Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQRCQWR001Z4HHAHVZT4CA

The first thing Rory noticed was the absence of London. No distant sirens, no low thrum of traffic, no faint bassline from some idiot’s Bluetooth speaker leaking through trees. Just…empty air and the sound of her own breath frosting in front of her. Richmond Park stretched black and silver under the moon, wet grass brushing the cuffs of her jeans, but once she stepped past the last crumbling bit of chain-link and into the stand of oaks, even the city’s glow thinned out, like light losing its nerve. It wasn’t just shadow. It was as if the world had stepped back a pace and was watching. She stopped and listened. Silence. A proper, deep sort that swallowed the soft rustle of her jacket, the tiny clink of the silver chain at her throat. No dogs barking in the distance. No fox scream. No wind, though she could see the tops of the trees ruffling against the cloud-scarred moon. “Brilliant idea, Carter,” she muttered, because her own voice helped. “Midnight meetup in bloody fairyland. What could possibly go wrong.” The grove opened ahead like a secret inhalation. Ancient oaks stood in a rough circle, not planted, not arranged, just grown old enough and bent enough that their trunks curved inward, like they were conferring. In the moonlight they did look like standing stones—knotted, massive, bark ridged and silver-grey. Between them, the ground dipped into a shallow clearing carpeted in wildflowers. Real, honest blossoms—blue and yellow and white—trembling on thin stems. In February. Her boots squelched as she stepped off the path and into the ring. Moss yielded under her soles, too soft, almost spongy, faintly damp. The smell of earth rose around her—loam and rot and something sweet that didn’t belong in winter. The Heartstone Pendant lay warm against the hollow of her throat. Rory pinched it through her jumper, thumb feeling the small hard shape beneath the knit. It was the size of her thumbnail, crimson and dense, with a weight that had nothing to do with grams. She’d worn it every day for months now without thinking about it, like a habit—necklace, keys, wallet, phone. But tonight it seemed heavier, aware somehow. The silver chain ticked softly under her fingers. The text had been precise: Come to the Grove. Midnight. Bring the Heartstone. I can explain. No name, no number she recognised, just an unknown sender and that sense, as she read it over Eva’s shoulder in the back room of Silas’ bar, that something had clicked into place. Answers. About the stone, about the weird heat in it, about the night she’d woken sweating from a dream of black water and found the necklace in her hand, chain coiled like a question mark. About whoever had sent it. Now, standing alone inside the ring of oaks with damp creeping up her jeans, it seemed possible that she’d made a terrible mistake. She checked her phone. 23:57, weak signal clinging on in the corner of the screen. Enough. Her thumb hovered over Eva’s name in the messaging app. She imagined the string of replies that would follow if she texted Now is not the time, but I might be about to get eaten by trees, can you stay on the line? If she told Eva, Eva would insist on coming. And if this was nothing—some elaborate prank, a lonely weirdo with too much folklore and not enough mates—Rory would never hear the end of it. She slid the phone back into her pocket and pushed her hands deep into her jacket, shoulders hunching against the cold that wasn’t quite cold enough to explain the shiver moving through her. The oak trunks loomed around her, evenly spaced. She could have sworn they’d been wider apart a moment ago. “Okay,” she said to the empty clearing. “You’ve got three minutes. Then I’m going home and deleting your number, mysterious benefactor.” Her breath steamed in front of her, white and quick. She watched it drift and vanish. Something chuckled very softly behind her. She spun, boot heel slipping in mud, fingers clenching around nothing. Her heart punched against her ribs—one, two thuds before she caught herself and forced her shoulders down. The little crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist tingled sharply where her sleeve had ridden up, as if cold air had found it. No one there. Just the pale suggestion of path she’d walked, the darker tangle of underbrush beyond, brambles arcing like claws. “Fox,” she told herself. “Or a bird. Something actually alive. That’s what lives in parks, remember? Animals. Not monsters.” The grove didn’t argue, but it didn’t agree either. It simply listened. She moved