Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQVG8PNB9TKMN9AGRH7XVQ

The oak standing stones rose out of the dark like blunt teeth. Rory found herself walking between them as if led by habit; the map on Eva's phone had fallen away somewhere down Prince's Road and the taxi had turned into fog, and still she had come. Richmond Park closed to the public at dusk, but the Grove was not in Park hours. It was in a pocket where the night had different rules, where wildflowers refused to take winter cues and the air never quite obeyed the sky. That knowledge was why she had kissed the coin of card money and left Silas' light behind, why she had kept the Heartstone tucked beneath her scarf until the cold burned her neck. The stones looked older than anything that should have been allowed to stand in a city park. Thick bark cut across lichen and moonlight; runes she could not read climbed some of them like a child's scratches. Between two stones, a ribbon of wildflowers — blue and violet and a tiny sickly white that glowed like moth wings — carpeted a dip in the ground. The sight should have been pretty in an easy way. Instead it made Rory's throat tighten. The flowers were out of season in more ways than one. She checked her watch three times in quick succession because habits rule you when the rest of you is raw. The face glowed 23:58. Midtown time. The Grove did not care. The minute hand did not move. She told herself she was doing theatre: testing a charm, meeting a promise, tapping a curiosity that had lodged there the way a splinter lodges. The Heartstone at her throat felt like a little foreign weight. She hooked a finger behind the silver chain, felt the thumbnail-sized crimson gem rest warm and not quite inert against the skin of her collarbone. It pulsed, barely; if she pressed, there was the minute beat of something underneath glass. "You're ridiculous," she said aloud. Even in the dark she imagined that voice as hers: cool, clipped, and just as matter-of-fact as when she corrected the wrong address on a delivery. The night swallowed the sound, but not cleanly. It came back to her as a small rustle, like fabric dragged across a chair. She had come because the note had said the Grove would answer questions. It had been written in careful, even script and folded into the pocket of a coat she hadn't known she owned when she found it under her pillow three days after Evan disappeared from her life. The Heartstone had arrived the same week in a plain cardboard box addressed to "Laila" — a name she only ever let her mother use. Whoever sent it had not signed. Whoever had asked for midnight had never said why. The Grove smelled like rain and iron. Not wet-pavement iron but the sharp, clean metallic of a new blade, or the scent that lingers on nervous palms. The smell made the little crescent of skin on her left wrist — the scar she'd carried from a childhood fall — prickle under her sleeve. She caught herself rubbing at it as if the scar might smooth away worry. There should have been crickets. There should have been the sound of leaves and perhaps the muffled echo of a road somewhere far off. Instead, the soundscape was layered wrong: the high, cautious tapping of a woodpecker in the distance, and beneath it, something like the careful turning of pages. Once, she thought the distant noise was another person breathing; then she remembered she was breathing too quickly and quieted, counting her inhales until she could tell which of the breathing belonged to her. A breeze lifted the hem of her coat. Nothing moved the canopy. The night held its shape like a thing that had been re-stitched. She moved into the ring of stones. The pendant warmed against her chest, almost like a palm, and she could feel the small inner glow through the skin of her palm as if it had thinned. The sensation was not heat so much as attention; something within the gem roused and found her curious. The pulse quickened. Her heart matched it, and for the first time since she had left Cardiff she felt panic as a physical thing pressing under the ribs rather than a shadow of thought. "Who's there?" she asked, because asking felt safer than imagining. No answer. Then a noise braided through the stillness — a scraping, like fingernails finding bark, very deliberate. It seemed to come from between two stones to her left, the ones with a notch like a doorway. Rory's first thought was that a fox had found den or that some late dogwalker had come in. Her second thought, which arrived before she could censor it, was a recollection of the way Evan's hands had felt when he had meant to comfort and instead had owned. She tasted copper. She told herself stories. The mind likes stories. A fox, a child's prank, electron interference on a phone, the way the pendant's glow could convince the brain it heard things. She told herself she could leave as easily as she had walked in. She imagined turning, walking back beneath the heavy oaks, out toward the road, out toward the chain of pubs and buses and noisy London that was, always, safety by motion. But the spot between those stones had a gravity that pressed on more than the soles of her shoes. It tugged at memory and at the muscle of curiosity she had trained in years of law school and odd jobs. "Come and see," the Grove said, as if the stones had lips. Something moved at the edge of her vision. Not a figure, not exactly — a flicker like someone shifting the corner of a page, a dark space that refused to be read. She turned and there was nothing. The wildflowers leaned toward her with a slow unanimous motion like the heads of an audience turning to a performer. She felt absurd standing there, as if she were the only human to have ever asked to be let in. The pendant pulsed harder. The warmth that had been a palm pressed up beneath the fabric of her shirt. Now her skin prickled where the chain lay; the crescent of the scar hummed with it. A laugh, small and quick, threaded through the Grove. It had no place: not high enough to be a girl's, not gruff enough to be a man's. It moved from stone to stone as if someone were walking a circle, sampling. She did not know whether to look or not; the choice felt like flinching and flaunting at once. "Rory." The name came out like a little key turned. The sound of it did more than locate someone in the dark; it brought with it a photograph of herself at five, hair braided awkwardly and freckles like star-maps across a nose. Laila. Aurora. The voice had folded her whole. It was too familiar and wrong. It could have been Eva's tone when she was teasing, or Evan's when he tried lightness and landed on something sharp. For half a breath she believed it was neither. Then the pendant slammed warmth into the bone of her