Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TSAPE5RFYJDK12D28ERN0

The last dog-walker had disappeared down the hill twenty minutes ago, and now Richmond Park belonged to the dark. Rory kept to the tree line where the sodium glow of distant streetlamps couldn't reach her, her trainers soundless on the leaf-matted ground. The air had that particular stillness that November nights brought to London — too cold for lingering, too damp for comfort, the kind of chill that crept through denim and settled against the skin like a second layer of clothing you hadn't asked for. She tugged her jacket tighter and pressed forward through the oaks, counting her steps the way Isolde had taught her. Forty-seven from the split trunk. Sixty-two past the hollow where the foxes denned. Eighty-one to where the ground began its subtle descent and the canopy thickened overhead until even the ambient glow of the city was swallowed whole. She'd been to the Grove three times before, always in daylight, always with someone who knew the paths better than she did. Coming alone at night was stupid. She was fully aware of that. But the text from the unknown number had been specific — *midnight, the Grove, come alone or don't come at all* — and the photograph attached had been of something she needed to see with her own eyes. Something she needed to understand. Step ninety-six. Ninety-seven. The standing stones appeared first as darker shapes among the trees, as though the oaks themselves had decided to stop pretending and reveal what they really were. They weren't actually stone, of course — they were ancient oak, petrified and weathered into something harder than granite, taller than Rory by half, arranged in a rough circle perhaps thirty feet across. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them even now, even in November, their petals bone-white in the dark. She could smell them — that strange, cloying sweetness that belonged to no season, the smell of a place that existed at an angle to the world she knew. She stopped at the boundary and listened. Nothing. No wind. No rustle. Not even the distant thrum of the A3, which should have been audible from this part of the park. The silence wasn't peaceful. It was the silence of a held breath, the silence of a room after someone has stopped talking and before someone else has decided to start. At her throat, the Heartstone Pendant pulsed once — a single throb of warmth, like a heartbeat that didn't belong to her. Rory touched it through her jacket, felt the thumbnail-sized gem press against her fingertip, its crimson glow invisible beneath the fabric but somehow still present, the way you can feel a candle flame with your eyes closed. She stepped between the stones. The air changed immediately — warmer, thicker, carrying a scent like rain on hot stone that had no business being in an English park in November. The wildflowers seemed to sway as she passed, though there was no breeze to move them. She walked to the center of the clearing and turned a slow circle, her eyes adjusting to the deeper darkness. No one was here. She checked her phone. 12:03. She was three minutes late, which shouldn't matter, though in a place where time moved like water — pooling, eddying, rushing forward without warning — three minutes could mean anything. The screen's glow turned the nearest stones a sickly blue, and she thumbed it off quickly, not wanting to kill her night vision. That was when she heard it. Not a sound, exactly. More the memory of a sound, or the space where a sound should have been — a low, arrhythmic something at the very bottom of her hearing, felt more in her chest than heard with her ears. Like a bass note played so deep it bypassed the eardrums entirely and went straight for the ribs. She held still. The sensation came and went, came and went, not quite matching the rhythm of her heartbeat, not quite matching the rhythm of anything. The pendant pulsed again. Warmer this time. "Hello?" Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. It didn't echo. In a clearing this size, surrounded by stones and trees, there should have been some kind of return. Instead, the word fell flat and dead a foot from her lips, as though the air had simply eaten it. She became aware, slowly and then all at once, that the wildflowers had stopped swaying. Every single one of them was motionless. Not the stillness of a calm night — the stillness of things that were paying attention. Rory turned again, slower this time. The standing stones stood where they'd always stood, evenly spaced, their weathered surfaces catching no light because there was no light to catch. But as her gaze swept past the third stone from the east — the one with the split running down its face like a scar — she saw something move. Not at the stone. Behind it. A shifting of the darkness, a rearrangement of shadows that had no source and no cause. She locked her eyes on the spot and willed herself to see clearly, but whatever it had been was gone now, folded back into the black, indistinguishable from the surrounding night. Her mouth had gone dry. She swallowed and tasted copper. The deep not-sound came again, longer this time, and the pendant flared warm enough that she could feel it through her shirt, a circle of heat against her sternum. Her hand went to it instinctively, fingers closing around the gem, and she felt its faint inner glow even through the fabric — the crimson light seeping between her fingers like something alive and desperate to be seen. She needed to leave. The thought arrived clean and certain and she honored it instantly, turning toward the gap between the stones where she'd entered. Her legs moved. The flowers bent away from her feet as though recoiling. Three steps. Five. The edge of the clearing was right there, the gap between the two nearest stones wide enough for two of