Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX1T9WV0AAMM2N9G0K8WJS

The last bus from Richmond had already gone by the time Rory crossed the park boundary. She'd known it would be. She'd planned for it, or told herself she had, because planning implied control and control implied she wasn't doing something monumentally stupid by coming here alone at half eleven on a Thursday night. The pendant sat warm against her sternum. Not the gentle ambient warmth of metal held close to skin — something deeper, deliberate, like a second pulse ticking just below her own. She pressed two fingers against it through her jacket and felt it throb. Richmond Park after dark was not the same place people brought their dogs on Sunday mornings. The deer were invisible shapes in the long grass, betrayed only by the wet snap of their jaws pulling at clover. The city's orange haze pressed against the southern sky but couldn't quite reach here, and the oaks threw down a darkness so complete that Rory's phone torch carved the path ahead in a narrow white wedge that made everything beyond it worse. She'd memorized the route from Isolde's sketch. Past the second cattle gate, bear left where the path forks at the ruined wall, follow the slope down until the standing oaks appear. Simple enough on paper. On paper, it had also been daylight. The cattle gate's latch stuck. She wrenched it and the metal shrieked against its bolt, a sound that carried outward like a stone dropped into still water. She stood motionless in the aftermath, listening. Wind through canopy. The distant arterial murmur of the A307. Nothing else. She walked. The path forked where Isolde said it would. Rory went left, ducking under a low hawthorn branch, and the ground sloped sharply enough that she had to brace one hand against a trunk to keep her footing. Wet bark. The tree was sweating despite the cold. She pulled her hand back and wiped it on her jeans without looking at what had come away on her palm. The standing oaks appeared gradually, not all at once the way landmarks were supposed to. First one, half-hidden behind a screen of holly. Then two more, their trunks so wide that they couldn't have grown naturally — and they hadn't. These were the markers. Petrified wood older than the park, older than London, driven into the earth in a rough circle like the bones of some vast creature's ribcage. The bark had turned to something between stone and glass. Under her torchlight it held a faint mineral sheen, almost opalescent. Rory stepped between two of them and the air changed. Not the temperature. Not the pressure. Something subtler. The park's ambient noise — the wind, the road, the restless deer — fell away as if someone had closed a window. What replaced it was silence of a kind she'd never experienced. Not the absence of sound but the presence of quiet, thick and fibrous, a thing with texture. She could feel it pressing against her eardrums. The pendant flared so hot she gasped and yanked her jacket open. Crimson light bled through her shirt, illuminating the hollow of her throat from below. The Heartstone was alive with it, pulsing in quick urgent intervals like a warning. "Right," she whispered. Her voice fell flat. The word didn't carry. It dropped at her feet and died. Wildflowers covered the ground inside the circle, absurdly vivid even in the grey wash of her torch. Bluebells and foxglove and something low and white she couldn't name. They bloomed dense and uniform, as if the seasons meant nothing here, which — Isolde had been clear — they didn't. Time behaved differently inside the Grove. An hour here could be minutes outside. Or days. Rory checked her phone. 11:47 PM. She took a screenshot for reference, knowing it was probably useless, then pocketed it and moved toward the center of the clearing. She was looking for a mark in the earth. Isolde had described it as a scar — a seam where the ground had split and healed badly, roughly six feet long, aligned north-south. It would feel wrong, Isolde said. You won't need me to tell you when you're standing on it. She found it. The seam ran through the wildflowers like a surgical wound. The petals on either side of it grew tilted, leaning away, the way grass leans from a buried electrical cable. Rory crouched and held her torch close. The earth in the seam was darker than the soil around it. Not wet-dark. Char-dark. It smelled of hot stone and something organic underneath — sweet and dense, halfway between overripe fruit and the copper tang at the back of a nosebleed. The Heartstone pulsed so fiercely she could feel it in her teeth. Rory set her bag down, pulled out the small leather journal she'd been filling with Isolde's notes for two weeks, and flipped to the page she needed. Soil sample. Measurement of the seam's width. Any visible residue or crystalline formation along the — A sound. She held perfectly still. Her fingers stayed frozen on the open page. The sound had come from behind her and to the right, somewhere between the standing oaks at the southern edge of the circle. It hadn't been footsteps. It hadn't been an animal. It had been a displacement of air — a thick, fibrous pushing, as if something large had shifted its weight from one position to another. Rory turned her head slowly and swept the torch across the tree