Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V370SPK0ETWVTD1EZSB2N

The last dog walker had left Richmond Park an hour ago. Rory watched the distant pinprick of their torch bob along the path toward the Sheen Gate, shrink, and vanish. She waited another five minutes in the dark before she moved. The grass was wet. It soaked through her trainers within the first dozen steps, and the cold crept up through her soles and settled in the bones of her feet. She kept her own torch off. The moon was fat enough to see by, and she'd memorized the route from the satellite images she'd stitched together on her laptop — past the stand of hornbeams, down through the bracken slope, skirting the edge of the pond where the water caught the sky like a dropped coin. She counted her steps. Two hundred and twelve to the first marker. Four hundred and nine to where the deer track forked left. Something about the walk felt longer than it should have. She'd studied this. Printed the maps, measured the distances, traced the path with her finger so many times the paper had gone soft along the crease. But the bracken slope hadn't appeared yet and she was past three hundred steps now, and the hornbeams behind her seemed no farther away than when she'd started. The moon sat in the same position it had occupied ten minutes ago. Rory stopped. Pressed her thumbnail into the crescent scar on her left wrist — an old habit, grounding — and listened. Richmond Park at night was supposed to sound like something. Foxes screaming. The rustle of deer bedding down. Wind through oak canopy. She'd read about it, prepared herself for it. What she heard was nothing. Not silence — silence had texture, a kind of soft static created by the absence of louder things. This was a void. As if someone had reached into the air and scooped the sound out of it the way you'd gut a fish. She started walking again. Faster. The bracken appeared all at once, not gradually the way terrain should reveal itself. One step was flat grass, the next was knee-high fern fronds scratching at her jeans. She pushed through. The pendant shifted against her sternum beneath her jacket, the silver chain catching on the zip of her hoodie. It was warm. Not body-heat warm — the kind of warm that had its own pulse, a slow and deliberate throb like a second heartbeat pressed against her chest. It had never done that before. The deer track split where she expected it to. Left fork. She took it, ducking beneath a branch she hadn't seen on any satellite image. The bark was black and slick and her fingers came away smelling of something vegetal and wrong — sweet in the way that rot was sweet, the last sugar of a thing breaking down. She wiped her hand on her jeans and kept moving. The standing stones found her before she found them. That was the only way to describe it. She hadn't seen them from a distance, hadn't watched them resolve out of the dark like landmarks should. She was walking through scrub oak and then she was among them — ancient columns of petrified wood that her research had called oak standing stones, though up close they looked less like oak and more like bone. Pale bone, grey-white under the moon, with whorls and grain patterns that might have been growth rings or might have been something else entirely. They stood in an uneven ring around a clearing no larger than her flat's kitchen, and inside the ring the grass was different. Short. Dark. The kind of green that belonged to the bottom of a lake. Wildflowers grew in clusters between the stones. Foxglove and bluebell and primrose, all blooming together in defiance of every season. Their petals were open as if reaching toward a sun that wasn't there. The Fae Grove. Rory stepped between two of the stones and the void-silence changed. It didn't become sound exactly. More like pressure — a low, subsonic hum that she felt in her jaw and the backs of her eyes. The Heartstone flared hot. She flinched, pressed her hand flat against it through her jacket, and felt it kick against her palm like a small and frantic animal. She was here to look. That was all. Isolde had described the grove in terms that were half poetry and half cartography, and Rory needed to see whether the description held, whether this place was real in the way that the rest of her increasingly impossible life was real. She'd told herself she would stay ten minutes. Observe. Leave. She crouched at the center of the clearing and pulled out her phone to take photographs. The screen wouldn't turn on. She held the power button. Nothing. The glass was cold, colder than it should have been even accounting for the November air, and when she tilted it toward the moonlight she saw that the screen wasn't black. It was dark, in the way that deep water was dark — a dimensionless non-colour that seemed to pull the light in rather than reflect it. She shoved the phone back into her pocket. Ten minutes. Observe. Leave. She noticed the flowers first. The foxglove nearest to her right knee had been facing the center of the clearing when she arrived. She was certain of this because she'd stepped carefully to avoid crushing it. Now it was facing her. The bell-shaped blossoms hung at an angle that pointed at her like fingers, and as she watched — frozen, one hand still pressed against the pendant — the primrose beside it rotated on its stem. Slowly. The way a radar dish tracks a signal. Every flower in the clearing was oriented toward her. Rory stood up. The movement was too fast and blood rushed behind her eyes, spotting her vision. When it cleared, one of the standing stones was closer than it had been. She didn't look at it directly. Some deep