Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X2V1FGEDMTYMJBQWMEMDG

The last of the daylight bled out behind the treeline as Rory crossed the deer track into the deeper part of Richmond Park. She'd memorized the route — south past the Isabella Plantation, then east through the old-growth oaks until the ground began to slope and the undergrowth thickened into something that didn't belong in a London park. She'd walked it twice in daylight. At night, everything rearranged itself. Paths she recognized seemed to curve the wrong way. Trees she'd used as landmarks hunched closer together, their canopies blotting out the sky until even the ambient glow of the city couldn't reach her. She pulled her jacket tighter and kept walking. The Heartstone pendant lay against her collarbone, barely noticeable most days. Tonight it was warm. Not the faint pulse she'd grown accustomed to — this was a steady, low heat, like a coin left in the sun. She'd first noticed it on the Tube ride from Hammersmith, a quiet throb against her sternum that made her press her fingers to it through her shirt. By the time she entered the park gates, the warmth had deepened into something she could feel in her teeth. She was close. The text from Isolde had been three words and a location pin: *The grove. Midnight.* No explanation, no context — which was standard for Isolde, who treated human communication technology with the same disdainful bewilderment she reserved for parking meters and self-checkout machines. Rory had tried calling back twice. Both times the line connected to silence — not dead air, not a dropped call, but a silence that felt occupied, as though someone were listening from a long way off. She'd stopped trying after that. Now she was here, and midnight was still forty minutes away according to her phone, and the grove was nowhere in sight. She stopped walking. Listened. The park at night had its own soundscape — foxes screaming in the distance, the rustle of deer bedding down in the bracken, the white noise of the A307 filtering through the trees. She knew these sounds. She'd catalogued them on her two previous visits, sitting on a bench near the Pen Ponds with her headphones around her neck, training herself to distinguish the ordinary from the other. What she heard now was none of those things. It was a tapping. Rhythmic, unhurried. Wood against wood, like someone knocking on a door frame. It came from her left, deeper in the trees, where the oaks grew close enough that their branches interlocked overhead. Tap. Tap. Tap. Then nothing. Then tap-tap. Then nothing again. Rory exhaled slowly through her nose and turned toward it. The pendant flared warmer. The standing stones appeared before the grove did. She nearly walked into the first one — or rather, what passed for a standing stone here, which was an oak trunk petrified into something between wood and mineral, its grain frozen in whorls that caught her torch beam and threw it back like quartz. She'd seen them before in daylight, a rough circle of seven marking the boundary of the clearing. In daylight they looked ancient, weathered, vaguely sad. In the thin cone of her torch they looked like figures. Hunched, patient figures, turned slightly inward, as though conferring about something they didn't want her to hear. She stepped between two of them and into the grove. The wrongness hit her like a change in altitude. The air was different. Heavier, wetter, carrying a sweetness that had no business existing in November — the smell of a garden in full summer bloom. And the flowers were there, she could see them now, carpeting the clearing floor in defiance of season and sense. Bluebells. Campion. Something pale and star-shaped she didn't recognize. They shivered slightly, all of them, in the same direction, though there was no wind. Rory swept the torch in a slow arc. The clearing was maybe thirty meters across, ringed by the stone-oaks and beyond them the ordinary trees of Richmond Park, which now seemed impossibly far away, as though the grove had expanded the moment she entered it. The grass underfoot was wet. Her trainers sank slightly with each step, and the ground made a sound like swallowing. No sign of Isolde. No sign of anyone. She checked her phone. The screen showed 23:24 and no signal bars. The battery indicator, which had been at sixty-one percent on the walk in, now read thirty-seven. She watched it drop to thirty-six as she held the phone in her hand. She put it away. "Isolde?" she called, and her voice came back to her wrong. Not an echo — an echo would have bounced off the trees and returned diminished. This was her own word handed back to her intact, as though the grove had caught it and was showing her what it looked like. *Isolde.* The syllables hung in the air a half-second too long before dissolving. The tapping had stopped. Rory became very still. She was good at stillness — it was one of the few useful things Evan had taught her, though he hadn't meant to. When someone else's mood is a minefield, you learn to freeze. You learn to read the temperature of a room in the space between one heartbeat and the next. She stood in the center of the grove and she read it now — the silence, the air, the faint tremor in the flowers — and what it told her was *wrong.* Not dangerous, necessarily. Not yet. But wrong in the way that a familiar room is wrong when you wake in the middle of the night and the furniture has shifted six inches to the left. Wrong in the way that tells you the rules have changed and no one has informed you of the new ones. She turned off her torch. The darkness that replaced it was not complete. The Heartstone pendant was glowing — a faint, deep crimson light that bled through her shirt and painted the hollow of her throat in shades of old blood. She pulled it out by the chain and held it in her palm. The silver links were warm. The stone itself was almost hot, its inner light pulsing now in a rhythm she didn't recognize, faster than her heartbeat, slower than breathing. She watched it for three pulses, four, five, and then she looked up because something at the edge of her vision had moved. Nothing there. Just the standing stones, the ring of oaks beyond, the impenetrable dark of the