Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W1GNYCW0BQZQ99TW1CREA

The last dog-walker had left Richmond Park an hour ago, and the darkness that settled over the hills was the particular kind of dark that only existed at the edges of London — not quite rural, not quite urban, a bruised purple sky backlit by the city's restless glow. Rory kept to the tree line where the shadows pooled thickest, her trainers silent on the damp grass. She shouldn't have come alone. Eva would have said as much, would have grabbed her by the sleeve of her jacket and physically held her back. Silas would have poured her a whiskey and told her to sleep on it. But the text had come at half-ten — an unknown number, six words: *The grove. Midnight. Come alone.* And under the words, a photograph of the Heartstone Pendant, identical to the one currently pressing its faint warmth against her sternum beneath two layers of cotton and canvas. She hadn't told anyone. That was the first mistake, and she knew it even as she was making it. The oaks of Richmond Park were old — centuries old, some of them — and at night their canopies merged into a single dark mass that swallowed the sky. Rory moved between their trunks with one hand outstretched, fingers brushing bark that felt too smooth, too warm for a November night. Her phone's torch picked out roots and mud and the occasional pale scatter of fungi, but she kept the beam low and close. Something about the idea of throwing light ahead of her, of announcing herself to whatever waited in that clearing, felt deeply, instinctively wrong. She found the standing stones by touch before she found them by sight. Her palm met the first one and she jerked it back as though burned. Not because it was hot — it wasn't. It was cold, the deep mineral cold of stone that had never seen sunlight, and the texture under her fingers was not oak bark at all but something ridged and grooved, like the whorls of an enormous fingerprint pressed into rock. She lifted her phone. The standing stone was exactly where it had been three weeks ago, when Isolde had first shown her the grove. Waist-high, grey-green with lichen, leaning slightly inward as though straining to hear something whispered at its base. There were seven of them, she remembered, arranged in a rough crescent that marked the boundary of the pocket — the place where the world thinned and something else pressed close. But tonight there were eight. Rory counted them twice, moving the phone's light from stone to stone. She counted a third time, walking the perimeter, her breath clouding in the air. Eight stones. The new one stood at the far end of the crescent, slightly taller than the others, its surface darker and unmarked by lichen. As though it had just grown there. As though it had just arrived. The Heartstone Pendant pulsed once against her chest, a single heavy throb like a second heartbeat finding its rhythm. Not warmth this time. Not exactly. More like a vibration, a deep subsonic hum that traveled through the silver chain and into her bones. Rory stepped between the stones and into the grove. The shift was immediate. The distant hum of the M3, the subsonic rumble of London existing — gone. Not faded. Severed. The silence that replaced it was so complete that she could hear the blood moving through her own ears, a soft oceanic rush that suddenly seemed very loud. The wildflowers were blooming. She could see them in the phone's light — clusters of foxglove and primrose and something blue she didn't have a name for, all of them open and trembling slightly as though a breeze were moving through the clearing. But there was no breeze. The air in the grove was perfectly, unnaturally still. Rory checked her phone. 11:47. Thirteen minutes. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the tree line. The oaks that bordered the grove were different on this side — their branches grew inward, reaching toward the center of the clearing like arms frozen mid-grasp. Between them, shadows stacked upon shadows in layers too dense to read. Anything could be standing just inside that dark. Anything at all. Nothing moved. She sat on the flattest of the standing stones and waited. The pendant hummed its low steady hum against her chest and she wrapped her fingers around it through her jacket, feeling the crimson facets press into her palm even through the fabric. Whoever had sent that text knew about the Heartstone. Knew what it looked like. That narrowed things considerably, and none of the remaining possibilities were comforting. At 11:52, she heard the sound. It came from behind her and slightly to the left — a wet, organic sound, like someone pressing their tongue against the roof of their mouth and slowly pulling it away. A click. A soft adhesive release. Then nothing. Rory turned. The clearing was empty. The foxgloves trembled. She was on her feet now, phone raised, the light cutting a narrow white corridor through the dark. The trees stared back at her with their frozen reaching limbs. Between two of the oaks, right at the edge of the light's reach, something glistened. Something wet on the bark, a thin vertical streak that caught the torchlight and