Run: 2026-03-15-01KKS2PGP63YQ3SNV7Z46QT1S4

The pendant warmed against her collarbone the moment Rory stepped past the standing stones. She paused, one hand rising to touch the crimson gem. The faint inner glow cast red shadows across her fingers. That wasn't right. It had only ever pulsed near Hel portals, and she hadn't come to Richmond Park looking for one of those. The wildflowers caught her attention next. Daisies and bluebells and things she couldn't name, all blooming in neat clusters despite the November chill. The moonlight made them look silver-washed, almost metallic. Beautiful, in the way that things in dreams were beautiful before they turned. "Yu-Fei said the delivery address would be past the oaks." She said it aloud because the silence in this clearing pressed against her ears like water. "Past the oaks. Right." There were no oaks. Just the standing stones, each one twice her height and carved with symbols that seemed to shift when she didn't look directly at them. Beyond the clearing, the park's trees had vanished. In their place stretched an expanse of tall grass that rippled without wind. Rory checked her phone. No signal. The time read 11:47 PM, but the digits hadn't changed since she'd entered the grove five minutes ago. Or what felt like five minutes. The pendant's warmth spread, crawling up her neck like a hand. She turned back toward the standing stones. They looked the same from this side. Same height, same carvings, same moss clinging to their bases in patterns that resembled faces. One of those faces had its mouth open. She was certain it hadn't been open before. "Right. Okay." Rory stuffed her phone in her jacket pocket and pulled out the delivery receipt instead. The address printed there made no sense—just a symbol she didn't recognise, repeated three times. Yu-Fei had given her this job specifically. Had said the customer was an old friend who preferred discretion. The grass behind her rustled. Rory spun. Nothing there. Just the silver flowers and the impossible grassland stretching into darkness. But the rustling came again, closer this time, and it sounded like footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. The kind of sound someone made when they wanted to be heard. "Who's there?" The footsteps stopped. A laugh drifted across the clearing, high and thin. It could have been a bird or a fox or the wind through branches that no longer existed. Could have been. Wasn't. Rory's hand found the pendant again. The stone burned now, hot enough that she should have felt pain, but the heat didn't register as discomfort. It felt like a warning. Like the gem was trying to tell her something she didn't want to hear. The wildflowers near her left foot began to close their petals. One by one, folding inward like dying insects. The closing spread outward in a wave, petals shutting all across the clearing, until only the silver ones near the standing stones remained open. "What do you want?" This time the laugh came from directly behind her ear. Close enough that she felt breath against her neck, cold and carrying the scent of turned earth and something sweeter underneath. Rot, maybe. Or flowers decomposing. Rory didn't turn. Turning would mean acknowledging whatever stood there, and she had spent two years learning not to acknowledge the things that haunted the edges of her vision. Evan had taught her that much, at least—how to make herself small, how to pretend she hadn't seen. But this wasn't Evan. This was worse. The pendant flared bright enough to cast her shadow long across the grass. In that light, she saw a second shadow join hers. Taller. Wrong-shaped, with too many angles where a body should have curves. It moved when she moved but not quite in sync, like a reflection in disturbed water. "I'm not here for you." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I'm making a delivery. That's all." The shadow stretched longer. Its head tilted at an angle that would have snapped a human spine. Something brushed against her wrist—the scar there, the small crescent from when she'd fallen through a greenhouse door at age seven. The touch felt deliberate. Felt like recognition. The wildflowers behind the standing stones began to bleed. Not red—something darker, thicker, pooling between the silver petals and spreading across the grass toward her feet. Rory backed away. Her heel caught on something and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell. The ground where her foot had been rose upward, a mound of earth pushing up like something burrowing toward the surface. It stopped inches from breaking through. "Yu-Fei sent me." She didn't know why she said it. Didn't know if it was true anymore, if this job had ever been real, if the receipt in her hand meant anything at all. "If you know her—" The second shadow vanished. The silence that replaced it was worse. The kind of silence that had weight, that pressed down on her shoulders and made her lungs work harder to expand. Even her own heartbeat sounded muffled, distant, like it belonged to someone else. The pendant's glow died. In the darkness, the standing stones began to move. Slowly, grinding against each other with a sound like bones breaking. They shifted in a circle, narrowing the clearing's edge, closing in. The symbols carved into their surfaces pulsed with faint bioluminescence, forming patterns that Rory's eyes refused to focus on. Her back hit stone. She hadn't realised she'd been walking backward. The face she'd seen earlier—the one with the open mouth—was directly in front of her now. Up close, she could see that the mouth wasn't just open. It was growing. Stretching wider, the stone softening and parting like wet clay, revealing darkness behind it that wasn't the colour of absence but of something else entirely. The breath came again, cold against her face this time. The sweet-rot smell filled her nose, her throat, her lungs. And then, from somewhere deep in that stone mouth, a voice. Not words exactly—more like the memory of words, the shape language made before meaning attached itself. It knew her name. Not Rory. Not Aurora. The other one. The one she'd buried when she left Cardiff, the one that Evan had carved into her with his hands and his rules and his endless patient corrections. The stone mouth opened wider. Rory pressed her palm flat against it, felt the stone give beneath her fingers like flesh, and screamed.