Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYV7XZDM8C9M40JPARJ21S

The air in the grove was always different. Heavier. Stiller. As she stepped past the ancient oak standing stones that marked its boundary, the normal night sounds of Richmond Park fell away. The distant hum of traffic, the cry of a distant fox, all of it vanished, swallowed by a silence that felt like a physical weight. Rory pulled her jacket tighter, though the air wasn't cold. It was just… dead. No insects chirped. No small things rustled in the undergrowth. The wildflowers, impossible blooms of vivid blue and ghostly white that had no right to exist in the English autumn, stood motionless in the moonlight. She was here for a reason. A scrap of information, a whispered name from a source she was still learning to trust. Moon-petal. It flowered only in this place, only when the moon was full and low. Supposedly, it could mend things that were broken. She needed it. For what, she wasn't entirely sure yet, but the instinct was a hook in her gut. *Focus, Carter. Find the flower and get out.* Her boots made soft sounds on the mossy ground, each crunch of a fallen twig sounding like a gunshot in the oppressive quiet. She scanned the strange, perfect blooms, looking for one with petals that seemed to drink the moonlight. A faint heat bloomed against her sternum. Rory froze. Her hand went to the silver chain at her throat, her fingers finding the Heartstone Pendant. It was no longer cool to the touch. A gentle, rhythmic pulse of warmth beat against her skin, like a second, slower heart. It only did that near a Hel portal. A gateway to the land of the dead. But there were no portals here. This was Fae-touched, a place of life, not death. Wasn't it? The warmth intensified. *Okay. This is new.* She let her hand drop, her eyes sweeping the clearing again. Nothing. The same silent flowers, the same dark trees standing like sentinels at the edge of the glade. The wrongness was a taste in her mouth now, metallic and sharp. A single, sharp *snap* came from her left. Her head whipped around. A broken twig lay on the ground a dozen feet away. Freshly broken. She stared at the dark space between two massive oaks. The shadows there were deep, impossibly so. They looked less like an absence of light and more like a solid, viscous substance. *Just a deer. They're all over the park.* Deer didn't move without making another sound. They didn't stand in the absolute stillness she was witnessing now. She took a hesitant step back, her gaze locked on that patch of darkness. The pendant against her skin grew hotter, a clear and insistent warning. She should run. Her every instinct screamed it. But her feet felt rooted to the spot, caught in the grove's strange time-drift. Another sound. A soft, slithering whisper, like silk being drawn over stone. There was no wind. Nothing moved. Yet the sound was there, wrapping around her, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once. From the right. From behind her. From the air right in front of her face. The wildflowers at the edge of the clearing began to tremble. Not a sway. A tremble. A violent, microscopic vibration that made them look blurry. The air shimmered with it. Rory’s breath hitched. A cold prickle traced a path down her spine. The rational part of her brain, the part that had aced Pre-Law and dissected legal arguments for fun, was frantically trying to build a case for normalcy. Strange acoustics. A localized weather phenomenon. A trick of the light. It was losing the argument. Because now she could see it. At the very edge of her vision, in the periphery she couldn't quite focus on, something moved. A shape that was darker than the shadows around it. It was tall and impossibly thin, its limbs too long for its body. It didn't walk. It flowed. A glitch in the fabric of the night. She snapped her head to the side. Nothing. Just the trees and the deep, waiting shadows. *You didn't see it. It's the fear. Your mind playing tricks.* But the Heartstone was almost burning now. The heat was a brand against her skin. And the silence had changed. It was no longer empty. It was listening. A thick, attentive silence that pressed in on her, waiting. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her more than any winter frost, that she was not alone. It had been watching her since she stepped between the stones. It had let her feel its presence, slowly, deliberately, like a cat toying with a mouse. The slithering sound came again, closer this time. And a new sound joined it. A soft, rhythmic tapping. Click. Click. Click. Like long fingernails being tapped patiently against wood. It circled her. Slow, methodical. Tapping from the left, then the right, then from behind. Rory didn't dare turn. She just stared straight ahead, at the moon-drenched center of the grove, her heart hammering against her ribs. The tapping stopped. The slithering stopped. The listening silence descended once more. Then, one of the deepest shadows near the largest oak detached itself from the others. It stepped forward, not into the moonlight, but just to the very edge of it, a place of twilight and ambiguity. Its form was a distortion, a tear in the reality she knew. It had the shape of a person, but its proportions were all wrong, its limbs bending at angles that would shatter bone. It raised a hand, a long, spindly thing that ended in too many joints, and pointed a single, elongated finger directly at her.