Run: 2026-04-25-01KQ2FJB3BBYJW3PVSMQYMPYN1

The Fae Grove wasn’t supposed to feel like this at night. Rory had been here a dozen times in daylight—motes of gold dust dancing through shafts of sun, wildflowers nodding in a breeze that smelled of honey and something older, something just beneath the skin of the world. A place of quiet wonder. A pocket between. But now, under a moon that hung fat and silver through the canopy, the grove had turned inward. The standing stones threw shadows that didn’t align with the light. The wildflowers still bloomed, but their colours bled into the dark—bruised purples, vein-blue, a white that glowed like bone under UV. The Heartstone pendant lay warm against her collarbone. It had started pulsing an hour ago, a steady thrum like a second heartbeat, pulling her away from her flat above Silas’ bar and out into the sticky London night. She’d followed the sensation through the park, past the locked gates she knew how to slip, through the deer trails that twisted in ways they didn’t during the day. She came because something had changed. Because the pendant had never guided her anywhere before, not once in the three weeks since it appeared on her pillow. And because Rory Carter had learned the hard way that ignoring strange signs only made them stranger. Now she stood at the edge of the stone circle, her breath shallow, and waited for the grove to make sense. It didn’t. The air was too still. No rasp of wind through oak leaves. No distant hum of the city bleeding through the boundary. The grove had sealed itself off, and the silence that filled it was not empty. It was listening. Rory took a step forward. Her boot crunched on something that wasn’t stone. She looked down. A ring of small bones—bird, maybe, or rabbit—lay arranged in a spiral at the base of the nearest standing stone. Deliberate. Fresh. The marrow still gleamed wetly in the moonlight. She didn’t remember seeing that on her last visit. Her thumb found the pendant’s gem. It was hot now, almost uncomfortable, the pulse quickening to match the speed of her heart. A warning, or a welcome. She looked up. Something moved at the far edge of the clearing. Not a deer. Too fluid, too deliberate. A shape that seemed to unfold from the shadow between two oaks, then vanish before her eyes could confirm its edges. Her peripheral vision caught a flicker of motion in the opposite direction—a glint, like light on polished bone, there and gone. Rory didn’t call out. Whatever this place had become, she wasn’t about to announce herself to it. She circled the stone ring slowly, keeping her back to no single point for more than a few seconds. The wildflowers rustled at her feet, but there was no wind. The movement followed her. Each step she took, the grass and petals stirred in her wake as if something unseen breathed across them. The pendant beat against her chest. One-two. One-two. Steady. She stopped at the stone directly opposite the entrance path. Its surface was rough, lichen-crusted, but a fresh groove had been cut into it—a spiral that matched the bone arrangement on the ground. Deep enough to fit her fingertip. The edges were smooth, as if worn by centuries of touch, not carved hours ago. Rory pressed her palm flat against the groove. The stone was warm. A sound broke the silence. Low. Resonant. A hum that came from beneath the earth, vibrating through her bones, through the very air. It lasted three seconds, then cut off. Her hand left the stone. The humming stopped. But the silence that returned was different. Expectant. It pressed against her eardrums, a pressure that had no source. Behind her, something exhaled. Very soft. Very close. Rory spun. Nothing. Only the dark between the trees, the wildflowers swaying without wind, the moon hanging fat and indifferent. The pendant pulsed once, sharply, like a spike of heat. She forced herself to breathe. Slow. Steady. Her cool-headedness was the only thing keeping her from bolting, and bolting was exactly what whatever this was wanted. She’d learned that lesson too—from Evan, from the shadows that followed her through the streets of Cardiff, from the night she’d packed a bag and never looked back. Running gave the dark things power. So she stayed. And the grove answered. A second hum, deeper this time, rolled up through the soles of her boots. The standing stones shimmered—just a flicker, their edges blurring as if seen through heat haze. The wildflowers around the central clearing rose and fell in a wave, moving from the centre outward, a ripple that had no cause. Rory’s skin prickled. The air thickened, grew heavy with the scent of wet earth and something floral—not honey, but the cloying sweetness of overripe fruit, the kind that drew flies. She wanted to check her phone. Wanted to see if time had slipped, if an hour inside had become something worse outside. But her hand wouldn’t move. The pendant had her attention, and the grove had her body, and between them they held her rooted to the spot. At the edge of her vision, the shape came again. This time it didn’t vanish. It coalesced, a figure woven from shadow and pale light, standing between two of the standing stones. No distinct features. Just a silhouette, the suggestion of shoulders, the tilt of a head. It was taller than her, but not impossibly so. Human-shaped, but wrong in the proportions—too narrow at the waist, too long in the arms. It did not move. Rory stared. The silhouette stared back. The pendant thrummed a slow, deliberate beat, like a heart coming to rest. She opened her mouth to speak—what, she didn’t know—but the air in her throat thickened, turned cloying, and the words died before they could form. The silhouette raised one arm. A hand, or the suggestion of one, extended toward her, palm open. Fingers—too many or too few, she couldn’t count them—curved in an unmistakable gesture. *Come.* Rory’s foot lifted without her permission. She set it down, hard, forced her weight forward instead of toward the figure. The movement broke something. The air thinned. The silhouette flickered, dissolving into the same shadow that had birthed it. The grove exhaled. And she was alone again, the pendant cool against her skin, the wildflowers still, the moon high and quiet. But at her feet, a single wildflower had uprooted itself. It lay curled on the earth, its petals bruised to black, its stem snapped clean. She hadn’t touched it. Rory backed away, step by step, until she reached the entrance path. The grove did not stop her. The standing stones did not hum. The silence was ordinary now, just the ordinary hush of a London park at night. She turned and walked—did not run, because running gave the dark things power—out of the Fae Grove, her hand pressed to the cold pendant, her heart a drum that had not yet learned to slow.