Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY9GDP6EH4TD8DK4RJNYS4

The last bus had dropped her at the Richmond Park gate twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes of walking through wet grass in trainers that had no business being out past midnight, the hem of her jeans wicking up damp in a cold band around her ankles. Rory held her phone out for the torch, the beam catching rain-beaded spiderwebs strung between hawthorn branches like tiny chandeliers, each one gone the instant the light passed. She knew the way. That was the strange part. She'd been here once before, in daylight, with Eva chattering beside her about some documentary on Richmond's deer population. That visit they hadn't gone deep. They'd stayed near the paths, taken pictures, caught the bus home before the gates closed. Rory had never entered the park at night. She'd never come from this direction, cutting south-southeast past the Isabella Plantation boundary, heading for a part of the park that didn't appear on any of the information boards. And yet her feet found every root, every dip, every mossy stone as if she'd walked the route a hundred times. The pendant sat warm against her sternum, pulsing in slow, even thumps like a second heartbeat. She hadn't told anyone she was coming. Not Eva. Not Silas. Not Yu-Fei, who would have insisted on driving her in the delivery van and waiting with the engine running. She'd simply woken at quarter past eleven with the certainty that she needed to be here, the Heartstone already glowing faintly through the cotton of her sleep shirt, its crimson light painting the ceiling of her flat above the bar. She slipped her phone back into her jacket pocket. Ahead, the treeline thickened. Ancient oaks — not the kind that grew in a London park, not really, their trunks wider than cars, bark folded and ridged like the faces of old men. The standing stones rose among them, pale and smooth, their surfaces untouched by lichen or weather. She counted them as she passed between the first pair. One. Two. The air changed. The hum of the distant A-road vanished as though someone had pressed a pillow over the world's mouth. Three. Four. The wildflowers started at the fifth stone. Bluebells and foxglove and something white she didn't recognize, all blooming in the dark, each petal holding a faint luminescence as if they'd soaked up a day's worth of sun and were slowly bleeding it back out. She'd read somewhere that foxglove was called dead man's bells. It didn't seem like a comforting thing to remember. The Fae Grove opened before her, a clearing ringed by the final stones. The canopy overhead was so dense that no sky showed through, yet the space wasn't dark. A sourceless pewter light suffused everything — the kind of light that existed before dawn in winter, flat and directionless, erasing shadow. Rory stopped at the clearing's edge. She listened. Nothing. Not the rustle of a hedgehog in the brush, not the distant bark of a fox. Not even wind. The silence had a pressure to it, the way deep water has pressure, pushing against her eardrums, making her swallow. She'd come because the pendant had called her. She didn't have a better way to describe it. The stone had pulsed, and she had known: the Grove, tonight, alone. The logic of it didn't survive examination. She'd stopped examining it somewhere around Mortlake, on the bus, staring at her own reflection in the rain-streaked window and wondering why she wasn't afraid. She was afraid now. The wrongness crept in like a change in temperature. Not something she could point to. Not a sound or a sight. Just a shift in the quality of the silence, as if the Grove had been holding its breath and had now, very quietly, exhaled. The wildflowers at her feet tilted. Not all of them. Not at once. A slow wave, radiating outward from the center of the clearing, each stem leaning a few degrees, then a few more, until every bloom pointed toward her like the needle of a compass finding north. Rory took a step backward. Her heel caught a root, and she stumbled, throwing her arms out for balance. In the half-second her gaze swung upward, she caught movement in the canopy. Something pulling back. Something that had been leaning down. When she looked again, there was nothing. Only branches, twisted together so tightly they formed a solid ceiling. No gaps. No movement. She steadied herself. Touched the pendant through her jacket. It pulsed faster now, the intervals shortening, warm enough that she could feel it through fabric and cotton undershirt alike. She pressed her palm flat against it and the rhythm matched her own heartbeat — which, she realized with an unpleasant lurch, was also accelerating. "All right," she whispered. Her voice came out wrong. Too close. The syllables didn't carry; they stuck to her lips, absorbed by the dead air. She tried again, louder. "All right. I'm here." Nothing answered. She hadn't expected anything to. But the flowers tilted another degree, and the nearest standing stone — the one to her left, waist-high, rounded at the top like a worn molar — gave off a faint vibration she felt through the soles of her trainers. Something moved behind her. She spun. The treeline. The oaks. The dark corridor she'd walked through to reach this place. Nothing stood among the trunks. Nothing she could see. But the distance between the trees had changed. She was certain of it. The gap she'd walked through five minutes ago was narrower. The two oaks on either side had leaned toward each other, their upper branches interlocked like fingers. "That wasn't like that before." Her voice, again, went nowhere. Flat. Swallowed. The words