Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR74EVGSSF1C8X52JA7APT

The taxi dropped her at the edge of Richmond Park just after midnight. Rory stood on the empty road, watching the red taillights disappear around a bend, and immediately regretted not asking the driver to wait. The pendant at her throat pulsed once—a single throb of warmth against her skin—then went cold and still. Wrong meeting time, she thought. The text from Isolde had been clear: midnight at the grove. But Isolde was Fae, and the Fae had their own relationship with precision. Midnight could mean the stroke of twelve or the deepest part of night or the moment between one day bleeding into the next. Rory should have asked for clarification. She pulled her jacket tighter and started walking. The park gates were locked, but she'd been here enough times to know where the fence sat low, where a person could slip through if they didn't mind snagging their clothes on chain-link. The pendant hung quiet against her sternum, a small weight that should have been comforting. It wasn't. The path into the park was visible only as a slightly lighter ribbon of packed earth against the surrounding darkness. No streetlights penetrated this deep. The moon hung thin and useless overhead, a fingernail scraping at the sky. Rory used her phone's torch, keeping the beam low. The trees pressed close on either side, their branches a tangle of reaching shadows. She'd walked this route three times before, always in daylight, always with Isolde leading. The standing stones that marked the grove's boundary were supposed to be a quarter mile in, just past the split oak that lightning had carved in half. She'd know it when she saw it. If she saw it. The path forked. Rory stopped, playing her light across both options. Neither looked familiar. She pulled up her mental map of the park, tried to orient herself by the position of the stars, but the canopy overhead was too thick. She chose left because left felt right, and because standing still was worse than moving. Something rustled in the underbrush to her right. Rory swung the phone toward the sound. The light caught nothing but ferns and the pale bark of a silver birch. She waited, counting her breaths. The rustling didn't repeat. Probably a fox. Richmond Park was full of them. Or a badger. Or one of the deer that gathered in the clearings at dawn, their eyes like wet stones. She kept walking. The wrongness started small. A smell, first—not unpleasant, exactly, but out of place. Honeysuckle. Sweet and cloying. But it was March, too early for honeysuckle, and too dark for flowers to release their scent. Rory breathed through her mouth and walked faster. The path widened. The trees pulled back, creating a corridor of space that felt deliberate, designed. Her footsteps made no sound on the packed earth. That was wrong too. She should have heard something—the scuff of her trainers, the crunch of scattered twigs. But the night had gone silent, as though someone had pressed their palm over the world's mouth. The pendant gave another pulse. Warmer this time, almost hot. Rory wrapped her fingers around it and felt the rhythmic throb against her palm. Once. Twice. Three times. Then nothing. She stopped walking. The phone's battery was at fifteen percent. Of course it was. Ahead, maybe twenty yards distant, she could just make out the dark bulk of something massive breaking the tree line. The split oak. It had to be. Relief flooded through her, brief and bright, before the silence registered again. No wind. No rustle of leaves. No distant call of night birds or screech of something small dying in the underbrush. Nothing. Rory approached the oak slowly. The tree was exactly as she remembered it—the trunk split cleanly down the middle, the two halves leaning away from each other like dancers frozen mid-step. But beyond it, where the standing stones should have marked the grove's entrance, there was only darkness. Not the ordinary darkness of night in a forest, but something thicker. Something that seemed to swallow her light. She swept the phone's torch across the area where the stones should be. The beam penetrated perhaps three feet into that darkness before it simply stopped, as though hitting a wall of black water. A sound behind her. Not a rustle this time. Footsteps. Deliberate. Measured. Coming closer. Rory spun, raising the light. The path behind her was empty. But the footsteps continued—crunch, pause, crunch—growing louder. Closer. She could hear the rhythm of them now, the particular weight and cadence. Human footsteps. Or something that wanted her to think they were. "Isolde?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was worse. Rory kept the light trained on the empty path, her thumb hovering over the emergency call button. The pendant was a hot coal against her chest now, pulsing in rapid, frantic beats. She fumbled with her free hand, pulling it out from under her shirt. The crimson stone glowed with an inner light she'd never seen before, bright enough to paint her fingers red. Movement at the edge of her vision. Left side. She jerked the phone toward it and caught—something. A shape. Tall and wrong, too many angles, there and gone before her brain could process the geometry of it. Another movement. Right side. She spun again, sweeping the light in a wide arc. Nothing. But she could feel it now, the certainty settling into her bones like ice water. She was being circled. Whatever was out there was moving around her, patient and deliberate, tightening its orbit. The pendant's glow intensified. The warmth turned to heat, then to pain. Rory hissed and grabbed the chain, ready to yank it off, but the moment her fingers touched the silver, the darkness ahead of her split. The standing stones were suddenly visible, ancient oak trunks placed in a perfect circle, their bark silvered with age. Wildflowers bloomed between them—impossible flowers in impossible colors, glowing faintly in the dark. The grove. Finally. But something was wrong with it. The flowers moved though there was no wind. The standing stones seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting like ribs. And beyond them, in the center of the circle, something waited. The footsteps started again. Behind her. Beside her. All around her. Multiple sets now, converging. The pendant burned against her palm, and Rory made a decision born of pure instinct and rising terror. She ran forward, through the circle of stones, into the grove where time moved differently and reality bent at its edges. As she crossed the threshold, she heard them behind her—the things that wore the sound of footsteps like masks. They stopped at the boundary. They could not follow. But they did not leave. Rory stood in the center of the grove, surrounded by impossible flowers, and understood with cold clarity that she had made a choice. She could not go back the way she'd come. Whatever those things were, they were patient. They would wait. The pendant's glow faded to a dim pulse. Around her, the grove breathed and shifted. And somewhere in the distance, from deeper in the space between worlds, she heard her name. Not Isolde's voice. Something else.