held it for a moment before the angle shifted and it was just bark again, just tree, just wood. The click came again. Closer. To her right this time. Rory pivoted, her heart slamming once, hard, against her ribs before settling into something too fast and too steady, the kind of pulse her body adopted when it had already decided to be afraid and was simply waiting for her mind to catch up. She'd felt it before — in the flat in Cardiff, lying in bed, listening to Evan's key in the lock at 2 a.m. — and she hated how natural the state felt, how quickly her body remembered the architecture of fear. The phone light found nothing. Empty air. Nodding foxgloves. And then, just as she began to lower the beam, she caught the movement. Not in the trees. On the ground. Among the flowers. One of the primrose clusters, about six feet from where she stood, was moving. Not trembling — *rearranging*. The pale yellow heads were turning, slowly, with the patient deliberation of sunflowers tracking the arc of the sun, except there was no sun, and they were all turning toward her. Rory took a step back. Her heel struck a standing stone and she caught herself, one hand slapping the cold grooved surface. Under her palm, the stone vibrated. A low frequency, barely perceptible, like a tuning fork pressed to solid rock. She pulled her hand away and the vibration continued, transmitted now through the soles of her trainers, through the earth itself. The clearing was humming. Not the pendant — though it too was pulsing, faster now, its rhythm falling out of sync with her heartbeat in a way that made her stomach lurch. The ground beneath her feet was producing its own sound, a resonance that lived below hearing and above feeling, and the wildflowers were responding to it, all of them turning now, hundreds of small pale faces orienting on her with blind botanical precision. 11:56. Something was breathing in the trees. She couldn't see it. She couldn't pinpoint the direction. But she could hear it — a long, slow inhalation that went on for far too long, ten seconds, fifteen, twenty, the sound of lungs that were not the right size filling with air that might not be air. Then a pause. Then the exhalation, warm and smelling of copper and wet soil, close enough that it moved the hair at the back of her neck. Rory didn't turn around. Every instinct she had — every good instinct, every one she'd sharpened in the years since Cardiff, since Evan, since learning what it cost to ignore the voice that said *leave now* — every one of them was screaming at her not to turn around. Not because turning would put her in danger. Because turning would mean *seeing*, and whatever stood behind her in the Fae Grove at four minutes to midnight was something that could not be unseen. The breathing continued. In. Out. The exhalation grazed her ear. She could feel the moisture of it on her skin. "I know you're there," she said. Her voice came out level, steady, nothing like the animal panic rioting through her nervous system. Cool-headed Rory. Quick-thinking Rory. Her hands were shaking and she shoved them into her pockets. "I came. Like you asked." The breathing stopped. The silence that followed was somehow worse. Silence in the Fae Grove was not the absence of sound — it was an active presence, a pressure, as though unsound were being manufactured and pumped into the clearing to fill the space where noise should be. Rory's ears rang with it. The pendant flared and went cold against her chest, so suddenly that she gasped, one hand flying to the spot. Through her jacket, the Heartstone felt like a chip of ice. Like a dead thing. And then she heard the voice. It did not come from behind her or in front of her or from any direction that a human throat could produce sound. It came from *inside* the standing stones, from the grove itself, vibrating up through the root systems and the mycelial networks and the ancient compacted earth, and it shaped a word that was not her name but was somehow *about* her, a word in a language she didn't speak that nonetheless communicated its meaning with the clarity of a hand closing around her wrist. It meant *found*. It meant *here*. It meant *at last*. The flowers turned their faces up. In the tree line, something that was not shadow shifted its weight, and for one terrible moment the shape of it was legible — too tall, too narrow, too many joints articulated in the wrong direction — and then the dark closed over it like water and it was gone. Rory stood in the center of the grove with her dead pendant and her shaking hands and the flowers watching her, and the eight standing stones hummed their low impossible chord, and midnight arrived without ceremony, and she understood two things with perfect and devastating clarity. The first was that whoever had sent the text had not sent it to bring her here. The second was that whoever had sent the text had sent it to bring her here *for something else*. The foxgloves swayed. The dark between the oaks rippled, reshaping itself. And Rory Carter, who had spent her life learning when to run, stood very still and did not look behind her, and waited to find out what had been waiting for her.