velvet. It was not a sound she could pin to a mouth. Aurora cursed softly. "Fine. Let's be direct. Where is the portal?" The pendant swung. The gem pulsed. The warmth became a steady bloom. The leather of the tree under her palm creased. Her breath came shallow now, but she told herself it was practice, or calculation. A thing moved at the corner of her vision: a face perhaps, slid between trunks as if it had been painted on the air. When she turned, the face was not there. Where it had been, the flowers had leaned inward and the grass lay flatter, like a field that had been walked through. She saw a shoeprint, narrow and ungrooved, the edges not quite right—too neat, as if it did not belong to a foot but to a memory of a foot. "You're not going to be useful if you keep doing that," she said. "Help me. Tell me if I'm near what I'm looking for." The pendant answered with a pulse under her palm and a shift in the clearing: a scent, like coins under rain, metallic and clean. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. The air itself seemed to lean. A branch tapped the stone beside her, a dry, articulate knocking. She started but kept her face level, voice neutral. "Come on in then. Come see the amazing human who follows jewellery into haunted gardens. Clap for us, will you?" Light moved along the line of standing stones. For a blink, a figure stood among them: a human shape, tall and too thin, draped in darkness that did not belong to shadow. It did not step forward. Its head cocked, but not like a living head would, more like someone tilting a lid to see inside. The pendant stuck to her skin, warm and obedient. She could feel the shape as a pressure against the back of her hand, as if someone had rested their palm where her bones were. "Name," the clearing suggested, a tone that was not a voice. It wanted inventory. "Rory," she supplied. She used the name she answered to when she wanted to seem smaller to danger. "Aurora Carter. Twenty-five. Delivery driver. Flat above a bar. Not looking for trouble. Leaving—" Her mouth drew a line. She forced the rest down. She did not answer for Evan. The figure tilted its invisible head and the flowers around it bowed. They did so in a way that looked like respect and looked like hunger at once. Aurora felt heat across her mouth. She tasted iron where none should be. "Show me the portal," she said. No footsteps approached. No figure strolled forward to meet command. Instead the pendant surged like a live thing and the grass at her boots erupted into a silent bloom. Where it fell back there was a shallow hollow the size of a fist. It was not a hole, exactly. It was an indentation in the world where light thinned and colour leaned away. She reached down. Her fingers hovered over the sunken earth. The gem warmed so swiftly her palm stung. A laugh that had no lungs drifted through the clearing, thin and delighted. "Don't," she said. The word was breath tight and close. "Don't do that." The laughter stopped. For a long moment only the too-near sound of her own pulse filled her ears and the pendant's steady beat under her thumb. Then, as if a door had eased open, something exhaled: the smell of wet stone and the faint, impossible rasp of leather. The indentation deepened. A thread of black moved inside it like smoke obeying a current. She could have taken her hand away. She kept it over the hollow. It trembled. The pendant flared so bright she could see the veins under her wrist clear as roots. "Okay," she breathed. She did not ask for courage; the Grove did not make deals. She only took stock. "If this is a trap, it will be clever. If it's a doorway, it's older than me. If it's a place to get lost, I've got places to be in the morning." A sound answered from beneath the soil: a name. Not hers, though. A name in a low gutteral voice, threaded with the old tongue she did not know she knew until she heard it. The pendant pulsed like a throat closing. "Who's there?" she demanded, louder than she had meant. The words scraped. From between the stones something leaned forward slowly, an edge of form stepping out of the dark. It dressed itself in the stillness of the clearing, and when it exhaled air ran like ink across the petals. Her skin crawled where the veil of the Grove brushed her arms. "You should not have come," a voice said, close as thumb to ear—her name called and folded into a different sound entirely. Aurora's mouth made another sound. It was short. It held steel. "I didn't know I would. I followed this," and she raised the pendant. Its red glow scoured the darkness. "What do you want?" The figure paused in its motion, as if the question had weight to it. The leaves sighed, the petals shivering. Something moved behind the figure, very near now. A hand, perhaps, or the suggestion of one, brushed the edge of a stone and the bark shivered under its touch. The pendant's pulse doubled. The hollow in the earth no longer looked like an indentation. It looked like a lip. It looked like a mouth beginning to part. She heard the thing at the edge of her hearing breathe and the breath said her name in a language she had not expected to hear and a sound that stole the small, consistent breath between her ribs. She could have drawn her hand back. Her fingers were already instinct with motion. "I—" she began. Something cold pressed across the back of her neck like a hand that had no need of a body. The Grove listened while she made her choice.