Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXSPJD6PC9PAK0ZJA5AKF6

The bus dropped her at the empty bus stop on Richmond Park's outer edge, and the red taillights disappeared down the dark road before Rory had even stepped onto the pavement. She checked her phone. No signal, of course. She'd known that before she'd come, had deliberately left her charger at home as though punishing herself in advance for whatever she was about to do. The pendant pulsed against her chest, warm through her thin jacket. She'd felt it for three days now—a faint thrumming that coincided with the dreams. In the dreams, she stood in a forest she didn't recognize, the trees too tall, the air too thick, and something watched her from between the trunks. She'd wake with the taste of copper on her tongue and the absolute certainty that she needed to come here. The path into the park was barely visible in the darkness. Moonlight filtered through the overhead canopy, turning the gravel into a river of pale stones. Her footsteps sounded too loud, too present, as though the silence around them was holding its breath. She'd asked Silas about the grove. He'd stiffened in that way he did when a topic touched something he didn't want to discuss, his hands stilling on the glass he'd been polishing. No one goes there at night, he'd said. That's not a place for people like us. People like us. Working-class Londoners. People who delivered Chinese food to flats above bars and lived in studio apartments that smelled of stale beer and other people's cigarettes. Not the sort of people who walked into ancient magic circles after midnight. But the pendant had pulsed warmer at his words, and Rory had known with a certainty that sat uncomfortable in her stomach that this was where she needed to be. The trees thinned. The grove opened before her like a held breath finally released. The standing stones rose from the wildflowers, ancient oaks that had been shaped by hands older than memory into perfect arches and upright sentinels. Even in the darkness, Rory could see them—the bark gnarled and thick, the branches reaching toward each other as though in constant conversation. The flowers should not have been visible, should not have been blooming at all in the middle of October, but they carpeted the ground in colors she couldn't quite name. Not quite white. Not quite blue. Something in between that her eyes refused to settle on. She stepped inside the circle. The wrongness started small. A pressure at the back of her skull, like being stared at from just behind. She turned. Nothing. The trees stood sentinel around the clearing's edge, their branches swaying in a wind she couldn't feel on her skin. Rory walked to the center of the grove. The pendant burned hotter now, a steady pulse that matched the heartbeat she could feel hammering in her throat. She pulled it out from under her shirt. The heartstone glowed—a deep crimson light that should have been visible for miles, that should have attracted attention from every living thing in the park, but seemed instead to be contained, to be reaching for something just beyond her sightline. A sound. Not a twig breaking—nothing so obvious. More like the memory of a sound, an impression of movement that her brain tried to assemble into something recognizable. She stood motionless, her breath shallow, her eyes scanning the tree line. Nothing moved. Nothing made itself seen. But the feeling of being watched intensified. She thought of Eva, her friend who'd convinced her to leave Cardiff, to start over. Thought of the flat above Silas' bar that she'd lived in for eight months now, the narrow bed, the window that looked out onto the alley where the bins sat waiting to be collected. Thought of the restaurant where she delivered pad thai and spring rolls to wealthy clients who never looked her in the eye. She did not think of Evan. She had trained herself, over many months, not to think of Evan. The silence in the grove was absolute. No insects, no rustling of animals in the undergrowth, no wind through leaves. Her own heartbeat seemed obscene in the quiet, a drum marking time in a place where time had no meaning. The flowers at the base of the nearest standing stone moved. Not from wind—there was no wind—but as though something had brushed through them. Rory watched, unable to look away, as a path was pressed down in the blooms. The path led from the tree line to the stone and stopped. No one was there. The path remained, a visible dent in the growth, pointing directly at her. Rory's hand went to her wrist, her fingers finding the small crescent scar there. A childhood accident. That's what she'd always been told. She didn't remember it, had been too young, but she'd grown up with the story: the fall, the glass, the blood. Her mother's panicked face. The scar that never quite faded. The scar that, she realized now, the pendant was wrapped around. She wore it on a thin silver chain, the heartstone resting in the hollow of her throat, but she'd tied the chain to the pendant's own chain and worn it like a bracelet since the dreams started. She didn't know why. It had felt important. The pendant pulsed, and the standing stone hummed. She heard it then. Not a voice—nothing so distinct. More like the idea of a voice, a presence of meaning without sound. