Run: 2026-04-25-01KQ2DFH11R7BWQMCNA0HFB1V1

The pendant grew warm against Aurora’s skin before she even saw the stones. She pulled the silver chain free of her collar, letting the heartstone rest against her palm. Its deep crimson surface pulsed with a faint inner glow, the light waxing and waning like a breath held and released. Through the trees ahead, she could just make out the dark shapes of the standing stones, their ancient oak forms twisted into silhouettes against a sky that held too few stars. She’d come because Eva’s message had been urgent. *Rory, I need you. The grove, midnight. Come alone.* And because Eva was the one person who’d never asked anything of her, the one who’d pulled her from the wreckage of her old life and found her work and a place to sleep and reasons to keep breathing, Aurora had come. Even though Eva had been missing for three days. Even though the message had arrived on a phone that had been disconnected since Tuesday. The grass beneath her boots was wrong. It bent the wrong way, springing back too quickly after each step, as if it resented her weight. The wildflowers that bloomed year-round in the grove were closed now, their petals drawn tight like tiny fists. In the distance, somewhere beyond the standing stones, a bird called out in a voice that was almost human and then fell abruptly silent. Aurora stopped at the boundary. The standing stones loomed above her, their surfaces carved with patterns that seemed to shift when she looked at them directly. She’d been here before, twice, both times with Silas and a group from the bar. The grove had been beautiful then, warm and welcoming, the air thick with the scent of honey and something green and alive. Now the air pressed against her skin like cold fingers, and the scent was wrong — damp earth and old metal, like the smell of a wound. “Eva?” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. The sound of it died quickly, swallowed by the trees. The heartstone grew hotter against her palm, and she felt its pulse quicken, matching the rhythm of her own heart. She’d learned enough in her months above Silas’ bar to know that the pendant was a warning system of sorts, a relic from a place called Dymas that reacted to the presence of Hel portals. It had never glowed like this before. It had never felt like it was trying to burn its way through her skin. She should leave. Every instinct she’d honed through years of reading people, of learning to sense danger in a room before it announced itself, told her to turn around and walk back to the park entrance and call Silas. But Eva’s message had been so desperate. And Eva had saved her once. Aurora stepped through the stones. The transition was immediate and nauseating. The world twisted, colors bleeding into each other like wet paint, and for a moment she was falling sideways through a darkness that had texture and weight. Then her boots hit solid ground, and she was in the grove proper, and the moon was in the wrong place. It hung low and heavy, twice the size it should have been, its surface mottled with shadows that didn’t correspond to any lunar geography she knew. Its light fell strangely, painting the clearing in shades of silver that seemed to come from the wrong direction. The wildflowers that carpeted the grove floor were still closed, their stems bent at angles that suggested they were trying to press themselves back into the earth. Aurora stood very still and listened. At first, there was nothing. A profound silence that seemed to have depth, like water pressing against her eardrums. Then, gradually, she became aware of sounds that shouldn’t have been there. A wet, rhythmic noise from somewhere to her left, like something large breathing through fluid-filled lungs. A soft scratching from the direction of the stones, as if something with too many legs was testing the boundary she’d just crossed. And beneath it all, so faint she almost missed it, the sound of a child humming. There were no children in the grove. There had never been children in the grove. “Eva?” she called again, and this time her voice cracked on the name. Something moved at the edge of her vision, a darting shape that was there and gone before she could turn her head. The humming stopped. In the silence that followed, Aurora became aware of a new sensation — the distinct, creeping certainty that she was being watched. Not observed, not monitored, but *watched* in the way a cat watches a mouse, with patience and hunger and the absolute knowledge of how the encounter would end. She pressed her back against one of the standing stones. The carved patterns were warm against her shoulder blades, warmer than stone had any right to be, and she could feel them shifting, rearranging themselves beneath her touch like blind things seeking light. She pulled away quickly, but not before she felt something that might have been a pulse. The heartstone was blazing now, hot enough that she had to wrap the chain around her knuckles to keep it from burning her palm. Its light painted the immediate area in shades of crimson, and in that light, she saw that the wildflowers had begun to open. Not toward the moonlight, but toward *her*, their petals unfurling to reveal centers that were too dark and too deep, like small mouths yawning wide. “I know you’re there,” she said, because she’d learned that acknowledging the presence of things that shouldn’t exist sometimes robbed them of their power. “I can feel you.” The grove responded. Not with words, not precisely, but with a pressure against her mind that felt like a voice if voices could be made of cold and shadow and the spaces between heartbeats. *Of course you can feel us. We want you to feel us. That’s the point.* Aurora’s breath caught. She’d dealt with fae before, with the denizens of the other realms who sometimes wandered into Silas’ bar and sat drinking in corners while the jukebox played songs that hadn’t been written yet. She’d learned their rules, their love of bargains and wordplay and the exact meaning of things. This was not that. This was older and stranger and it didn’t want to bargain. Movement again, closer this time. A shape that might have been human if humans had too many joints and moved in ways that suggested their bones were only a suggestion. It slipped between the trees at the far edge of the clearing, and Aurora caught a glimpse of something pale that glistened wetly in the oversized moonlight before it was gone. “Where is Eva?” She forced steel into her voice, the same tone she’d used in courtrooms during her brief, miserable legal career. “What have you done with her?” The pressure against her mind shifted, became something that might have been amusement if amusement could curdle milk and kill small birds in flight. *Eva. Eva. Which one was Eva? There have been so many.* The scratching at the boundary stones grew louder. The wet breathing from her left was closer now, and she could smell it — a sweet, cloying scent like overripe fruit and something chemical beneath, something that burned the back of her throat. She turned, putting the standing stone at her back again despite its warmth and its shifting patterns, and tried to track the movements that flickered at the edges of her vision. Three shapes. Maybe four. They moved in ways that made her eyes ache, sliding through the moonlight like fish through dark water. One of them was wearing something that might have been clothes, fabric that hung in tatters from a frame that was too tall and too thin. Another crawled on all fours, or perhaps on all sixes, its limbs articulating in directions that Aurora’s mind kept trying to correct. The heartstone’s light flared, sudden and bright as a camera flash, and for one clear moment she saw them all. They ringed the clearing, a dozen or more of them, and they were *watching* her. Their faces — if they could be called faces — were turned toward her with an attention that was almost reverent. In the center of the clearing, where there should have been nothing but wildflowers, there was a depression in the earth that her eyes kept sliding away from, a place where the ground seemed to breathe. Then the light faded, and they were shadows again, and the humming resumed. It was coming from inside the depression. It was coming from somewhere beneath the earth. And as Aurora listened, her blood turning to ice in her veins, she realized that she recognized the melody. It was a song Eva used to sing, years ago in Cardiff, when they were both young enough to believe the world was simple. “Oh God,” Aurora whispered. “Eva.” Something that was not Eva smiled at her from the darkness between the trees. It had far too many teeth. “She’s still here,” it said, and its voice was the sound of branches breaking under snow. “She’s part of us now. She’s *singing*. Do you want to sing with her, Aurora Carter? Do you want to join the choir?” The heartstone burned. The wildflowers opened their hungry mouths. And in the depression at the center of the grove, something stirred that had been patient for a very long time.