Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY3R2VH0YNGJ4GZQ6KYGT2

Rory ducked beneath the low hanging branch. The bark scraped her cheek, cold and wet with evening rain. She straightened, brushing dirt from the knees of her jeans. The Heartstone pulsed against her sternum, a rhythmic throb that matched no heartbeat she'd ever felt. It had dragged her here, burning against her skin for the past three hours, leading her away from the warmth of Silas's bar and into Richmond Park after midnight. She stood within the reach of ancient oaks. These trees didn't belong here. She knew this section of the park intimately. She'd cut through it a hundred times delivering Yu-Fei's orders, weaving between bracken and holly bushes with insulated bags bungeed to her back rack. Tonight, the familiar path had twisted. Brambles had parted like curtains, revealing a gap she couldn't have missed before, wouldn't have missed before. Three standing stones rose from the earth, gray and weathered, petrified oak trunks harder than iron. They formed a triangle that made her teeth ache when she looked at it directly. Wildflowers carpeted the ground within the stone boundary. Bluebells nodded their heavy heads. Foxgloves thrust purple spears toward a moon that hung too low, too large. October had stripped the rest of London bare weeks ago. These blooms shouldn't exist. Rory touched the pendant. The crimson gem flared, hot enough to sting. She stepped over the threshold. The temperature plummeted. Her breath crystallized, hanging in clouds that dissipated too slowly, clinging to her hair like spider silk. She checked her phone. The screen displayed 11:03 PM. She blinked. The digits flickered, bleeding into 3:47 AM, then 2:15, then 4:33. She shook the device. The display stabilized at 11:04, but the battery now read seven percent despite the full charge she'd had upon entering the park. Sound guttered. The distant hum of the A316, constant and droning since her arrival, severed. No rustling leaves. No scurry of urban foxes through undergrowth. The silence pooled in her ears, thick and viscous, pressing against her eardrums with physical weight. She moved deeper into the clearing. Wildflowers crunched under her boots, brittle as spun glass despite their vivid color. Her hand drifted to her left wrist, fingers tracing the crescent scar she'd earned at age six, falling from her father's garden wall. Old habit. Grounding technique. A twig snapped. The crack echoed between the standing stones, doubling and tripling until it sounded like a fusillade of gunshots. Rory spun. The stone circle stood empty. Moonlight carved stark shadows between the ancient oaks beyond the perimeter. Nothing moved. She turned back. The path she'd taken into the grove had sealed itself. Brambles knit together with vegetal efficiency, thorns interlocking like teeth in a closing jaw. The pendant flared again. Heat radiated through her cotton shirt, branding the skin beneath. She walked the perimeter of the stones. Her shadow stretched long and thin across the wildflowers, then shortened, then stretched again without the moon changing position. Time moved differently here. She remembered the vague warning Eva had whispered years ago, back in Cardiff, about thin places and borrowed time. Rory had laughed then. She wasn't laughing now. A giggle echoed. High. Feminine. Wrong. Rory froze. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing off stones that shouldn't have created acoustics, resonating in her marrow. She scanned the darkness between the oaks. Something tall stood there. She caught the impression of height, of limbs too long for any human frame, silhouetted against the phosphorescent moss growing on the northern stone. It disappeared when she looked directly. She glanced sideways. Movement danced at the edge of her vision. Antlers? Branches? The shape resolved into nothing when she turned her head, but the afterimage burned in her retinas—something angular, something that wore a crown of thorns and bone. The silence shattered. Whispers crowded her skull, not entering through her ears but vibrating in her teeth, her sinus cavities, the hollow space behind her eyes. Words in languages that predated Welsh, predated the Gaelic her grandmother had spoken. They spoke of bargains struck in blood. Of boundaries thinner than skin. Of tithes paid not in gold but in minutes, in hours, in the years of a life. Rory backed toward the center stone. Her heel struck something soft that yielded, then gripped. She looked down. Foxgloves had grown around her boots. They wound up her ankles with serpentine speed, stems tightening with vegetal strength. She kicked. Petals shredded, raining blue and purple confetti, but the fibrous stalks held fast, rooting themselves in the soles of her trainers. The footsteps resumed. Crisp. Definite. Moving through dry leaves that shouldn't exist in a grove of oaks. She yanked the pendant from her collar. The crimson stone blazed, casting arterial light across the clearing. The standing stones absorbed it, drinking the radiance until they glowed from within, revealing glyphs carved into surfaces she'd thought were smooth. Shadows stretched, elongating toward her like fingers eager to grasp. Between two stones, the air rippled. Heat haze in winter. Through the distortion, she glimpsed the park as it should exist—street lamps distant and yellow, the A316 beyond, the twenty-four hour petrol station on the roundabout. Safety. Normalcy. The footsteps stopped directly behind her. Close enough that she felt the displacement of air, the drop in temperature that accompanied the presence. Rory didn't turn around. She knew, with the cellular certainty of prey sensing the wolf, that turning would break whatever fragile rule kept her positioned as observer rather than victim. The presence loomed, taller than her by several feet, breathing air that smelled of loam and rotting petals and the chemical sweetness of gas leaks. The Heartstone screamed in her fist. It pulsed, burning her palm, the silver chain digging into her fingers. She squeezed tighter until her knuckles ached. The wildflowers at her feet released her. They retreated, hissing against the soil, leaving pollen stains on her jeans. She had come here following the warmth, chasing the promise of answers about the pendant's origin, about the unknown benefactor who'd slipped it into her coat. Now she understood. The grove wasn't a destination. It was a threshold. A place where the earth's skin had worn thin. And something had been waiting for the door to open. The whispering coalesced into a single voice. It spoke her name—not Rory, not Aurora, but the third name, the hidden one, the syllables that only her mother had known and whispered once, twenty-five years ago, in a Cardiff hospital room. Her blood stuttered in her veins. The crescent scar on her wrist flared with phantom pain. The standing stones groaned. They shifted, millimeters at first, then inches, grinding against bedrock that didn't exist in any London geology. The triangle contracted, the stones moving toward her, herding her toward the center. Rory lunged for the ripple in the air, the glimpse of the real park. Her fingers brushed the boundary. Static electricity arced between her skin and the threshold. The thing behind her exhaled. The breath smelled of winter apples left to ferment in dark cellars. Her vision doubled. She saw the grove in two states simultaneously: the quiet clearing where wildflowers bloomed eternal, and the truth beneath—the twisted forest where time pooled like stagnant water, where figures with too many joints and too many eyes watched from between black trees that dripped sap like blood. The pendant's chain snapped in her fist. She stumbled forward. The heat of the stone branded her palm. Behind her, the footsteps started again, not following, but circling. Always circling. The rhythm matched the pulse of the Heartstone, which now beat in counter-time to her own heart. The moon vanished behind clouds that hadn't existed moments before. Darkness swallowed the grove. Only the Heartstone provided light, its crimson glow revealing shapes that stood perfectly still among the oaks, waiting for the light to die, waiting for the warmth to fade, waiting for her to blink. Rory ran.