Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXRS0WAVNFX0J85CAWY6KT

The last bus had dropped her at the Richmond Park gate twenty minutes ago, and already Rory questioned every decision that had led her here. She shifted her backpack higher on one shoulder and followed the gravel path that cut south through the park's interior, her trainers crunching too loud against the silence. The instructions had been specific: reach the grove by midnight. The folded note, slipped under her door that morning with no return address, had used the old name — Isolde's grove — a name she'd only heard once before, from Eva, years ago in a Cardiff pub, half-drunk and grinning and spinning stories Rory hadn't believed. She believed them now. The Heartstone Pendant sat warm against her sternum, a thumbnail-sized coal burning through her shirt. It had been pulsing since she'd crossed the park's boundary fence, a slow metronomic throb she felt in her teeth. The path ahead dissolved into grass. Rory pulled out her phone. No signal. The screen's blue glow painted her knuckles white, and she switched on the torch function and swept it across the dark. Ancient oaks loomed at the far edge of the beam, their bark twisted into shapes that looked deliberate — columns, almost, or sentinels standing shoulder to shoulder. The standing stones. She'd found them faster than she expected. Faster than the note's hand-drawn map had suggested. She stopped. The wind had died. Not faded — died, suddenly, as if someone had sealed the night in glass. The leaves overhead, which had been rustling thirty seconds ago, hung motionless. Her breath came out in a thin ribbon of vapor, though it was late June and the afternoon had been sweltering. "Right," she muttered. "Fine." She stepped between the two nearest oaks and the temperature dropped five degrees in the space of a single stride. The torch flickered. Rory smacked the side of her phone with her palm and the light steadied, finding a floor of wildflowers — campion, foxglove, something pale and star-shaped she didn't recognize — blooming in impossible profusion across the clearing. Their petals were open despite the darkness. Some of them swayed, though there was no wind to move them. The grove was smaller than she'd imagined. Forty feet across, maybe fifty. The oaks ringed it completely, their canopy knitting together overhead into a lattice that blocked the sky. She could see no stars. No moon. Just the black weave of branches and the sense of a ceiling pressing down. She walked to the center of the clearing and crouched, setting her backpack on the ground. The note had said to wait. So she'd wait. A minute passed. Two. Five. Rory became aware of a sound she couldn't place. Low, rhythmic, organic. She held her breath to isolate it. Not her heartbeat — the rhythm was wrong, too slow, too deliberate, like something large drawing air through a passage that was almost, but not quite, sealed. Breathing. Something in the grove was breathing. She swept the torch in a full circle. Oaks. Flowers. Empty space between the trunks. Nothing. The breathing didn't stop. It came from no fixed direction, seeming to rise from the ground itself, from the flowers, from the air between the petals. She stood and turned again, slower this time, letting the beam linger on each gap between the trees. The fourth gap held something that made her fingers tighten on the phone. A shape. Upright. Thin. Standing just beyond the tree line, half-hidden by an oak trunk. She'd swept past it on the first rotation and it hadn't been there. "Hello?" The shape didn't move. Didn't respond. It had the proportions of a person — narrow shoulders, a suggestion of a head — but the posture was wrong. Too still. Too vertical, as if it had been hung from a wire rather than standing on its own feet. "I got the note," Rory said, her voice coming out steadier than she felt. "If you're the one who left it, you could stop lurking and actually talk to me." The shape remained. The breathing continued, unchanged. Rory aimed the torch directly at it. The light hit bark, shadows, the suggestion of a face that resolved into a knot in the wood. A trick of depth and darkness. She exhaled through her nose and turned back toward her backpack. The flowers nearest her feet had closed. A circle of them, maybe three feet in diameter, their petals folded tight as fists. Beyond that circle, every other flower in the grove remained open. She hadn't stepped on them. Hadn't brushed them. They'd simply sealed themselves shut in the exact spot where she'd been standing. The pendant flared hot against her chest. Not the slow pulse she'd grown accustomed to — a sharp, sudden burn, like touching a pan handle bare. Rory hissed and pulled the chain away from her skin, letting the crimson stone swing free. Its inner glow had brightened from its usual faint ember to something vivid, something that threw red light across her fingers and the pale flowers below. She turned toward the gap between the trees