Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYJJ6MKBQJVEGQ91GT7321

The stones marked the boundary like the ribs of an old animal. Aurora had stood at their edge until the cold bled through her jacket, the Heartstone snug against her sternum under her shirt, warm and patient. Night had folded over Richmond Park in a clean, dark sheet. Inside the ring, the air tasted different—thin, like the breath between two worlds. "I came because it pulsed," she said to the trees, to the silver chain, to the empty space that answered with moth-dark quiet. Her voice fell away and the pendant warmed, a small steady thrum against the skin where the crescent scar caught the chain and made it sit slightly off-centre. She had put one foot past the oaks and the grass had held the sound of it, as if the grove kept memory. Wildflowers leaned under the moonlight and opened faces at her arrival. Their petals had no frost on them; dew had settled like tiny lenses that reflected her own uncertain face back at her. For a moment she looked like a stranger. "Okay," she said. "No drama. Check it. Come back." Her phone told her it was a quarter past three. The lock screen had a photograph of Eva laughing over curry at Golden Empress two days ago. The timestamp spun and misbehaved every time she glanced. Time here had the bad manners of a drunk guest: it arrived late, it left early, it refused to follow the script. Aurora tucked the phone away. Metal kissed skin beneath fabric, a heartbeat of light. At first the wrongness had texture rather than shape. There were sounds that did not belong: a cloth dragged across stone where there was no stone; the dry krek of something climbing an invisible fence; the faint, precise clink of a bone against glass. They were small, quick things. She collected them and found they fit into a pattern she did not want to understand. "Hello?" she tried again, and the word came out less confident. It hung, a paper boat on still water. The pendant answered by warming. The glow inside the tiny crimson stone thinned and brightened like a thought inhaled. It pulsed faintly toward the oak on her right, then toward the ring of standing stones, mapping the air in a slow, private orbit. She moved. Boots sank into moss that did not smell of earth but of iron and old papers. Her shadow slid the wrong way, elongated, collapsed, then refused to line up with her at all. Once—twice—she realised the rustle she heard to her left had not been caused by wind. Leaves uncurled and folded back again as if some invisible hand read them a single sentence. "I should just—take a picture, a recording," she said, already fishing the camera app open. Her fingers hovered. The screen held a white smear where the clearing was, and in the smear a darker smear like a face. She frowned. The smear changed when she blinked, smiled at angles her mouth could not. The first voice arrived like the wrong echo. It sounded close, like someone whispering into the shell of a big bone. No shape made it. No one stepped into view. "Rory." Her name could have been the wind. It could have been a memory dredged up by the grove. She knew the sound of it as if she had always been named that and sometimes not. The name made the skin at the back of her neck prickle. That prickle was practical. It meant alertness. It meant she did not run. "Who are you?" she asked out loud. Her fingers tightened on the pendant so the chain bit the skin of her wrist, pulled the crescent scar into a small white crescent of pain. Pain anchored her. The answer came like a child imitating speech, like someone who had learned words from a whispering radio. It folded around the trees and came back thinner. "Not who you expect." "Not who I expect," she agreed, stepping toward the centre because movement made the world solid. Her breath steamed white in front of her, small and human in the space between the flowers. The pendant warmed under her fingers until the metal felt like a coin kept in a pocket for years. There were things at the edge of vision that did not belong to night. A shadow bunched between two trunks and folded like fabric. It did not have a clear outline—tendrils of darkness lapped at air and withdrew. Petals turned away from it the way skin turned from a hot stove. Aurora kept talking. Dialogue filled the vacuum where fear might otherwise grow loud. "You know why I'm here," she said. "You made it hum in my coat last night. It woke me in the van, made the rice boxes rattle." Silence. The grove paid no compliments. It listened as if listening were a weapon. "Show me something useful," she added, sharper. "Names. Directions. A door. Anything." Something moved near a stone and the world lost its edges. The pendant pulsed faster, a small, insistent thing: a pulse that told her she had not guessed wrong, that the warmth which had chased her from the city windows had a source. She could imagine it—a thin seam between world and world, a hairline fracture where the Hel portals bled their cold into the bark. The Heartstone's glow sometimes pulsed with that tide. She had been given the gem by someone who had said nothing and left everything. "I don't talk to shadows," she muttered. "So either you talk back or I leave." The voice returned in a different pitch, a careful mimicry, like someone learning accents from the radio. "Laila," it offered. Aurora froze. Laila was a name she had not used since college when, briefly, she had tried on other ways to be. It lay somewhere under her given name and her school nickname and the pet names you avoided in job interviews. The grove had picked one and held it up. "What do you want with a delivery girl?" she asked, laughing without