Run: 2026-03-18-01KM0A4NVQ83DCEXP8EN540G5P

Rory cut the engine and listened to it tick itself quiet. The car sat crooked on the dark verge outside Richmond Park, its headlights bleaching a slice of grass and tree trunks while the rest of the world stayed black. No traffic hissed on the road. No dog barked. The park looked sealed shut, all that old London sprawl pressed flat by night. She kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other around the Heartstone pendant at her throat. The gem sat cool against her fingers for one second, then gave a low warmth, like a mouth closed around a coal. “Cheers,” she muttered, and opened the door. The air outside carried damp earth, crushed leaves, and something sweet from the grove ahead, a floral smell with no business blooming this late. Rory shoved her phone into her pocket, tugged the hood of her jacket up, and swung the bag of supplies higher on her shoulder. Torch. Chalk. Salt. A bottle of water she had already half-drunk. She checked the bag by habit, then checked it again as if the second look might turn up a better plan. The pendant warmed once more as she crossed the fence gap and stepped into the park. A narrow path cut through the dark, but she knew the route by now. Keep left past the split oak. Follow the dip in the ground. The grove sat tucked behind the old stand of trees, hidden from the common paths, hidden from anyone who didn’t know to look. Isolde’s grove, Eva had called it the first time, with a little shiver and a grin that didn’t match. Rory walked on. The beam from her phone torch flicked over roots, nettles, and pale fallen branches. The beam picked out moths too, or things like moths. They floated through the light and vanished before she could fix on them. Richmond Park usually held some noise even this late — a fox crunching underbrush, a car on the road beyond the trees, the low rumble of a plane climbing over London. Tonight the park took her footsteps and gave nothing back. She stopped near a clump of holly and listened. A dry click came from somewhere behind her. Rory turned fast, torch sweeping over the trunks. Nothing. The beam cut across bark, dead leaves, and a patch of pale fungus climbing a fallen log. No movement. No eyes. The click came again, farther off now, as if something had shifted its weight from one branch to another. She angled her shoulders and kept walking. The path dipped, and the grove opened ahead of her between the oak standing stones. Ancient trunks ringed the clearing, their roots knuckled out of the soil like old hands. Wildflowers crowded the ground inside the boundary, white and blue and a bruised shade of purple that caught the torchlight and gave it back wrong. Even at night they looked fresh, petals slick and upright as if morning had just passed. Rory stepped to the edge and stopped. The silence inside the grove had shape to it. It sat thick on her tongue. The air felt a touch warmer than the park outside, but stale too, like a room left shut for months. Her pendant pulsed once, a steady thrum against her skin. She lifted her phone. No signal. She clicked the torch off and on. The grove stayed the same either way, dark and waiting, the flowers bright enough to show their own outlines. “Right,” she said to the clearing. “So you’re in a mood.” The sound of her voice came back thin, without the usual park echo. It vanished at the boundary as if the standing stones had swallowed it. Rory took two more steps in and crouched by the nearest stone. The surface rose above her head, rough bark grown hard with age, split by pale seams. Faint carvings threaded down its side, old marks worn almost smooth. She set the bag down and ran her fingertips over the bark. Cold. She drew her hand away. A whisper brushed past her left ear. Not words. Breath, maybe. A soft little scrape of air. Rory stood so fast her knees cracked. Torch in hand, she spun around in a tight circle. The beam lashed over the clearing, caught the flowers, the stones, the dark mouths between the trees. For one sharp second she saw movement low to the ground near the far side of the grove, a shape too quick to hold. It skimmed behind a trunk and broke apart into shadow. She kept the light there. Nothing. Just bark and roots and a curtain of leaves. Her pendant heated again. Not warm this time. Hot enough to sting. She let it drop against her chest and pressed her palm over it through her shirt. “Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t start.” The grove answered with a rustle that came from every direction at once. Rory stood still and listened. The sound repeated, a soft dragging through grass. She turned toward it. Nothing moved in the flowers. Yet the stems bent in a path that curved away from her, each head nodding as if a person had just passed through, careful