Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VFT5H7KE6K0FBGSY077FD

The last dog-walker had disappeared down the path twenty minutes ago, and Rory stood at the edge of the treeline with her phone's torch cutting a thin blade through the dark, telling herself she was not afraid. She was, of course. But she'd learned long ago that fear was just another voice in the room, and you didn't have to let it speak loudest. Richmond Park at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night was a different creature from the sun-drenched sprawl she'd cycled through on deliveries. The deer were somewhere out in that blackness — she could feel them the way you feel someone watching from across a pub. Hundreds of dark eyes in hundreds of dark skulls, standing perfectly still in the long grass. She kept her torch fixed ahead and walked. The Heartstone pendant lay flat against her sternum, cold as a coin left on a windowsill. It had been warm when she left the flat, warm enough that she'd noticed it through her shirt on the Tube, warm enough to make her press her fingers to it every few stops to make sure it wasn't just her imagination. By the time she reached Richmond station it was almost hot. Now it was cold. She didn't know what that meant. She found the first oak standing stone by nearly walking into it. Her torch swept across bark so old it had turned to something closer to stone — grey and grooved in deep vertical channels, like the thing had been clawed by centuries of patient fingers. It stood apart from any living tree, rooted in a circle of bare earth where nothing else grew. She reached out and touched it. The wood was dry and strangely warm, as if it held the memory of a sun that had set a thousand years ago. There were supposed to be more of them. She turned slowly, sweeping the torch in a wide arc, and found the second stone twenty feet to her left. The third, another twenty feet beyond that. She followed them like breadcrumbs, counting under her breath — three, four, five — until the trees around her thickened and the canopy overhead closed like a fist and the sounds of the park fell away. Not faded. Fell away. As if someone had pressed a mute button on the world. She stopped walking. Held her breath. Listened. No traffic noise. No wind. No foxes. The silence was so complete it had texture — a cottony pressure against her eardrums, the way silence feels in a room that's been soundproofed. She swallowed and heard the click of her own throat with surgical clarity. The Fae Grove. She stepped between the last two standing stones and the clearing opened before her like a held breath finally released. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in defiance of November — bluebells and primroses and things she couldn't name, all leached of colour by the darkness but visible somehow, as though they generated their own faint luminescence. The sky overhead was wrong. She knew it was overcast tonight — she'd checked the weather, she'd seen the low orange ceiling of London clouds from the train — but here the sky was clear and full of stars she didn't recognise. Too many stars. Too bright. Arranged in constellations that looked almost right but weren't, the way a word looks almost right when you've stared at it too long. Rory lowered her phone and switched off the torch. The starlight was enough. More than enough. It painted the grove in shades of blue and silver and made the standing stones at its perimeter look like the fingers of a buried hand reaching up through the earth. She'd come because the message told her to come. Three words on a piece of paper slipped under her door at the flat, written in ink so dark it looked like it had been extracted from the space between things: *The grove. Midnight.* Stupid. Coming here was stupid. She knew that. She'd known it while lacing her boots and she'd known it on the Tube and she'd known it walking through the dark with her phone held out like a talisman. But the pendant had been hot and the message had been there and she had the particular curse of needing to know. She checked the time. 11:47. The flowers at her feet moved. Not from wind — there was no wind — but a slow, directional swaying, as though something was passing through them just below her line of sight. She tracked the movement as it curved wide around the clearing's edge, a rippling wake in the bluebells that traced a lazy semicircle and then stopped. She stared at the spot where the motion had ceased. Nothing there. Just flowers and starlight and the black line of the standing stones. But the pendant was warm again. Not hot. A gentle, almost apologetic warmth, like a hand placed tentatively on her shoulder. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. The grove swallowed it without echo. She was aware, suddenly and completely, that she should not have spoken. The certainty arrived fully formed, not as a thought but as a physical sensation — the same lurch in the gut she'd felt the night she realised Evan had locked the front door from the inside. A signal from some ancient part of the brain that understood danger before the conscious mind had finished forming the question. Something had heard her. She couldn't say how she knew. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. The stars overhead continued their alien glittering. But the quality of the silence had changed. Before, it had been the silence of an empty room. Now it was the silence of a room with someone standing very still in the corner, waiting for you to turn around. Rory did not turn around. She stood perfectly still and breathed through her nose and let her eyes adjust to the periphery. Something was there — not behind her, she decided, but to her left. At the edge of the clearing. She could feel it the way she'd felt the deer: a weight, a presence, a displacement of the dark. It was standing among the stones. The pendant pulsed. A single, clear beat of warmth against her chest, like a second heartbeat. She turned her head, slowly, and looked. It was nothing. A shadow that was slightly too deep between two of the standing stones. A darkness that didn't match the angle of the starlight. But as she stared at it, the darkness seemed to resolve — not into a shape exactly, but into the *suggestion* of a shape. Something tall and narrow. Something that stood the way a person stands when they've forgotten how people are supposed to stand, the angles subtly, horribly wrong. Rory's mouth went dry. The shape didn't move. Didn't advance. It simply occupied its space between the stones with a patience that made the hairs on her arms lift one by one. She had the terrible impression that it was studying her with the same careful attention she was giving it — that they were locked in a mutual observation, predator and prey, and she wasn't sure which one she was. She stepped backward. One step. The flowers gave beneath her trainers with a wet sound that was too loud. The shadow shifted. A lateral movement, smooth and unhurried, like something sliding behind a curtain. It moved from between the two stones to behind one, and then the standing stone was just a standing stone and the shadow was just the dark behind it and Rory was alone again. She wasn't alone. She knew this the way she knew her own name. She could feel it in the changed weight of the air, the way the grove seemed to have contracted around her by some imperceptible degree, the flowers a little closer, the stones a little nearer, the sky a little lower. The thing hadn't left. It had simply stopped letting her see it. The pendant was hot now. Properly hot. She pressed her hand to it through her shirt and felt the crimson stone throb against her palm— a rhythm that didn't match her heartbeat. Faster. Urgent. A warning she couldn't decode. A sound reached her. The first sound she'd heard in the grove that she hadn't made herself. It came from below. From the ground. A low, resonant vibration that she felt in the soles of her feet before her ears caught up — a hum, almost musical, almost beautiful, rising through the earth like something vast turning over in its sleep and beginning to wake. The wildflowers shivered. All of them, all at once, a collective tremor that rippled outward from the centre of the clearing. From where she was standing. Rory looked down. The flowers directly beneath her feet had changed. They'd been bluebells a moment ago — she was certain of that — but now they were something else. Dark. Almost black. Petals curled inward like fingers making fists. And where they met the bare skin of her ankles above her socks, they were warm. Warm and faintly damp. She lurched sideways, out of the dark patch, and the flowers she stepped into were normal again — pale, cool, ordinary. But the black patch remained where she'd been standing, visible in the starlight like a bruise on the clearing floor. As she watched, it spread. Slowly. A stain soaking into fabric. The dark flowers multiplied, pushing aside the bluebells and primroses, reaching toward the edge of the clearing with organic inevitability. The pendant was almost too hot to bear. Something laughed. Not a human laugh. Not an animal sound. A single, low exhalation that nevertheless contained in it the architecture of laughter — the rhythm, the breath pattern, the suggestion of amusement — translated into a register that human vocal cords couldn't produce. It came from everywhere and nowhere. It came from the spaces between the standing stones and from the ground beneath her feet and from the alien sky overhead. Rory ran. She bolted for the gap between the stones where she'd entered the grove and the standing stones reared up around her like sentries and the bluebells lashed at her ankles and the silence pressed against her ears like water. She hit the treeline at full sprint and crashed through undergrowth that grabbed and tore and suddenly the sounds of the world came roaring back — wind and distant traffic and a fox screaming somewhere to the west — and she was stumbling through ordinary English woodland in ordinary English dark with branches whipping at her face and her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth. She didn't stop until she reached the path. The wide, paved, lamp-lit path with its reassuring council signage and its dog-waste bins and its iron benches bolted to concrete. She bent double, hands on her knees, breathing in great ragged gulps. Her phone had survived — somehow still clutched in her left hand, the hand with the crescent scar, her knuckles bone-white around it. She checked the time. 3:14 AM. She'd been in the grove for thirteen minutes. More than three hours had passed outside. The pendant lay against her sternum, cooling steadily, its crimson glow fading to something barely visible through the fabric of her shirt. A dying ember. She pressed her fingers to it and felt the last threads of warmth unravel. Behind her, deep in the park, the fox screamed again. Rory straightened up. Pushed her hair out of her face with shaking hands. Walked toward the station with quick, measured steps, eyes forward, not looking back. She did not look back, because she understood now — the way the body understands before the mind catches up — that the grove had let her leave. That speed and will had nothing to do with it. Whatever stood among those stones had opened its fingers and allowed her to pass through them, the way you lift your hand from a beetle to watch which direction it runs. The Heartstone cooled to nothing against her chest. The stars overhead were London's stars again — dim and sparse and mercifully, blessedly wrong in all the right ways.