Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXCTF2YNRMXQGKBPNCCSEK

Rory's trainers crunched against frost-rimed gravel. The gates had locked at dusk, but the gap in the wrought iron near Petersham yielded to her shoulder with a complaint of rusted metal that sounded too loud in the suburban silence. She checked her phone. Eleven-forty-three. The screen flickered, digits stuttering like dying neon before stabilizing. She shoved it into her jacket pocket, her breath clouding in the November air. Her left wrist itched beneath her sleeve. She scratched at the crescent scar without thinking, the childhood mark burning in the chill as it always did when weather turned, though tonight the sensation carried an edge of warning. She moved past the perimeter oaks. The standing stones of Isolde's Grove waited in the clearing ahead, three trunks that centuries of wind and weather had tortured into verticality, their bark silvered by moonlight into something resembling bone. Between them, the boundary breathed. She felt it in her teeth, a pressure change that made her sinuses ache. Rory touched the Heartstone Pendant through her shirt. The crimson gem sat against her sternum, ice-cold when she'd fled the flat above Silas' bar three hours ago, now sweating heat through the cotton. It had woken her from a shallow sleep, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn't hers, pulling her south through empty streets and sleeping suburbs with the insistence of a hooked vein. She'd followed it across London on the last Tube, then the bus, then these feet that now ached with the cold and the strangeness of the walk. The wildflowers showed first. They shouldn't exist. Not in November. Not at midnight in Richmond Park. Yet they carpeted the approach to the stones, bluebells and poppies and foxgloves swaying without wind, their colors leached to greyscale by the moon but undeniably blooming, thriving, their petals fat with moisture. Their scent hit her—honey-sweet and rotting, like fruit left too long in the sun, cloying enough to coat the back of her throat. Rory stopped. The silver chain of the pendant grew hot against her collarbone, the metal conducting the gem's pulse. She pulled it free. The crimson stone glowed, faint inner light bleeding into the dark, pointing toward the center stone like a compass needle drawn to magnetic north. "All right," she muttered. Her voice sounded wrong. It died in the air inches from her lips, failing to carry, failing to echo. It simply dropped, consumed by a silence that had weight and texture, pressing against her eardrums. She stepped over the threshold between the first two oaks. The temperature inverted. The winter cold vanished, replaced by a thick, greenhouse humidity that pressed against her face and curled the ends of her straight black hair. Her jacket became a burden, trapping heat against her skin. She unzipped it, the metal tag clicking loud as a gunshot. The sound did not travel. It hung suspended, visible almost as a ripple in the air, before dissolving. Rory counted her heartbeats. One. Two. Three. Her watch ticked along with them, steady, reliable. Then the second hand hesitated, reversed, ticked backwards. She stared at it. The mechanism whirred, confused, then resumed forward motion at double speed, racing around the dial while the minute hand remained stationary. The standing stones weren't oaks anymore. Bark became sinew in her peripheral vision, rough texture smoothing into something resembling skin. Roots became fingers digging into earth that wasn't quite earth, shifting with the slow rhythm of a sleeper's breathing. She snapped her head toward the leftmost stone. It stood motionless, ancient and inert, yet the moss growing at its base had arranged itself into patterns that looked almost like words in an alphabet she couldn't read, wet and black in the moonlight. Her pulse hammered against her throat. Law school had taught her to trust evidence, to build cases from fact. The facts here dissolved under scrutiny. The clearing measured perhaps thirty feet across according to the maps she'd studied in the library yesterday, yet when she looked back, the path she'd taken had stretched into a tunnel of absolute darkness. Richmond Park was gone. The distant London glow of streetlamps, the hum of the A307, the whisper of planes overhead—vanished. Replaced by a starless void that pressed against the treeline with the opacity of ink. The pendant throbbed. One pulse. Two. A rhythm that synced with her own heart, then diverged, slower, heavy as a drum underwater. Something rustled behind her. Not leaves. Fabric. Or the suggestion of fabric, silk dragging across wet grass. Rory spun. The wildflowers parted in a wake that led nowhere, stems bending and rebounding in a serpentine path that terminated at the third standing stone. No body. No shadow cast by the moon. Just the impression of displacement, the