amusement. She tucked the pendant back inside her jacket, keeping its warmth as close as a pulse. "You carry," said the grove, or the thing that passed for the grove's words. The syllable moved air, rearranged it. "You carry between things. You know thresholds." "That's called a job," she replied. "I don't—carry between things. I carry food. People call it food." "Sometimes food carries stories," the voice said. It had no gender, no breath, a voice like rustling paper and wet stone. "And sometimes people carry doors because they wear the wrong kind of bone." Aurora heard the humour in it before she recognised it as humour. She did not like jokes that leaned on people's ribs. "Don't speak like you know about Evan," she said, without looking for him. The name tasted of old fights and slammed doors. It was a hand she had pulled away from. The grove bent that memory with delicate fingers. Silence answered. The wildflowers kept their faces polite. "Stop," she said, softer. "If this is a test, I'm not in the mood." A movement to her left made the air sing. Leaves at knee-height shivered though no wind touched them. The stones threw long, inaccurate shadows that crossed beneath her shoes. She took another step and found the sound of her boots did not always meet the ground. Sometimes it met thin air and made a hollow. A smell rose then—like wet wool and old coins and something floral that was not any flower she had ever known. It filled her nose and slid down the back of her throat; it made her want to cough and kept her from doing it. "You asked," the voice said. "You stepped through." "I almost didn't," she admitted. "There was a pub, there was a warm flat, there were lists of things to do tomorrow. But it pulsed. It pulled." "It always pulls," replied the voice. "It likes people who can close things." Aurora did not like being called functional. She preferred the label quiet, precise, clever. Functional felt like a role in a play she hadn't auditioned for. A figure unfolded between two stones, not fully a person. Its limbs were long and wrong in the way that made human eyes anxious. It wore the idea of a coat—nothing that could keep rain from hair—but when it turned, the surface of it reflected nothing. The space where a face should have been held air that remembered a face. It stepped into the light and the wildflowers leaned, half-curious, half-afraid. "Don't come closer," Aurora said. Her fingers found the scar and traced it without thinking. The chain beneath her jacket had cooled and then flared like a warning lantern. The thing tilted its head. The motion was a question and an answer. Its voice—if it could be called a voice—rearranged the grove. "You are alone," it said. "But not lonely." "You're wrong about the second part," Aurora said. "I'm never alone for long." Her mouth tasted metallic. The pendant pulsed hard, as if it kept time with something huge and slow below the ground. A light leaked from the stone, thin as a thought. Something in the clearing responded: a faint answering luminescence that bled from between two rocks, a vein of light that the wildflowers ignored. The figure stepped forward and the air distorted like heat over asphalt. Her phone lay on its own screen in her hand; the camera showed nothing but a smear of colour that rearranged into a dozen half-recognised faces. Once, for a second, the smear took the shape of the man she had left—the lean jaw, the well-cut excuses—and then it was gone. "Don't," she said. "I left that for a reason." The thing—if it was a thing—made no claim to empathy. It only smiled the way a pond reflected the moon: perfectly, patiently, without malice but without warmth. "You left because you thought the door would stay shut," it said. "Doors are habits. They open when people forget to close them." "Shut up and show me how to close yours," Aurora replied. She kept her voice even. The grove wanted drama. She would refuse it. She stepped in, close enough to see the way the thing's limbs bent at angles that had no business in human joints. The pendant warmed so fiercely her palm wanted to blister. Its inner light pulsed in quick, shallow bursts, like a trapped bird. "Close it," the figure insisted. "Close doors. Close the seam." The grove shifted—time bending like a reed. She felt older and younger at the same time. Her left wrist itched where the crescent scar lived. She watched the pendant and the pendant watched back. "Can you close it yourself?" she asked. "Will you show me?" Silence stretched like silk. The wildflowers hushed their whispers. Something moved behind a stone and the shadows stitched themselves together, making a seam that did not belong. "This is not the way you close a thing," the voice said at last. The tone was almost admiring, the way a predator admired a puzzle. "You do not do it with hands that have opened things on the wrong side." "Then what do I use?" Aurora asked. Her breath was small in her chest. She held the pendant up like a compass that had lost its true north. It stepped back then, and the motion revealed a space between two trunks where moonlight shredded into ribbons. In that slit, the air held a shimmer like heat on a road. The Heartstone pulled—a tug that wanted to be obeyed—and Aurora felt, in the bones behind her teeth, that she stood on the edge of something that could be closed, or opened wider. "Come," the voice said, low and patient. "Come and see." "I came," she said. "I've come this far." Something in the grove shivered like an offended animal. The pendant flared once, too bright. Her pulse answered, a sound in her ears. Footsteps she did not make walked across the carpet of moss and petals and stopped a breath behind her.