her, and she could see the normal darkness of the park beyond — the layered shadows of oak and beech and the far-off suggestion of light that meant the city still existed. She stopped. There was someone standing between the stones. Not moving. Not breathing, as far as she could tell. Just standing, a figure that was almost a silhouette but not quite, because silhouettes required backlight and there was none. It was darker than the darkness behind it — a shape that existed not because light revealed it but because light refused to go where it was. Tall. Still. Close enough that if she took two more steps, she would be able to touch it. The pendant was burning now. Not painfully, not yet, but with the insistent heat of a warning, the way a stove element glows before it turns red. Rory's hand tightened around it and she took a step backward, her heel crushing flowers that gave way with a wet, fleshy sound. The figure didn't move. She couldn't see its face, couldn't see if it had a face, but she knew — the way you know in dreams that the thing behind the door is wrong — that it was looking at her. That it had been looking at her for longer than she'd been standing in this clearing. That it had perhaps been looking at her since before she'd entered the park, since before she'd left the flat above Silas' bar, since before the text had arrived on her phone with its careful, specific instructions. "Who are you?" she said, and her voice didn't fall dead this time. This time it carried, rang off the standing stones, came back to her from every direction at once, doubled and tripled and overlapping, *who are you who are you who are you*, as though the Grove itself had decided the question was worth repeating. The figure tilted its head. Just slightly. The way a dog tilts its head when it hears a pitch it can't quite place. Rory backed up another step. Then another. She was in the center of the clearing again, the exact center, and she could feel the geometry of the stones around her like pressure points on her skin — the circle they made was a boundary, she knew that, a threshold between the place she lived and the place that lived alongside it, and she was inside the boundary and the figure was standing on it, and she did not know which side of the line it belonged to. The deep not-sound swelled. It wasn't beneath her hearing anymore. It was everywhere — in the earth beneath the flowers, in the stones themselves, in the roots of trees she couldn't see and the sky she couldn't look at because looking up felt like a mistake, felt like the kind of thing you did once and then never again because what looked back would not be stars. The pendant's heat reached a pitch and then, abruptly, went cold. Not cool. Cold. The kind of cold that burns. Rory gasped and yanked her hand away from it, and in the half-second that her fingers pulled clear of the gem, she saw it — the crimson light, her thumbnail-sized sliver of something that was supposed to protect her, had gone entirely dark. And in the silence that followed, she heard breathing. Not from the figure at the stones. From behind her. Close enough to stir the hair at the nape of her neck. She didn't turn around. Every instinct, every childhood terror that had ever pinned her to a mattress at three in the morning, every animal whisper coded into the base of her brainstem, told her the same thing: *don't turn around*. If she turned around, it would be real. If she didn't turn around, there was still the possibility — thin, irrational, a rope made of smoke — that she was imagining it. The breathing was slow. Measured. It had a texture to it, a wetness, the sound of air being drawn through something that didn't quite work the way lungs were supposed to work. In front of her, between the stones, the figure was gone. Rory stood in the center of the Fae Grove with wildflowers motionless at her feet and a dead pendant at her throat and something standing behind her close enough to touch, and she thought of Cardiff and her mother's kitchen and the way rain sounded on the windows of the house she'd grown up in, and she thought of Eva's voice on the phone saying *come to London, it'll be good for you*, and she thought, absurdly and with terrible clarity, that she had never once in her life been as alone as she was right now. The breathing stopped. The pendant flared hot — an explosion of warmth against her chest, sudden and violent, and in the instant of its burning she felt something draw backward, a presence recoiling, the darkness contracting like a pupil in bright light. The flowers shuddered. The stones hummed a single low note. And the normal night sounds of Richmond Park came flooding back — wind in the canopy, the distant drone of traffic, a fox screaming somewhere on the other side of the hill — as though someone had lifted a glass dome from over the clearing. Rory sank to her knees in the wet grass. Her hands were shaking. Her breath came in short, ragged pulls that she couldn't seem to slow down. The pendant hung warm and steady against her chest, its crimson glow bleeding through her shirt like a slow ember, and she pressed both palms flat against the earth and stayed there, kneeling, until her heartbeat found something resembling its normal rhythm. When she finally looked up, the clearing was empty. The stones stood where they'd always stood. The wildflowers swayed gently in a breeze that had, at last, decided to make itself known. She didn't stand right away. She knelt in the flowers and the dark and touched the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist — an old habit, a compass point, a reminder that she was real and present and solid and alive — and she waited until the trembling stopped. Then she got to her feet and walked out of the Grove on legs that wanted to run, at a pace that refused to let them, and she did not once look back.