Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXYJ8QH2APBDH7JXK7Q2NM

She reached the grove when the city was a smear of orange on the horizon, when the park's paths had emptied and the lamplight surrendered to a darker, older dark. The standing stones rose like ribs from the earth, ancient oaks wrapped around them as if protecting something small and dangerous. The air smelled of moss and something sweet and coppery that made the back of her tongue tingle. The pendant had started in her palm on the bus, a faint heat moving against her skin like a pulse. She had wrapped it in the cuff of her coat and told herself it was nothing—old metal warming from the body, nerves over a silly old thing. Then the warmth had slid like a tug, insistent, and she had gotten off two stops early. "I shouldn't have come," she said, loud enough to carve a hole in the night, and the words thudded away between trunks. She pushed through a skirt of bracken and the undergrowth gave when she stepped. Her breath came out in bright ghosts though the night had held its breath. She checked her phone; the lock screen announced a time that made no sense, minutes stretched into hours and then rewound as if the world had hiccupped. The pendant warmed again against her palm, a small core of crimson under the silver chain. It pulsed in a rhythm that wasn't hers. She frowned, fingers tightening around the chain. "Show me," she told the pendant. She clipped it over her collar and let the metal rest against her sternum. Her scar itched under the strap of her bag as if something small and patient had noticed her. She had come for a reason: the pulse in the pendant, for one, and the scrap of handwriting left in the bottom of a takeaway bag from Yu-Fei's—Isolde's grove—middle of the night—if you want to see it. Whoever had written that had crossed a bar of ink with a hand that didn't tremble. Whoever had given the pendant had left no name. The grove kept its own time. At her first step inside the circle, birds that had slept in the deeper branches woke and listened, one calling once and then quiet. The wildflowers at her feet were shining like eyes; their petals caught light she could not place and hummed faintly as if vibrating with a note beneath hearing. Something struck the edge of her vision, a slip of movement behind the closest stone. She turned fast. Nothing. The wind that wasn't there arranged the grass in a lazy wave. "Hello?" she asked, the sound small, too human, and she moved forward because she had not come to the park to stand in the dark and babble. Her foot sank slightly into the earth. The ground had the give of a place kept warm, like a bed someone had just left. The pendant throbbed, warm through her shirt, and a tiny glow behind the crimson stone leaked like reflected blood. At the far side of the circle a fox slipped between roots and vanished as if swallowed. Not a real fox: too silent, too flat in its motion. It had the wrong number of joints, the wrong angle to its head, and it left no print on the leaf-strewn floor. "You're not a fox," Rory said, and she reached down. The leaves murmured under her fingertips, cool as breath. She wanted to laugh—out loud, bright and ridiculous—and the laugh died in her mouth because there was no movement but the edges of sight kept twitching. Shadows drew themselves thin and then re-bloomed, pointing like fingers. She checked the standing stones. Carved symbols she had not noticed at the entrance crawled across the weathered faces in ink-thin relief: lines that did not belong to oak grain, words that seemed to take their time to reveal themselves. When she blinked, they weren't there. When she blinked again, the carvings lay open as if a page. "That's new," she said, and the words sounded like a dare. She ran a thumb along a line and felt heat, not from sun but from something pressing close, like a cheek against glass. The pendant answered with a single pulse, bright and quick. A sound scraped the air—too high and even to be a human voice. It didn't belong in the night. It threaded between the trunks and left an aftertaste of iron on her tongue. She turned its direction with her body, every muscle taut. There was rhythm in the grove. Tiny things kept time. Leaves shivered in perfect intervals as if someone counted them. The longer she stood, the more noises stacked, building like a score: a footfall that did not touch ground, a whisper that moved sideways around her ear, a small laughing that could have been a child or a wind. "Okay," she said. "Okay, you're clever." She moved toward the centre because she had to know. She had to be where the pendant pulled hardest. Her watch showed twenty-one minutes past. Her phone refused to light the screen. The pendant warmed, suddenly hot, and the inner glow bled through its casing until she could see a pulse within the stone, like a heart trying to speak with a broken larynx. Something shifted at the edge of the clearing—no shape, more a suggestion of movement—leaves lifting as if a hand had passed across them. When she squinted, there were faces in the bark. Not faces in the pattern of knots, but real faces, small and close, eyes closed, mouths moving as if chanting. She listened. The mouths were not making words she knew. They made clicks and sighs and the soft rasp of breath. When she tried to catch what they said with her ears her skull filled with soundless letters, a script of pressure that pushed against her teeth. "You don't need to be afraid," she said, as if comforting a child. She rubbed her wrist at the scar where she had cut herself once, hard enough to sting and make rational feeling return. She had left Evan because she had a spine. She had left because fear sharpened her. This fear required a different blade. The pendant pulsed again, harder, and a warmth spilled across her chest. Her stomach dropped like a lift. Her shadow stretched long and wrong and then doubled beside her, a second silhouette that moved a beat out of sync. She turned toward the double and found the space empty. Rope of ivy had curled away from a trunk like the tail of an offended thing. Tiny flowers that had been white when she entered were suddenly pale as bone. The year-round blooms of the grove seemed less like flowers and more like mouths closed tight. Something laughed beneath a branch—so soft it could have been the sound of damp fabric rubbing—and the laugh had layers, like a chorus sung in very small voices. She tried to speak, to demand an answer in the way you interrogated a stranger in a dark alley. Words came out clipped. "Who are you?" she asked. A breeze answered by pulling at her braid. She had not felt wind before. The hair at the nape of her neck lifted. The pendant pulsed against her sternum like a bird beating in a fist. She tucked the chain further inside and felt the heat through three layers of fabric. A shape moved across the clearing. It kept to the periphery, slipped between trunks with a dancer's glide. When it reached for the nearest stone it took on the texture of the bark