and unhurried. The bent line crossed the clearing and vanished at the opposite stones. Rory stared at it. The torchlight shook a little in her hand. “Nope.” She stepped back and the bottle in her bag knocked against the chalk. She felt that tiny movement through the strap, loud as a shout in the hush. The bent flowers lifted again, one after another, as if whatever had pressed them down had doubled back. Rory held her breath. A shape stood at the far boundary. It matched the dark too cleanly at first for her eyes to catch it, then the torch picked a pale edge — a shoulder, a face, or the idea of one. The thing stood half behind a stone, thin as a cutout, its outline rippling where leaves should have hidden it. Rory raised the torch higher. The shape slid away. She flashed the beam along the tree line. Branches crowded together, black against black. A fox’s skull of moon-white bone glinted from a root hollow, then vanished when she blinked. No one stood there. No one had stood there. She swallowed and tasted metal. “Eva?” The word left her before she could stop it. The clearing held. She laughed once under her breath, a short ugly sound that did nothing to break the pressure in her chest. “Course not.” A small sound answered from behind her. Not a voice. A soft tap on wood. Rory turned. The standing stone beside her bore three new marks in the bark, lines cut fresh through the old grain. She could have sworn they had not been there when she arrived. The grooves shone pale and wet, as if something sharp had just passed over them. She backed away. The heel of her boot nudged the bag. Inside, the chalk clacked against the torch. The pendant pulsed hard enough to make her flinch. The warmth pointed deeper into the grove. Rory stared at the centre of the clearing. The flowers there leaned inward, their heads turned to a patch of empty ground no bigger than a kitchen table. The earth rose there in a low mound, and on the mound sat a flat stone she had not noticed before. Someone had set it level with the grass. Someone had placed a ring of white petals around it, each one fresh and bright as bone. She hadn’t put that there. Her mouth went dry. The phone in her pocket vibrated once. Rory yanked it out. The screen lit her hands blue. 00:17 blinked at the top. She frowned and jabbed the side button. The display shifted to her home screen, then to the lock screen again. 00:17. She checked the date. Still Thursday. Still the same one. She had left her flat at nearly eleven. The drive should have taken twenty minutes. She looked up. The grove had gone darker. Not night-dark. Denser. The black between the trunks had thickened to a depth that made the torch feel weak. The flowers kept their colour, but the stems looked damp now, as if a rain had passed through the clearing without touching anything else. Rory turned in a tight circle. The boundary stones stood where they had been. The trees pressed close. Yet the space felt rearranged somehow, like a room after furniture had been shifted in the dark. Her route back to the park no longer looked direct. The gap between two trunks she had marked on the way in sat farther to the right than it should have. The path she had followed had folded back on itself. A low murmur drifted through the grove. Rory froze. It sounded like voices speaking behind a closed door, words carrying the wrong shape. One voice. Two. Maybe more. None of them close enough to catch. The sound rolled through the flowers and over the stones, then thinned into silence. Her skin tightened over her arms. “Show yourselves,” she said, and hated the shake in it. The grove gave her nothing. Then, from somewhere just beyond the nearest standing stone, a wet little inhale answered her. Rory snapped the torch toward it. A face flashed in the beam and vanished. It had stood low to the ground, too low for a person, with a sharp pale cheek and an eye that reflected the light like glass. Not an animal. Not any face she wanted to name. She saw only enough to know it had been watching from very close. Rory stumbled back and hit the stone behind her. Cold bark barked through her jacket. The bag slid off her shoulder. She caught it before it struck the ground, fingers tangling in the strap. The torch beam swung wild and landed on the centre mound. The flat stone there had not been empty. A dark mark lay across it now, a handprint in something too black to be mud. Rory stared at the print. Another pulse burned through the pendant at her throat, sharp and insistent, and at the edge of the clearing something moved again, this time without hiding. A figure slipped between two trunks, tall and narrow, its outline broken by branches. Rory caught the line of an arm, then the tilt of a head that turned toward her in the dark. The grove did not stay empty any longer.