park at their backs. She stared at the spot where the movement had been — the gap between the third and fourth stones on the northern arc — and waited. The crimson light from the pendant reached just far enough to touch the base of the nearest stone, and in that light, the petrified wood grain seemed to shift. Slowly. Like something breathing under stone skin. She blinked. The grain was still. A sound reached her from behind — from outside the grove, beyond the standing stones at her back. Not the tapping this time. Something softer. A drawing in of breath, long and slow and deliberate, as though the park itself were inhaling. It lasted three seconds, four, five. She didn't turn around. She stood with the pendant in her hand and her eyes fixed on the northern gap and she did not turn around because a small, cold certainty had taken root in her chest, quiet as a seed, and it told her that if she turned she would see something standing between the stones. Not Isolde. The inhalation stopped. Silence rushed in to fill it, thick and pressurized. The flowers at her feet had stopped shivering. Every petal was motionless, angled toward her, and in the red glow of the Heartstone she could see that the star-shaped flowers — the pale ones she hadn't recognized — had no centers. Where the stamen should have been, there were only small dark openings, like mouths, or like eyes with the irises removed. Rory closed her fingers around the pendant. The heat sank into her palm, into the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, into the small bones of her hand. She could feel her pulse there now, amplified, as though the stone were a second heart nestled against her skin. "I know you're there," she said. She kept her voice level. Conversational, even. The grove swallowed the words this time — no return, no echo. Just gone, like stones dropped into deep water. From somewhere behind her, very close, came a sound like laughter swallowed before it could fully form. A wet, truncated thing. It was followed by a whisper she couldn't parse — syllables in a language she almost recognized, the way you almost recognize a face in a crowd that turns out to belong to no one you know. The pendant's pulse quickened. The crimson light brightened, throwing her shadow out long and stark across the wet grass, and in the second before she had the presence of mind to close her fist tighter and smother the glow, she saw that her shadow was not alone. There was a second shadow stretching beside it, taller, thinner, with proportions that didn't correspond to any body she wanted to imagine. It had arms — she was almost sure it had arms — but they were wrong, too long, bending at joints that human arms didn't have. She closed her fist. The light died. The shadows vanished. The grove was very dark now. Very quiet. The air pressed against her eardrums with the dense hush of a room sealed shut. She could hear her own breathing — too fast, she was breathing too fast — and beneath it, below the threshold of real hearing, a vibration. Low. Subsonic, almost. She felt it in her sternum, in the roots of her teeth, in the soles of her feet through the wet ground. It was the sound a large thing makes when it is trying very hard to be silent. Rory took a step backward. Her trainer squelched in the grass. She waited. Nothing. She took another step, angling herself toward the gap she'd entered through — the southern arc, between the two closest stones. She didn't run. She knew better than to run in the dark, in a place where the ground could swallow your ankle and the distances lied. Three more steps. Four. The stone-oaks should have been right behind her. She reached back with one hand, fingers searching for the petrified bark. They found skin. Warm. Smooth. Impossibly smooth, like river stone, like glass that had been polished for centuries. Her fingertips pressed against it for a fraction of a second before her mind caught up with her body and she yanked her hand back and stumbled forward, a sound escaping her throat that was not quite a scream and not quite a word. She spun, torch up, thumb finding the switch. The beam cut through the dark. The standing stones stood where they'd always stood. Seven of them, ancient, empty, nothing between them but shadow and the faintest memory of wildflower perfume. No figure. No skin. No wrong-jointed silhouette. Just stone and dark and the faraway sound of traffic on the A307, filtering back in as though someone had unmuted the world. Rory stood there with the torch shaking in her grip and the pendant burning against her closed fist and the taste of copper on her tongue where she'd bitten the inside of her cheek. Her breath came in sharp, shallow pulls. She forced it slower. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way she'd learned in the months after Evan, when her body had forgotten how to be calm and she'd had to teach it again from scratch. In. Out. In. Out. The pendant was cooling. She could feel it losing heat degree by degree, the crimson glow dimming behind her clenched fingers until it was just a faint warmth, a whisper of itself. Whatever had been close enough for the Heartstone to scream about was pulling away. Or had been pulled. Or was simply choosing, with the terrible patience of something that had all the time in the world, to wait. Rory did not wait. She turned off the torch, pocketed it, and walked. Not toward the southern gap — she no longer trusted herself to find it in the dark — but toward the break in the canopy where a sliver of city-stained cloud cover was just barely visible. She walked steadily, hands at her sides, and she did not look back, and she did not stop until the ground beneath her feet turned from wet grass to packed dirt to the familiar gravel of the deer track, and the park reassembled itself around her in all its ordinary, explicable, blessedly mundane detail. She checked her phone. 23:19. Five minutes earlier than when she'd last looked. The crescent scar on her wrist throbbed once, faintly, in time with a pulse that was not her own. Rory started walking toward the gate, faster now, the pendant cool and silent against her chest, and behind her — far behind, from the direction of the grove — the tapping began again.