Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ09G96TRANWETB8W63HN4JN

Rory's breath misted in the November air, but the vapour vanished the instant she stepped between the two oak trees. Richmond Park stretched behind her, dark and ordinary and safe, the path she had taken from the streetlamp's reach swallowed by fog. She had followed the pendant's warmth across the park for twenty minutes, the silver chain digging a faint line against her collarbone as the crimson gem pulsed against her chest in a rhythm that matched no heartbeat she knew. Now the heat bordered on pain, and the fog behind her had gone silent. No traffic hum. No distant bark of dogs. Just the wet sound of her own boots and the gem's insistent throb. Ancient oaks formed a ring around the clearing ahead, their trunks twisted into shapes that resembled standing stones more than wood. Wildflowers carpeted the ground. Poppies and bluebells and clusters of white campion swayed in a breeze she could not feel against her cheeks. Rory's fingers found the crescent scar on her left wrist, a childhood souvenir from a broken fence rail that itched beneath her sleeve. She pushed the cuff back. The pale line had flushed pink, the skin around it raised and angry. "All right," she said. Her voice sounded small, a coin dropped down a well. "I'm here. Show me something." Nothing answered. That should have comforted her. It didn't. She moved forward. The grass gave beneath her boots with a wet sound that didn't match the dry autumn she had left behind. A foxglove brushed her knee, and she flinched. The blossom was warm. Living things weren't warm at midnight in late autumn. She glanced at her phone. The screen read 12:04, the numbers crisp and blue. She walked ten paces, boots sinking into the loam, and checked again. 11:47. The battery icon dropped from eighty percent to sixty. Then to forty-five. The digits swam, rearranging themselves into symbols she didn't recognize before snapping back to 12:22. She shoved the device into her jacket pocket. Her heart knocked against her ribs, a rhythm out of time with the pendant's steady throb. A sound drifted from the left. Laughter, high and fluted, like a child blowing across the neck of a bottle. Rory's head snapped toward the gap between two oak-stones. Shadows pooled there, thick and absolute, a darkness that drank the faint red glow of her pendant. "Who's there?" The laughter stopped. The silence that followed was heavier, as if the grove had drawn a breath and held it inside lungs made of bark. Rory took another step. The wildflowers rustled. Not away from her. Toward her. Stems bent, blossoms angled like faces turning to track her movement. She stopped. They stopped. A drop of sweat traced her spine beneath her shirt, cold as meltwater. The pendant flared. Light leaked from the deep crimson gem, faint at first, then strong enough to paint her palm red. The silver chain vibrated against her sternum. Rory lifted it from her shirt. The glow revealed the texture of the nearest oak-stone, bark carved with spirals that spun when she didn't look directly at them. She looked directly at them. They froze. She looked away. In her peripheral vision, they crawled, winding deeper into the wood like worms burrowing. Footsteps crunched behind her. She spun. The grass lay flat in a line of crushed stems, a path pressed by invisible weight, leading from the grove's edge to where she stood. The crushed line stopped two feet away. The air carried a smell she knew intimately: sesame oil and garlic, the back-of-house scent of the Golden Empress where she worked deliveries. Then it shifted. Old wood. Spilled stout. Her flat above Silas' bar. Then something darker. Something musky and sharp that made her stomach clench and her throat tighten. Evan's cologne. Rory's hand closed around the pendant. "No." The word came out hoarse. She backed toward the nearest oak-stone. The scar on her wrist burned now, the crescent shape raised and hot against her palm. She didn't remember lifting her hand to her mouth, but her teeth worried the edge of her thumb, a habit she had broken three years ago. The grove remembered. It dredged up the gesture and forced it back onto her body. Between two of the ancient oaks, something stood. It had her height. Her straight, shoulder-length black hair. It wore a silhouette that matched her own jacket, her own posture, the same slight lean to the left she adopted when her lower back ached from lifting delivery boxes. It did not move when she moved. It watched, head tilted at an angle that made her neck ache to imagine. Rory's bright blue eyes strained against the dark. The figure's face remained smooth, featureless, a smudge of pale nothing where features should have been, as if someone had erased her reflection with a thumb. "Who are you?" The figure didn't answer. The wildflowers answered. They sighed, a thousand petals opening at once, the sound like wet lips parting in a dark room. The temperature in the clearing plummeted. Rory's breath returned, misting thick and white, but the figure's breath did not. It didn't need to breathe. It only needed to stand there, wearing her shape like a coat on a hanger. The pendant went cold. Ice formed against her sternum, biting through cotton and skin, crystallizing in the hollow of her throat. Then it blazed, hot enough to scorch, and the silver chain seared a line into her neck. Rory gasped. She turned to run, to find the gap between the oaks that had let her in, but the ring of trees had shifted. The exit was gone. Oak-stone after oak-stone circled her, an unbroken boundary that hadn't been unbroken when she arrived. She counted twelve. Then twenty. Then she stopped counting because the number kept changing. A whisper touched her ear. Not from behind. From inside the ear itself, buzzing against the drum. "Rory." She whipped around. The featureless figure stood closer now. Ten feet. Close enough that she could see its shoulders rise and fall in a mockery of breathing. Close enough to see its left wrist. A crescent-shaped scar marked the pale skin, identical to hers, except the edges wept dark fluid that pattered onto the wildflowers. The flowers drank it, stems thickening, petals darkening to the color of old bruises. "Rory," it said again, and the voice was hers, but filtered through water, through roots, through the long dark of buried things. "You brought the key." Rory clutched the pendant. The crimson light stuttered, frantic, a heartbeat in arrest. She backed against an oak-stone. The bark was soft. It gave like flesh, warm and yielding, and she felt a pulse through the wood that matched the gem's rhythm. Something pressed against her shoulder. Five points of pressure, not sharp, but definite. Fingers. Or the suggestion of fingers. She didn't need to look. The figure was in front of her. Whatever touched her from behind was something else. The grove went still. The wildflowers stopped swaying. The air hung suspended, waiting, the silence so complete she could hear the fluid dripping from the mimic's wrist, each drop a small wet punctuation. Then the figure smiled. It had no face, but it smiled, and the expression twisted her own muscles, her own cheeks stretching, her own lips peeling back from her teeth in a rictus that answered to another will. Her hand rose to her face, but her hand wasn't hers anymore. It mirrored the thing before her, moving in horrible unison. The pendant shattered its glow across the clearing, blinding white, and in that flash, Rory saw them all. Between every stone. Behind every flower. Pressed against the invisible membrane of the grove, waiting for the boundary to thin. Waiting for her.