further into the clearing, boots whispering through the low flowers. They brushed her ankles like fingers. She paused to look more closely. Daisies, in February. Tiny purple bells that might have been campanula, except there shouldn’t be any this time of year. Their petals gleamed faintly, as if they held onto daylight. The wrongness ticked higher by a degree. Not dangerous, not yet. Just…off. Like a photograph printed slightly out of register. “Maybe that’s the point,” she murmured, thinking of the stories her Welsh grandmother told in a parlour reeking of coal smoke and stewed tea. Fairy places, bent out of true by another world pressing its thumb into the soil. People went into those places and didn’t come out the same. Or didn’t come out. She realised she could no longer hear her own breathing. Her chest still rose and fell; her lungs worked. But the faint rasp of air, the tiny hitch she made when she held it—gone. As if someone had turned down the volume on her body. Her hand flew to her throat. Skin, warm. Pulse under her fingers, quick but steady. The pendant between her nails and her palm, very hot now. Not burning, but close. She held her breath deliberately and heard nothing. Exhaled. Silence. “Right,” she whispered, because the silence was worse. Her voice bounced back from the oaks in a small, tight echo that didn’t sound quite like her. “That’s not creepy at all.” A branch shifted high overhead, a crisp crackle of bark. She looked up, half-expecting to see a squirrel. The canopies of the oaks knitted together like a dark, warped ceiling. The stars beyond were unfamiliar—too many, too bright, patterns wrong. She searched automatically for Orion, for the tail of the Plough. Nothing. She swallowed hard. Her tongue felt too thick. Rory checked her phone again. 00:01. Her fingers, clumsy with the cold, swiped down the lock screen. The signal had gone. No bars. No emergency calls. Fine. She paced. It was either that or stand like a sacrificial idiot in the centre of the circle, and she hadn’t survived twenty-five years of other people’s rage to go out like that. She walked the inside circumference of the ring, trailing her gaze along the trunks. Each oak wore deep grooves from centuries of weather, hollows gaping like blind eyes. Lichen traced pale maps across bark, constellations of its own. Here and there, someone had carved initials, years half-remembered: J.W., ‘73. L + M, inside a sloppy heart. Near the far side of the grove, one of the trunks split into two thick limbs just above the ground, making a narrow arch big enough for a child to duck through. Beyond it, the darkness looked denser, black welled in the space like ink in a cut. The pendant throbbed once under her jumper, a slow, heavy pulse, too deep to be her heartbeat. A faint red glow seeped through the knit, nearly invisible, like banked coals. She stopped. Heat crawled along the silver chain, up the back of her neck. The space between those two limbs was only a darker patch of night, nothing to get dramatic about, but looking at it made something in her hindbrain whine. The air there felt…thin. Wavering. Like those summer days she used to get in Cardiff, standing on the kerb and watching heat dance above the asphalt. Except tonight the cold had teeth. Her breath puffed white. Her fingertips were numb. “Portal,” she said before she could swallow the word. It tasted stupid coming out of her mouth, childish and melodramatic. The grove listened. Under the loam smell, there was another scent now. Faint, but distinct. Iron and ash. A funeral parlour’s cooled ember. It gathered around that narrow gap in the tree. She took one step toward it before she realised her legs had moved. “Stop,” she told herself sharply. Her boots halted. “Nope. We are not walking into random eldritch holes because a necklace’s having a moment.” Somewhere to her right, leaves rustled. She turned slowly. The undergrowth shivered in a line, as if something were moving just beyond it, circling. No shape, only motion. The sense of a body low to the ground, or many small bodies, rippling through bracken. Her scalp prickled. She crouched, fingers curling toward the cold ground, ready to snatch up a rock, a stick, anything. Her eyes strained against the dark. Nothing came out. The rustling continued, a steady progress that never approached, never receded, just drew a loose ring beyond the trees. Encircling, like the oaks. “Maybe foxes,” she whispered, but the word fox sounded wrong here, too bright and everyday. It didn’t match the way the hair on her arms stood up, or the way the flowers at her feet