Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYMGEMST95J6VPCDZTAM1K

The standing stones rose out of the dark like old teeth. Moonlight slicked their faces and pooled in the hollows where ivy refused to climb. Aurora tuned her breath to the hush between the trees and felt the pendant against her palm, warm as a held coin. The silver chain whispered as she looped it over her fingers and watched the deep crimson heart inside pulse faintly, throwing a tight, embarrassed light across her thumb. "I came," she said. She pressed the pendant flat against the crescent scar on her left wrist, and the warmth hopped along her skin as if it recognised the scar's little habit of remembering. She had told herself nothing would startle her here. A stupid promise, spoken alone under an open sky, sounded thin. The grove accepted it without comment. The boundary oaks breathed. The wind outside the stones lay flat and sleeping; inside, leaves sighed in a rhythm that didn't match the world beyond. Something in the air tasted like rusted keys and sugar. Wildflowers leaned forward and unhoused their night scent—sweet, old, and wrong for the season. Her jacket hair drawn tight at the collar, Aurora took one step between the stones. The pendant thudded warm and steady. It was louder than last week, louder than the walk from her flat above Silas's bar to the bus stop. It pulsed as if something on the other side of the clearing had reached out and dipped a finger in. "Show yourself," she said. Her voice landed on the grass and skittered away. For a second, the grove answered with an echo that wasn't an echo; it rearranged her words into something softer, a half-sentence that left meaning hanging like a torn seam. The petals of a bluebell trembled though no wind touched them. She moved deeper, steps careful, boots swallowing dew. At the edge of her vision a branch shifted. It shouldn't have. There was no wind. The branch arranged itself into the gesture of a pointing finger and then, when she blinked, it was merely a branch again. "Stop playing," she said. Her laugh came short. She tightened her grip on the pendant until the silver bit into her palm. The warm pulse under her skin matched her heartbeat. Under the pulse, something old as the stones hummed—not sound, texture. She had followed a stranger's instructions to a place that held no address on any map, guided by a light the size of a thumbnail that had started pulsing in pockets and drawers and beneath train seats. That was the reason: answers. She trusted answers more than memory these days. A noise like children clapping started far away at the edge of the clearing, two hands smacking together in a counting game, then a line of small feet stamping in time. It wasn't the rhythm of children she had heard before. It was too slow and too precise, like someone tapping a metronome inside a closed room. "Who gave this to you?" a voice asked. It wasn't a voice she recognised. It shaped itself from the hush behind the stones and still sounded like it belonged to a different era—papered and re-edged. Her throat tightened. She slid her free hand up to her neck. "The person who had the coin," she answered. Her words left a small puff of warmth. When she spoke, leaves leaned further in. The pendant's glow throbbed; the crimson caught in the darkness and flung back a colour like dried wine. A step sounded to her left. She turned. Nothing. The grass lay flat, as if someone had trailed a long shadow across it and then lifted the weight. She moved again toward the centre of the grove, and the temperature shifted in increments; cool trickled from the trees, then heat crept up from the roots. "You always came when the sky favoured the brave," the voice said. It wasn't a question. She knew the cadence. It sounded like a woman who remembered songs and debts. The sound brushed the back of her neck with the impression of being recognised, and the pendant sang under her hand. "I didn't come for bravery," Aurora said. "I came because it pulsed." She felt childish naming in the sound that replied, an old name she hadn't used since she was a kid in Cardiff. It called her Laila and it landed soft and heavy. "Laila," it breathed. She pressed her thumb so hard into the metal that it ached. The crescent scar burned beneath the pressure. She put the pendant against the scar again and let the warmth draw up her wrist. Moving made the world rearrange itself: paths lengthened, the gap between one stone and another inhaled and exhaled. The grass whispered as something slid through it somewhere behind the ring of standing stones. The sound was the precise, dry scratch of a shoe on sand. She froze and the sound stopped. She took another step and it resumed, skirting her like a cat. She had thought the grove would offer a single, clear sign, a point to plant both feet and say, "Here." Instead it hid itself in the margin. "You're not alone," she said. She did not ask. She stated. Her voice kept her steady the way a sparrow keeps a branch from tilting. A laugh answered—thin and layered, as if several people had laughed into the same echoing cup. It was not warmth. It had the flatness of glass. A shape moved at the periphery then, a shift of cloth and a slit of pale face that vanished when she turned. It left behind the smell of wet paper and the sudden, wrong certainty that footsteps tracked every path she'd taken from Cardiff to London to here. The pendant pulsed faster, the warmth rising like breath to her mouth. "Why me?" she asked. Something in the grove