Run: 2026-03-15-01KKS2WT7MEB4APJT7EH2Y244D

The gap between the standing stones barely admitted her shoulders. Rory turned sideways, the rough bark of the ancient oaks catching on her jacket, and stepped through into the Grove. She had expected stillness. The Fae-touched places she had encountered before carried a particular silence, the kind that pressed against eardrums like deep water. This was different. The air hummed with a frequency she felt more than heard, a vibration that settled in her teeth and the small bones of her wrists. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in colours that made no sense for November. Bluebells tangled with foxglove, and something that might have been snowdrops glowed pale among the undergrowth. The moonlight that filtered through the canopy above seemed wrong too—too bright, too white, casting shadows that pooled like spilled ink. "Right then." Her voice came out flat. "Let's get this over with." She pulled the Heartstone pendant from beneath her shirt. The crimson gem caught the wrong moonlight and threw it back in shades that shifted between red and something darker. No warmth against her skin. Whatever she had come here to find, the pendant wasn't reacting. Not yet. The reason sat heavy in her jacket pocket—a folded note, the handwriting unfamiliar, the address leading here. Someone had wanted her to come. Someone who knew about the Grove, about the places between places, about the pendant she had never been able to explain. Rory started across the clearing toward the far edge, where the wildflowers thinned and a second stand of oaks marked what might have been another boundary. The ground beneath her boots felt soft, yielding in a way that grass and soil shouldn't. Each step released a scent like crushed herbs and something sweeter underneath, cloying, the kind of sweetness that turned the stomach if inhaled too long. Halfway across, she stopped. The flowers behind her had closed. Not wilted, not drooped—closed, petals folding inward like hands clenching into fists. She turned fully and watched the wave of closure spread outward from her footprints in a perfect circle. "That's new." No response but the hum, which had pitched slightly higher. She turned back toward the far oaks and kept walking. The flowers ahead of her remained open, their faces tracking her progress like an audience. A foxglove near her knee bent as she passed, its spotted throat opening wide enough to show the dark interior where something moved—wet, glistening, retreating deeper into the bloom. Rory did not look closer. She kept her eyes forward and her pace steady. The pendant remained cold. At the second stand of oaks, she found what the note had promised. A stone, no larger than her fist, half-buried in the root system. Pale grey, veined with something that caught light the way the Heartstone did. She crouched and reached for it. The sound came from behind her. Not a snap of twigs or rustle of leaves—something wetter. A dragging, like a sack of offal pulled across wet grass. She didn't turn. Her fingers closed around the stone and pulled it free. Cold, so cold it burned, and the veins pulsed once beneath her thumb. The dragging stopped. Rory straightened, pocketing the stone, and turned around. The clearing looked the same. Wildflowers open and watching. Standing stones framing the entrance she had come through. Moonlight pooling in the wrong shadows. Nothing moved. But the shadows had changed shape. They no longer matched the trees that cast them. One stretched too long, too thin, branching into shapes that suggested limbs rather than boughs. Another pooled at the base of a standing stone but crept up its surface in a way that defied the light source. "You wanted me here." She addressed the Grove itself, the shadows, whatever listened. "I'm here. What do you want?" The hum in her teeth became a buzz. The wildflowers rippled in a wind that touched nothing else, their petals fluttering to reveal dark centres that glistened. Movement at the edge of her vision. Left side. She kept her eyes straight ahead and counted to three, then snapped her gaze that direction. Nothing. Just the oak boundary, the closed flowers beyond, the darkness of Richmond Park pressing against the Fae-touched space like a fist. But something had been there. She had caught the edge of it—a shape that didn't belong, too tall, too thin, folding itself around the trunk of a tree the way a person might press against a wall to avoid being seen. The pendant stirred against her chest. Not warm. The opposite—a cold that spread through the chain and into her skin, into the small crescent scar on her left wrist that had ached on and off since she had found the note. "Right." She took a step toward the entrance stones. "I've got what I came for. We're done." The dragging sound started again. Closer this time. And something else beneath it—a voice, maybe, or the memory of a voice, words in a language she didn't know but somehow recognized. The syllables pushed against her ears like cold fingers. The shadows between her and the entrance had multiplied. They no longer avoided the moonlight but grew denser within it, taking on shapes that resolved and dissolved in the same moment. A hand. A face. Something with too many joints in its fingers. Rory pulled the pendant free and held it up. The crimson glow steadied, and the shadows recoiled—not all of them, but the nearest ones, pulling back like worms from salt. She walked forward. The shadows parted, then closed behind her like water. The dragging followed, keeping pace, always just at the edge of hearing. The flowers on either side of her path had all closed now, dark and clenched, their sweetness curdled into something that smelled of rot. The entrance stones loomed ahead. The gap between them looked narrower than before. She turned sideways and pushed through. The bark scraped her palms. The gap was definitely narrower—the stones had moved, or the trees had grown, or something had shifted in the geometry of the place. She squeezed through, felt the rough wood catch her jacket, tear the fabric, and then she was through, stumbling into the normal darkness of Richmond Park. Behind her, nothing. Just the standing stones, ancient and inert, marking what looked like an ordinary copse of oaks. No glow of wildflowers. No hum in her teeth. No wrong moonlight. Rory stood there, breathing hard, the cold stone heavy in her pocket and the pendant frozen against her skin. A fox screamed somewhere in the park. The ordinary sound of it made her flinch. She started walking toward the park gates, not looking back, listening to her own footsteps on the path and trying not to notice that there was a second set, just slightly out of rhythm with hers, that stopped every time she stopped. The stone in her pocket pulsed once, cold and eager, and something that was not quite a voice whispered from somewhere just behind her left ear: "Thank you."