again. The shape was closer. One full oak-span closer, standing now at the very edge of the clearing where grass met root. She hadn't heard it move. The breathing — the groundless, directionless breathing — hitched once, then resumed at a fractionally faster pace. Rory's hand found the crescent scar on her left wrist without thinking, her thumb pressing into the familiar ridge of tissue. A grounding gesture. Something she'd done since childhood whenever the world threatened to slip out from under her. "I can see you," she said. The shape tilted. The motion was small — a few degrees of lateral inclination, like a dog hearing a new sound — but it was unmistakably deliberate. Whatever stood at the edge of Isolde's grove was listening to her. And then the flowers began to close. Not the ring around her feet, which had already sealed, but the rest of them, progressing outward from the center of the grove in a slow, expanding wave. Each bloom folded with a faint sound, something between a whisper and the tick of a clock, and together they built into a ripple of soft clicks that spread toward the tree line. The grove was shutting down, petal by petal, and in the diminishing color Rory realized that the wildflowers had been the clearing's only true light source. A foxglove sealed. A campion curled inward. The pale star-shaped flowers went last, winking out like snuffed candles, and the darkness thickened around her until the only light left was the red pulse of the Heartstone and the weakening beam of her phone. Her torch died. The screen went black in her hand. She tapped it. Pressed the power button. Nothing. The glass was cold against her thumb, refrigerator cold, and she shoved the dead phone into her jacket pocket. The Heartstone's glow remained. She cupped it in her palm and held it up, a coal-red lantern that threw perhaps three feet of usable light. Enough to see the nearest flowers, all closed now. Enough to see the grass. Not enough to see the trees. The breathing stopped. The silence that replaced it was worse. It was not the ordinary silence of a park at night — there had been that, earlier, on the gravel path, a silence made of distant traffic and the hum of the city sleeping. This was absence. A void where sound should have been, as if the grove had been excised from the world entirely and placed somewhere that noise could not reach. Rory's own breathing sounded obscene in it. She forced herself to slow it down. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Controlled. Think. The note said midnight. She didn't know what time it was anymore — the phone was dead and she didn't wear a watch — but she knew the grove's reputation. Time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She might have been standing in this clearing for thirty seconds or three hours. A sound broke the silence. Not breathing this time, but footsteps. Soft, unhurried, circling the grove's perimeter just beyond the reach of the pendant's light. Footsteps on dead leaves, except there were no dead leaves — the grove floor was living grass and living flowers — and Rory tracked the sound as it moved behind her left shoulder, around to her back, past her right side, forward. She pivoted to follow it. The Heartstone's light caught nothing. The footsteps continued their circuit, steady and patient, and Rory realized they were spiraling. Each pass brought them marginally closer. She could hear the difference — the sound gaining resolution, gaining texture, the way a radio tunes from static into voice. She heard the weight in each step now, the slight drag of something trailing on the ground behind the walker, something soft and long that brushed the closed petals with a sound like silk on silk. "You wrote the note," Rory said. Not a question. The footsteps stopped. Directly in front of her. Close. Close enough that she should have been able to see whatever stood there, but the pendant's light found only empty air and the sealed faces of flowers. She held the stone higher. Shadows shifted. The space before her looked wrong — not occupied, but thickened, as if the darkness there had more mass than the darkness elsewhere, as if it would resist her hand if she pushed it forward. She didn't push her hand forward. "Tell me what you want," she said. The grove exhaled. She felt it on her face — a gust of warm, sweetly rotten air that carried the scent of turned earth and something underneath it, something mineral and deep, like the smell at the mouth of a cave. The pendant's crimson glow stuttered, pulsing fast and shallow, the heartbeat of a small frightened animal. Then a voice. It came from everywhere — from the oaks, from the closed flowers, from the dense air in front of her. A voice like wet wood splintering. "Closer." Rory held her ground. The scar on her wrist throbbed. The pendant burned. Somewhere beyond the canopy, in a world she might still belong to, a fox screamed — distant, muffled, a sound traveling through water — and the grove swallowed it whole.