Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRCKYA440TK3XFJ2XKHF11

The last bus from Richmond had been nearly empty, just Rory and a man who smelled of wet wool and wouldn't stop clicking his tongue against his teeth. She'd gotten off two stops early to be rid of him and walked the rest of the way along the park wall in the dark, her trainers scuffing through wet leaves that had gathered against the pavement like small drowning things. She shouldn't have come at night. She knew that. Eva would have said as much, would have called her a stupid cow and meant it lovingly. But the pendant had been warm against her sternum all day — not the faint background hum she'd grown accustomed to, but a steady, insistent heat, like a coal pressed to skin through cotton. And the text from the unknown number had said midnight, had said the grove, had said come alone or don't come at all. So here she was. Alone, and coming anyway. The gap in the park wall was where it always was, half-hidden by a sprawl of ivy that should have died back months ago but never did. Rory pushed through it sideways, feeling the leaves drag wet fingers across her neck, and dropped down into the grass on the other side. Richmond Park at midnight was a different country. The sodium glow of the streetlamps didn't reach past the wall. The city sounds — the distant arterial hum of the A316, a siren threading itself thin across Twickenham — fell away as though someone had slowly turned a dial. She stood still for a moment, letting her eyes adjust, and listened. Wind in the canopy. The soft percussion of water dripping from branch to branch somewhere ahead. Nothing else. She crossed the open ground quickly, keeping her head down, navigating by memory and by the feel of the terrain under her feet. The grass gave way to bracken, the bracken to the broad root-knuckled floor of the old oaks, and then she could see the stones. They didn't look like standing stones in any traditional sense. They looked like trees that had forgotten how to be trees — ancient oaks gone grey and smooth, stripped of bark and branch, narrowed to rough pillars that formed an imperfect circle in a clearing no map had ever shown. Wildflowers grew between them. Even now, in November, she could see pale blooms nodding in the dark, their petals catching what little light filtered through the canopy. Snowdrops, or something that wanted to be mistaken for snowdrops. Rory stepped between two of the stones and into the grove. The temperature changed. Not dramatically — not the way stepping into a walk-in freezer changes things — but in the way a room changes when someone opens a window you can't see. The air moved differently. It tasted different. Greener, somehow, and older, and faintly sweet in a way that sat wrong on the back of her tongue. The pendant flared hot. She pressed her hand to it through her jacket, feeling the shape of the crimson stone against her palm. Thumbnail-sized, silver-chained, unremarkable to look at unless you caught it in the right light and saw the slow pulse of its inner glow, like a heartbeat rendered in garnet. She didn't know why it did what it did. She didn't know who had left it for her, tucked into a takeaway bag from the Golden Empress with a note that said only keep this close. She knew only that it reacted to things she couldn't see, and that when it burned like this, she should pay attention. She was paying attention. The grove was wrong tonight. It took her a moment to identify why. The flowers were facing the wrong direction. All of them — every pale bloom in the clearing — had turned to face the centre of the circle, their heads bowed inward like congregants at prayer. She'd been here four times before, and the flowers had always faced outward, toward the stones, toward whatever light they could find. Now they strained toward a point in the middle of the grove where the grass grew tallest and the dark seemed to gather and thicken like something with weight. Rory stopped walking. She stood perhaps ten feet inside the boundary, close enough to the nearest stone that she could have reached back and touched it. She did not reach back. She didn't want to know what it would feel like right now. A sound reached her. Not wind, not water. A tapping. Arhythmic and soft, like fingernails on wood, coming from somewhere to her left. She turned her head slowly and saw nothing — just the dark spaces between the stones, the undergrowth beyond, the suggestion of tree trunks in the deeper black. The tapping stopped. Then started again, from her right. She kept her breathing even. Counted the stones. There should have been nine. She'd counted them every time she'd come. Nine grey pillars, irregularly spaced, forming a rough circle roughly forty feet across. She counted them now. Ten. She counted again, starting from the tallest, the one she'd entered beside, working clockwise. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. She went back. Slower this time. The tenth was on the far side of the circle, directly opposite her. It was narrower than the others, and slightly darker, and when she stared at it for too long her eyes watered as though she were looking at a bright light instead of a shadow. It hadn't been there before. The pendant's heat intensified. Not painful yet, but close — an urgent, blood-warm insistence against her chest, as though the stone were trying to burrow through her ribs and get away from something. She covered it with both hands and held it still. The tapping came again. Closer now, and from multiple directions at once — a scattered, patternless percussion that surrounded the grove's edge like rain on a tin roof, except that it wasn't rain and there was no roof and each individual tap had a deliberateness to it that rain did not possess. Something moved. She caught it at the very edge of her vision — a shift in the darkness between two stones on her left, a vertical displacement, as though something tall had straightened up from a crouch and then gone still again the instant she looked. There was nothing there. Just the gap between stones five and six, and the black beyond, and the faintest suggestion of breath that wasn't hers. She should leave. The thought arrived clearly and completely, the way good thoughts do. She should turn around, step back between the entry stones, and walk out of the grove, and keep walking until she hit the park wall and the road and the sodium light and the sounds of a city that had the basic decency to be noisy. She should go home. She should climb the stairs above Silas's bar and lock the door and sit on her bed and be somewhere that was not here. She didn't move. The grass at the centre of the grove rippled. There was no wind. The air in the circle had gone perfectly still — she could feel the stillness on her skin, a breathless, pressurized absence of movement that made her eardrums ache. But the grass moved anyway, bending and swaying in a slow circular pattern, as though something large and invisible were walking through it in a tight, patient orbit. The flowers tracked it. Their pale heads turned in unison, following the unseen circuit, a ring of small blind faces chasing something she couldn't see. Rory's fingers found the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. She pressed her thumbnail into it, hard, the way she always did when she needed to anchor herself — a habit from childhood, from the moment a broken teacup had opened the skin and her mother had told her scars were just the body's way of remembering what it had survived. The tenth stone moved. It was subtle. If she'd blinked, she would have missed it. But she didn't blink, and she saw it — a lateral shift of perhaps two inches, the stone sliding sideways without sound, without any visible mechanism of locomotion. It was closer to the ninth stone now. Closer to the gap she had not entered through. She watched it, and as she watched, she understood something that made the heat of the pendant feel very far away and very unimportant. The tenth stone was not a stone. It had no texture, no grain, no lichen. It was a shape. A tall, narrow, upright shape that was darker than the dark around it, and it was standing where a stone should be because it wanted to be mistaken for a stone, and it had been mistaken for a stone right up until the moment it moved, and now it knew that she knew, and it had stopped pretending. The tapping ceased. Every sound ceased. The grove held its breath. Rory stood in the silence and felt the pendant burn against her chest and felt the scar throb under her thumbnail and felt the particular, exquisite terror of being seen by something she could not properly see. The dark shape across the circle did not move again. It didn't need to. It had closed the distance by inches, by patience, by the simple arithmetic of a predator that had all the time in the world and knew that its prey had already made the mistake of stepping inside the ring. The flowers had stopped turning. They faced her now. All of them. Every white bloom in the clearing had swiveled to point at her, and in the faint, impossible glow of the Heartstone she could see that they were not snowdrops. They had never been snowdrops. Snowdrops did not have petals that tapered to points like teeth, and they did not grow from soil that was the wrong colour, and they did not lean toward warmth the way these were leaning toward her. Time moved differently in the grove. She knew this. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. She had no idea how long she'd been standing here. It felt like seconds. It felt like her whole life. Behind her, close enough that she felt the displacement of air against the back of her neck, something exhaled. It smelled green, and old, and faintly sweet. Rory did not turn around. She kept her eyes on the shape across the circle, and she pressed her thumbnail deeper into the scar on her wrist, and she breathed in, and she breathed out, and she waited for whatever happened next in the terrible, patient silence of a place that was no longer pretending to be empty.