Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V6CCBFSAS8HD8A3B5AAKJ

The text had said midnight. Rory checked her phone — 11:58 — and looked up at the tree line where Richmond Park swallowed the last of the ambient city glow. Behind her, the park's edge hummed with distant traffic and the orange bleed of streetlamps. Ahead, there was only dark. She pulled her jacket tighter and walked toward it anyway. The message had arrived that morning, slipped under the door of her flat while she slept. No envelope. Just a folded square of paper, cream-coloured, with her name written in ink that had a slight iridescent quality under direct light, like a beetle's shell. Inside, four words in the same hand: *The grove. Come midnight.* No signature. Nothing else. She should have ignored it. She knew she should have ignored it. But the Heartstone pendant had been warm against her sternum all day, the way it got sometimes — a low persistent pulse, like a second heartbeat sitting just outside her own rhythm — and that meant something. It always meant something. So here she was, alone, crossing wet grass in the dark with leaves beginning to turn overhead and the smell of autumn coming in cold off the Thames. The standing stones were barely visible until she was almost upon them. They rose at uneven intervals among the oak roots, dark and shoulder-height, arranged in an arc that the park's official maps didn't acknowledge. She'd been here once before, in daylight, and the stones had looked almost natural then — like something geological, easiest to explain away as glacial debris or an artist's installation. In daylight you could manage that. At midnight, with no one around for half a mile in any direction, the explanation didn't hold. She passed between two of the stones and felt the air change. Not dramatically. Not like a door opening or a cold wall walked through. Subtler than that — a pressure differential, barely perceptible, as though the atmosphere on this side of the stones had a different weight. She'd felt it before. She breathed through it and kept moving. The grove opened ahead of her. Wildflowers. She stopped. They were everywhere — low, pale-headed things scattered through the grass, catching what little light reached the clearing from the sky above. It had been October when she crossed the park. October in England meant bare mud and frost-singed grass, nothing blooming, nothing soft. But here the flowers grew as if it were May, unhurried and numerous, and the grass around them was a green so deep it was almost black in the dark. She stood still and listened. Wind in the oaks. Her own breathing. Somewhere far behind her, a car. And then — nothing. She couldn't explain nothing as a sound, but the absence of it had a quality, like a room after a door slams. The ambient noise of the park, the small nocturnal sounds of a living space, had simply stopped. No owls. No rustle of foxes. No creak of branches settling in the wind. The wind itself had stopped. The pendant pulsed. Rory pressed her hand flat against her chest without thinking, feeling the warmth of it through the fabric of her jacket. It was hotter than it had been all day. Not painfully so, but insistently — a heat with intention in it. She closed her fingers around it through the cloth and turned slowly, scanning the boundary of the clearing. The oaks stood enormous and indifferent. Between their trunks, shadow folded into more shadow. She was looking for the shape of a person, she realised. Her eyes kept searching for the outline of a standing figure, and they kept finding almost-shapes — the suggestion of a shoulder, the particular vertical of something upright, the way darkness collected in a tree hollow at a height that was exactly wrong for a tree hollow. Every time she stared directly at one of these almost-shapes, it resolved back into bark and shadow and nothing at all. Every time she let her gaze drift, the shapes came back. She'd read once that peripheral vision was better in darkness. More rods than cones at the edge of the visual field. She wished she hadn't remembered that. "Hello," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. It landed in the clearing and didn't echo, which wasn't right — the oaks were close enough on all sides that there should have been some return of sound, some small repetition. Instead the word just ended. Silence. Then, from somewhere behind her and to the left, a sound. She spun. It had been small. A single soft impact — not quite a footstep, but the sound of weight transferring. The sound of something shifting its position. She stared into the dark between two oaks and the dark stared back without offering anything, and the pendant was hot enough now that she could feel it through her palm, through her jacket, definite and purposeful. Rory forced herself to breathe out slowly. She was not going to run. Running was how you lost your footing in the dark, how you fell, how you made noise and gave away your direction and stopped being able to hear what was around you. She counted to three under her breath and turned back to face the centre of the clearing. The wildflowers had changed. She was almost certain they had been evenly scattered before, a loose and natural distribution across the grass. Now they were gathered along a line — a narrow path of white blooms that hadn't been there a moment ago, beginning two feet ahead of her and curving away toward the far end of the clearing, where the oaks were densest and the dark was absolute. She looked down at her feet. There was a wildflower almost touching the toe of her shoe. The pendant pulsed again. Twice this time, irregular, off-beat. She'd never felt it do that before. In the trees at the end of the flower-path, something breathed. She was sure of it — not in the way she'd been almost-sure about the shapes, not a trick of rods and cones in the dark. A breath. Low and slow and patient. The breath of something that had been waiting for a long time and had learned to be comfortable with waiting. Rory wrapped her hand around the pendant, the silver chain biting into her palm through the cotton of her t-shirt, and made herself look directly at the dark between the trees. Nothing looked back. But the breathing didn't stop. She took one step forward and the wildflowers lit up. Just for a moment — less than a second — each bloom flaring with a cold, faint luminescence as if something below ground had flickered briefly alive. The light was gone before she could be certain she'd seen it, but she felt the afterimage of it, white and sharp, burned onto the back of her vision. The breathing had stopped now. Stopped the exact instant she'd moved. Whatever it was, it knew she'd heard it. Rory stood in the middle of Isolde's grove at two minutes past midnight, hand pressed to her sternum, and the thing that she recognised forming in her chest was not quite fear. Fear would have been cleaner. What she felt was the particular, concentrated wrongness of being observed by something that was in no hurry — something that was content to let her understand, slowly and thoroughly, that the clearing had been arranged for her arrival long before she'd arrived, and that she was precisely where it wanted her to be. She did not move. She did not call out again. She stood very still in the windless dark and breathed carefully and thought about every exit point she'd passed coming in, mapping them against the position of the almost-shapes between the trees. The flowers began to open. One by one, in the middle of the night, in October, as if it were a perfectly ordinary morning.