had stilled, petals held rigid as if holding breath. “Rory.” The voice came from directly behind her left ear. She jerked upright with a strangled noise, heart slamming so hard she felt it in her throat. She spun, stumbling, hands up. The clearing was empty. No one between the trees. No figure among the oaks. Only the gap between the twin limbs, darker than ever. “Jesus Christ.” Her own voice shook; she hated it. “No. No. We’re not doing whispering ghost shit. Who’s there?” Silence. Then— “Rory,” the same voice said again, softer. Her mother’s voice this time, precise and lilting and faintly disapproving, Jennifer Carter calling her down for tea. Rory, you’ll be late. Rory, you’re not listening. Her throat closed. “Mum?” The pendant flared hot enough to sting. She sucked in a hiss of air and clutched at it through the fabric, nails digging. Her eyes burned suddenly, stupidly. “Mum, where are you?” No answer. The flowers nearest the twin-limbed oak trembled, as though an invisible breeze moved only there. The next time the voice spoke, it wasn’t her mother’s at all. It was male, rough, too close. “Laila,” it purred. Evan’s voice, the one he used when he wanted her small. “Always running off, aren’t you?” Her stomach lurched. Cold spread through her limbs like ink in water. “You’re not real,” she said. “You’re not—” “You came back,” he murmured. “Good girl.” She couldn’t hear her own breathing. Couldn’t hear her pulse. Only that voice wrapping around her name like fingers. “Fuck off,” she snapped, louder, anger sparking bright and ugly and blessedly ordinary. “You’re not in my head anymore. You’re not anywhere. Do you hear me, you bastard?” The oaks didn’t move, but the space between them seemed to tighten. The ring felt smaller, the trees leaning in. Something shifted at the edge of her vision—just there, to the left, where the bole of an oak curved thick and black. A rounded shape half-behind it. The outline of a shoulder. A face. She turned sharply. Nothing. Only bark and shadow. “Rory,” the voice said again, and this time it wasn’t anyone’s she knew. It was…hers. Not the way she heard herself, but the way she sounded on old videos, flattened and strange. Her fingertips went numb. The little scar on her wrist burned suddenly, a hot line beneath the skin, as if something had traced it. “Stop it,” she whispered, but the plea felt thin, childish. The pendant hammered against her sternum, its own slow rhythm, one beat for every two of her heart. Heat spread outward, a shallow, pulsing warmth that made her chest feel too tight. Drawn and repelled at once, she found herself facing the split oak again. Up close, the space between the limbs was narrower than she’d thought, no wider than her shoulders. The dark pooled there was complete; even the moonlight seemed to slide off its edges. It wasn’t a hole—no carved doorway, no visible difference in the wood. Just night, deeper than it had any right to be. Her hand rose of its own accord, as if some unseen string had tugged it. She stared at her fingers, watched them reach toward that blackness. The air around it felt colder, vibrating faintly against her skin. Nothing touched her. But something on the other side noticed. Awareness pressed back through the dark, immense and patient. It had the weight of deep water. Of stone under the earth. It hadn’t been looking here before; now it was. Her breath hitched—and this time she heard it. A rough, startled sound that broke the strange muting the grove had laid over her. The pendant blazed, sudden and agonising. Heat bit into her palm like a coal. Rory swore and snatched her hand back, wrenching the chain. The tiny crimson stone seared through knit and skin, sharp enough to bring tears to her eyes. The pressure on the other side of the dark surged in response. Not anger, exactly. Interest. A slow, inexorable turning, like some enormous creature rolling over in its sleep and opening one eye. The flowers all around her snapped upright, petals rigid, as if pulled on strings. Their colours dulled to grey under the red flicker pumping from her chest. “Enough,” she gasped through her teeth, fingers fisted around the burning pendant. “No. No. I’m done. I’m leaving.” She spun away from the split oak and strode toward where she was certain the path lay. There was only more grove. Oaks. Wildflowers. No trampled line through brush, no gap in the circle. The trunks all looked the same now, their pattern unfamiliar, as if someone had shuffled them while her back was turned. Panic blew through her like a gust, hot and hollow. Her throat tightened, breath coming