Run: 2026-03-15-01KKS33FWZ0WN2Q3X67Q4RTJJZ

The standing stones rose from the darkness like broken teeth, and Aurora Carter immediately knew she had made a mistake. She stopped at the boundary, one foot on the path she had followed from the park's edge, one foot on the moss that carpeted the clearing's approach. The stones were ancient oak, petrified and silvered with age, arranged in a rough circle perhaps twenty feet across. Beyond them, wildflowers bloomed in colors that had no business existing under moonlight. Pale blues. Sickly yellows. A deep, arterial red that seemed to drink in the darkness rather than push against it. Rory pressed her back against the nearest stone. The bark was smooth under her palm, almost warm, and she hated the way it felt like skin. She had come here because of the pendant. The Heartstone had been pulsing against her collarbone for three days now, a faint warmth that intensified when she moved in certain directions. South toward Richmond Park. Deeper into the green. She had traced it like a compass needle, told herself she was being logical, being thorough. Someone had sent her the pendant. Someone who knew things about her that no one should know. Finding out who meant finding out why, and the why felt like it mattered in a way she couldn't articulate. The pendant lay still now. Cool against her skin. The deep crimson gemstone caught no light, gave none back. That was wrong. It should be glowing. It should be warm. Rory checked her phone. No signal. She had known that would happen—the signal dropped a hundred yards back—but checking was habit. Pre-Law had drilled certain behaviors into her. Verify. Confirm. Don't trust assumptions. The time on her screen read 11:47 PM. She had entered the park at 11:15. Thirty-two minutes. That felt wrong too. The walk from the gate had been perhaps ten minutes, and she had been standing here for what felt like two, maybe three minutes at most. She stared at the numbers until they changed. 11:47 became 11:48, and the second hand moved normally, and she told herself she had simply lost track. That happened. People lost track of time all the time, in all sorts of places. Not like this, though. Not in places where time moved differently. She hadn't known that about the Grove when she started walking. She knew it now, the same way she knew things sometimes—suddenly, fully, with a certainty that came from nowhere she could identify. The knowledge sat in her chest like a swallowed stone. A sound came from inside the circle of stones. A rustling, dry and papery, like someone shuffling through fallen leaves. There were no fallen leaves. The wildflowers grew close-cropped from the moss, and the few trees within the clearing were evergreen, their needles dark and still. Rory held her breath. The sound stopped. She should leave. Every part of her that had survived the last year—the part that had packed a bag at two in the morning and fled Cardiff without looking back, the part that had learned to read the weather of a room and know when to get out—said she should leave now. The stones were right behind her. The path was right there. She could walk back the way she came and be at her flat above Silas's bar in an hour, and whatever this was would stay here in the dark where it belonged. But the pendant had led her here. And she was tired of running from things she didn't understand. She stepped through the gap between two stones. The air inside the circle tasted different. Sweeter, somehow, like flowers decomposing. The wildflowers swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel, and she realized with a crawl of unease that they were all facing her. Every stem bent in the same direction, every bloom oriented on her position like a crowd of tiny watchers. She laughed, a short sound that came out thinner than she intended. Flowers didn't watch. Flowers didn't do anything except grow and die and grow again. She was spooking herself, that was all, letting the dark and the silence and the strangeness get under her skin. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist began to itch. Rory scratched it without thinking, the old habit automatic, and froze. She hadn't felt that scar itch in years. Not since she was a child, not since the accident that had caused it, the one her mother refused to discuss in detail. The one that had left her with a single perfect curve of pale tissue and a recurring nightmare about falling into water that wasn't water. The rustling sound came again. Closer this time. Just to her left, maybe ten feet away. She turned her head slowly. Nothing there. Just more wildflowers, more moss, the dark bulk of an oak tree with branches that reached toward her like arms. No. Not like arms. Like branches. She was doing this to herself, projecting fear onto neutral things, and she needed to stop. The Heartstone pulsed once against her chest. Warm. Faintly glowing. Rory looked down at it. The crimson gemstone threw a dim red light across her fingers, and in that light she saw something that made her blood go cold. Flowers. On the ground where the light fell. Wildflowers that had been facing her a moment ago, now turned away. As if they had lost interest. As if they were looking at something else. Behind her. She didn't turn around. She stood very still, the pendant warm against her skin, and listened to the silence fill with the sound of breathing that was not her own. It was soft. Rhythmic. Just over her shoulder, close enough that she could feel the faint displacement of air. Whatever was breathing was large, or at least tall—it seemed to come from above her, from the height of a person standing just behind her head. The wildflowers at the edge of her vision swayed toward the breathing thing, all of them, the whole field of tiny faces turning to regard it with their silent attention. Rory's hand found the pendant and closed around it. The warmth spread up her fingers, her wrist, her forearm. The scar stopped itching. She counted her heartbeats. One. Two. Three. The breathing continued, unhurried, patient. Four. Five. Six. She thought of her flat, of the familiar smell of beer from the bar below, of the way London noise never fully stopped even at three in the morning. Seven. Eight. Nine. The breathing stopped. She waited. The silence pressed against her ears like water. Then, from somewhere deep in the Grove, from beyond the range of what she could see even in the pendant's faint glow, something laughed. It was a quiet sound, barely more than an exhalation, but it carried a quality that Rory recognized with sick certainty. Amusement. The thing that had been breathing behind her had not left. It had simply decided she was funny. She walked forward. Not quickly—she did not want to run, did not want to give it the satisfaction, did not want to turn her back on whatever space it occupied—but with purpose, her eyes fixed on the far side of the clearing where more standing stones marked another boundary, another exit. The wildflowers bent out of her path as she passed, parting like a curtain, and she tried not to think about what that meant. The laugh did not follow her. But she could feel it watching, the same way she could feel her own heartbeat, and she knew with the same bone-deep certainty that had told her about the time that the Grove was not done with her yet. She had come looking for answers. She had a feeling she had found something much worse than questions.