Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYSBFWE2DRV4MN0S6A9C42

The London night bit at Aurora’s exposed skin, a sharp, damp cold that promised rain. She pulled the collar of her jacket higher, her breath pluming in the weak moonlight filtering through Richmond Park’s skeletal winter trees. Every step on the dew-slicked grass was a soft crunch, the only sound in an unnatural quiet. No cars. No distant city hum. Just the dead weight of silence. The Heartstone pendant against her sternum was the reason she was here. It had been a faint, persistent warmth all day, a low-level thrum she’d almost gotten used to. An hour ago, that thrum had become a pulse, a steady, insistent beat that pulled her west, out of the city and into the park’s sprawling darkness. It wasn’t a painful feeling, but it was demanding. A summons. She found the path she wasn’t supposed to know about, a faint deer track leading into a denser copse of ancient oaks. And then she saw them. The standing stones. Seven monoliths of dark, gnarled oak, each one the height of a man, arranged in a rough circle. They marked the boundary. This was Isolde’s grove. The Fae Grove. The place Eva had warned her about with a strange seriousness in her eyes. Rory hesitated, her hand instinctively going to the pendant. The crimson stone felt hotter now, almost uncomfortably so. The pulse was stronger, a frantic beat against her fingertips. Whatever was calling to it, it was in there. Her cool-headed nature warred with a primal instinct to turn back, to run back to the familiar, noisy safety of the London streets. But her curiosity, that relentless engine that had driven her through law school and out of a bad relationship, won. She stepped between two of the oak pillars. The change was immediate. The air grew still, not just quiet, but utterly devoid of movement. The faint breeze that had been at her back vanished. The temperature, already cold, dropped several degrees, seeping into her bones. The silence deepened, pressing in on her eardrums. It was a solid, heavy thing. The grove was just as the stories described. A perfect circular clearing, carpeted in a thick, lush moss. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, their colours vibrant even in the pale moonlight—blues so deep they were almost black, whites that seemed to radiate a soft light, reds the colour of spilled blood. They were beautiful. And they were wrong. Nothing bloomed like this in the dead of English winter. A knot of unease tightened in her stomach. The pendant’s heat intensified, a sharp, insistent throb against her skin. She took a few steps deeper into the clearing, her boots sinking silently into the moss. The flowers seemed to lean toward her, their heads tracking her movement. A sound. A soft rustle from her left. Rory froze, every muscle tensed. She scanned the edge of the clearing, where the deep shadows of the oaks bled into the night. Nothing. No wind. Not a single leaf stirred on any of the trees. The sound hadn't come from the trees. It had come from the flowers. She stood perfectly still, listening. The silence returned, thicker than before. It was listening too. She could feel it. She started walking again, toward the centre of the grove, drawn by the frantic beating of the Heartstone. With every step, the feeling of being watched grew stronger. It wasn't just a vague paranoid sensation; it was a physical pressure, like a spotlight trained on her back. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood on end. Another sound. A soft, clicking noise, like dry twigs snapping. It came from behind her. She spun around. The clearing was empty. The flowers swayed gently, though there was no wind. Their movement was slow, a collective, hypnotic dance that made her head swim. But the sound… it was gone. “Hello?” Her voice was a croak, swallowed by the oppressive silence. No answer. Of course, there was no answer. She looked down at the pendant. It was glowing now, a faint, sickly crimson light visible through the thin fabric of her shirt. The heat was a low burn. She pulled it out, the silver chain cold against her fingers while the stone itself felt like a living coal. The light pulsed in time with the beat she felt, pointing like a compass toward the largest of the standing stones on the far side of the grove. That was it. The source. As she turned to face it, a flicker of movement at the very edge of her vision caught her attention. A shadow, detached from its owner, stretching and writhing with an impossible fluidity. It was there and gone in a second, melting back into the darkness between two of the oaks. Rory’s heart hammered against her ribs. This was beyond strange. This was dangerous. Her mind, usually a fortress of logic, struggled to categorize what she was seeing. A trick of the light? A stress-induced hallucination? She didn’t believe in either, not really. She believed in evidence. And the evidence was piling up. She forced herself to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, toward the stone the pendant indicated. The air grew colder still, and a new scent joined the smell of damp earth and cloying floral perfume. It was the smell of an old tomb, of dust and cold stone and the long-dead. It was the smell of absence. The clicking sound returned, closer this time. It was a dry, rhythmic clatter, like someone tapping their long fingernails together. It seemed to come from all directions at once, echoing strangely in the sound-proofed air. She reached the central stone. It was immense, wider than she was, with a surface like gnarled, aged skin. The pendant in her hand was almost too hot to hold now, its crimson light a frantic strobe against the darkness. The low hum she’d mistaken for her own heartbeat was louder here, a resonant thrumming that vibrated up her arm from the stone. She saw it then. A crack in the ancient oak, a jagged line that ran from the base to about chest height. It wasn’t a natural split. The edges were too sharp, too dark. From within that fissure, the sepulchral cold emanated, along with a velvet blackness that seemed to drink the moonlight. The clicking stopped. The silence that rushed back in was absolute, a vacuum. Rory stared into the crack. The blackness within it wasn’t empty. It stirred. It wasn't a movement of a thing, but a movement of the darkness itself, a slow, deliberate swirling like smoke in a vacuum. It coalesced, forming a shape that had no shape, a presence that was defined by its utter lack of light or substance. A wave of pure, animal terror washed over her, so cold and complete it was almost paralyzing. This wasn't Fae magic, not the tricky, whimsical power Eva spoke of. This was something else. Something ancient. Something hungry. The Heartstone pendant, which had been burning with heat, suddenly turned ice-cold in her grasp. The crimson light died, leaving only the deep, lifeless gem. The pulse stopped. And from the crack in the stone, the darkness began to seep out.