Run: 2026-03-18-01KM1H7CHEWJ6GD7M5QFFBWA34

The path had seemed so clear when she'd started out. Rory stood at the edge of Richmond Park, the Heartstone pendant cold against her chest beneath her jacket, and tried to remember exactly what had compelled her to come. The memory felt thin, stretched—like a photograph pulled too far in one direction. She had a reason. She was certain of that much. Something about the grove. Something about answers she couldn't find anywhere else. The streetlamps behind her cast long fingers of orange light across the grass, but ahead, where the old oaks grew thick and their branches wove together into a canopy so dense it seemed to swallow the sky, there was only darkness. Not the darkness of night, which still held hints of blue and silver, caught in the scatter of stars. This was something older. Something that seemed to drink the light before it could reach her. She checked her phone. 11:47 PM. The battery indicator flickered—sixty-three percent—and then, without her touching anything, jumped to forty-one. She stared at it for a long moment before pocketing the device. No signal. She hadn't expected any, not here, not this close to the place the old stories called the Fae Grove, but the reminder still settled like a stone in her stomach. The standing stones were somewhere ahead. She remembered that much from the fragments of conversation she'd overheard at the bar, from Silas's muttered warnings when he thought she wasn't listening. Ancient oaks, he had called them. Markers for a boundary that existed between places, or perhaps between moments. She hadn't thought much of it then. She thought about it now. The grass crunched beneath her boots as she stepped off the path. Each sound seemed too loud, too present, cutting through the silence that pressed in from all sides. She was breathing too loudly. She slowed her pace, made it quieter, and felt immediately foolish for the effort. There was no one here to hear. There was no one here at all. Except the pendant had begun to warm against her skin, and she hadn't imagined that it was supposed to do that. Not yet. Not until she was closer. The trees closed around her like walls. Not menacingly, not with any obvious malice, but with the simple indifference of something that had been standing here long before people thought to walk beneath its branches and would continue standing long after they had forgotten they had ever existed at all. The bark of the oaks was dark and deeply ridged, catching the faint light in ways that made it difficult to tell where the shadows ended and the tree began. She walked for what felt like twenty minutes, though when she risked another glance at her phone, the time had barely moved. 11:52. Either time was moving strangely here, or she was losing her grip on its passage. Both options unsettled her equally. The wildflowers were the first wrong thing. They grew in clusters along the bases of the trees, pale petals catching what little light filtered through the canopy. They should not have been blooming. It was late autumn, and Richmond Park was all brown leaves and bare branches and the skeletal fingers of dead undergrowth. But these flowers looked fresh, vibrant, as though it were high summer beneath these ancient oaks. Rory crouched to examine them more closely. They had no scent. That was the second wrong thing. Flowers always had scent—this close, this numerous, she should have been able to smell them. Instead, there was only the cool, damp earth-smell of the forest floor and, beneath that, something else. Something faintly sweet and faintly wrong, like honey that had begun to turn. She straightened and kept walking. The standing stones appeared without warning. One moment the path was empty, the next they were simply there—three massive oaks grown so close together that their trunks had fused into a single rough column, their roots churning up the earth around them in raised ridges like the knuckles of a buried fist. The canopy opened just enough here to let in a thin wash of moonlight, silver light that seemed to linger on the bark rather than falling through to the ground. And beneath them, carved deep into the trunk of the central oak, was a symbol. It might have been old writing, or a sigil, or simply a mark left by someone who had stood here before her. She couldn't tell. The lines were too weathered, too worn by time and weather to hold any clear meaning. The pendant pulsed against her chest, warm now, almost hot, and she reached up to press her hand against it through the fabric of her jacket. The warmth was reassuring, in its way. It meant she was close to something. It meant the pendant thought she was close to something. She just wished she could remember what. The silence was the third wrong thing. It had been building gradually, she realized. She had been so focused on the trees and the flowers and the path and the stones that she hadn't noticed its absence until it was suddenly, overwhelmingly present. There were no insects. No rustle of small animals in the underbrush. No wind moving through the branches. The world had gone still, held its breath, and she was standing in the stillness like an intrusion into a space that did not want her here. A sound reached her then. Distant, faint, easily dismissed as imagination or wind or the settling of old wood. It was singing. Rory turned, searching the darkness between the trees for the source. The melody was high and clear and beautiful in the way that ice was beautiful, in the way that distance was beautiful—in a way that did not invite warmth, only a kind of hollow awe. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, drifting through the branches like smoke. She should not have been able to hear it. She knew that with a certainty that bypassed thought entirely. Whatever was making that sound was not meant for human ears. The knowledge should have sent her running back the way she came. Instead, she took a step forward. The pendant flared hot enough to burn, and she gasped, yanking her jacket open to see it glowing through her shirt. The crimson gemstone had always held a faint inner light, but now it blazed like a coal, pulsing in rhythm with a heartbeat that was not her own. She stared at it, transfixed, as the light painted the standing stones in shades of red and shadow. The singing stopped. The silence that followed was worse. It had weight now, presence, and she could feel it pressing against her like deep water, like earth, like the closing of a grave. Something had heard her. Something was aware of her now in a way it had not been before. Rory forced herself to breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The pendant was cooling slowly, its glow fading to embers. Her hands were shaking. She was aware of that distantly, the way one might notice the weather, and she made herself stop shaking through sheer force of will. She had left an abusive ex. She had moved to a new city alone. She had built a life out of nothing, and she had done it by refusing to let fear make her decisions. She turned to leave. The standing stones were not where they had been. The path was still there, the trees still surrounded her, but the oaks that had marked the clearing had somehow shifted. Their trunks were in different positions, their branches reaching in new directions, and the carved symbol on the central tree had changed. The lines that had been weathered and unreadable were now sharp, fresh, bleeding sap like wounds. She was not where she had been. She was not on the path she had walked. Rory stood very still and made herself think. The grove existed between places. Time moved differently here. She had known that before she came, had accepted it as part of the reason she needed to be here. She had needed answers. She had needed to understand. But understanding felt very far away right now, and what she needed now was to leave. She chose a direction and began to walk. The trees seemed to lean in as she passed, their branches bowing toward her with a curiosity that felt predatory. At the edge of her vision, shapes moved—not clearly, not enough to identify, but present in a way that made the hairs on her arms rise and the scar on her wrist itch with sudden, vicious intensity. She did not look directly at them. Looking felt dangerous, like an invitation, like a challenge she was not equipped to meet. The singing started again, closer now. Louder. The melody was different this time—lower, more mournful, carrying words in a language she did not recognize and yet somehow understood. It was a welcome. It was an invitation. It was a warning dressed in beautiful sound. The pendant pulsed in answer, and she felt it pulling her forward, toward the singing, toward whatever waited in the heart of the grove. She fought against it, digging her heels into the soft earth, but her feet kept moving as though they belonged to someone else. The Heartstone wanted her to go. The Heartstone had brought her here. She did not want to go. The shapes at the edge of her vision drew closer. She could see them more clearly now—not clearly, not fully, but enough to know that they were not human. They were too tall, too thin, their proportions subtly wrong in ways that made her eyes ache to look at. They moved without sound, without seeming to touch the ground, and they were gathering around her like wolves around wounded prey. The singing swelled, beautiful and terrible, and the moonlight seemed to bend toward the center of the grove where a figure waited. A figure that had not been there before. Rory opened her mouth to scream, to demand answers, to say anything at all, and found that she had no voice. The pendant burned against her skin, searing, branding, and the last coherent thought she could form before the singing swallowed her entirely was a single, desperate question: Why had she come here? The grove did not answer. The grove did not need to. It already knew.