and then replaced itself with the bark again. If she had reached, she would have found only rough wood. Her fingers grazed the stone and found the hidden skin of a living thing, slightly warm. "Isolde?" she called, because the grove had Isolde's name in every turn of root. Silence returned like a lid. The sound felt engineered, the hush heavy and deliberate. She expected the wind to come back and it did not. The only sound was the pulse from the pendant, and with each beat the clearing drew closer, as if time itself sucked in a breath that included her. Her own breathing sounded wrong—too loud, too wet—amplified by something that made the small noises of the night giant. A twig snapped at the edge. Her head whipped toward it. A rabbit sat there, white except for one black eye and a third dark slit where an ear should be. It did not blink. When she looked again it was gone, leaving only the quick imprint of a pad that faded into moss as though the ground had eaten it. She took two steps back, then stopped because the trees closed in like fingers, narrowing the path she had come. She had not noticed until now that the stone circle made a boundary not just of wood and rock but of expectation. Everything outside it belonged to one logic; inside, another law held. "I came because it pulsed," she said, because explanations ground her. "Because someone—" She cut herself off, because admission felt like opening a gate. She had been given the pendant and told nothing, like a stranger pressing a sealed envelope into her palm. She had taken the gift and now she was paying its price. The pendant flared. The light was not loud but it pushed at the back of her eyes. For a moment the grove inverted—stems like bones, sky the colour of old spoons; then it settled like a breath released. In that blink the flowers had turned toward her and some of the faces in the bark had opened their eyes. They were not human eyes—no pupil she recognised—but they held motion. They watched her and did not blink again. She felt watched by an arithmetic of things. Time shifted perceptibly; the watch on her wrist crawled forward then snapped back. She had not stood here long, she thought, and yet her legs hummed as if she had been in the same spot most of the night. There was a sound now, a dragging, like fabric being pulled slowly over gravel. It came from behind a stone and then from another, from two and then a dozen small sources, each at the periphery of her hearing. The noises arranged themselves into a rhythm that matched her own heartbeat. With every drag the pendant pulsed, so that the two beats harmonised and made her chest ache. She swallowed. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Who left you?" she asked the grove, the trees, the faces, the laughing small things. "Who gave me this?" A long breath filled the clearing. The trees inhaled together and exhaled something moist that smelled like a hearth gone out. The pendant answered with a slow, deep pulse that felt like a hand cupping her sternum. The warmth deepened, spread down her throat into her stomach. She felt dizzy, not from fear but from recollection of a memory she had never had: a room with a single chair, a man humming under his breath, a hand placing a small box on a table. Memory slid away, replaced by the sense of being inside a throat, looking outward between teeth of root. The standing stones hummed, harmonics low and clear. Somewhere, something tapped a code on wood—three taps, two, three—as though making a list and then erasing it. She stepped closer to one of the stones. Up close the carvings had become letters she almost recognised, names that blurred when she tried to pronounce them. Each time she reached to touch a name the pendant burned and her hand recoiled. "Not here," she whispered, though why she thought the pendant needed instruction she did not know. She slid her fingers into the soil, feeling for roots, for something solid. Her nails came away with a fine dust that was not earth but ash. The ash smelled faintly of seaweed and old coins. At the farthest stone something moved with the deliberation of things that had been awake a long time. The bark split like lips. A small, thin hand—or the suggestion of one—emerged, knuckles pale, tapered fingers curved like the root of a fern. It did not reach toward her. It reached toward the centre of the clearing and hovered over the spot where the earth rose slightly, a soft mound that hadn't been there moments before. The pendant screamed—no, not screamed, a sharp lighting of heat—and a pain like hunger pressed at her sternum. Her knees went almost out from under her. She had to sit. Her hands shook. The dirt under her palms was cold. "Stay," she said to herself, and the words acted like a promise. She remembered Silas' bar above her, the small flat with a kettle that took forever to boil, the friends that waited when she called. The thought steadied her, a pin at the edge of her hand. The hand at the stone withdrew, leaving the bark whole, and then the mound at the clearing's centre shifted. It uncoiled like a sleeping thing waking to find the world different. Petals opened across it, small and rapid, and the sound they made was like someone reading a page very fast. A voice rose, thin and layered and impossible to locate. It sounded like breath against the back of her neck and like an echo in a well. It did not speak words she recognised. It made other things happen: the pendant flared, the ground shivered, that small mound exhaled and the air around it rippled as if someone had thrown a stone into a pool and the pool refused to stop. She did not have a chance to ask what it meant. Something touched her arm—light, grazing, not heavy enough to lay a hand but precise enough to make the hairs along her forearm stand like a row of soldiering cilia. The pendant pulsed once, very fast, and for a breath she felt like an animal pinned to the world by a string. "Leave," she said, not as a question but as a contract. Her throat closed around the word and it sounded softer than it had in her head. She pulled at the pendant with one hand, wanting to bury it in the earth, to break the chain and let the small red stone go cold. Her fingers found the silver and the chain was warm, as if someone had been wearing it moments before. The thing at her arm pulled back as if hurt. The contact left a dampness, not quite sweat, not quite dew, and it smelled like the inside of a mouth after too much whispering. The grove leaned in. Time did something it had not done before: it folded small and concentrated. The standing stones cast shadows that stepped and repositioned themselves, arranging a corridor that pointed at her. The pendant pulsed in a fierce, steady beat, none of the shy warmth it had held at first. It tugged her toward the mound, toward the place the hand had hovered. She had come for an answer. She had thought she was alone. The night laughed that lie from her like a sleeve, and then the sound narrowed to a single, very close breathing behind her shoulder.