Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYEYYV8ZHK8WE0CKM8CV1Q

The taxi had dropped her at the Richmond Park gate, and Aurora had paid the driver in cash without explaining why she needed to be let out at this hour. The man had looked at her strangely in the rearview mirror before pulling away, the taillights disappearing down the dark road like the eyes of some large animal blinking shut. She hadn't minded. She had other things on her mind. The Heartstone Pendant hung cold against her chest. It had been cold for three days now—ever since she'd found the note tucked into her flat door, a single sheet of paper in handwriting she didn't recognize. The message had been simple: *The Grove. Tonight. Come alone. Ask for Isolde.* She didn't know who Isolde was. She didn't know who had left the note or how they'd gotten into the building. Silas, her landlord, kept the front door locked, and Rory had checked the lock herself after finding the paper. The deadbolt had been secure. Nothing else had been disturbed—nothing taken, nothing moved. Just the note, left like a challenge or a summons. She had come anyway. That was what she did. When something was wrong, she walked toward it, not away. Eva called it stubbornness. Her mother called it reckless. Rory called it the only way she knew how to live. The path into the park was overgrown, though she found it easily enough. Her phone's flashlight cut a pale wound through the darkness, illuminating twisted oak branches that seemed to reach toward her like grasping fingers. The air smelled different here—thicker, heavier, layered with something floral she couldn't name. Wildflowers, she remembered. The note had mentioned wildflowers. She found the standing stones within twenty minutes, though she hadn't expected to find them so quickly. According to the maps she'd studied, this area should have been dense woodland, impenetrable at night. Instead, she stood at the edge of a clearing, and the clearing opened before her like a held breath finally released. The oak stones rose eight feet tall, arranged in a rough circle that caught the moonlight and threw it back in fragments. Between them, the grass grew waist-high and silver-touched, moving in a breeze she couldn't feel. At the center of the clearing stood a tree—a single ash, massive and ancient, its trunk scarred with symbols she didn't recognize. The pendant pulsed warm against her skin. Rory stopped at the edge of the stones. The warmth was faint, barely there, but it was the first change in three days. She pressed her palm flat against the pendant, feeling its faint heartbeat like a second pulse layered beneath her own. "I'm here," she said. Her voice came out steady, though the words fell into the darkness and vanished without echo. "I don't know who you are, but I came. So show yourself." Silence answered her. Not the silence of an empty place—it was too total, too heavy. It was the silence of somewhere listening. She stepped between the standing stones. The moment she crossed the boundary, the quality of the air changed. The floral scent intensified, nearly choking, and then faded into something else—something older, deeper, like the smell of rain on stone that had been dry for centuries. The moonlight shifted, brightening though clouds obscured the sky. The grass around her had begun to move, but not with the wind. It rippled in patterns, slow and deliberate, like something passing beneath the surface. The ash tree at the center of the clearing was covered in blossoms. She hadn't noticed them from outside—white flowers that gleamed with a faint luminescence, each one glowing softly like a small held breath. They hadn't been blooming when she'd first looked. She was certain of that. She had been looking right at the tree, and there had been no flowers. Now they covered every branch, every twig, a weight of petals that seemed ready to fall but never did. "Hello?" She kept her voice level. Speaking aloud felt important somehow—a way of claiming space in whatever this was. "I was told to come here. There's a woman named Isolde. I need to speak with her." The flowers on the ash tree trembled. Not from wind. From something else. Rory waited. The pendant pulsed warmth in slow, rhythmic intervals, and she counted the beats without meaning to. Seven seconds between each one. Seven seconds exactly, like a clock that had found its own rhythm. Then she heard the sound. It came from behind her—a soft sound, barely there, like a footstep in dry grass. She turned, shining her phone's flashlight toward the darkness between the standing stones. Nothing. The oak pillars stood in their ancient circle, unmoving, unchanged. She turned back to the clearing. The ash tree was closer. Not closer in distance—she hadn't moved, and neither had the tree. But it filled more of her vision now, dominated more of the space. The blossoms seemed larger. The trunk seemed wider. The symbols carved into the bark had changed; they hadn't been there before, or she hadn't seen them, but now they wound upward in spiraling patterns that made her eyes ache if she looked too long. The pendant pulsed faster. Six seconds now between beats. Rory took a step backward. The grass resisted her foot, not like mud but like something alive, something that didn't want her to leave. She pushed through it anyway, her ankle catching on something she couldn't see. She stumbled, caught herself, and when she looked down, the grass was at her chest. It hadn't been that tall before. She was certain of that. She was five-foot-six, and the grass had been at her waist. Something creaked behind her. A sound like wood bending under weight, slow and deliberate. She spun around, phone raised, and the flashlight swept across the standing stones. They had moved. They hadn't been in that arrangement before—she had walked between them, she remembered the path clearly, but now they stood at different angles, their positions shifted like the points of a compass spinning slowly out of alignment. The flowers on the ash tree had begun to fall. They drifted downward in slow motion, each petal catching the moonlight, each one landing without sound. But there were so many of them, a cascading waterfall of white, and they didn't scatter. They accumulated, forming patterns on the ground, patterns that looked almost like— Rory's breath caught. They looked like footprints. Leading from the ash tree toward where she stood. And then beyond her, toward the gap between the standing stones where she had entered. The clearing was not empty. She had known that already—had felt it the moment she crossed between the stones, had heard the silence that was too complete to be anything but listening. But knowing it and seeing evidence of it were different things. The patterns made by the fallen petals were not random. They were too regular, too deliberate. Each one shaped like the print of a bare foot, heel to toe, the curve of an arch, the individual marks of toes. They started at the tree. They ended at the edge of where she stood. And then they started again. Past her. Toward the stones. Something was circling her. "Show yourself." Her voice cracked on the second word. She steadied it, forced it back under control. "I didn't come here to play games. If you want to talk, then talk." The ash tree groaned. The sound was deep, vibrational, felt more than heard, and the trunk had begun to twist. Not with wind—there was no wind—but with something internal, something that turned the wood like muscle flexing. The symbols carved into the bark shifted, rearranged themselves, and then resolved into something she could read. *YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED.* The letters glowed faintly, then faded. Rory's hand found the pendant. It pulsed quickly now—three seconds between beats, maybe less—and the warmth had intensified, burning almost. She thought of the note, the simple instruction. *Ask for Isolde.* "Isolde," she said. "I asked for Isolde." The flowers stopped falling. The clearing went silent—not listening silence this time, but waiting silence, the kind that precedes a question about to be answered. And then she heard it. Breathing. Not her own. Not the sound of the trees or the grass or the distant noise of the city beyond the park. Breathing. Slow and deep and close, closer than the ash tree, closer than the standing stones. Breathing that matched the pulse of the pendant, three seconds between each inhale and exhale. Something exhaled, and she felt it on the back of her neck. Rory did not turn around. Every instinct screamed at her to turn around, to face whatever was behind her, but she held still. Her fingers tightened on the pendant. The warmth surged, and the breathing paused—interrupted, as if the thing behind her had noticed the change. "You came to the Grove," a voice said. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from the ash tree and the standing stones and the space directly behind her. It was not a human voice. It was layered, harmonic, like several voices speaking in unison with slightly different tones. "You came because you were called." "Yes." The word came out as a whisper. "You were not supposed to come." The voice held something like wonder, or perhaps amusement. "The one who called you does not know what lives here. What has always lived here. In the space between." Rory's jaw tightened. She thought of Evan—thought of the three years she'd spent with a man who had made her feel small and afraid, thought of the night she'd finally left, sneaking out while he slept with a bag she hadn't fully packed and a phone she'd turned off. She thought of the fear that had lived in her chest for years, the fear that told her she couldn't do things, couldn't go places, couldn't be safe. She was not afraid of this. Whatever this was. "I came anyway," she said. "So either talk to me or let me leave. I'm not interested in being circled." The breathing resumed. But it was different now—not behind her but all around her, shifting position with each exhale. And then, gradually, it began to move toward the ash tree. Toward the center of the clearing. The petals that had fallen began to stir. They lifted, one by one, each one rising from the ground as if caught in a gentle updraft. They formed a shape—a woman's shape, tall and slender, made entirely of white flowers. The face was blank, featureless, but it turned toward her with the slow intention of something aware. "The pendant," the voice said, and now it came from the flower-figure, from the petals that formed its lips. "You carry the Heartstone." "It was given to me." "By whom?" Rory shook her head. She didn't know. She had never known. The note had come with the pendant, left on her doorstep three weeks before the note about the Grove. A gift, the card had said. *For what comes next.* No name, no explanation, no return address. "I don't know," she said. The flower-figure tilted its head. The blank face couldn't express emotion, but something in the angle of it suggested curiosity. Or hunger. "It pulses for the Grove," the figure said. "It knows this place. It knows what lives in the space between. But you, Aurora Carter—you do not know. You came anyway." "I came because I was asked." "You came because you are curious. Because you are brave. Because you have never been afraid of the dark." The figure took a step forward. The petals that formed its feet did not make a sound. "But this is not the dark you know. This is older. This is the dark that existed before humanity, before the first fire, before the first word for fear." Rory's hand stayed on the pendant. It burned now, really burned, but she didn't let go. The warmth traveled up her arm, into her chest, and she felt it settle somewhere behind her ribs like a second heart beginning to beat. "What do you want?" she asked. The flower-figure stopped. The breathing that surrounded her stopped with it. The silence was absolute, total, a silence so complete it felt like pressure against her eardrums. "What do any of us want," the voice said slowly, "who live in the space between?" And then the figure moved—not toward her but past her, through her, and Rory felt the brush of something impossible. Not cold, not warm. Not solid, not insubstantial. Something that existed in between, that passed through her like light through glass, and when it was done, when the flower-figure had moved past her and taken its place at the edge of the clearing, Rory found that she could move again. She turned. The figure stood at the gap between the standing stones, blocking the way out. "You carry something that belongs here," the voice said. "You cannot leave until you understand what it is. What it means. What you have been called to become." Rory looked at the pendant. It pulsed steadily now, the warmth steady, the beat matching her own heart. "Tell me," she said. The flower-figure raised one hand—a gesture made of drifting petals, unstable, constantly falling apart and reforming. "Ask for Isolde," it said. "I am Isolde. And I have been waiting for you since before you were born." The flowers on the ash tree began to fall again. The standing stones shifted behind her, the gap closing, and Rory understood then that she had not been given a choice. She had been given a direction. She had walked into the space between, and now she would have to see it through. The pendant burned. The darkness waited. And somewhere in the Grove—in the space between, in the ancient roots of the ash tree, in the silence that had learned her name—something that had been waiting finally began to move.