Run: 2026-03-12-01KKFR6GEA8XC07CSMKJ4Y41B3

The path through Richmond Park didn't feel right. Rory knew the route. She'd walked it four times now, always at dusk when the light went amber and the deer grew bold enough to cross the footpaths in velvet streams. But tonight the shadows under the oaks stretched wrong, pooling in places where she remembered flat grass, and the air tasted metallic on the back of her tongue. Like licking a battery. She checked her phone. No signal. Hadn't had signal for twenty minutes, actually. She should've turned back then. The Heartstone Pendant hung warm against her sternum, beating with that faint pulse she'd learned to associate with proximity to the Fae Grove. It hadn't done this before. Not with this frequency, not with this heat. Her fingers found the chain through the fabric of her jacket and she pressed the stone flat against her chest. It thrummed like a second heartbeat. "Great," she muttered to the darkening treeline. "That's new." She'd come because of the text. Simple words, no sender ID: *Isolde needs you. The Grove. Tonight.* Isolde, the Fae who'd helped her before, who existed in that strange pocket between Richmond Park and somewhere else entirely. Isolde, who had never once used a mobile phone to communicate. So either someone was pretending to be Isolde, or the situation had gotten bad enough that Fae were resorting to modern technology. Neither option sat well. The standing stones appeared between one step and the next. That was the thing about the Fae Grove — you couldn't walk to it deliberately. You had to stumble into it, or be called. The ancient oaks rose from the earth like fingers, their bark black and smooth as obsidian in the failing light. Seven of them, arranged in a rough circle, their canopy woven so tight that the sky beyond was invisible. Not that there was much sky left to see. Dusk had bled into night faster than the weather app predicted. Rory stopped at the threshold. The warm air from inside washed over her — wrong again. It should've been cold. November in London was cold. But the grove breathed out heat, thick and humid, carrying the scent of flowers that had no business blooming in winter. She stepped between the stones. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in colours that belonged to midsummer — oxeye daisies, red campion, cornflowers so blue they seemed to produce their own light. They grew to her waist, their stems brushing her jeans as she waded through. The Heartstone's pulse quickened. She could feel it against her ribs, skipping like a bird in a cage. "Isolde?" Her voice came out steady. Good. She needed steady. Nothing answered. The grove held its breath. She pushed forward through the flowers. Her boots found the old path, a bare-earth track that wound toward the centre of the clearing where a flat stone lay half-buried in moss. The stone served as a meeting place, a threshold between Earth and wherever Isolde called home. It was empty. Rory scanned the edges of the grove. The oaks stood motionless, their lower branches reaching like arms frozen mid-grab. Between their trunks, the darkness had a thickness to it — not the absence of light but something more deliberate. She watched it for a long moment, waiting for shapes to resolve themselves out of the black. Nothing moved. She took out her phone again. Dead. Not the battery — the screen was black and unresponsive, the device cool and inert in her hand. She'd charged it to eighty-three percent before leaving the flat. She slipped it back into her pocket and wrapped both hands around the pendant. "Right. So." Her breath fogged. The heat from moments ago had vanished, replaced by a chill that crept through her jacket and settled into her bones. She shivered once, violently, and the sound of it — her teeth clicking together — seemed too loud for the space. It bounced between the standing stones and came back wrong, like an echo from a room larger than the grove could contain. Something shifted at the edge of her vision. She turned. The far side of the clearing looked the same — flowers, trees, dark. But the flowers there had changed colour. Where moments ago they'd been whites and blues, now the petals closest to the stone's shadow were deep red. Not the red of campion. The red of wet meat. Rory blinked. The flowers were white again. "Just the light," she told the grove. The grove didn't care. She stepped onto the flat stone. It was warm beneath her boots, warmer than it should've been, and the moss that coated its surface had a texture like skin. She resisted the urge to step off it. Isolde had told her once that the stone was a landmark, a fixed point. If she stayed on it, the grove couldn't shift around her. *The grove cannot shift around you.* She'd imagined that, hadn't she? Isolde had said nothing about shifting. Rory pressed her palms against her temples. Her thoughts felt syrupy, moving too slow through her skull. The time distortion — that was real, at least. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She'd known that coming in. She'd planned for it. Set an alarm on Eva's phone for three hours, told her to send someone if she didn't check in by midnight. How long had she been here? Twenty minutes? An hour? There was no way to know. No moon visible through the canopy. No stars. A sound reached her from beyond the oaks. Footsteps. Soft, deliberate, circling the outer edge of the grove. She held still and tracked them by ear — north side, moving east, each step placed with care. Not the crunch of boots on fallen leaves. Something wet. A soft, rhythmic *pat-pat-pat*, like bare feet on damp ground. "Isolde?" The footsteps stopped. Silence poured into the gap they'd left. Rory's ears rang with it, a high thin whine that climbed and climbed until she pressed her palms flat over them. The pendant pulsed against her chest, rapid and panicked, and she realized her own heart had matched its rhythm without her permission. The footsteps resumed. Closer now. Inside the ring of standing stones. She turned slowly. The clearing looked the same, flowers and moss and the flat stone beneath her feet. But the darkness between the oaks had drawn inward. She could see the boundary, the place where the last wildflower gave way to shadow, and it was closer than it should've been. The grove was shrinking. "That's — okay." She forced her breathing to even out. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way Dr. Patel had taught her after the Evan stuff. "That's fine. I just need to think." The pendant's warmth spiked. She looked down. A faint red glow emanated from the gemstone, seeping through the weave of her jumper. She'd seen it glow before, but never like this. Never this bright. The light it cast painted the moss in shades of crimson and made the flowers around the stone look bruised. Another sound. Closer than the footsteps, right at the edge of the stone. Breathing. Slow and wet, the kind of breath that comes through teeth too long for a mouth. She didn't look down. Looking down felt like the wrong thing to do. *Pat-pat-pat.* Behind her now. The footsteps circled the stone with patient precision. Rory's hand moved to the pocket of her jeans. She carried a folding knife — Silas had insisted after her second week working the late delivery shift. She flicked it open and the blade caught the Heartstone's glow, throwing a sliver of red light across the flowers. The breathing stopped. She held the knife at her side and stared straight ahead. Her pulse hammered in her ears. The pendant burned against her skin, not painfully but urgently, a sustained pressure like a hand pressed flat over her heart. Something scraped across the stone behind her. A fingernail. Or something shaped like a fingernail, dragged slow across the moss, leaving a trail she could hear but refused to look at. "What do you want?" Her voice didn't waver. She gave herself points for that, even as her legs trembled and her free hand clenched so tight her nails bit crescents into her palm. The scraping continued. Circled her once. Twice. Each revolution tighter, the sound drawing closer to her boots until whatever made it traced the outline of her left foot and she felt a pressure through the leather, light and exploratory. She jumped sideways off the stone. The wildflowers swallowed her up to the waist. She stumbled, caught herself, turned with the knife raised. The flat stone sat in the clearing, empty. The moss was undisturbed. No scratches, no trail, nothing. But the grove had changed. The standing stones were closer together, their canopies interlocking overhead to form a dome. The flowers around her had turned entirely red, every petal, every stem, a uniform crimson that made the clearing look like a mouth. The air smelled different — not flowers anymore but something older, something that reminded her of cellars and forgotten rooms and the particular mustiness of a place that had been sealed for a long time. She checked her watch. The hands weren't moving. "Okay." She backed toward where the entrance should be, between two oaks on the western edge. The darkness there had substance, a quality like fabric, and she reached toward it with her free hand. Her fingers touched something cold and smooth. Not bark. Not stone. She yanked her hand back and the thing she'd touched moved — a slow, deliberate withdrawal, like something shifting away from her touch. Rory ran. She ran without direction, through flowers that grabbed at her ankles with stems that felt too much like fingers, toward the nearest gap between the oaks. The pendant blazed against her chest, a point of warmth in a world that had gone cold, and she followed its heat like a compass needle. The grove fought her. The flowers thickened. The ground tilted. Sounds layered on top of each other — that wet breathing from all sides now, the footsteps multiplying until it sounded like a crowd, and underneath it all a voice that might have been words in a language she didn't know. She burst through the treeline and hit grass. Real grass, cold and wet with dew, the kind that grew in Richmond Park and nowhere else. The oaks stood behind her, normal and still, their canopy open to a sky full of stars. Rory collapsed onto her knees and vomited into the grass. The pendant had gone dark against her chest. Her phone buzzed in her pocket — she pulled it out, hands shaking so badly she nearly dropped it. Three percent battery. Six notifications from Eva. 11:47 PM. She'd been inside for less than an hour. Maybe less than that. She sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The grove looked ordinary behind her — a circle of old trees, nothing more. The wildflowers, if there were any, were invisible from this distance. Her phone buzzed again. Eva: *You good??* Rory looked at the grove. Looked at her phone. Looked at the red scratches on her left hand, four parallel lines that wept thin blood in the moonlight. She didn't remember getting scratched. She typed back with her thumb: *On my way home.* She stood. She didn't look back at the grove as she walked toward the park exit. She didn't need to. She could hear something following her.