line. Nothing. The oaks stood in their ancient ring. The holly beyond was a solid black mass. Wildflowers swayed faintly, though there was no wind. She returned to the journal. Her handwriting, when she pressed pen to paper, came out in tight cramped letters that didn't look like hers. Width of seam: approximately four inches at widest point. Depth— She stopped writing. The flowers to her left had stilled. Every other bloom in the clearing continued its gentle phantom-wind sway, but in a rough oval maybe ten feet from where she crouched, a cluster of foxglove stood rigid. Stems straight. Bells motionless. As if something were standing among them, and the weight of its presence had pressed the air flat. Rory's breath caught. She moved the torch beam toward the still patch and the foxglove resumed swaying. Seamlessly. As if they'd never stopped. The stillness appeared again immediately — behind her now. She didn't see it. She felt it. A dead zone in the ambient movement of the Grove, directly at her back, close enough that the fine hair on her neck prickled to attention. She didn't turn around. She stayed crouched over the seam, pen hovering above the page, and forced herself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The air tasted of char and copper. The Heartstone pendant threw red light across the journal's open pages in rhythmic waves, quick as a rabbit's heartbeat. Something exhaled behind her. Not breath, not exactly — more like the long slow release of compressed silence, a sound made of negative space. It moved across the back of her neck and lifted a strand of her hair. Rory closed the journal. Capped the pen. Put both into her bag with steady hands that she held steady through will alone. She stood and turned in a single movement, sweeping the torch in a wide arc. The clearing was empty. Nothing stood behind her. Nothing visible, nothing solid, nothing that reflected light or cast a shadow. But the wildflowers in a rough circle the size of a doorway — directly where the exhalation had come from — were lying flat against the earth, their stems bent as if something enormous had been resting there and had lifted away at the exact moment she turned. Rory counted to five. The flowers didn't spring back. She took three careful steps backward, keeping her torch trained on the flattened circle. Her heel caught on a root and she stumbled, dropping the beam for half a second. When she brought it back up, the circle of crushed flowers was wider. Two feet wider in every direction. Nothing had made a sound. The scar on her left wrist — that old crescent from the broken greenhouse pane when she was nine — began to itch. It hadn't itched in years. She pressed her thumb into it hard. "I know you're here," she said. Not a challenge. Not bravado. A statement of fact, spoken in the same flat measured tone she used to give delivery ETAs over the phone. Neutral. Professional. As if whatever stood unseen in the Fae Grove could be managed the same way she managed late orders and wrong addresses. Nothing responded. The silence re-thickened. The crushed flowers held their shape. Then, from somewhere inside the seam at her back — from below the ground, from the black split in the earth she'd been crouching over moments ago — came a sound that made her stomach drop through the floor of her body. Knocking. Three measured knocks, muffled by soil and stone but unmistakable in their rhythm and intent. The sound a fist makes against a door when it knows someone is home. Patient. Certain. The Heartstone pendant blazed so bright the crimson light threw her shadow across the standing oaks forty feet away. The shadow stretched, elongated, and for a fraction of a second before Rory killed the thought, she could have sworn it didn't match her shape. The knocking came again. Same rhythm. Same patience. But louder, as if whatever was down there had moved closer to the surface. Rory picked up her bag, slung it across her chest, and walked toward the gap between the two nearest standing oaks without running. She would not run. Running was agreement. Running was confirmation that something behind her merited fear, and the moment she confirmed that, the rules would change. She stepped between the oaks. The park's ambient noise flooded back — wind, road, the distant hydraulic sigh of a night bus — and the air lost its thick silent weight so abruptly that she stumbled forward and caught herself against the holly. Behind her, inside the Grove, the knocking stopped. She checked her phone. 11:49 PM. Two minutes. She had been inside for two minutes. It had felt like an hour. Rory turned off her torch and stood in the dark, one hand braced against the holly, the other pressed flat over the Heartstone pendant. It was cooling rapidly. The pulse slowed from its frantic rabbit-rhythm to something steadier, calmer, matching itself to her own heartbeat the way it always did when danger receded. She looked back toward the standing oaks. The gap she'd walked through was a vertical slash of deeper darkness. Beyond it, the wildflowers would still be blooming, the seam would still be scarring the earth, and somewhere beneath the soil, something that knocked like a visitor at a familiar door was either waiting or wasn't. She pulled her jacket closed. The night air found every gap.