Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMVRF2G58FTC2PQM7D2YX5C

The ancient oaks stood like sentinels in the moonlight, their gnarled branches creating a canopy so thick that only fragments of silver light filtered through to the forest floor. Rory pressed her palm against the rough bark of the nearest standing stone, feeling the thrum of something old and patient beneath her fingertips. The Heartstone pendant at her throat pulsed with its familiar warmth, but tonight the rhythm felt erratic, almost anxious. She shouldn't be here. Not at this hour, not alone. But the dreams had been getting worse—visions of Eva calling her name from somewhere beyond reach, always just out of sight among these very trees. The rational part of her mind insisted it was grief manifesting in her subconscious, but the pendant's restless pulsing suggested otherwise. Stepping between the standing stones felt like crossing a threshold made of cobwebs and electricity. The air grew thicker, charged with an energy that made her teeth ache. Behind her, the distant sounds of London faded to nothing, swallowed by an unnatural quiet that pressed against her eardrums. The wildflowers that bloomed year-round in Isolde's grove glowed faintly in the darkness, their petals seeming to emit their own pale luminescence. Rory had always found them beautiful during her daylight visits, but now they looked wrong somehow—too bright, too perfect, like plastic flowers in a funeral home. She picked her way carefully along the narrow path, her footsteps muffled by moss that felt strangely warm beneath her feet. A twig snapped somewhere to her left. Rory froze, her heart hammering against her ribs. The sound had been too sharp, too deliberate for a small animal. She turned slowly, scanning the darkness between the trees, but saw nothing except shadows layered upon shadows. The pendant against her chest grew warmer. "Hello?" Her voice sounded small and foreign in the heavy air. "Is someone there?" Silence answered her, but it was the wrong kind of silence—not the peaceful quiet of an empty grove, but the breathless hush that comes when something is listening. Waiting. She forced herself to keep walking. Eva's voice in her dreams always seemed to come from the heart of the grove, from the small clearing where an ancient yew tree grew in a perfect circle of white stones. If there was any truth to the visions, any chance her friend was somehow trying to reach her, she had to check. The path wound deeper into the grove, and with each step, the wrongness intensified. The air grew colder despite the pendant's increasing warmth against her throat. The wildflowers' glow flickered and dimmed, as if something was passing between them and the source of their light. When Rory glanced over her shoulder, the standing stones that marked the entrance were no longer visible. A whisper drifted through the trees—so soft she almost convinced herself she'd imagined it. But then it came again, a susurrus of syllables that might have been her name or might have been the wind through leaves. Except there was no wind. The air hung motionless around her, thick as honey. "Rory." Her blood turned to ice. That was Eva's voice, unmistakably, floating from somewhere ahead in the darkness. But Eva was gone. Eva had been gone for three weeks now, vanished without a trace from her Camden flat with no sign of struggle, no note, nothing but an open window and the lingering scent of ozone. "Eva?" The word came out as barely more than a breath. "Eva, where are you?" Laughter answered her—light and musical and utterly wrong. It echoed from multiple directions at once, as if the trees themselves were laughing. The pendant burned against her skin now, hot enough that she had to resist the urge to tear it off. The path opened into the circular clearing, and Rory's breath caught in her throat. The ancient yew tree stood in the center as always, its massive trunk scarred with age and weather. But the white stones that surrounded it were gone. In their place, darker shapes huddled in the grass—objects that weren't quite rocks, weren't quite roots, and definitely weren't natural. One of them moved. Rory stumbled backward, her heel catching on something that definitely hadn't been there moments before. When she looked down, she saw that the path behind her had vanished. Where the narrow trail should have led back to the standing stones, there was now only an impenetrable wall of thorny undergrowth. "You came," Eva's voice said, but the sound seemed to come from the yew tree itself. "I knew you would." A figure detached itself from the shadow of the massive trunk—tall and pale and almost right. Almost Eva, but not quite. The proportions were subtly wrong, the limbs too long, the smile too wide. When it moved, it didn't quite touch the ground. Rory's hand flew to the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone was burning now, so hot that tears sprang to her eyes, but she didn't let go. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't Eva. Couldn't be Eva. "What are you?" she whispered. The not-Eva tilted its head at an impossible angle, that too-wide smile never wavering. "I'm what you've been looking for. What you've been dreaming of. Isn't that what you wanted?" More shapes began to emerge from behind the yew tree—tall, pale figures with familiar faces twisted just enough to fall into the uncanny valley of almost-human. She recognized her mother's cheekbones on one, her father's jaw on another. All of them smiling those wrong, wide smiles. "We've been waiting," they said in unison, their voices creating a harmony that made Rory's bones ache. "Waiting so long." The pendant's heat was unbearable now, but still she held on. It was the only real thing in this place of almost-right reflections and impossible geometry. The only thing that remembered what world she belonged to. "You're not real," she said, proud that her voice remained steady. "None of this is real." "Real enough," the not-Eva said, drifting closer. Its feet—if they were feet—still didn't quite touch the moss. "Real enough to keep you. Real enough to make you one of us." The other figures began to circle the clearing's perimeter, their movements too fluid, too synchronized. As they walked, the wildflowers in their path withered and died, leaving trails of blackened earth. Rory closed her eyes and focused on the pendant's burning weight against her throat. Somewhere beyond this place of shadows and almost-truths, London hummed with life. Silas was probably closing down the bar, stacking chairs and wiping down tables. Yu-Fei might be preparing the last orders of the night at the Golden Empress. Real people in a real world that suddenly seemed impossibly far away. When she opened her eyes again, the not-Eva stood directly in front of her, so close that Rory could see the minute details that marked it as wrong—the eyes that were the right color but reflected no light, the skin that was the right tone but had no pores, the hair that moved without wind. "Let go," it whispered, reaching out with fingers that were too long and too pale. "Let go of that burning thing and stay with us. Stay forever." The pendant pulsed once more, so hot now that Rory was sure it would leave a scar. But in that pulse, she felt something else—a pull, faint but insistent, tugging her back toward the world of standing stones and London fog and friends who were truly friends. She took a step backward, then another. The circle of almost-familiar faces watched her with expressions of patient hunger. "I don't think so," Rory said quietly, and ran. Behind her, the laughter started again—dozens of voices raised in terrible harmony. But ahead, barely visible through the dark maze of trees, she could see a faint glimmer that might have been moonlight on ancient oak.