Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXEY4MFWW7E0F53HM0ZQ3S

The last train from Waterloo had deposited Rory at Richmond station just past eleven, and she'd walked the rest of the way in darkness. The park gates should have been locked at this hour, but the iron bars hung open when she arrived, chain dangling loose like a broken promise. She'd told herself not to think too hard about that. The pendant had been warm against her chest all day, a persistent throb like a second heartbeat. It had started that morning, pulling her attention during her shift at the Golden Empress until Yu-Fei had snapped at her twice for mixing up orders. By evening, the warmth had become heat, and Rory had known where she needed to go. Now she walked the night-black paths of Richmond Park, her phone's torch cutting a pale wedge through the darkness. The ancient oaks rose around her like sleeping giants, their branches interlocking overhead to block what little moonlight filtered through the clouds. Her footsteps crunched on gravel, then went soft as she veered onto grass, heading toward the place she'd only visited once before. Isolde's grove. The boundary between worlds. The pendant pulsed, and Rory pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket. The crimson stone burned even through two layers of fabric. Something rustled in the undergrowth to her left. She stopped, swept her torch toward the sound. Nothing but bracken and shadow. A fox, probably. The park was full of them. She'd seen them dozens of times on evening walks, their eyes catching the light like copper coins before they slipped away into the dark. She waited. The rustling didn't come again. Rory walked on, faster now, her breath misting in the cold air. The standing stones couldn't be far. She remembered the path from her first visit—through the cluster of Spanish chestnuts, past the fallen oak that had never been cleared, then left at the stream until the trees opened up and— Her torch flickered. She shook it, and the beam steadied. Cheap phone, cheap battery. She should have charged it before leaving. The percentage had been fine when she'd checked at the station, but now when she glanced at the screen, it read twelve percent. That wasn't right. She'd had over sixty when she left the flat. The cold deepened around her. Not the gradual chill of a November night but something sharper, something that crept under her collar and settled against her skin like damp cloth. Her breath came out in a longer plume now, hanging in the air before dissolving. She heard the stream before she saw it—a thin trickle of water over stones. In daylight, it had been pretty, almost peaceful. Now it sounded wrong. The rhythm was off. Too regular, like something mimicking the natural burble of water without quite understanding how randomness worked. Rory crossed the stream on the stepping stones, her balance precarious in the dark. The torch caught something in the water—a pale shape beneath the surface—and she jerked her light back toward it, heart hammering. A plastic bag. Just a carrier bag trapped against a rock, billowing in the current. She let out a breath that shook more than she wanted to admit and kept walking. The oaks grew older here, their trunks gnarled and split, bark rough as ancient skin. Some of them had been standing since before the Tudors built their palace nearby. Rory had read that somewhere, found it charming at the time. Now the weight of those centuries pressed down on her, all those years of roots drinking from the same soil, branches reaching toward the same indifferent sky. The standing stones emerged from the darkness like teeth. She stopped at the edge of the grove, her torch beam playing over the weathered surfaces. There were seven of them, arranged in a rough circle around a clearing where wildflowers bloomed even now, even in November. Bluebells and foxglove and something that might have been wood anemone, their petals catching her light and holding it. The pendant burned. Rory stepped between two of the stones, crossing the boundary. The air changed immediately—thicker somehow, sweeter, carrying a scent like honey and something underneath that she couldn't name. The cold didn't abate, but it transformed, becoming less physical and more present, a weight in her lungs with each breath. She stood in the center of the grove and turned in a slow circle, torch held out before her like a talisman. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. The stones swallowed the sound, gave nothing back. No echo, no resonance. Just silence that felt deliberate. The pendant pulsed again, three quick beats, then nothing. Rory pulled it out from beneath her jacket. The crimson stone glowed faintly, casting reddish light across her fingers. It had never done that before—not this brightly, not with this intensity. She could see her own veins through her skin, illuminated from within. A sound reached her from somewhere beyond the stones. Not rustling this time. Something else. Something that might have been a voice if voices could be made of wind and water and the creak of branches, all layered together into a single impossible chord. She spun toward it, torch sweeping the darkness between the oaks. The trees stood motionless. No wind stirred their branches. But the sound came again, closer now, and Rory realized with a crawling certainty that it wasn't coming from between the trees at all. It was coming from beneath them. The ground felt different under her feet. Softer than it should have been, yielding slightly with each shift of her weight. She looked down, and her torch showed her grass that was too green, too lush, blades bending away from her shoes as if trying to avoid her touch. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She whipped around, and there was nothing there. Just the standing stones, just the flowers, just the endless dark beyond the grove. But she'd seen it—a flicker of pale movement, there and gone in the space between heartbeats. "Who's there?" Silence answered her. But it was the wrong kind of silence now, the kind that listened. Rory's phone died. The torch cut out without warning, and darkness crashed over her like a wave. She fumbled with the device, jabbing at the power button, but the screen stayed black. Dead. Completely dead, though she could have sworn she'd had battery life left. She stood perfectly still in the center of the grove, pendant clutched in one hand, dead phone in the other. Her eyes strained against the darkness, trying to adjust, trying to find some scrap of light to hold onto. Slowly, very slowly, shapes began to emerge. The standing stones were darker than the dark around them, solid absences in the night. The flowers at her feet gave off the faintest phosphorescence, not enough to see by but enough to outline the clearing's edge. And there—between two of the eastern stones—something stood that hadn't been there before. Rory couldn't make out details. Just a shape, taller than a person should be, thin in ways that seemed wrong even in silhouette. It didn't move. It simply occupied space that had been empty a moment ago, as if it had always been there and she was only now being allowed to see it. The pendant flared hot against her palm, and she nearly dropped it. "I know you're there." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I came because—" The shape shifted. Not a movement exactly—more like a rearrangement, a reconsideration of the space it held. One moment it was between the eastern stones; the next it was closer, near the southern edge of the circle, though Rory hadn't seen it cross the distance between. Her heart slammed against her ribs. She took a step backward, then another, her heel catching on something in the dark. She stumbled but didn't fall, and when she looked up again, the shape was gone. Gone, or moved. She turned slowly, scanning the darkness between each pair of stones. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. And then— There. It stood directly behind her, close enough that she should have felt its breath if it breathed at all. She could see more of it now, her eyes having adjusted to the dark. Pale features that were almost a face, arranged in almost the right configuration. Long limbs that bent at angles that human limbs shouldn't bend. A shape that wore the idea of a body like an ill-fitting coat. Rory didn't scream. She didn't run. Some deep, animal part of her brain understood that either action would be a mistake, that whatever stood before her was waiting for exactly that—for her to break, to flee, to give it permission to give chase. Instead, she raised the pendant between them. The crimson light swelled, painting the creature's face in shades of blood and shadow. And for one terrible moment, Rory saw its expression clearly—saw something that might have been curiosity, might have been hunger, might have been recognition. It smiled with a mouth that had too many teeth. Then the grove was empty. The cold retreated. The pendant's glow faded to its usual faint pulse, and Rory stood alone among the standing stones, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her whole body trembling with the aftermath of fear. But she knew—knew with absolute certainty—that she wasn't alone. Not really. Whatever had been here was still watching from somewhere just beyond her perception, waiting in the space between heartbeats, patient as stone, old as the oaks that guarded this place. She'd come to the grove for answers. Now she understood that some questions were better left unasked. The walk back to the station took hours, though her watch showed only twenty minutes had passed. She didn't look back. She didn't stop. And every step of the way, she felt that terrible attention fixed on the back of her neck, curious and cold and utterly, perfectly patient. The pendant never cooled.