and wordless architecture in her brain — older than language, older than reason — told her not to. She'd felt this once before, as a child, the summer her family had rented a cottage in Connemara and she'd woken in the middle of the night to find the bedroom door open and a shape in the hallway that might have been a coat on a hook and might not have been. The same instruction had come then: do not look. Do not confirm. Because the act of seeing would make it real, would establish a contract between observer and observed, and whatever stood at the edge of her vision did not deserve that kind of acknowledgement. The stone was two feet closer. She could see it in her periphery — pale, columnar, its grain patterns shifting in a way that petrified wood should not have been capable of. Behind her, a branch snapped. Not the crisp, decisive snap of a deer hoof on dead wood. This sound was wet, fibrous, like a joint bending past its limit. It came from outside the ring. Rory turned her head just enough to scan the treeline with the outer edge of her vision. The oaks beyond the standing stones were dense and black and unmoving, and between two of them she saw a gap that was darker than it should have been. A vertical absence, roughly the height and width of a person, where the moonlight simply stopped. It didn't move. She didn't breathe. The Heartstone was no longer pulsing. It had become a continuous heat against her chest, a low burn that was creeping toward pain. She gripped the pendant through her jacket and felt the crimson gemstone — thumbnail-small, impossibly dense — vibrating at a frequency that made her fingers numb. The dark gap between the trees shifted. Not sideways. Closer. As if it had taken a step, though she hadn't seen motion, only the result of motion — the same way you might see a clock's minute hand in a new position without ever watching it move. Her legs decided before her mind did. She stepped backward, toward the far side of the ring, never letting the gap leave her peripheral vision. Her heel caught on a root where no root had been, and she stumbled, caught herself on one of the standing stones. The surface was warm. It shouldn't have been warm. She ripped her hand away and something clung — fine threads, gossamer-thin, stretching between her palm and the stone's surface before they broke. The dark gap was inside the ring now. It stood between two of the stones on the side she'd entered from, and this close she could see that it wasn't an absence at all. It had texture. Layers. The kind of black that deepened the longer you stared, that contained grades and strata of darkness the way a bruise contained grades of purple. And at its center — roughly where a face would be on something shaped like a person — there was a point of stillness so absolute it made the rest of the night seem frantic by comparison. She felt it looking at her. Not with eyes. With attention. A vast and patient attention that pressed against her skin like a palm against glass. "I'm leaving." Her voice came out flat and foreign in the pressurized silence. The flowers trembled. The dark shape did not respond. She moved sideways. Circled the edge of the clearing with her back to the stones, sliding her shoulder blades along their warm and faintly sticky surfaces, never taking her peripheral focus off the shape. It rotated to follow her — or rather, its orientation changed without visible movement, the same awful lurch of something being in one state and then another with no transition between. The entry gap was three stones to her left. Two. One. The Heartstone screamed. Not audibly. The vibration in the gemstone spiked into a frequency that bypassed her ears and landed directly in the center of her skull, a white-hot wire of sensation that turned her vision to static for one terrible second. She gasped, pressed both palms against her sternum, and in that moment of broken attention the dark shape crossed the distance between them. It was in front of her. Close enough that if she'd extended her arms she'd have reached inside it. The cold it radiated was not temperature — it was the memory of warmth being taken away, the afterimage of heat. She could smell leaf mould and copper and something acrid beneath both of those, something that reminded her of singed hair. Up close, the point of stillness at its center resolved into something almost recognizable. Not a face. A place where a face had been. An impression, like a death mask pressed into wet clay and then removed — the hollows of eyes, the ridge of a brow, the suggestion of a mouth frozen mid-word. It was the mouth that undid her. Because it was moving. The impression of lips shifted against the dark surface with painstaking slowness, shaping a word or a name that produced no sound, and she understood with a certainty that sat in her stomach like swallowed glass that if she stayed long enough to read what it was saying, she would never leave this clearing. Rory threw herself sideways through the gap between the stones. The transition was instantaneous. One step and the pressure collapsed, sound rushed back in — foxes, wind, the distant hiss of traffic on the A307 — and the cold November air hit her sweat-damp skin and she was running, crashing through bracken, not counting steps, not following the memorized path. Branches clawed at her jacket. Her wet trainers slipped on mud and she caught herself and kept running. She didn't look back. The instruction held — old, wordless, absolute. Behind her, in the clearing between the pale stones, the wildflowers turned slowly back toward the center of the ring. And the dark between the trees was patient.