Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMQ1NX0FAVCQ39ESYPE

The standing stones looked smaller at night. Rory had visited the Fae Grove twice before, always in daylight, always with Isolde or someone who knew the way. She told herself it was different at night only because she was alone — that the ancient oaks forming the boundary of the clearing simply cast longer shadows, that the stones themselves hadn't changed, that the unease crawling up the back of her neck was tiredness and nothing more. She pushed through the last of the bracken and stepped across the boundary. The wildflowers were open. That was the first wrong thing. White blooms she didn't know the name of, scattered across the clearing floor like something spilled, their petals fully spread in the dark the way flowers weren't supposed to be. No moon to justify it. No light source she could identify. They simply glowed, faintly, from no particular source. She checked her phone. Half past eleven. She'd left the flat at quarter past, walked the familiar path through Richmond Park with her torch and her resolved, practical mind, told herself she was only here because the pendant had started doing something new. It had been pulsing all day — not the gentle throb she'd come to recognise near a portal, but something faster, more urgent, the way a second heartbeat would feel pressed against your palm. She'd come to the Grove because the Grove was the only place she understood even slightly. She'd come because standing in her flat watching the stone glow against her collarbone felt worse than coming here. She stood in the centre of the clearing and held the pendant up. The deep crimson of the stone caught nothing and gave back a faint inner light of its own. It had stopped pulsing. She waited. The trees at the boundary moved — just the upper branches, just a little, the way they did when a breeze came through. Except the air around her was completely still. She could feel that plainly. Not a breath of movement against her skin, no shift in the tall grass at the clearing's edge. The branches moved anyway. She lowered the pendant. Something in the trees to her left made a sound. Not loud — a single soft crack, like weight settling onto dry wood, and then silence. She turned toward it and kept her torch pointed low, the way Isolde had shown her, so she didn't ruin her own night vision. Nothing. The wildflowers nearest the tree line were bending. Not all of them — just a cluster, three or four, their white heads tilting slowly in the direction of the standing stones as though tracking something moving through the air. She watched them for a full minute. They kept bending. Then they stopped. She let out a slow breath and started toward the nearest standing stone, thinking she'd rest a hand on it, thinking the cold of old oak would clarify something. She'd taken four steps when she heard it — a sound from directly behind her. Not a crack this time. Something lower. A long, sustained pressure of air, almost below the threshold of sound, the kind of thing you felt behind your sternum before you properly heard it with your ears. She turned around. The clearing was empty. The wildflowers sat still. The boundary trees held their branches where branches belonged. She was not frightened. She was not frightened — she made the decision about that clearly, named it in her own mind the way her father used to name disputed facts in court, laid it flat on the table. She was not frightened. She was alert. There was a distinction. She checked the pendant again. Still, and cold now in a way it hadn't been a moment ago, the silver chain carrying a chill up through her fingers. She heard footsteps. Or not footsteps exactly — the impression of footsteps, weight on grass at a regular interval, coming from the far side of the clearing. She looked. The grass didn't move. The sound kept coming, steady, unhurried, growing neither louder nor quieter, as though whatever made it was neither approaching nor retreating but simply moving parallel to her, always at the same distance, always at the edge of where her vision softened into dark. She turned slowly, tracking it. It moved with her. Whatever it was — sound, presence, trick of acoustics in the pocket-space between realms — it maintained exactly the distance it had started with, and it moved precisely as she moved, and she stood very still in the middle of the clearing and became aware, with a cold and total certainty, that it had been doing this since before she'd noticed it. That it had been circling her since she'd stepped across the boundary stones, and that she had only now tuned her attention correctly. She counted her breaths. Four in. Four out. The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed had a quality to it she didn't like — the quality of held breath, of something that had stopped moving not because it had gone but because it had arrived. Because it was where it had intended to be. She could feel the shape of it behind her right shoulder, feel it the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue, a certainty without evidence. She did not turn around. The pendant flared against her chest, sudden and sharp, the warmth of it cutting through her shirt like a pressed coin left in hot sunlight. Not the slow pulse from earlier. One hard beat, like a warning. One of the white flowers at her feet folded shut. Then another. Then the whole cluster, one after the next, petals drawing inward in the dark, as though something nearby had swallowed the source of whatever light they'd been drinking from. Rory stood very still, her torch in one hand and the cold silver chain in the other, and the Grove went absolutely, completely quiet.