Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WQ1FYZK2K0XMWHD97HY7E

The last dog-walker had left Richmond Park an hour ago. Aurora watched his torchlight bob through the distant tree line until it vanished, and then she was alone with the dark and the sound of her own breathing. She pulled her jacket tighter and checked her phone. 11:47. The screen threw cold light across her knuckles, and the Heartstone pendant pulsed once against her sternum — a slow, liquid warmth, like a second heartbeat pressed to her chest. She tucked the phone away and let her eyes adjust. The oak standing stones were harder to find at night. She'd been here twice in daylight, both times with company, and the grove had felt different then. Inviting, almost. The wildflowers had turned their faces toward her as she'd passed. The air had tasted sweet and old. Now the air tasted of nothing. That was the first wrong thing. Richmond Park in October should smell like wet earth and rot and deer musk. Instead the space between the trees held a vacuum, scentless and still, as though the night had been scrubbed clean. Aurora stopped walking. She stood in the gap between two ancient oaks, their bark ridged and silver under a quarter moon, and she listened. Nothing. No foxes barking. No rustle of wind through canopy. No distant motorway hum that was always, always present in this part of London, even at the dead hours. Just a silence so total it had texture, like gauze packed into her ears. She swallowed. The sound was grotesquely loud. "Right," she whispered, and the word fell dead at her feet. Didn't carry. Didn't echo. Just stopped, like the dark had eaten it. The standing stones materialized out of the tree line one by one as she moved deeper — not stone at all, of course, but oak so ancient and so dense it had petrified into something harder than granite. Five of them in a rough crescent. She counted them off as she passed each one. One. Two. Three. Four. She stopped at five and looked back. Six stones stood behind her. Aurora's pulse kicked sideways. She counted again, slower this time, pointing at each one and mouthing the number. The sixth stone was between the second and third, a narrow column she hadn't passed. Hadn't been there when she'd walked through. She was certain of that. Almost certain. She pressed her palm flat against the Heartstone through her shirt. Warm. Not hot. Whatever the pendant was reacting to, it wasn't a Hel portal. Small comfort. The grove opened ahead of her — a clearing roughly forty feet across, carpeted with wildflowers that should not have been blooming in late October and were not blooming now. The flowers were there, yes, but closed. Every petal sealed shut, every stem bent in the same direction, northeast, as though something in the far corner of the clearing had frightened them into fetal curls. Aurora stepped into the clearing and felt the ground change under her boots. Softer. Spongy. The grass here was too long and too wet. It wrapped around her ankles with each step and released with a faint sucking sound. She'd come because the message had told her to. Three words scratched into the condensation on her bathroom mirror that morning, in handwriting she didn't recognize: GROVE. MIDNIGHT. ALONE. She'd spent the day telling herself she wouldn't go. Then she'd put on her boots. Quick out-of-the-box thinking, Eva called it. Rory called it something less flattering. The compulsion to walk straight into whatever dark room everyone else had the sense to avoid. She reached the centre of the clearing and turned in a slow circle. Nothing. Just the wall of ancient trees, the sealed flowers, the wrong silence. She checked her phone again. 11:58. The screen flickered. A single bar of signal shivered and died. The time display blinked — 11:58, then 11:51, then 12:17, then 11:58 again — and she shoved the phone back in her pocket before the numbers could rearrange themselves further. Time moved differently here. She knew that. She'd been warned. But she hadn't been warned about the sound. It started low. So low she felt it before she heard it — a vibration in the soft earth that climbed through the soles of her boots and settled in her molars. A hum. Not mechanical. Not musical. Organic and vast, like the ground itself was exhaling through clenched teeth. Aurora held still. The hum climbed in register, found a frequency that made her sinuses ache, and stopped. In the silence that followed, she heard breathing. Not hers. She held her own breath to be sure. The sound continued — slow, deliberate inhalations from somewhere behind the tree line to her left. The rhythm was wrong. Too long between each breath. Thirty seconds of silence, then a slow, wet intake that lasted five or six beats, then silence again. "I'm here," Aurora said. Her voice came out steadier than she'd expected. "You left me a message. So I'm here." The breathing stopped. She waited. The pendant was warmer now, not by much, but enough that she was aware of it against her skin — a coin left in the sun. She wrapped her fingers around it through her shirt and squeezed. A branch cracked. Not to her left, where the breathing had been, but directly behind her. Close. Ten feet, maybe less. The snap was sharp and definitive, the sound of something heavy shifting its weight. Aurora turned. The tree line stared back, black and featureless. But one of the shadows between the oaks was the wrong shape. Taller than it should have been. Narrower. And as she watched, it moved — not quickly, not with any sudden lunge, but with the slow lateral drift of something that had been standing motionless for a very long time and was only now