Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRATRY0YGAJ85YVB24BSQX

The standing stones of Richmond Park had always looked like ordinary oaks to Aurora Carter. She'd passed them a hundred times on delivery runs, never sparing them a second glance. Tonight, though, tonight they watched her back. She tightened her jacket around herself and checked her phone. 11:47 PM. The screen's glow seemed feeble against the dark, and when she looked up from it, the afterimage left floating black shapes in her vision. She blinked them away, but the sensation of being observed didn't fade. The pendant burned cold against her sternum, then hot, then cold again. She'd felt it pulse twice on the bus ride over—faint, rhythmic warnings that something was wrong. The deep crimson gemstone normally sat dormant against her skin, a pretty curiosity she'd never thought to remove. Now it wouldn't stop shifting temperature, and the silver chain bit into the back of her neck like a warning. She'd received a message three days ago. No sender, no number, just an address and a time: the standing stones, midnight, the night of the new moon. Rory had dismissed it as a wrong number, a prank, maybe Evan playing some new game. But the pendant had flared hot when she'd read the words, and she'd learned to trust the strange artifact's instincts. It had led her true before. The park gates had been locked, of course. She'd climbed over, scraping her palm on the iron. The cut stung in the cold air, a thin line of warmth across her lifeline. She'd made her way by flashlight across the grass, the beam catching the shapes of sleeping deer that scattered like leaves in a sudden wind. But now she stood at the edge of the grove, and the stones that had been trees a moment ago rose above her in a rough circle, their bark twisted into something that looked almost like faces. The wildflowers at their bases shouldn't have been there—shouldn't have been blooming in November, shouldn't have been visible without her flashlight, shouldn't have been giving off their own faint luminescence. Rory stepped forward. The air changed. A pressure drop, her ears popping, and then silence so complete it pressed against her eardrums. She couldn't hear the distant hum of London traffic anymore. Couldn't hear the wind in the branches. Just her own breathing, suddenly loud, and the crunch of wildflowers beneath her boots. She looked down. The flowers weren't crushed. They'd sprung back up behind her foot, unbroken, their pale glow pulsing gently. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay. This is fine. This is absolutely fine." The words fell dead in the air. No echo. No response. Just the silence, waiting. She moved deeper into the grove, and the standing stones closed behind her like a door she couldn't see. She knew they had, somehow—could feel the change in the air pressure, the sense of being enclosed. Her flashlight beam caught movement at its edge, but when she turned, there was nothing. Just flowers. Just stones. The pendant blazed hot against her chest, and she clutched it through her shirt. The gemstone pulsed in time with her heartbeat, or maybe her heartbeat had synchronized to it. She couldn't tell anymore. She'd come here for answers. Three weeks ago, a customer at the Golden Empress had pressed the pendant into her palm after she'd delivered his order. He'd been elderly, ancient really, with eyes like milky glass and hands that trembled. He hadn't spoken a word. Just given her the necklace and closed her fingers around it. She'd forgotten him until she'd found herself wearing the pendant the next morning, unable to remember putting it on. Now she stood in a grove that shouldn't exist, surrounded by flowers that glowed, and she was starting to suspect she wasn't going to get any answers. A sound. Her head snapped up. Footsteps. Not hers—these came from ahead, deeper in the grove. Soft, deliberate, moving through the flowers without crushing them. The glow beneath them shifted, bending away from something that passed. Rory's hand went to the crescent scar on her left wrist, an old habit when fear coiled in her stomach. The skin there felt hot, and when she looked down, she saw the scar had darkened. It stood out against her pale skin like a brand. The footsteps stopped. She waited. The silence pressed in. She counted her breaths—one, two, three—and on the fourth, she heard something else. A voice, perhaps, or a whisper, or the memory of one. It came from everywhere and nowhere, threading through the stillness. "You came." Two words. Her flashlight flickered and died. She thumbed the switch, once, twice, three times. Nothing. The darkness rushed in, absolute and complete, and for one terrible moment she couldn't see anything at all. Then, slowly, shapes began to emerge. The flowers grew brighter, their glow strengthening, and in their pale light she saw the stones around her more clearly than she had with her flashlight. Their bark really was twisted into faces—dozens of them, hundreds, all different, all wearing expressions of sorrow or pain or rage. And between two of the stones, at the far edge of the grove, stood a figure. It was tall. Too tall, its limbs stretched in a way that made her stomach lurch. It stood perfectly still, watching her—or she assumed it was watching. She couldn't see its face in the shadows between the stones. "I received a message," she said. Her voice didn't shake. She was proud of that. "Someone told me to come here." The figure didn't move. The pendant burned. "You were expected," it said. The voice didn't come from the figure but from the air itself, from the stones and the flowers and the strange heavy silence that blanketed the grove. "The door opens soon. You must be ready." "What door?" She took a step forward, then stopped. The wildflowers near her feet had gone dark, their glow retreating from her boots. "What am I doing here?" The figure tilted its head. A slow, jerking motion, like a puppet on strings. "He gave you the key. You carry it still." The voice dropped lower, became something almost like recognition. "He should not have. But what is done is done, and now you are here, and now they know." Rory's skin prickled. "They?" The temperature dropped. Not gradually but all at once, as if someone had opened a freezer door. Her breath misted in the air, and the flowers' glow flickered like candles in a wind she couldn't feel. "You should not have come alone." The figure's shape wavered, grew taller still. "They are coming. They heard the door unlock, and they are coming, and you are not ready." She stepped back. The wildflowers crunched beneath her heel, and this time they stayed crushed, their light dying in a wisp of something that smelled like burning hair. "Who's coming?" Her hand closed around the pendant. It scorched her palm, but she didn't let go. "Tell me what's happening." The figure's arms moved, raising slowly, joints cracking with each inch. It spread them wide, and for a moment it looked like it was embracing the darkness. Then it stepped forward, into the light of the remaining flowers, and Rory's throat closed around a scream. The face was hers. Not quite—there were differences, wrongness in the details. The eyes were wrong. Her eyes were bright blue, distinctive, memorable. These were blue too, but wrong, the color spread too far, no whites, no pupils, just endless solid blue that caught the flower-light and swallowed it. But the face was hers. The black hair, the jaw, the small straight nose. Even the expression—cool, controlled, careful—was hers. "They are already here," the thing with her face said. "They have always been here. You just couldn't see them before." It smiled, and its teeth were too many, too sharp, and the grove erupted with movement at the edge of her vision. Shapes between the stones. Shadows that peeled themselves away from the darkness and stood on their own. A rustling in the wildflowers that sounded almost like whispers, like voices repeating her name, like something learning how to speak. Rory backed up until her shoulders hit one of the standing stones. The bark pressed against her spine, and she felt it shift, felt the carved face against her back open its mouth in a silent scream. The pendant blazed white-hot against her chest, and the world went bright and dark and bright again, and when she opened her eyes she was alone. The grove was empty. The figure was gone. The shapes had vanished. But the wildflowers at her feet had all gone dark, and when she looked down at her wrist, the crescent scar had turned black as ink, and beneath her feet, deep beneath the earth, she felt something stir.