didn't echo off the stones or bounce from the canopy. They simply ceased to exist the moment they left her mouth. Rory turned back to the clearing. One of the standing stones — not the one nearest to her, but the one directly across, the tallest of them, about six feet high — had a mark on it. A dark smear at head height. She hadn't noticed it when she arrived. She was very, very sure it hadn't been there, because she'd looked at that stone first when she entered the grove. She'd looked at each one. Counted them. She counted them now. Eight. There had been eight before. She'd passed them in pairs. One-two, three-four, five-six. The pair at the clearing's edge made seven-eight. Nine stones stood around her. The ninth was behind her and to her right, in a gap between two others where no gap had existed a minute ago. It was shorter than the rest, its surface darker, its shape wrong — too narrow, too upright, without the rounded weathering of its neighbors. Rory stared at it and the pendant flared hot against her chest. Not warm. Hot. A sharp, adrenal sting, like a wasp trapped between skin and fabric. She hissed and pulled the chain away from her body. The crimson glow bled through her fingers, painting the grass red, and in that red light the ninth stone looked less like a stone. It had texture. Fine, fibrous texture. Something that could have been grain in wood or could have been something else. Fibers. Threads. The surface moved, a slow rippling, so subtle she questioned whether her own shaking hands were creating the illusion. She held her breath and went still. The rippling continued. Then the ninth stone was a stone again. Rough. Grey. Mute. She blinked and couldn't remember why she'd thought otherwise. The pendant cooled against her palm, returning to its earlier rhythmic pulse. The wildflowers around the clearing relaxed their lean, straightening degree by degree, pointing back toward the absent sky. Rory released the pendant and flexed her fingers. A red impression of the chain remained on her palm, raw and stinging. She looked at it without processing, then looked up. The clearing was empty. The stones numbered eight. She counted twice, turning slowly, touching each one with her eyes. Eight. The gap where the ninth had stood held only foxglove and bluebell, their stalks unbent, their petals turned upward. But the smear on the tallest stone remained. Darker now. Wet-looking. And it had a shape — not a recognizable symbol, nothing so generous. More like a print. Four long streaks drawn downward, as if something with fingers had dragged them through a substance she didn't want to identify and wiped them clean against the pale surface. The silence deepened. She hadn't thought that possible, but it did — it intensified, compressing, until she felt the pressure of it in her chest, behind her eyes, in the roots of her teeth. The pendant pulsed. Deep in the canopy overhead, something breathed. Not wind. Breath. A long, rattling inhalation that started at one edge of the clearing and moved across to the other, as though whatever produced it had a mouth wide enough to span the entire grove. Rory locked her eyes on the branches above and saw them bend inward under a weight she couldn't see. Leaves rustled. Twigs snapped. A fine rain of bark dust drifted down and settled on her shoulders. The exhalation never came. Whatever had drawn that breath was holding it. Holding it, and leaning down, just as before — the branches bowing, the canopy depressing, the distance between the crown of the grove and the top of her head shrinking by inches. She felt the air pressure change, felt the cold of something vast pressing down above her, felt the pendant sear a circle against her chest. Rory didn't run. Running felt like the wrong answer, the way shouting felt wrong in this place. Instead she sank into a crouch, slowly, keeping her head up and her eyes on the canopy. She pressed her palm against the cold grass and curled her fingers into the earth. The blades were wet. Real. She held onto that — the mundane sensation of cold, wet grass under her hand. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist caught the pendant's glow and shone white for a moment, a sliver of old pain. She clenched her fist. "I know you're there." The words didn't die this time. They carried upward, through the compressed air, into the dense tangle of branches. They carried, and something in the canopy shifted, and the silence broke with a sound like a single footstep on dry leaves, though there was no ground up there, only dark. Then the breath released. It came down on her like a wave of cold — not wind, something thicker, heavier, carrying a scent of turned earth and iron and something sweet underneath that she couldn't name. It pressed her hair flat against her skull and rippled the surface of the wildflowers and pushed the breath from her lungs in a thin gasp. In the wake of it, close as a whisper against the shell of her ear, she heard a voice. Not words. Not quite. A sound that almost coalesced into language, that brushed against meaning the way the ninth stone had brushed against shape — nearly there, nearly recognizable, sliding away the moment she reached for it. The pendant went dark. Every trace of light — the sourceless pewter glow, the soft luminescence of the flowers, the crimson ember at her chest — extinguished at once. The Grove plunged into a black so total that Rory couldn't see her own hand in front of her face. She crouched in the wet grass with her fingers in the dirt and her heart hammering in her throat and waited for whatever came next. In the perfect dark, something touched the top of her head.