hummed, not with a voice but with a memory. The answer came as a line of words she had not spoken aloud for years: the name of the barrister who'd sat at his polished desk and smiled like a trap, the soft Welsh phrases a mother had taught to soothe a small girl during storms, the single name of Evan only a shadow. The grove collected fragments and returned them as pedigrees. The world narrowed. Aurora's chest filled with the cold of every night she'd spent looking over her shoulder. She set her palm on the nearest stone and felt the slow pulse of the world under bark and root. Time loosened its ties; a moth fluttered across her vision and left months of dust in its wake. She glanced at her phone out of habit. The screen showed a time that had jumped, as if the grove pinched hours from elsewhere and tucked them into the night. "You didn't tell me about him," the voice said. It sounded pleased in a way that made the hair along her arms prick. "I didn't tell you anything," she said. "I don't owe you—" "Answers," the grove finished for her. "You owe us answers." A cluster of foxgloves turned their heads toward her as if to listen. She swallowed. Dialogue continued to keep the moment crisp, to make each step an action and not a surrender. "I found the pendant," she said. "Someone left it. It pulsed. It guided me here." "Guided," the voice echoed. A dry petal skated across the grass. "Or led." Something large shifted behind the oak line, close enough that the bark's furrows showed teeth in silhouette. Aurora heard the scrape of fabric—again the impression of someone wearing old clothes, clothes that had held conversations. The pendant flared, bright as spilled blood, and then reduced itself to a steady ember. She took another step forward. The grove felt alive in a way that made the hair on her skin stand at attention: not merely full of creatures but full of attention, as if eyes hovered within leaves. "Tell me where the Hel portal is," she said. Silence fell heavy and then layered, as if the grove considered multiple answers and layered them into one that had no single truth. The heart of the pendant pulsed hard under her palm and bled heat into her veins. The light inside went from deep crimson to the near-black of a coal about to open into flame. "You will not tell us," the grove hummed finally. "You will be the telling." She felt the words like cold water thrown over her, and a sound—very soft—like paper being folded a thousand times, creased and uncreased, thrummed from the boundary stones. Her throat closed. She had been reasonable once; law school had taught her contingency plans and forms of argument. None of that mattered here. Language folded back over itself until it became ritual and not explanation. A child giggled again, close to her left ear, and it clipped the end off the sentence she'd meant to speak. "Don't be clever," she said. The giggle made a dry sound like wind through a broken bone. Her knees tightened. She felt, more than heard, something step into the clearing. The grass bent not beneath weight but beneath expectation. The pendant warmed until she felt it in her molars. "Why do you keep my names?" a voice asked from very near, like breath against the other side of the stone. It had the clarity of someone who had been listening to incantations for a long time and had learned to repeat them in perfect tones. "You knew them," Aurora said. "You called—" The word she had not used in years—Malphora—slipped out of her like a lock yielding to pressure. It sounded wrong, too ancient for her mouth. The grove answered with a different name, something with syllables like turning keys. It pronounced her like a thing that had been borrowed and kept too long. Something moved in the space between two oaks, a silhouette that might have been garment or might have been shadow. It stepped and the grass around it did not bend; it didn't need to. The pendant pulsed once, a small violent pulse that sent a hot prickle up her arm. "Stop," she said. The silhouette paused. A face arranged itself from the dark in a way that blurred the line between human and reflection—features that seemed both too familiar and rearranged. The mouth opened without sound, then formed a single syllable. "Home," it said. Aurora's breath left in a sharp exhale. Her fingers closed over the pendant until she heard metal kiss metal. Every sensible plan she'd made in the last months — to leave Evan, to take a job that kept her busy, to answer the unknown benefactor with caution and open eyes — evaporated into the night's stillness. All she had left was the pendulum beat under her palm and the certainty that the grove had been waiting for her steps. She moved so slowly her muscles complained. The figure took two steps forward, and sunlight-lightning—or moonlight—caught the edge of a cheekbone. The trees arranged themselves as if to record the moment. "Don't," she said. The figure smiled. The pendant flared. The air pressed against her like a remembered hand. She felt the truth of being watched, catalogued, named. The grove held its breath along with her. "Come forward," it said. She obeyed. Her boot passed a tuft of moss, her heel left a small print. The figure was closer. The pendant beat faster, not like a heart but like a drum counting down. She reached the space where the figure's shadow lay across the grass. The pendant blazed. The figure's mouth began to move and formed the first word of something she thought she wouldn't hear again, and she opened her mouth to answer, to argue, to demand—