Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HN08PXPKGB6XT5Y5W1R

The last bus had dropped Rory at the edge of Richmond Park forty minutes ago, and she'd walked the rest in the dark with her phone torch cutting a pale wedge through the trees. She knew the path. She'd walked it twice before, both times in daylight with Isolde beside her, the old woman pointing out the markers — a split elm, a cairn of three flat stones, the place where the ground dipped and the air turned faintly sweet. Rory had memorised it the way she memorised everything that mattered: methodically, without sentiment. She hadn't expected to need it at midnight on a Tuesday, but Isolde hadn't answered her phone in four days, and the pendant had started burning against her sternum somewhere around Hammersmith. Not painfully. Just insistently. The way a person taps their finger on a table when they're waiting for an answer. She found the split elm and turned left. The park was never truly silent, even at this hour. Foxes moved through the bracken, deer stood like dark furniture between the trees, the distant hum of the South Circular bled through on still nights. Rory had expected all of that. What she hadn't expected was the quality of the silence she walked into now — a silence that felt less like the absence of sound and more like the held breath before one. She stopped. The pendant pulsed once, slow and warm, against her ribs. She walked on. The standing stones came into view between the oaks, eight of them arranged in a rough ellipse, their surfaces silvered by a moon that sat too bright and too full for what her weather app had told her. She'd checked it on the bus. Seventy percent cloud cover, it had said. Yet here the sky sat clear and strange above the grove, as though the clouds had been asked to leave. Rory stepped between two of the stones. The temperature dropped. Not the creeping cold of a November night but a sudden subtraction of warmth, the way heat leaves a room when a window breaks. She pulled her jacket tighter and stood still for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. The wildflowers were there, white and yellow and a deep arterial red she couldn't name, blooming in clusters at the base of each stone the way Isolde had said they always bloomed, regardless of season. She focused on them. Something ordinary to look at. "Isolde." Her voice sounded smaller than she intended. Not frightened — just contained, as though the grove had walls she couldn't see. "It's Rory. I've been trying to reach you." Nothing moved. She walked toward the centre of the clearing, her boots pressing down the long grass without sound, and that was the first thing she catalogued consciously: her footsteps made no noise. She stopped and stamped once, deliberately. Nothing. The ground swallowed it. She took out her phone. Full signal, which meant nothing here, Isolde had warned her. The grove interfered with things in ways that didn't follow rules. She tried the number anyway. It rang four times and cut to voicemail. She lowered the phone. At the far edge of the clearing, just past the standing stones on the north side, something moved. She caught it in her periphery — a shift of shadow against shadow, low to the ground and too deliberate to be wind. She turned her head slowly. Nothing there. Just the dark between the oaks, layered and still. She turned back. The wildflowers nearest to her were facing the wrong direction. She was almost certain — she fixed on it, pressing it flat in her mind rather than letting it unseat her — she was almost certain they'd been facing outward when she'd arrived. Now their heads were turned inward. Toward her. Flowers didn't do that. The pendant pulsed again. Twice this time, in quick succession. Rory crouched and pressed her palm flat to the earth the way Isolde had shown her, feeling for what the old woman called the current — the low rhythmic thrum of the grove's pocket boundary, regular as a heartbeat. She pressed down and felt nothing. No thrum. A flatline. She straightened slowly. The sound came from behind her left shoulder: a single exhalation. Not wind. Breath. The kind a body makes, warm and involuntary, close enough that she felt the slight disturbance of air against the back of her neck. Every muscle in her body locked. She turned around. Nothing. Open grass. Wildflowers. The stones. She stood for ten full seconds counting her own pulse, eyes moving across every inch of what she could see. Her scar ached — the crescent on her left wrist, the one she barely noticed anymore — a deep cold ache that started in the bone. She pressed her thumb against it and felt it throb in time with the pendant. Something was watching her from the dark outside the stones. She couldn't see it. She couldn't hear it now. But the certainty settled over her the way certainty did when she'd worked through a problem and arrived at the only remaining answer: she was not alone in the grove, and whatever shared this space with her was not Isolde. The wildflowers turned again. A slow collective rotation, all of them, stems bending without wind. She watched it happen and didn't move. Then the grove went absolutely dark. Not the gradual dimming of cloud crossing the moon — instantaneous, total. Her phone torch was still on. She could see its beam in her hand. But the light stopped roughly three feet in front of her, as though the darkness had a surface. She stood at the edge of her own small circle of light and looked at where the beam died, and waited to see if anything on the other side of it moved.