Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRB45TMZV318EHSVYA9FQD

Rory stood at the treeline, her breath clouding in the October air, and watched the standing stones breathe. She told herself it was the wind. Richmond Park had wind enough for ten cities, tearing across the grasslands to rattle the ancient oaks. But the stones—massive things, weathered gray and older than the park, older perhaps than the city—didn't rattle. They expanded. Contracted. A slow, tidal rhythm that matched the pulse of the pendant resting against her sternum. The Heartstone was warm. Not the gentle warmth of skin against silver, but a fever-heat, throbbing in time with her heartbeat. It had started three days ago, a faint tickle as she’d climbed the stairs to her flat above Silas’ bar, and had grown steadily since—a compass needle swinging toward magnetic north, if north were a place that existed sideways from the world. Rory touched the crescent scar on her left wrist, a habit when her nerves frayed. The old wound itched, as it always did before rain, though the sky above the park was clear and star-pricked. She should turn back. The sensible thing—the Cardiff thing, her mother’s voice whispered—was to return to the flat, brew tea, and pretend she hadn’t felt the pendant’s insistent tug leading her through the park’s western gate at midnight. But Rory had not been sensible since she’d fled London’s East End six months ago, since she’d packed a single bag and left Evan sleeping in their bed, his fists finally still. She had learned that the world was wider than the corridors of escape routes, and stranger than the Pre-Law textbooks she’d abandoned in Cardiff. The pendant had come to her a week after her arrival—a delivery to the restaurant, Yu-Fei’s Golden Empress, with no return address, only her name written in a script that seemed to shift when she looked away. She stepped into the clearing. The standing stones ringed a space no larger than her flat’s sitting room, seven oaks transmuted to stone, their bark petrified into ripples and whorls. Between them, wildflowers bloomed in defiance of the season—bluebells and foxgloves and something white and star-shaped that Rory didn’t recognize, their petals open to the dark. The air smelled of pollen and ozone, like the moment before lightning strikes. The pendant flared, hot enough to burn. Rory gasped, clutching it through her jacket. The silver chain hummed against her fingers, resonating with a note she felt in her teeth. The standing stones were singing—not audible sound, but pressure, a subsonic thrum that vibrated in her scar, her ribs, the hollow of her throat. She was not alone. The realization came not as thought but as instinct, the primate recognition of predator in the brush. Rory went still, her breath shallow. The wildflowers had stopped swaying. The wind had died. In the absolute silence, she heard something shift behind the nearest stone—a footfall on grass, the whisper of fabric against bark. She turned, slowly. Nothing. Only the stone, its surface pitted and ancient, casting a shadow that pointed the wrong way. The moon was behind her; the shadow should have stretched toward the clearing’s center. Instead, it reached sideways, pooling against the base of the opposite stone like spilled ink. Rory’s hand went to her pocket, finding her phone. Dead. She’d charged it before leaving, had checked the battery at ninety-four percent, but now the screen remained black, unresponsive as a river stone. She tried to remember what time she’d entered the park—twelve-fifteen, perhaps twelve-twenty—but the numbers felt slippery, wrong. She had been walking for twenty minutes, surely, but the moon hadn’t moved. The stars held their positions with artificial stillness. The flowers were watching. She caught it from the corner of her eye—the white star-shaped blooms turning, their faces tracking her movement as she stepped backward toward the treeline. Not the wind. The wind had not returned. They moved with purpose, with intention, petals adjusting like lenses focusing. Rory ran. She bolted for the gap between two stones, the way she’d entered, her boots pounding the soft earth. The pendant bounced against her chest, searing hot, the crimson gem glowing now with a light of its own, red as arterial blood. Behind her, the flowers rustled, a sound like whispering, like laughter. She reached the stones and stopped. The gap was gone. Where there had been an opening wide enough for three men walking abreast, the standing stones now pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, their ancient surfaces fused, bark-texture merging into a solid wall of petrified wood. Rory touched the stone—cold now, cold as deep winter, the singing silenced. Trapped. She turned, her back against the unyielding stone. The clearing had changed. The wildflowers had grown, stems thickening, reaching waist-high, their white faces turned toward her in unison. The shadows between the stones deepened, pooling into darkness that drank the starlight. And in the darkness, something moved. It wore her face. Rory saw it clearly for one heartbeat—her own features, her black hair, her bright blue eyes—stretched across a form that stood too tall, joints bending wrong, skin that rippled like water. It smiled with her mouth, and the crescent scar on its left wrist glowed silver. Then the flowers closed their petals, and the darkness rushed in, and Rory understood that the standing stones were not a boundary to keep the Fae out, but a cage to keep something older, hungrier, and infinitely more patient from leaving. The pendant burned against her heart, a final warning, as the thing that wore her face stepped into the starlight.