Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTZ6VA93QT3DDVZ3YT42BC

Rory ducked between the oak standing stones just as the last of the twilight bled out of the sky. The grove took her in with a sigh. That was how it felt — a long, slow exhalation pressed against her skin, warm where the park behind her had been cold. She stopped three paces inside the ring and listened to her own breathing until it steadied. "Alright," she muttered. "I'm here. Now what?" The pendant answered before anyone else could. A flutter of heat against her sternum, faint as a moth's wing, then nothing. She pressed her palm flat over it through her jumper. Still warm. Barely. Eva had sworn the grove was safe. Eva had sworn a lot of things. Rory moved deeper, boots soundless on moss that shouldn't have been this green in November. Wildflowers nodded around her ankles — foxgloves, cornflowers, something pale and bell-shaped she didn't know the name of. They shouldn't have been blooming. They were blooming anyway. She'd come for answers. That was the plan. Sit in the middle of the clearing, wait for whoever had left the pendant in her letterbox three weeks ago, and ask the questions she'd been carrying around like stones in her pockets. Simple. Except the grove was wrong tonight. She couldn't place it at first. The air tasted the same — that strange sweetness she remembered, half honey, half iron. The stones stood where they'd stood before. The moon, when she looked up, hung exactly where it should, a clean white coin slightly past full. And yet. Rory turned a slow circle, counting. Seven oaks. There had been seven last time. There were seven now. Good. She counted again to be sure. Eight. Her mouth went dry. She counted a third time, forcing her eyes from trunk to trunk, and got seven, and then on the fourth pass she got seven again and told herself firmly that she had miscounted the one time, that the light in here played tricks, that the moon through branches made shadows look solid. She sat down. The moss received her like a cushion someone had plumped in advance. She pulled her knees up, tucked her hands inside her sleeves against the cold that wasn't actually there, and waited. A minute passed. Two. Somewhere in the trees, a woman laughed. Rory's head snapped up. The sound had been soft — three notes, low in the throat, the kind of laugh you gave someone across a pillow. It came from her left, maybe twenty feet out, past where the wildflowers thinned into bracken. "Hello?" Nothing answered. The flowers bobbed. A single oak leaf spiralled down and landed on her knee, crisp and brown and entirely out of place among all that green. She picked it up. Turned it over. The underside was black and slick, like something rotted from the inside. She dropped it. "Isolde?" She tried the name Eva had given her, even though Eva had said never to use it out loud here unless she was sure. "If that's you, I've got the pendant. I came." The laugh again. Closer this time, or maybe further — the grove played tricks with distance the way it played tricks with time. Rory stood up slowly, very slowly, and put her back to the nearest oak. The bark was warm. Not sun-warm. Not the remembered warmth of a summer day. Warm like a body was warm. She felt it through her jumper, a steady human heat at her shoulder blades, and she did not turn around. She did not want to know what the tree felt like if she turned around. She stepped away from it instead. Out into the middle of the clearing, where at least there was nothing close enough to touch her. The pendant pulsed. Once. Harder than before. She looked down and caught the tail end of its glow fading under the wool, a dull red like a coal cooling. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay, okay, okay." Movement, at the edge of her sight. She didn't turn her head. She'd learned that trick as a kid, back when her father used to say the worst thing you could do to a frightened dog was look it in the eye. She slid her gaze sideways instead, and caught — something. A shape between two of the oaks. Tall. Thin. Standing the way people stood when they didn't know yet how to wear a body properly, shoulders a fraction too high, head angled a fraction too far. When she looked directly, there was only a tree. She looked away. The shape came back, in the soft corner of her vision, nearer now by a pace. It hadn't moved while she watched. It had moved while she hadn't. Her breath came shallow. She counted oaks again without meaning to. Nine. "Right," she said aloud, and her voice sounded small and unreasonable in all that listening quiet. "If you're going to do something, do it. I haven't got all night." The grove considered her. That was the only way she could describe the weight that settled on her shoulders then — the sense of being weighed, measured, held up against some standard she hadn't been told. The wildflowers stopped bobbing. The air, which had been moving without any wind she could feel, went perfectly still. Even her own heartbeat seemed to quiet, as though it were trying not to be overheard. A twig snapped behind her. She didn't turn. Footsteps — soft, deliberate, the pad of something walking on two feet that had perhaps been four not long ago. They circled her at a distance, moss muffling most of the sound but not all. A breath, drawn in long through what might have been a nose. Held. Released against the back of her neck from a distance no breath should have been able to cross. The pendant went cold. Not warm, not pulsing — cold, a sudden bright coldness that bit through the wool and into her skin like a coin left on ice. Rory closed her fist around it through her jumper and squeezed until her knuckles ached. "I'm not alone, am I," she said, very quietly. Behind her, close enough now to kiss her ear, something laughed the same three soft notes.