Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TS0VC3Q049W20Y7G3585T

The last jogger had passed her twenty minutes ago. After that, Richmond Park belonged to the deer and the dark, and Aurora Carter belonged to neither. She kept to the footpath until the lamplight thinned, then cut across the grass toward the tree line. Wet ground sucked at her trainers. The torch on her phone carved a pale disc against the black, illuminating nothing much — frost-stiffened grass, a crimp of fallen bark, the reflective pinpricks of animal eyes that blinked once and vanished. She walked until the path was a memory behind her, the distant hum of the A307 reduced to something she felt more than heard, a vibration in her molars like a held note. The pendant had not stopped pulsing since Hammersmith. She pressed her thumb against it through her jacket. The warmth was steady, metronomic, a second heartbeat nested against her sternum. Whatever frequency it operated on had ratcheted up the closer she got to the park. On the District line it had been a faint suggestion. Walking through Richmond Gate it had become insistent. Now, in the guts of the park where the old oaks knotted together and the canopy sealed out the city-lit sky, the Heartstone throbbed hard enough that she could feel it in her teeth. She checked her phone. 11:47. The signal had died three minutes ago — not faded, died, the bars replaced by a small hollow circle that meant nothing and no one could find her out here. That was fine. She had not told anyone she was coming. Eva would have asked questions. Silas would have locked the flat door from the outside. Yu-Fei would have called her a fool and then followed her anyway, which was worse, because whatever waited at the grove did not need witnesses. The note had said to come alone. She had found it that morning, slipped beneath the restaurant's service entrance, folded into a tight square no larger than a stamp. No signature. No postmark. Just coordinates written in an ink that shimmered when she tilted the paper, and a single line beneath them in handwriting she did not recognize: *The grove answers at midnight. Bring what was given.* Rory was not the kind of person who followed anonymous instructions into a public park after dark. She had survived Evan. She had survived moving to London with four hundred pounds and a gym bag full of clothes. She knew what it meant to walk into situations where the exits were not clearly marked. But the pendant had been driving her half-mad for weeks — warmth flaring at odd hours, that crimson glow leaking through her shirts in the middle of the night, and once, just once, a sound from inside the stone itself, a low chime like a finger tracing the rim of a glass. She needed answers more than she needed safety, and she hated herself a little for that arithmetic. The oaks thickened. Roots buckled the ground. She stumbled, caught herself on a trunk, and her palm came away sticky with something that was not sap. She wiped it on her jeans without looking. Ahead, the trees opened. She stepped into the clearing and the world changed register. Sound dropped. Not gradually — a lid coming down. The ambient noise of the park, the wind through canopy, the far-off bark of a fox, all of it compressed into silence so total that her own breathing became grotesque, wet and labored in her ears like she was listening to it through a stethoscope. The standing stones rose from the ground at the clearing's edge, six of them, ancient oaks petrified into columns that were neither wood nor rock but something between. In the dark they looked like figures with their backs turned. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing floor despite the November cold. She could not see their color in the torchlight but she could smell them — heady, sweet, funereal. The kind of perfume that made her think of hospital rooms and wake houses and her grandmother's bedroom the week before she passed. The pendant flared hot. Rory pulled the chain out from her collar and held it up. The Heartstone cast its own light now, a deep crimson glow that turned her fingers to something strange — too red, the creases black, the nails like dark little shells. In that light the standing stones threw shadows that were too long. The geometry was wrong. The shadows pointed toward the light source rather than away from it. She stood very still and watched the shadows, because the shadows were moving. Not quickly. Not in any way she could have filmed or described to someone after. They moved the way hour hands moved — imperceptible in the moment, obvious when you looked away and then looked back. One of the stone shadows had been pointing north. Now it pointed northeast. The gap between it and the next shadow had narrowed. She turned a slow circle. Six stones. Six shadows. All of them oriented inward, toward her, like the spokes of a wheel with her body at the hub. "Hello?" Her voice came out flat. No echo. The clearing ate the word and gave nothing back. She checked her phone again. 11:51. Then 11:51. Then 11:51. She waited, counting heartbeats — hers and the pendant's, out of sync in a way that made her feel seasick — and checked again. 11:51. Right. The Fae Grove. Time moved differently here. She had read Eva's notes, the folklore Eva collected the way other people collected vinyl, and this was one of the warnings: *Do not trust clocks. Do not trust the length of the dark. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside.