Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ92QEB8ZA14RHF0E1FTP6J

The stones were wrong. Rory had been to the grove a dozen times now, enough to know its particular rhythms — the way the air cooled as she passed through the ring of oaks, the way the wildflowers held their colours even at night, luminous and slightly too vivid, like a painting attempting to describe a dream. She knew the way sound changed inside the boundary, how the ambient noise of Richmond Park dropped away and left something quieter and more honest in its place. Tonight, the stones were wrong. She couldn't say exactly how. They were still standing, still ancient, still wearing their mantles of dark moss. The boundary markers she'd memorised over weeks of careful visits. But as she stepped between the two easternmost oaks at half past eleven, her foot catching briefly on a root she always forgot about, there was a quality to the air that made her pause before she'd taken three steps inside. She stood still and listened. Nothing. That was the thing. Not the layered, breathing nothing of the grove at rest, the cricket-hush and the distant owl and the soft percussion of her own heartbeat — but a flat, pressurised nothing, the nothing of a room after a sound has just been made and hasn't finished echoing yet. She'd come because of the pendant. It had started pulsing at quarter to eleven, while she was eating leftover dumplings from work over the kitchen sink, still wearing her courier jacket, not yet committed to bed. A faint warmth against her sternum, rhythmic, insistent. She'd pressed two fingers to it through her shirt and felt the heat building and receding with clockwork patience, and she'd thought, the grove, and then she'd thought, it's nearly midnight, and then she'd thought, when has that stopped you, and she'd laced up her trainers. Now the pendant was still. Not cool — it was never quite cool — but still, the pulse suspended, as though it too were listening. Rory moved deeper into the clearing because that was the kind of person she was. She moved carefully, though. That was also the kind of person she was. The wildflowers were open. She noticed that immediately, because she'd wondered once whether they closed at night, and she'd never managed to check. White starbursts and small purple clusters and something yellow-orange she'd never been able to name, all of them tilted slightly upward, the way flowers turn toward a light source. There was no moon tonight. She'd checked before leaving — cloud cover all the way in, the forecast had said. But the flowers were turned toward something in the centre of the clearing, and Rory's eyes moved to follow the geometry of their attention. Nothing there. An empty patch of grass, slightly darker than the rest, or perhaps she was imagining that. She exhaled slowly. Behind her — not close, but not far — a twig snapped. She turned. The oaks stood in their ring, impassive. The space between them was the deep, unreadable grey of a night without stars. She watched the gap she'd entered through and counted to ten in her head the way she'd read once about managing fear, though she'd never quite believed in it. It helped the way cold water helped — not by solving anything, just by giving her something else to focus on. Nothing came through. She turned back to the clearing. There was a shape at the treeline to her left that she was almost certain had not been there a moment ago. She looked directly at it, which was perhaps the wrong instinct, but she'd never been good at looking away from things. A shadow, roughly the dimensions of a large shrub, but too vertical, too articulated, too much like a suggestion of a person who did not wish to be perceived as a person. She stared at it for a long moment. It did not move. She reminded herself that the brain in low light manufactures intentions and faces from neutral shapes, that pareidolia was a survival mechanism and not a prophecy. The shape didn't move. Her eyes, tired from the staring, slid briefly sideways — only for a second, a reflexive adjustment — and when she looked back, the shape was in a slightly different position. Not closer. Not farther. Just different, the way an actor moves when they think no one is watching the stage. "Alright," she said, because silence felt suddenly unacceptable. Her voice fell flat in the deadened air and did not come back. She had been cold since entering. She registered this belatedly, the way she registered hunger sometimes only when it was already urgent. The grove was never warm exactly, but it was usually temperate, the mild impossible warmth of somewhere seasonless. Tonight she could see her own breath, thin white ribbons curling upward in the dark. She watched one dissipate. Watched another form. Something moved at the very edge of her vision, over her right shoulder this time. She didn't turn. The trick with peripheral movement, she'd found, was that it rewarded attention. Whatever it was — optical, real, somewhere between the two — it saved itself for the corner of the eye. Every time she turned toward it, it withdrew or resolved into a branch, a shift of shadow, a plausible nothing. She was beginning to understand this as a pattern. She stood in the centre of the clearing, breathing carefully, and let her vision go soft and wide. The pendant lay against her skin, still, patient, waiting for something she hadn't provided yet. The sounds came next. Small ones, first — the sound of weight being redistributed on soft ground, not a single footstep but a continual, almost meditative shifting, as though something stood very close and rocked gently in place. She counted three distinct points of origin around her. Perhaps four. The sounds didn't synchronise, but they shared a quality, a frequency beneath frequency, and she understood without wanting to that they were related. She turned slowly, performing calm. The clearing was, so far as she could see, empty. She had been here for seventeen minutes, she estimated. In the grove, that could mean anything. Out in the park, it could mean less. Or far, far more. The pendant flared. Not the soft patient pulse she'd felt earlier, but a sudden hard heat, almost painful against her sternum, and she gasped before she could stop herself and pressed her hand flat against her chest over her jacket. The warmth built and crested and held, a sustained note, an alarm, and the darkness at the treeline deepened, thickened, acquired a texture. The shifting sounds stopped. In the total silence that replaced them, Rory became aware of breathing that was not her own. It came from her left, from below her eye level, from somewhere very close, and it had the slow cadence of something that had been there for quite a long time already, watching her sort out what was wrong. She turned her head, slowly, toward the sound. Whatever had been waiting in the dark met her gaze and waited to see what she would do next.