fast and loud—she could hear it again, rushing in her ears. “Okay,” she said, hearing the edge in her own voice. “Okay. Calm down. You came in on a straight line. Turn around, walk back in a straight line. It’s not—” The undergrowth rustled ahead of her, a smooth, synchronous movement, like grass parting around a body. She froze. A shape stepped out from between two trunks. It was made of nothing she could name. It was the suggestion of a person assembled from where the light wasn’t, a cut-out in the air, the absence of stars. It wore the faint shimmer of leaves around its edges, like a cloak caught in a wind she couldn’t feel. Where its face should have been, the dark folded inward, layered and deep, as if she were looking down a well. It was exactly her height. Her skin crawled. Every instinct she had screamed to run, but her legs locked. The thing tilted its head, studying her. The void of its face gathered, coalesced. For one awful second, she thought she saw her own features there, reflected in negative—eyes like empty sockets, mouth a pale slice. “Rory,” it said in her voice. The sound didn’t come from its non-existent mouth. It came from inside her, vibrating along her spine, tickling her teeth. She tasted metal and rot. The Heartstone gave one fierce pulse. Heat seared her palm, her chest, radiating outward in concentric waves. The thing flinched—just a tiny retraction of that shadow body, but real. The edges of it blurred, losing their hold on the air. Pain broke whatever had frozen her. Rory stumbled backward, boots sliding in the wet earth, then turned and ran. Branches whipped at her face, snagged her hair. Flowers crushed underfoot with tiny, popping sounds like knuckles cracking. She had no sense of direction, only away, get away, now. The grove lurched around her, trees doubling and twisting, trunks where there hadn’t been trunks, the circle folding in. Behind her, something moved. Not footsteps exactly, but the sense of them—weight finding the ground, again and again, in perfect echo with her own, only half a beat off. Her scarred wrist throbbed where a low branch raked her sleeve, catching flesh. Cold shocked through the old crescent-shaped mark like electricity. She cried out, more in fear than pain. “Rory,” the voice called, many voices braided into one. Her mother and Evan and herself and something else, something vast and wordless. “You came. Don’t run.” She didn’t look back. Couldn’t. Every scrap of her will was focused on pushing her legs harder, shoving through the weird, heavy air that dragged at her like water. The oaks loomed and parted and loomed again, but there—a gap, a shred of grey beyond the trees that wasn’t this compressed, gleaming dark. She threw herself toward it. For an instant, resistance closed around her, thick and cold, like pushing through an invisible curtain. The pendant scorched white-hot. Her lungs seized. The grove clutched. Then she was through. She stumbled out into night air that smelled of exhaust and wet asphalt. Her boots hit tarmac, then gravel. The distant roar of the A316 washed through her, blessedly ordinary. A dog barked somewhere, shrill and stupid. She doubled over, hands on her knees, dragging in great, ragged gasps. Sound—her own breath, the ticking of some unseen car’s engine cooling, the faint rustle of a breeze in winter-stripped trees—came back in a rush. The grove behind her was only a dark stand of oaks now, indistinguishable from the rest of Richmond Park. No circle of flowers, no ring of watching trunks. Just trees. Her chest ached. The skin at the base of her throat felt raw. When she pried her fingers away from the pendant, she half-expected to see scorched flesh. The jumper was unmarked. Her skin was flushed red underneath where the stone had pressed, but not blistered. The Heartstone itself lay quiet against her, its crimson heart dulled, only a faint, intermittent glimmer deep within, like something sleeping. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, violent in the silence between her gasps. She flinched, then yanked it out with trembling hands. 01:12, the lock screen read. No missed calls. One new text, from an unknown number. She opened it. Next time, the message said. Don’t run. Her reflection stared back at her from the dark screen, superimposed over the words: pale face, hair snarled, eyes blown wide and bright as the stone at her throat. Behind her, in the glass, the line of oaks was just shadow. If she looked long enough, she thought she could see, between two trunks, a patch of dark that was just a shade too deep, too patient, waiting.