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from the stones and the flowers and the dark spaces between the trees. It was not speaking to her. It was speaking around her, about her, as though she were a subject being discussed in a language she almost understood. Her skin prickled. The air had grown colder, though she couldn't say when the change had happened. Rory forced herself to breathe. In. Out. In. She was not going to panic. Panic was for people who couldn't think, and she had always been able to think her way out of things. She had thought her way out of Cardiff. Out of Evan's flat. Out of the situation that had left her with a scar on her wrist and a fear of raised voices. She needed to understand what was happening. She needed more information. She walked toward the stone where the path had appeared. The flowers parted for her, not bending but simply not existing in the spaces where her feet landed. The hum grew louder, more insistent, and she realized it was coming from the stone itself—from deep within the oak, from a place below the bark and the wood and the roots that must stretch down into the earth for miles. She pressed her palm flat against the trunk. The world inverted. She saw the grove from above, from a height that shouldn't exist, and she saw herself—a small figure in a dark jacket, her black hair stirring in a wind that still didn't touch the ground below. She saw the other figures too, standing at the edges of the clearing, just beyond the ring of stones. Human-shaped but not human. Still in a way that living things never were. Waiting. They were waiting for her to turn around. Rory pulled her hand away from the stone. The vision snapped shut like a door. She was herself again, standing in the center of the grove, the pendant pulsing wildly against her chest. The wrongness was no longer subtle. The flowers had stopped pretending to be flowers. They still looked like blooms, still had petals and stems, but now they were clearly something else—something that only chose to resemble flowers because it made sense to do so in this place. The standing stones had not moved, but they had changed their arrangement in her perception, had become a circle that faced inward with intention, with purpose. And at the edge of the grove, exactly where she had seen them in the vision, the figures waited. She could see them now. Not clearly—they were more impressions than beings, more suggestions of form than solid shapes—but they were there. Tall. Thin. Watching her with attention so focused it felt like physical pressure against her skin. One of them stepped forward. Rory did not run. Running would mean turning her back, would mean not seeing what was coming. Instead, she stepped backward, keeping her eyes on the figure, her hand closing around the pendant. The heartstone burned her palm, hot enough that she should have felt pain, but the sensation was distant, muffled, as though it were happening to someone else. The figure stopped at the edge of the flowers. It had a face now, or something that served as one—features that suggested humanity without achieving it, that pointed toward a person-shaped absence rather than an actual person. It spoke. The sound was not sound. It was meaning imposed directly on her thoughts, words that arrived fully formed without traveling through her ears. You called. The word carried a weight that made her knees want to buckle. You brought the stone. You came to the door. Rory swallowed. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I didn't call anyone. I came here because—" Because you remembered. The figure tilted its head. Because the blood remembers what the mind forgets. Her wrist throbbed. She looked down at the scar, the small crescent mark she had carried since childhood, and she understood nothing, understood less than nothing, but she understood that she was in danger and that the danger was very old and that the pendant had brought her here for a reason she was not yet allowed to know. The other figures shifted at the tree line. Their attention was a living thing, a weight that pressed against the air in the clearing. The figure extended a hand. Long fingers. Too many joints. A hand that had never belonged to anything human. Come, it said. The door is open. You have been chosen. Rory thought of Eva, who had given her a place to stay. Thought of Silas, who had never asked questions about the girl who appeared on his doorstep with a bag and a bruise on her cheek. Thought of her mother in Cardiff, who still called every Sunday, who still didn't know the full truth of what had happened. She thought of the flowers, and the standing stones, and the path that had appeared from nowhere. She thought of the scar. And she understood, with a clarity that felt like ice water in her veins, that she had a choice. She had always had a choice. That was the horror of it—not that she was trapped, but that she was not, that she was free to walk forward into the dark if she chose, that the door the figure mentioned was not a door at all but an invitation, and the invitation had been extended to her specifically because she had answered. The pendant pulsed. The figures waited. The grove held its breath. Rory opened her mouth to speak.