Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G5XPJKYJA9NQ4D7R14CP7

The last bus from Richmond had rattled off into the dark twenty minutes ago, and Rory was still walking. She kept her torch low, the beam cutting a narrow tunnel through the frost-bitten grass. Above her, the park spread out like a drowned field, blue-black and silvered by a thin moon. She'd told Eva she wouldn't come alone. She'd told herself, too, pacing the flat above Silas' bar, counting the cars in the street below and the reasons to stay put. But the pendant had been pulsing since sundown — a slow, warm thump against her sternum like a second heartbeat — and the note in her jacket pocket had said *tonight, before the moon fattens,* and she had run out of excuses. The standing stones resolved out of the dark the way teeth do in a mouth: one, then two, then the rest, darker than the sky behind them. Four oaks, squat and lightning-scarred, knuckled up from the earth in a rough ring. Between them, the air looked wrong. Not misty, exactly. Thicker. As if someone had painted a second night over the first and the colors hadn't quite agreed. Rory paused at the boundary. The Heartstone gave a soft throb under her collar, the warmth of it spreading down into her ribs. She swallowed. Slipped between the stones. The temperature changed first. A summer softness, grass against her boots that should have been iron-hard with frost. Wildflowers opened pale faces around her ankles — cornflower, foxglove, something she didn't have a name for — their colors muted to bone by the moonlight. Crickets hummed. That was the part that undid her, more than anything: the crickets. It was January. She had left January on the other side of the stones. "Hello?" Her own voice surprised her. Small. Swallowed quick by the grass. No answer. She hadn't expected one. The note had said *come*, not *meet*. She stepped further in. The grove was wider than it had looked from outside — that was how these places worked, Eva had warned her, the geometry sloppy, the edges folding — and she made for the low stone at the center where she'd been told to wait. The torch wobbled in her hand. She forced it steady, swept the beam once around the perimeter, and saw nothing. Wildflowers. Tree trunks. A curl of low mist pooling between them like spilled milk. Then the sound. Not loud. A chime. High and tuneless, single-note, the way a wet finger sings around the rim of a glass. It came from somewhere to her left, or behind her, or both, and when she turned the beam to chase it there was only grass and the pale faces of the flowers looking up. She waited, and her breath went shallow, and the chime did not come again. The crickets kept up their dry chorus. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay." She made it to the center stone. Sat. Put the torch across her knee with the beam pointed back the way she'd come. The pendant thumped, thumped, thumped against her collarbone; when she lifted it out of her shirt the crimson glow of it painted a faint bloody patch onto her jaw. She tucked it away again. She didn't like being lit. Minutes passed. Maybe. Time was wrong here — she could feel it going wrong, a slight loosening in her chest, like the second hand had come unseated. Her own watch, when she glanced at it, read 11:42. It had read 11:42 when she stepped through the stones. It read 11:42 now. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She swung the torch. Nothing. A tree. The mist, waist-high, curling. She held the beam there until her arm started to shake, and then she lowered it, and the moment she lowered it she felt — and she would swear to this, afterward, in daylight, to Eva over a kettle that wouldn't stop whistling — she felt the mist *take a step*. A sort of weight-shift in the air. A listening. "I'm here," she said, louder. "Whoever you are. I came. I'm here." The crickets stopped. All of them, at once, as if a hand had been laid gently over a radio. The silence that replaced them was not silence at all: it was full, pressurized, the kind of quiet that a room takes on when someone has just stopped speaking and hasn't decided whether to speak again. Rory's ears rang with it. She could hear her own pulse. She could hear, she thought, something else's — slower, bigger, not hers — and she told herself it was the pendant and did not quite believe it. A shape passed between two of the far oaks. Long. Upright. Slow. She didn't move the torch. She'd learned that, at least, from Evan — that the worst thing you could do when something was watching you was let it know you'd seen. So she sat, and she breathed through her nose, and she let the shape exist at the edge of her vision where it could pretend, and she could pretend, that it was a trick of the moon on a trunk. It did not move like a trunk. It shifted — weight from one foot to the other, if there were feet — and the wildflowers beneath it did not bend. That was the worst thing. That was the thing her mind refused, the way the eye refuses a stair that isn't there. Whatever stood under the oak had mass and did not have weight. The foxglove beneath it held their pale bells up untouched. The pendant was burning now. A hot coin against her skin. She pressed her palm flat over it to smother the glow, and she felt the beat of it run up her wrist and into the small crescent scar there, that old childhood nick, which she had not thought about in months and which, tonight, prickled as if freshly cut. "Aurora," something said. It wasn't a voice. It was the shape of a voice laid over the hush, the way a mouth-print fogs a window. It had her name in it. Her whole name, the one her mother used, and under that — fainter, wrong, tasted more than heard — another name she didn't know she knew. *Malphora.* Her stomach dropped through the stone she sat on. She stood up slowly. Slowly. The torch trembled in her hand but she kept the beam down, away, obedient. The shape under the oak did not move closer. It did not need to. The grove itself was moving, the mist sliding towards her in a way mist should not slide, uphill, against no wind, and the flowers were turning their small pale faces. All of them. Towards her. The pendant gave one enormous pulse, like a fist in her chest, and in its red flare she saw — for half a second, no longer — that the shape under the oak was not one shape. It was several. Standing very close together. Standing very still. She ran.