throat like a hand. "Who is it?" she said. Her voice failed at the last syllable and the Grove swallowed even the tail end. Footsteps circled, but careful, soft, never settling into rhythm. The wildflowers dipped, rose, dipped again. In the dark between two stones, a shadow leaned as if to peer; the shadow held the shape of a person but wrong at the edges, as if a picture hung in a wind and the frame had blurred. It made her think of those cheap holograms on postcards, faces that insisted they were there but would not quite hold if you pressed. She knew a path out. She also knew if she ran she would be proving the thing right. Running, she thought, would be letting instincts erase the years of careful thought she'd amassed — the nights of studying case law, the mornings of rehearsing phrases in her head, the thousand quiet decisions that had been a life. She threaded her fingers through a pocket until they brushed the cool metal of the Heartstone's chain and held on. The pendant's pulse became a small beating drum that matched her pulse and then outpaced it. The gem shivered with a light she could not see. The sound that came from it was not audible but folded in her bones: a small, steady, beckoning rhythm like a sailor's drum or a child's lullaby half-remembered. It spoke of corridors and doors and bargains phrased in silver so fine they seemed kind. "Do you know why I'm here?" she asked, because she had to say it. Words anchor you when the ground is slippery. She heard her own breath answer in quick, frightened little pulls. There was an answering rustle, the sound of fabric dragged perhaps, or leaves. A hand, she thought, brushed the inside of a stone. Not a living hand, not now, but an impression left as if someone had reached through and felt. "You sound like her," the voice said. Not any one voice but a chorus mimicking one another in careful offset, like a choir taught to imitate a single soprano. It said her first name and then a name she had not heard in years, the schoolyard name that had been a soft private lighthouse in the years she spent too polite to hurt. "Aurora," they said, and there was no affection in it but a measuring. The pendant flared. She felt the flare at the top of her sternum, spreading, warm and not quite comfortable. Memory wrenched at her with the force of a gale. She remembered Evan's face when he'd caught her reading a text on another man's phone; she remembered Sylvia, the barrister who had told her that evidence mattered even when the pieces were ugly; she remembered Eva's hand on her back the morning she left. All of them seemed to be in that voice, layered, leaching into each other. Fae liked an imprint'd thing — a name, a moment — and the Grove smelled of other people's loss the way damp earth smells of buried roots. A thing moved where the shadow had been. It was only a sliver at first — a hand that caught moonlight and somehow drank it. The hand touched the nearest stone and the bark shivered like a heart. Where its fingertips fell, the runes glowed black in the smoothness, like ink spilled and absorbed. The hand had fingers too long and knuckles too quick. It should have been a grotesque thing, but it was not. It was precise. It felt like a professional watching a novice fool itself. Rory considered flat rational explanations, one after another: light at an angle, some late prankster drunk on solitude, the pendant heating from static, some kind of wildlife with unusual paws. Her intelligence lined each excuse up like ducks in a row, but the ducks refused to stay. The space between explanation and what she felt was full of wind. "Why did you send it?" she asked the voice. "Who sent the Heartstone?" The answering sound made the air taste of metal and honey. A whisper passed over her ear, so close the warmth of it ghosted the scar on her wrist. It said simply, "We did," and then, as if bored, "We always send." She had expected something more. An offer — help, a trade, a threat. What she had was a mild domesticity to the words, as if someone had rung and asked to be admitted for tea and told the truth about the kettle later. The pendant vibrated like a trapped bird against her chest. The stones rearranged. Not physically. A stone that had crouched nearer to her path now seemed further back; the gap between two stones closed by a notch so tiny she might have imagined it. The floor of the clearing felt less like ground and more like a stage set. Time pulled at the hem of her day. When she flicked her watch on, the hands still refused to move. Why did she expect normal measures to hold here? Because she was trained to count and account, to make things add up. The Grove did not add. A small, soft sound like a child's counting spilled through the night: one, two, three, and then silence. Rory tried to tell herself to be brave, to take a step forward, to ask the next question. She'd come for answers; answers required proximity and risk. She had left Evan's fists, but she had not left the habit of measuring danger before it landed. She squared her shoulders against the small, insistent panic that rose like ice in her throat. "Show yourself," she said, and the command in her own voice brought a new steadiness. She had lectured clients; she had stood in front of rooms of people who wanted to hear decisions and given them the cold facts. Fear could be faced with a clean blade. She could not tell if this terror was an honest thing or an elaborate trick. From behind one of the stones a shape leaned forward, and for the first time what she had feared and what she had hoped collided. The person there wore a coat like hers, the same dark cut; the hair was shoulder-length and black. For a beat her brain filled with relief — Eva, Silas, anyone. Then the face turned and the relief curdled. It was a face made from borrowed memory: the eyes were her bright blue, the mouth the nearly smug set of a man who had never been questioned, the jawline something her father might have had at his angriest. It fit like a photograph over glass. The thing smiled, and the teeth were not monstrous so much as arranged with a patience that did not include her. It reached out and, very gently, touched the pendant at her throat. The warmth found a new pathway, climbing through bone and into muscle the way a lie climbs into a belief. "You're not alone," it said. The voice had the rhythm of home and the cruelty of a closed door. Rory had the narrow, focused terror of someone who knows she can retreat but fears the cost of leaving. The Heartstone burned now; it seared small, polite lines into the skin beneath it. The pendant's inner glow was visible, a heartbeat under glass. The Grove waited. The wildflowers leaned. Time, for all its indifference, held its breath.