* Rory's stomach went tight. She could have been standing here for thirty seconds. She could have been standing here since Tuesday. Something rustled at the far edge of the clearing, beyond the sixth stone. She swung the phone toward it. The torch beam hit the tree line and fractured, scattering through branches in a way that made shapes — a shoulder, a jaw, the ridge of a brow — that dissolved as soon as she tried to focus. No animal. No person. Just the light doing something it shouldn't, giving form to empty spaces. The pendant's pulse quickened. She looked down at it. The glow had deepened. Not brighter but *denser*, the crimson compressing toward something almost black at its core, like blood pooling under a bruise. It was warm enough now that it stung against her palm, a small bright coal suspended on its silver chain. The rustling came again. Closer. Not from the same direction. Rory turned. The sixth stone — the one she had been facing when she entered the clearing — had a shadow that now touched her left shoe. She had not moved. The stone had not moved. But the shadow lay across her trainer like a hand across a threshold, and where it touched the leather it was cold. Not night-cold. Not winter-cold. The kind of cold that came from deep closed places, from cellars and crypts and the still water at the bottom of wells. She stepped back. The shadow did not recede. It stayed where it was, severed from the stone that cast it, a dark strip on the ground that no longer needed a source. Her breath misted. It had not been misting before. She scanned the clearing. The wildflowers nearest the stones had changed. She could see it now in the pendant's glow — the petals were curling inward, not wilting but closing, the way sea anemones contracted when touched. One by one, ring by ring, starting at the perimeter and moving inward. Toward her feet. A slow tide of closure that turned the carpet of blooms into a carpet of fists. Something exhaled behind her. Not wind. Breath. She felt it on the back of her neck, warm and damp and carrying a smell like turned earth and copper. She did not spin around. Every cell in her body screamed for her to spin around, but Rory was a woman who had learned early that the worst things happened when you gave them your full attention, when you opened yourself to them like a door. She closed her hand around the pendant. The heat was fierce now, branding the crescent scar on her left wrist where the chain wound, and the glow between her fingers bled light through skin and bone so that she could see the architecture of her own hand — phalanges, metacarpals, the delicate cage of her grip — rendered in red stained glass. The breath came again. Closer. Against her hair. "I brought what was given," she said. Her voice did not shake. "You sent the note. Here I am." Silence. But a different silence now — not absence but withholding. The silence of something choosing not to speak. The standing stones' shadows had converged. They formed a circle around her feet, a dark ring on the ground no wider than a manhole cover, and the cold that rose from them was absolute. She stood in it as though standing in black water up to the ankles, her legs numb from the shins down, the warmth of the Heartstone the only thing left in the world that pushed back. One of the standing stones creaked. Not wood. Not rock. The sound a throat makes before it speaks — a dry, preparatory click — magnified to the scale of something old and tall and rooted in the ground for centuries. She looked at the nearest column. In the crimson light she could see what she had not seen before. Grain. Texture. Not the grain of wood or the texture of stone. Skin. Bark-dark, riven with deep lines, but unmistakably skin, stretched over something that swelled and contracted in a rhythm she recognized because the pendant echoed it, because her own chest echoed it. The stones were breathing. All six of them. A respiration so slow she had mistaken it for stillness. Expand. Contract. The spaces between them narrowing with each cycle like ribs cinching around a lung. The clearing was smaller than when she had entered it. The tree line was closer. The sky — she looked up and the sky was gone, replaced by a canopy of branches that had not been there, woven so tight not a single star broke through. The pendant screamed. Not sound. Sensation. A spike of heat so acute it felt like a needle driven through her palm into the center of her wrist, and the crimson light flared outward in a ring that swept across the closing flowers and the breathing stones and the wrongful shadows, and for one instant — one stuttering heartbeat — she saw. A figure. Between the third and fourth stones. Taller than either. Thin in a way that was not human, the limbs too segmented, the angles of the joints reversed. It had no face she could discern but it had attention, and that attention was fixed on her with the total, unblinking focus of a cat watching a bird through glass. Then the light collapsed back into the stone and the dark returned and the figure was gone and the silence was the old silence, the dead silence, the silence of a clearing that did not exist in any place she could name. Rory stood with the pendant burning against her scar and her breath coming in short white plumes and the flowers closed tight around her feet like a field of small clenched mouths. She did not run. She wanted to. The animal machinery of her body — the adrenal system, the fast-twitch muscle fibers, every legacy of ten thousand years of ancestors who survived because they ran — demanded it. But the grove had sealed itself around her, and there was nowhere to run to that was not deeper in, and deeper in was where the breathing came from. She opened her hand. The pendant sat in her palm, the crimson glow steady again, a thumbnail-sized coal that cast her lifeline and heart line in sharp relief. It pulsed. Paused. Pulsed again. Behind her, between her shoulder blades and the nape of her neck, the warm breath returned. Patient. Closer than before. And this time, it whispered.