Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V0W36R0KJ7Q6429N5AJ9M

The ancient oak standing stones of the Fae Grove cut black silhouettes against the bruised purple of the twilight sky. Aurora Carter stepped through the gap between two of them, the grass under her boots silent and springy. The air in the clearing held a different weight—thicker, cooler, tasting of damp earth and something sweet she couldn’t name. Year-round wildflowers dotted the gloom, their colors muted to shades of grey and blue in the failing light. She had come because the map, drawn in spidery ink on the back of a Golden Empress takeout menu, indicated this spot. Because the note, slipped under her door this morning, had read only: *Midnight. The Grove. He knows.* And because the Heartstone pendant, nestled now against her sternum under her jacket, had given a single, distinct pulse as she’d entered Richmond Park. Rory shoved her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, her fingers finding the familiar crescent ridge of the scar on her left wrist. A habit. A anchor. The cool-headed logic she prided herself on felt thin here, stretched like mist over the clearing. It was too quiet. Not the absence of sound, but the wrong kind of silence. The distant hum of London was gone, swallowed completely. No rustle of nocturnal animals, no sigh of wind through the park’s trees beyond the stone circle. Only the low, steady thrum of her own heartbeat in her ears. The wildflowers didn’t stir. She walked toward the center of the clearing, her eyes scanning the dark spaces between the monolithic oaks. The stones seemed taller at night, their rough surfaces absorbing the weak starlight. She counted them. Twelve. She was sure she’d counted twelve from the outside. Now, standing in the center, turning a slow circle, she saw thirteen. A cold trickle, unrelated to the temperature, traced a path down her spine. She stopped turning. Breathed in. The sweet scent was stronger now, cloying, like rotting honey. A snap, to her left. Her head jerked toward the sound. Nothing but the deeper shadow between two stones. A fallen branch, maybe. The ground here was clear. The Heartstone gave another pulse, a warm bloom against her skin that faded too quickly. Not a warning of a Hel portal—she’d felt that before, a persistent, radiating heat. This was different. A flicker. A signal. “Hello?” Her own voice was a foreign intrusion, swallowed by the grove’s dense silence. No echo. It didn’t travel. Something brushed against the back of her neck—a sensation like a strand of spiderweb. She slapped at it, whirling around. Empty air. *Get a grip, Carter. You’re spooking yourself.* But the intelligence that had gotten her out of Cardiff, away from Evan, that solved logistical puzzles for Yu-Fei’s deliveries with ruthless efficiency, was now screaming a single, coherent thought: *The rules are different here.* A whisper. It came from everywhere and nowhere, a sibilant exhale that skirted the edge of language. It wasn’t a word she knew. It was the sound of dry leaves skittering over stone, given intent. She went still, every muscle locked. Her bright blue eyes, wide now, darted from shadow to shadow. Nothing moved. Then, at the extreme periphery of her left vision, a shape detached itself from the base of one of the oaks. Tall, slender, a column of deeper darkness that flowed rather than stepped. She turned her head to look directly at it. There was only the stone. But the stone… she was certain it had been five paces to the west a moment ago. The geometry of the clearing had shifted. The gap she’d entered through was no longer where she’d left it. The whisper came again, this time from her right. Two voices, maybe three, overlapping in a fluid, breathy chatter. She caught a syllable that might have been “Lai…”—a fragment of ‘Laila’, the alias she’d used for three terrified months in Bristol. A name nothing in London should know. “Who’s there?” Her voice was harder now, a blade she forged from fear. “Show yourself.” The whispering stopped. In the absolute quiet that followed, she heard the footsteps. Soft, measured, a crunch on unseen gravel. They circled her. One set. Then two. A third, lighter, almost a patter. They didn’t sync up. They moved in a lazy, predatory orbit just beyond the ring of stones. Rory’s hand went to the pendant, pulling it out from under her jacket. The deep crimson gemstone held a faint inner glow, just enough to cast a bloody highlight on her fingers. It was warm, not with the portal-heat, but with a living, rhythmic warmth that matched the pace of the circling footsteps. *Thump… step… step… thump…* She was not imagining this. The cool-headed part of her mind began cataloguing exits, weapons, possibilities. Her keys were in her pocket. A small can of anti-harassment spray Eva had insisted she carry. Useless against things that weren’t there. A flicker of movement, straight ahead. Not a shape this time, but a suggestion of one—a distortion in the air, like heat haze on a summer road, but it was cold here. It resolved for a fraction of a second into something with too many long, jointed limbs, before dissolving again. The footsteps paused. The silence that fell was worse. It was a listening silence. A waiting silence. She felt the weight of eyes on her. Not from one direction, but from all around, from the stones themselves, from the earth under her feet, from the empty, star-pricked sky above the clearing. Something was looking at her from a place she couldn’t see, studying her with a cold, impersonal curiosity. The wildflowers at her feet began to wilt. She watched it happen. The petals of a bluebell curled inward, blackening, crumbling to dust in the span of a single held breath. A circle of decay spread out from where she stood, a creeping blight that turned the vibrant grass to ash-grey powder. The Heartstone flared, a sudden, painful heat against her palm. It pulsed in time with the frantic hammer of her heart. A breath, not her own, stirred the hair by her ear. It carried the scent of old books and cold, deep soil. “Aurora.” The voice was right behind her. It was a voice of polished stone and root-sap, genderless and ancient. It knew her real name. She didn’t scream. She didn’t turn. Every instinct told her that turning, meeting the source of that voice, would be an end. She stood frozen in the center of the dying grove, the pendant burning in her fist, the presence at her back so close she could feel the displacement of the air. The footsteps began again, slow and deliberate, moving from the circle of stones inward, converging on her position. They were no longer hiding. She was not alone. She had never been alone from the moment she’d stepped between the stones.