Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VHDBXWCNNHYVEKVQBS1HD

Richmond Park after midnight was its own kind of silence — not the comfortable urban quiet of a city holding its breath, but something older and more deliberate. The kind of silence that had teeth. Rory moved along the treeline with her torch angled low, the beam catching wet grass and nothing else. The text had come at half eleven, unsigned, routed through a number that no longer existed by the time she tried to ring it back. Three words. *Grove. Tonight. Come.* She'd known what it meant. She'd been waiting for a message like it for two weeks, ever since the pendant had appeared on her doorstep wrapped in brown paper with no note. It sat against her sternum now, the Heartstone, and it was warm in a way that had nothing to do with body heat. The standing stones emerged from the dark before she expected them. Ancient oaks, really — she understood that now — their trunks grown so close together over centuries that they'd fused at the roots, forming a rough ring that the park's groundskeepers somehow never noticed, never marked on any map. She stopped just outside them and listened. Wind in the upper branches. Her own breathing. A fox somewhere distant, its sharp bark cutting once and then nothing. Normal. All of it perfectly normal. She stepped through the gap between two of the trunks. The air changed. That was the only word for it — changed. The temperature dropped by several degrees in the space of a single step, and the smell of damp earth gave way to something floral and too-sweet, like lilies left in a vase three days past their best. Wildflowers pressed against her ankles in the dark, pale heads nodding, though there was no wind inside the grove. The canopy sealed overhead, dense enough to block the low orange smear of London's sky, and Rory's torch became the only light. She swept it across the clearing. Empty. A rough circle of grass, the flowers at its edge, a mossy stone in the centre that looked like it might have been a feature once — a marker, or an altar, or just a big rock — and nothing else. No one waiting. No note, no object left behind, no second message arrived while she'd walked from the gate. "Hello?" Her voice landed flat, absorbed by the trees with an immediacy that felt wrong, like speaking into a padded room. Nothing answered. She crossed to the stone in the centre and crouched beside it, running her hand over its surface. Dry, despite the rain earlier. She pressed her palm flat and felt — nothing. No pulse beneath the rock, no heat, no answering vibration from the Heartstone. Just cold granite and lichen. She straightened and checked her phone. No signal, which was expected. No new messages, which wasn't. Whoever had told her to come here had presumably meant to be here when she arrived. She'd give it ten minutes. She stood with her back to the stone and watched the treeline. The torch lit a rough semicircle in front of her, the shadows beyond it absolute. The flowers moved again — that same slow nodding, rhythmic, unhurried. She turned her head and watched them. The movement tracked from left to right along the border of the clearing, a subtle wave, as though something walked the perimeter just inside the trees. She didn't move. The Heartstone pulsed once against her skin, a single beat of warmth, and went still. A branch cracked to her left. Not the dry snap of dead wood — a green crack, weight-driven, the sound of something that had stepped badly and corrected itself. She turned her torch toward it and the trees stared back, indifferent, bark silver-grey in the beam. "If someone's there," she said, keeping her voice even, "now would be the time." The silence that followed wasn't empty. She'd grown up in Cardiff, had spent enough evenings in the countryside with her father to know the difference between a wood at rest and a wood holding its breath. This was the latter. Even the high branches had gone still. She turned slowly, a full rotation, torch arm extended. Nothing broke the treeline. Nothing moved. But the flowers had stopped nodding. She looked down at them. Every pale head faced inward now, toward the centre of the clearing, toward her. She hadn't noticed them do it. Hadn't seen them turn. One moment moving, the next — oriented. Watching, if flowers could watch, which they couldn't, which she told herself very firmly. She started walking back toward the gap in the standing stones. The sound began when she was halfway across the clearing. Low, rhythmic, almost — not quite — like breathing. More like the sound a person made when they pressed their mouth against something and exhaled through it. It had no direction. She stopped and turned and the sound was behind her. She turned again and it was in front of her. She turned a third time and understood with a cold, certain clarity that it surrounded her, equidistant at all points, a ring of exhalation moving at the same slow pace she'd been walking. It had been matching her steps. She stood very still and it stopped. Her heart wanted to run. Her legs wanted to run. She stood still and breathed through her nose and counted to four, the way her mother had taught her for panic attacks, though this was not a panic attack. This was something else entirely. The Heartstone burned against her chest — not warm now, not the gentle pulse from before. Hot. A sustained, insistent heat that pressed against her sternum like a thumb. She looked down. Through the neck of her jacket she could see the faint red glow of it bleeding through her shirt. She had never seen it glow before. In her peripheral vision, at the very edge of the torch's reach where light collapsed into black, something shifted. Not moved — shifted. As though it had been there for some time, patient, and had simply allowed itself to become fractionally more visible. A shape without clear edges. Taller than she'd want anything to be. She did not look directly at it. She kept her eyes forward, on the gap between the oaks, and she walked.