Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX4B75C80DNNB9JCGFJ4J3

The city was a living thing, and tonight it had a fever. Sirens wailed a constant, distant counterpoint to the bass thumping from the bar below her flat. Rory couldn’t take it anymore. Her head throbbed in time with the music, a dull, persistent ache that no amount of paracetamol could touch. She needed quiet. Real quiet. Not the dead silence of a locked room, but the breathing, living quiet of a place untouched by concrete and exhaust fumes. She’d found the Grove by accident a month ago, on one of her long, meandering delivery routes for the Golden Empress. A gap in the ancient park wall, almost completely overgrown with ivy, had led her into a part of Richmond Park she didn’t recognise. And then she’d seen them. The standing stones. Seven massive oaks, stripped and weathered to the colour of bone, arranged in a perfect circle. Eva had called them a fairy tale, a local legend. A place where the world was thin. Rory parked her bike against a moss-covered oak well outside the park's official closing time, locking it with a practised flick of her wrist. The walk was familiar now, but the night made it different. The path was a ribbon of grey under a sliver of moon, the surrounding darkness a physical presence. The air grew cooler as she approached the clearing, carrying the scent of damp earth and something else. Something sweet and cloying, like decaying flowers. She ducked under a low-hanging branch and stepped past the first of the standing stones. The change was immediate. The faint, ever-present hum of the M4 motorway vanished. The wind died. The air, which had been stirring the leaves a moment ago, became still and heavy. It was a silence so complete it felt like a pressure against her eardrums. Inside the circle, the wildflowers were a riot of impossible colour, their petals glowing faintly in the moonlight. Blues and purples and whites, all blooming as if it were the peak of summer, not the tail end of autumn. Rory pulled her jacket tighter. The cold was sharper in here. She found her usual spot, a patch of soft grass in the centre of the circle, and sat down, drawing her knees to her chest. This was why she came. To sit in the profound quiet and let the noise in her head settle. A twig snapped somewhere in the darkness beyond the stones. Rory’s head lifted. Her body went still, a reflex honed by years of navigating London’s streets after dark. Just a fox. Or a badger. The park was full of them. She listened, her breath held tight in her chest. Nothing. No scuttling, no foraging. Just that profound, heavy silence again. She let out a slow breath and relaxed her shoulders. See? Nothing. The city was making her jumpy. Another sound. A soft, dry rustling. Not the crisp shuffle of leaves in the wind, but the sound of something being dragged through them. A long, slow, scraping whisper. It came from her left, from the dense wall of bracken and hawthorn that bordered the Grove. She stared into the gloom, her eyes struggling to pick out shapes. The darkness seemed to deepen there, to thicken into a solid mass. “Just a branch,” she whispered to the empty air. The words sounded small and foolish. A prickle of warmth bloomed on her chest, right over her heart. Rory frowned, her fingers finding the Heartstone pendant beneath her shirt. The crimson gem was cool to the touch, as it always was. Must be her own body heat, trapped against her skin by the wool of her jumper. She let it drop and wrapped her arms around her legs again. But the warmth didn’t fade. It grew, a gentle, insistent heat that spread through the silver chain and against her skin. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was wrong. It was a feeling that didn't belong. Then it began to pulse. A slow, rhythmic beat, faint but unmistakable. A warmth that bloomed and faded in perfect time with a silent, second heartbeat. Rory scrambled to her feet, her cool-headed composure finally fracturing. Her eyes darted around the clearing, scanning the spaces between the ancient oaks. The flowers. They were still. Not a single petal stirred in the dead air, yet she could have sworn they were all turned towards her, a silent, watchful audience. A flicker of movement at the edge of her vision. She spun to her right. Nothing. Just the gnarled bark of a standing stone, its surface like a withered face. But there had been something. A shape, darker than the shadows, that had moved and then was gone. The pendant’s pulse quickened, matching the frantic thumping of her own heart. The warmth was no longer gentle; it was an intense, focused heat, beginning to feel uncomfortable against her skin. She had to leave. Now. The thought was a jolt of pure adrenaline. She turned back the way she came, towards the gap in the stones she had entered through. It looked different. The stones seemed taller, more menacing. The gap between them appeared narrower, shrouded in a deeper shadow than before. A low sound began then. It wasn't a rustle or a snap. It was a hum. A discordant, tuneless melody that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It vibrated in the soles of her boots and hummed in her teeth, a single, droning note that promised nothing but emptiness. Rory fumbled in her pocket for her phone, her fingers clumsy with panic. The screen lit up, a harsh, blue-white glare that made her flinch. The battery icon, which had been full when she left the flat, was now red. A sliver of power remaining. And the time. She’d been here for twenty minutes. It felt like hours. The humming grew louder, resolving into two, then three clashing notes that scraped against each other like nails on glass. She looked up, her phone held loosely in her hand. And she saw it. Between two of the standing stones, a figure stood. It was tall and impossibly thin, its limbs too long for its body, its joints bent at angles that made no sense. It was a silhouette cut from the absolute blackness of the grove’s edge, a thing of jagged lines and wrong proportions. It had no face she could see, only a smooth, featureless oval of shadow that was tilted in her direction. It wasn't a trick of the light. It wasn't an animal. It was watching her. The pendant grew hot, searingly so, a brand against her skin. Through the thin fabric of her shirt, she saw a faint crimson glow begin to emanate from it. The figure took a step. Its movement was a horrifying, stuttering lurch, like a broken puppet being pulled by unseen strings. It didn't walk into the clearing so much as it unfolded, one long, disjointed limb at a time, into the space between the stones. Rory didn't scream. Her throat was locked tight, all the air frozen in her lungs. Her mind, the quick, clever part of her that always found an answer, was a blank wall of white-hot terror. There was no reasoning with this. No out-of-the-box solution. There was only the wrongness, the humming, the heat on her chest, and the thing that was now standing at the edge of the circle of wildflowers. She ran. Not thinking, just reacting. She spun away from the figure, away from the humming, and sprinted towards the nearest gap in the stones. The one she thought was the exit. The ground beneath her feet felt soft and treacherous, as if it were trying to hold her back. The humming rose to a piercing shriek that filled her entire head, a sound that felt like it was drilling directly into her skull. She stumbled, her boot catching on an unseen root, and went down hard. The impact drove the air from her lungs. She landed in a bed of the impossible flowers, their soft petals brushing against her cheek. For a terrifying second, she lay there, paralysed. The heat from the pendant was now an agony. Get up. The thought cut through the panic. She pushed herself up, her palms scraping against dirt and stone, and scrambled forward on her hands and knees. She didn't dare look back. She could feel it behind her, a cold, heavy presence that sucked all the warmth from the air. Her outstretched fingers touched the rough, weathered surface of a standing stone. She hauled herself towards the gap, a dark rectangle of promise. She threw herself through it, tumbling onto the other side. The world rushed back in. The sudden chill of a real night breeze. The distant hum of traffic. The hoot of an owl. The sounds were so normal, so mundane, they were a physical blow. Rory lay on the damp ground, gasping for breath, her chest heaving. The screaming hum in her head was gone. The pendant against her skin was already cooling, its angry red glow fading to nothing. She pushed herself onto her elbows and looked back. The Grove was just a clearing in a park. The standing stones were just ancient, weathered trees. There was no figure. There was no impossible darkness. There was only the moonlight and the silent, sleeping woods. But as she stared, a single, perfect blue wildflower that grew right on the boundary line wilted, its petals turning to black dust before her eyes.