bending of starlight around an absence, and the smell of ozone and wet copper that filled her nostrils. She reached for her phone. The screen remained black. Dead. She pressed buttons, shook it, held the power button until her thumb ached. Nothing. The device had become a brick of glass and plastic, inert as the stones pretended to be. "Okay," she said, forcing the word into the heavy air. It came out as a whisper, stolen immediately by the silence. "Okay, just nerves. Just the dark playing tricks." The grove answered. A sound threaded through the bluebells, not words but the approximation of them, the wet click of a tongue against palate, the sound of wind through hollow teeth. It came from everywhere and nowhere, circling her like a shark in deep water, moving from her left to her right without traversing the space between. Rory backed toward the center stone. Her heel struck something soft that gave beneath her weight. She looked down. A foxglove had wrapped its fibrous stem around her ankle, petals opening and closing with peristaltic rhythm, like a mouth gasping for air, revealing stamens that looked too much like teeth. She kicked free. The flower shrieked, a sound like tearing metal and breaking glass, and withered into black slime that smoked against the soil. The standing stones groaned. Not wood creaking in wind. Voices. Old voices. The oaks twisted on their roots, grinding in the earth, inching closer, closing the gap between them like jaws beginning to shut. The clearing shrank. Thirty feet became twenty. Twenty became ten. Rory ran. Three strides toward where the entrance had been, toward Petersham and the real world and the delivery scooter parked outside Yu-Fei's restaurant where her life made linear sense. The space distorted. Each step carried her deeper into the grove, the stones remaining equidistant no matter how fast she moved. Her lungs burned. The humid air refused to fill them properly, too thick, tasting of pollen and grave dirt and the particular copper scent of the pendant heating against her chest. She stopped. Bending double, hands on knees, she forced herself to think. Cool-headed. Quick out-of-the-box thinking. That's what Eva always said after Cardiff, after Evan, after the courtrooms that felt like cages. Panic killed. Observation saved. The pendant. Rory straightened. The crimson gem hung suspended from its chain, no longer pointing forward but sideways, toward the space between the second and third stone. There, where the darkness pooled thickest, something had coagulated. A shape that defied the moonlight, that absorbed it, that bent the visual field around its edges like a gravitational lens, creating a halo of twisted perception. It wasn't walking. It was unfolding. Layers of shadow peeled back to reveal more shadow, depth without dimension. The wildflowers turned to face it, worshipful, their heads bowing in unison, stems creaking like old floorboards. The temperature plummeted. Rory's breath crystallized in the air, hanging as suspended crystals before falling to shatter against the grass. The scar on her wrist flared with sudden white-hot pain, as if the childhood injury had reopened, bleeding memory instead of blood. She clutched the pendant in her fist. The warmth surged, fighting back the cold, creating a sphere of crimson light that pushed against the encroaching dark, illuminating the edges of things that refused to resolve into concrete form. The unfolding shape paused. From within the fold of darkness, eyes opened. Not two. Dozens, arranged in concentric circles that suggested a face but revealed nothing of anatomy or intent. They blinked asynchronously, wet shutters over pits that reflected nothing, not even the glow of the Heartstone. Rory stepped back. Her shoulders struck the rough bark of the center standing stone. The tree shuddered, a vibration that traveled down her spine and into her teeth, and she realized with a clarity that froze her blood that the stone wasn't wood at all, but something watching, waiting, holding her in place for the entity that now detached itself fully from the shadows and began to drift across the wildflowers, which did not bend beneath its weight but rather withered in its wake, smoking and blackening. The grove held its breath. Time stuttered. Her watch ticked backwards, the hands spinning counter-clockwise. The air grew teeth, biting into her exposed wrists, her face, seeking entry. Rory gripped the Heartstone until her knuckles matched the silver chain. She didn't run. Running hadn't worked. The thing had no feet, no legs, yet it closed the distance, the eyes rotating to maintain contact, unblinking now, curious and ancient and hungry. She stared into the multitude of eyes and raised the glowing gem high, casting her own shadow long and trembling across the impossible clearing, and waited for the collision that would either shatter the boundary or shatter her.