Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMKH5XDWEX8M2Q77YA2

The standing stones were taller than she remembered. Rory stood at the edge of Richmond Park, where the manicured grass gave way to something older and less willing to be tamed. The tree line ahead absorbed the last of the amber glow from the distant car park lamps, and beyond it, nothing. The Grove swallowed light the way deep water swallowed sound. She checked her phone. Quarter past midnight. She'd told herself she wouldn't come back here after dark, but the note had been specific. Handwritten on paper that smelled of earth and something sweetly wrong, like fruit left just a day too long. *The Grove. After dark. Alone. Bring the stone.* The Heartstone Pendant hung against her sternum, warmer than it had any right to be on a November night. She pressed two fingers to it through her jacket, felt the steady pulse of it like a second heartbeat that wasn't hers. She stepped through. The cold left first. That was always the first thing — the English winter simply stopped, as though she'd passed through a door into a room where autumn hadn't finished yet. Wildflowers caught the moonlight at her ankles, white and pale blue things that had no business blooming in November. The oaks that ringed the clearing were enormous and close, their roots knuckled above the earth like the fingers of buried hands. Rory stood still and listened. Wind through leaves. A distant owl, once. Then silence thick enough to press against her ears. She moved toward the centre of the clearing. The grass here was soft in a way that felt almost deliberate, like a welcome mat laid out by something that understood the concept but not quite the warmth behind it. She turned slowly, taking stock. The stones stood at the boundary as always, eight of them, each roughly the height of a man, dark with moisture despite the dry air. Eight. She counted again. Nine. She stopped. The ninth stone stood between two she knew — had always known — were adjacent. It was slightly shorter than the others, its surface smoother, without the lichen that crusted the rest. She stared at it for a long moment. It didn't move. Of course it didn't move. Stones didn't move. She looked away, back toward the centre of the clearing, and pressed her thumbnail into the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. A habit. An anchor. Something rustled at the far tree line. "Hello?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was something. The rustling stopped. The pendant flared warm against her chest — not painfully, but suddenly, the way a coal brightens when you blow on it. She looked down at it reflexively, though it was hidden under her jacket, and when she looked up again the clearing felt different. Not visually. Nothing had changed that she could point to. It was more like the atmosphere of the place had shifted one degree, the way a room changes when someone enters it who hasn't yet spoken. She was not alone. She knew this the way she'd once known, in the last months with Evan, that the sound of the front door at night was never just the front door. A body learns threat before the mind catches up. Her shoulders drew in. She made herself unfold them. "I got your note," she said, to the clearing, to the trees, to whatever was arranging itself in the dark just beyond her line of sight. "I'm here." Nothing answered. The flowers nearest the tree line bent, all at once, in a direction opposite to where the wind was coming from. She watched them. They righted themselves slowly, petal by petal. She took three steps toward the stone she didn't recognise. Up close, it was wrong in ways that resisted description. The grain of it didn't match the local stone — it was too dark, too smooth, and its surface held faint impressions that might have been letters or might have been the shadows of letters, visible only at the edge of her direct gaze. When she looked straight at them, they vanished. She reached out one hand, stopped an inch from its surface. The pendant pulsed hard. Once, like a fist knocking. She withdrew her hand. Behind her — close, maybe four metres — she heard breathing. Slow and deliberate, measured as a metronome. She turned around in one smooth movement. The clearing was empty. But the grass behind her held two long depressions, parallel, side by side. Like something had been standing there. Like it had stepped back when she turned. Rory's heart threw itself against her ribs three times in quick succession. She breathed through her nose, held it, let it go. "Right," she said quietly. She turned back to the stone and this time kept her eyes fixed on it, refusing the urge to look at her peripheral vision where things kept suggesting themselves — a shape between two oaks that was probably just shadow, a pale curve above the tree line that was certainly just cloud, a reflection on the dewy grass that moved in a way reflections didn't move. The breathing started again. Closer. The pendant had stopped pulsing. The absence of it was somehow worse, like a warning light that goes out not because the danger has passed but because the system has given up reporting it. She stared at the new stone. In the surface of it, in the grain she'd thought was too smooth to hold anything, she could see — not letters. A face. Or the suggestion of one. Eyes closed. Mouth pressed shut. Hands she hadn't noticed before, folded beneath it, fingers against its own surface from the inside. From the inside. Something touched her shoulder.