deciding to adjust its position by a few inches to the right. Her mouth went dry. She couldn't make out features. Couldn't tell where the shadow ended and the dark began. Just the shape of it — tall, thin, upright in a way that no tree or stone or deer could account for — and the absolute certainty that it was watching her. "Who are you?" The shape didn't answer. It drifted another inch to the right, and Aurora became aware, with a cold drop in her stomach, that it wasn't moving laterally at all. It was moving toward her. The angle had just been wrong. It was coming closer in fractions so small that the approach looked like a sidestep, and each time she blinked it was nearer by the width of a hand. She locked her eyes open. Tears built. The shape held still while she watched it, patient, content to wait for the next blink. Her eyes burned. She blinked. It was fifteen feet away now. Close enough that she could see it wasn't a shadow at all but a gap — a void cut into the air in the rough outline of a figure, a space where the dark was denser and the faint moonlight simply stopped. It had no face. No surface. It was the absence of something, and the outline kept shifting at the edges like smoke failing to hold a shape. The pendant flared hot against her chest. Not Hel-portal hot. Something else. A warning she had no frame of reference for. Aurora took a step backward. The wet grass gripped her ankle and held. She yanked her foot free with a sound like a kiss breaking, and the void-shape shuddered. The outline of its head — if it was a head — tilted. The movement was curious. Almost gentle. The way a person might cock their head at a bird that had landed on a nearby branch. Then the flowers opened. Every bloom in the clearing unfurled at once with a sound like a hundred whispered syllables, and the smell hit her — not the sweetness she remembered from her daylight visits but something coppery and alive, the scent of a wound before the blood dries. The flowers faced her now. All of them. Every petal angled inward toward the centre where she stood, and in the dim moonlight she could see that they weren't the white and purple she remembered. They were dark. Wine-dark. The colour of the Heartstone pendant, and they pulsed in time with the warmth against her chest. The void-shape took a step. A real one this time, not the creeping fractional drift but a deliberate forward motion that covered three feet in a single fluid movement. The grass didn't bend under it. No sound accompanied the step. It simply occupied a new space, closer, the outline of one long limb still extended in mid-stride. Aurora's hand found the pendant and pulled it free of her shirt. The crimson stone threw a feeble glow across her fingers, barely brighter than a dying ember, and in its light she saw the ground between her and the shape. Footprints. Dozens of them, pressed into the soft earth in concentric circles around the spot where she stood. Not fresh — the edges had softened with rain and time. But they were her size. Her tread pattern. The chevron grip of the boots she was wearing right now. She'd been here before. Or she would come here again. Or time had folded over on itself in this pocket between worlds and all her visits — past, future, imagined — had left their marks at once. The shape stood ten feet away and did not move. The flowers pulsed. The pendant burned. And from somewhere in the tree line behind the void, the breathing started again — only now it came from every direction at once, surrounding the clearing in a ring of slow, measured inhalations that rose and fell with the rhythm of the Heartstone in her fist. Aurora's mouth opened. She tasted copper. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She didn't reach for it. Couldn't look away. The shape held still, its not-face angled toward hers, waiting with the patience of something that had been here since the oaks were saplings and would be here long after they fell. A second vibration. A third. Then a continuous buzzing that drilled into her hip, and the pendant went cold — instant, total, like plunging her hand into ice water. The glow snuffed out. The void-shape exhaled. She felt it on her face. Warm. Wet. It smelled like soil after rain, and underneath that, something sweet and cloying that stuck to the roof of her mouth. The outline of the figure sharpened for a single heartbeat — she glimpsed angles that suggested cheekbones, the hollow where eyes should have been, a jaw that was too long and hinged in the wrong place — and then the moonlight shifted and it was just a gap again, a tear in the night shaped like a person. Her phone stopped buzzing. The silence flooded back, thicker than before. The flowers closed one by one, each shutting with a soft, wet click that sounded horribly like teeth meeting. The shape raised what might have been a hand. It pointed at the ground between them. At the footprints. At the circles she had apparently walked, was walking, would walk. Then the hand — the limb — the suggestion of a gesture — turned and pointed at her chest. At the spot where the pendant hung dark and dead against her shirt. Then it spoke. Not in words. Not in sound. The voice arrived inside her skull, behind her eyes, in the place where thoughts form before language captures them. A single impression, clear and absolute, that carried no syllable but communicated with the precision of a knife: *You left this for yourself.* The clearing went black. The moon vanished behind a cloud. And in the perfect dark, Aurora heard the grass begin to move around her feet in slow, tightening circles — the sound of something vast and patient, drawing closed.