Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VR6FF1HZ78AJPMYPNSTGM

The standing stones looked smaller at night. Rory had been to the grove twice before, both times in daylight, both times with someone she trusted at her shoulder. She'd thought she understood its dimensions — the rough diameter of the clearing, the way the ancient oaks crowded close at the boundary, their roots surfacing from the earth like arthritic knuckles. She'd thought she had a sense of the place. She'd been wrong. The grove at night was a different country entirely. She passed between two of the marker stones and felt the familiar shimmer — that thin, membrane-like resistance that distinguished the grove from the ordinary parkland surrounding it. Richmond Park lay a quarter-mile behind her, its lamp-lit paths and distant dog-walkers already feeling like a memory from another life. Here the only light came from the moon, which was three-quarters full and doing what it could through a gauze of high cloud. Not enough. Not nearly enough. Rory switched on her torch. She had a reason to be here. That was what she told herself, moving deeper into the clearing. A specific, sensible, time-limited reason: Isolde had left a message through the usual channel — a folded note slipped under the door of the flat, written in that cramped, archaic hand — asking her to retrieve something from the base of the large stone on the grove's eastern edge. A small parcel, the note said. Wrapped in cloth. Rory was to take it and leave, and not linger. She hadn't lingered on the instructions either, which in hindsight felt like a mistake. The wildflowers were the first thing that unsettled her. They bloomed year-round in the grove — she'd known that, had seen it before, white wood anemones and purple clover persisting through February frost — but now, at half-past eleven on a Tuesday night in mid-October, they were open. Fully, absurdly open, as though it were noon in high summer. She swept the torchlight across the ground and the flowers tracked it, or seemed to. She stopped. Moved the beam back slowly. The flowers were still. Of course they were still. They were flowers. She kept moving. The eastern stone was easy enough to find. She picked her way across the clearing, dry grass whispering against her boots, and crouched at the stone's base. Her fingers found the parcel quickly — a dense little bundle wrapped in dark fabric, tied with twine, about the size of her fist. She tucked it into her jacket's inner pocket and straightened up. That was when she heard it. Breathing. Not her own. Hers was controlled, deliberate — she was conscious of it. This came from the left, from the direction of the tree line, slow and rhythmic and too close. She turned the torch. Nothing but the oaks, their bark silver-pale in the beam, their shadows pooling deep between the trunks. She held her own breath and listened. Silence. Not the natural silence of a park at night, with its small rustlings and distant traffic murmur. Actual silence. Total. As though everything in the grove had stopped at once, waiting. Rory exhaled carefully. "Hello?" Her voice didn't carry the way it should have. It fell flat a foot from her mouth, absorbed by the air itself, as though the grove had swallowed it before it could travel. She didn't try again. She started back toward the entry stones, keeping her pace measured. Brisk but not running. Running was for when you knew something was behind you. Right now she just suspected, and there was a meaningful difference, and she intended to maintain it. The pendant shifted against her sternum. She stopped walking. It was warm. Not wildly, overwhelmingly warm, but warm in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago — a faint, deep pulse of heat through the fabric of her shirt, as though the stone inside it had woken. She pressed her palm against her chest through the jacket. One pulse. Two. Slow, irregular, like a heartbeat finding its rhythm. The pendant was supposed to pulse near a Hel portal. She had never been told what to do when it started pulsing in a place where there wasn't one. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the tree line. Something was at the edge of the clearing. She couldn't have said precisely what it was. Her mind kept sliding off it, the way a tongue slides off the gap left by a missing tooth — it registered an absence where her perception should have landed cleanly on a shape. It was approximately the height of a person, or perhaps taller. It was approximately still, or perhaps it moved in increments too small to track directly. Twice she caught what might have been a pale oval where a face would go, and twice when she fixed her torch on the spot, the beam found only bark and shadow. The third time she decided not to check. Some better-calibrated part of her brain had already reached a conclusion her conscious mind hadn't articulated yet. Don't look directly at it. She kept the torch aimed slightly to the left of where she'd seen it and made herself walk. One stone post showed in her torch beam. Then the second. The membrane was three feet ahead of her, the shimmer just barely visible as a slight distortion in the air, the way a road surface looks when heat rises off it. Behind her: a sound. Not breathing this time. Something between a footstep and a sigh, high and soft, as though someone had exhaled through a sustained note. Then another. Then a third. Evenly spaced. Getting nothing closer, because the sound didn't travel the way sounds should — it arrived fully formed in her ears, already close, skipping whatever middle distance ought to have existed between origin and arrival. The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled sharply. Rory walked through the standing stones. The membrane closed behind her. The sound cut off as though a door had been shut, and the ordinary night rushed back in — distant traffic, the cold smell of autumn leaves, a dog barking from somewhere across the park. She kept walking without checking her pace until she'd put fifty yards between herself and the grove entrance. Then a hundred. Then she stopped in the shadow of an oak that didn't belong to any standing ring, just an ordinary English oak with ordinary dark bark, and she pressed her back to it and breathed. The pendant had gone cold. She reached into her jacket and drew it out by the silver chain, letting it pool in her palm. The deep crimson stone stared back at her without light, without warmth, the faint inner glow that usually lived in it entirely absent now, extinguished. She'd never seen it go dark before. In all the weeks she'd worn it, across all the strange rooms and stranger conversations it had accompanied her through, it had always maintained some faint internal warmth, as though the stone were alive. She curled her fingers around it and stared back in the direction of the grove. The note had said not to linger. She understood now, with the cold clarity that arrived when fear finished and the body began its accounting, that the instruction had not been a suggestion about her time management. It had been the same kind of instruction as don't put your hand near a flame. Practical. Empirical. Founded on knowledge Isolde possessed and Rory did not. She began walking toward the park gate. She did not look back. She was certain — with a certainty she couldn't entirely justify and had no desire to examine more closely — that the thing at the edge of the tree line would not cross through the standing stones. She was also certain that if she looked back toward the grove now, she would see that it was watching her go. And that it was patient. And that it had been there before and would still be there when she eventually returned. That was the part that frightened her most. Not the not-shape at the boundary, not the swallowed sound of her own voice, not the dead stone cold in her fist. The knowing that she would return. Because she always did. Because the grove had a way of arranging things so that she did.