Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9410SS1GKPP5R929WXP23

The oak trees rose like cathedral pillars around the boundary of the grove, massive and ancient, their bark silver-grey in the moonlight. Rory had been here twice before, always in daylight, always with someone else at her side. She had told herself that was coincidence. Standing now at the treeline with only her phone torch and the cold October air for company, she understood it hadn't been coincidence at all. She went in anyway. The pendant was the reason. It had started warming against her sternum an hour ago while she was eating leftover noodles above Silas' bar, an insistent gentle heat, the way a coal holds warmth long after the fire has gone. She'd touched it through her shirt and felt the pulse of it — rhythmic, almost biological — and known without being able to explain how she knew that it was pointing her here. To Richmond. To the grove. She'd taken the tube and then the bus and then walked twenty minutes along the dark edge of the park, telling herself with every step that she was being ridiculous. That was fine. Ridiculous was better than the alternative, which was that the pendant meant what it seemed to mean, and that there was genuinely something waiting for her in the clearing between worlds at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night. The wildflowers were still blooming. That was the first thing she noticed as she stepped between the standing stones — the way there always were flowers here, regardless of season. White and violet and pale yellow, low to the ground, faintly luminous where the moonlight caught their petals. In daylight it was beautiful. Now it looked like something preserved under glass. Too still. Too perfect. Rory swept her phone torch in a slow arc. The grove was small — perhaps thirty metres across — and she could see the whole of it from where she stood. Mossy earth, a tumble of flat stones near the centre, the wildflowers carpeting the ground between patches of exposed root. Empty. Quiet. She breathed out slowly and the mist of her breath dissolved into the cold air. "Right," she said quietly to no one. Hearing her own voice helped. She walked toward the centre stones, her footsteps soft on the moss. The pendant pulsed again, stronger now, a warmth that spread up through her sternum like the first sip of tea. She looked down at it where it lay against the front of her jacket — that faint inner glow, the deep crimson of the stone bleeding a dim rose-coloured light through the fabric. She hadn't zipped the jacket fully. She hadn't thought to. She stopped at the central stones and stood still and listened. The park was never truly silent. There was always the distant sound of the A316, a low arterial murmur of London carrying itself forward through the night, and there were usually foxes, and the shift of branches in whatever wind was moving. These sounds existed now at the grove's perimeter. But within the boundary of the standing oaks, the air was different. Thicker. The sounds of the city reached her as though filtered through water, distant and compressed, and in their place was a quiet that wasn't quite absence of sound. More like something waiting for the right moment to begin. She turned her torch toward the far edge of the clearing, scanning the space between the oaks. Nothing there. She made herself look away. She crouched by the flat stones and pressed her palm to the largest one, which was cold and slightly damp, perfectly ordinary beneath her fingers. Her left wrist rested against its edge, and she felt the crescent scar brush the stone's surface the way it always caught on things — cuffs, countertops, the corner of a page — a small habitual reminder. The wildflowers nearest her ankle moved. Not in wind. There was no wind inside the grove. The grove had its own atmosphere, its own interior weather, and she had noticed before how still the air was here even when the trees outside the boundary were bending. These flowers moved the way flowers do when something brushes past them low to the ground. A small displacement. Then stillness again. Rory stood up slowly. She didn't run the torch toward the flowers. She wasn't sure she wanted to see whatever was there. That was new, that particular quality of not wanting to know. She was not generally a person prone to dread. She was generally a person who checked under the bed and opened the cupboard and said well, nothing there then, in a practical voice. But the grove at night had its own logic and she found herself defaulting to it. She stood very still and waited. Somewhere to her left, something exhaled. It was a small sound, barely a sound at all, but she was certain of what it was — the kind of soft exhalation made by something that had been holding very still and had let a little of its held breath go. Not a nocturnal animal. The sound was too controlled, too deliberate in its quietness, as if whatever had made it understood the value of silence and had only just failed. Rory did not turn her head immediately. She kept her gaze on the central stones and let her peripheral vision work, scanning leftward. She had lived with Evan long enough to know that stillness was a weapon. That the time between hearing something and reacting was the time in which decisions were made. Left, fifteen degrees, something was standing at the treeline. She couldn't see it directly. That was the thing — the thing at the edge of her vision had a shape, a human-ish shape, taller than she would have liked, standing with the particular stillness of something that doesn't move because it doesn't need to. When she turned her head toward it, it was a shadow. An arrangement of tree trunks and darkness that formed nothing. But in the periphery it was there. She shifted her weight and it didn't move. The pendant pulsed again. Hot now. Almost uncomfortably hot, and she flattened her palm against it through her jacket and felt the warmth radiating upward into her fingers. It had never done this before. Whatever was near wasn't just fae-touched, wasn't just a shimmer in the boundary between this place and whatever lay beyond the grove. The stone was telling her something different now. Something with more urgency in its language. She turned her torch toward the shape. Bark and shadow. Nothing there. She swung the beam back to centre and stood breathing. Her heartbeat was measured and even — she was grateful for that. She had spent a year learning to keep her heartbeat even, to make her face give nothing away, to treat the body as a manageable system. That year had not been wasted. The moss to her right produced a single soft sound. A settling weight. A compression. And then, in her left periphery, the shadow moved. Not lurching. Not rushing. It moved the way fog moves, a slow decisive drift that crossed from the treeline toward the centre of the clearing, and when she turned her torch directly toward it there was nothing and when she looked away it was closer and it had no face that she could discern and it had no particular edges but it moved with intention, with the patience of something that understood time differently from her, and the grove around her seemed to hold its breath in the way that groves apparently could. Rory closed her fingers around the pendant and held on. The warmth in the stone flared sudden and sharp, bright heat against her palm, and the pendant lit through her fingers like a coal — the crimson of it visible even in her closed fist — and the shadow at the edge of her vision paused. Just paused. In the space of that pause she became certain of one thing with a clarity that felt almost physical: whatever this was, it was not the thing she had come here to find. The pendant hadn't led her here for this. This was something else. Something that had noticed the same warmth she was carrying and had followed it into the grove, and had been watching her from the moment she crossed the standing stones. She took one step backward, then another, her torch held steady and pointing nowhere useful. The shadow drifted again, unhurried, lateral now, moving along the treeline. She kept backing up until her heel found the edge of the standing stone boundary and she felt the change in air against the back of her neck — the city returning, the faint smell of exhaust and damp leaves, the low murmur of the A316 resolving back into itself, London reaching in from the outside to claim her. She stepped back through the boundary. The pendant cooled. She stood on the outside of the standing oaks and watched the clearing and there was nothing in it. Wildflowers in their impossible bloom. Flat stones at the centre. Moonlight and stillness. She stayed there for a long time, the cold working into her jacket, her left hand pressed against the pendant through the fabric. Nothing came out of the grove after her. Eventually she put her phone torch away and turned and walked back toward the park gate through the dark, and the city came up around her gradually — the orange glow of street lamps, the sound of tyres on wet tarmac, someone's music from a passing car. Normal things. Solid things. She didn't run. But she walked quickly, and she didn't look back, and she didn't take her hand off the pendant until the park gate was closed behind her.