Run: 2026-04-25-01KQ2JD5TZGYDQEKDYDE2EJ0D1

The mist clung to the ground like a living thing, curling around the roots of the ancient oaks as Rory stepped through the gap in the hedge. The last light had bled out of the sky an hour ago, and the moon offered nothing but a pale smear behind the clouds. She’d been to the Fae Grove before, always with Silas or Eva, always in daylight when the standing stones looked like old friends and the wildflowers seemed to glow from within. Tonight was different. She’d come alone because the pendant had started pulsing again—a deep, insistent warmth against her collarbone that refused to fade, even when she pressed her palm flat over the crimson stone. The heat had pulled her from the flat above the bar, through the empty streets of Richmond, and into the dark maw of the park. She told herself it was curiosity. That she needed to know why the Heartstone reacted so strongly. That it was research, nothing more. The wrongness hit her ten paces into the clearing. The air changed. Not colder, not warmer—something in between, like stepping into a room where someone had adjusted the atmosphere to a frequency her skin didn’t recognise. The wildflowers that should have carpeted the grove were gone. In their place, a fine grey dust covered the earth, as if the colour had been leached out of the ground and left behind only ash. No breeze stirred the leaves overhead, but the grass beneath her feet trembled. A vibration, low and rhythmic, like a heartbeat pressed into the soil through a stone floor. Rory stopped. Her breath clouded in front of her, though the air didn’t feel cold. She waited, listening. Silence. Real silence, the kind that pressed against the eardrums until they ached for any sound at all. No distant traffic. No owls. No rustle of small creatures in the undergrowth. The grove had swallowed the world whole. The pendant pulsed against her throat. One beat. Two. She touched it with her fingertips and felt the surface hum. She took another step forward, and the dust puffed up around her boots. The ancient oak standing stones loomed at the edges of the clearing, their bark slick with moisture that didn’t match the dry air. One of them—the tallest, the one that always drew her gaze during the day—had changed. A fissure ran down its centre, dark and narrow, like a mouth held barely open. Rory’s skin prickled. She told herself it was just the cold, the isolation, the absence of familiar sound. She’d grown up in Cardiff, spent nights in the Brecon Beacons with her father under skies so dark you could see the galaxy spin. She knew how to be alone in the wild. But this wasn’t wild. This was something else. The vibration underfoot grew stronger. She felt it through the soles of her boots, up through her shins, settling in her chest like a second heartbeat. The pendant responded, glowing brighter, casting a faint red light across the dust. She could see her own shadow now, stretched thin and wrong, bending in a direction that didn’t match the light source. Her mouth went dry. She turned her head slowly, scanning the tree line. Nothing moved. The shadows between the trunks were thick and absolute, blacker than any night she’d ever known. She saw something shift in the periphery—a flicker, a ripple, like heat haze at the edge of a bonfire. She snapped her gaze to it. Nothing. But the certainty settled into her bones: she was not alone. It wasn’t a thought. It was a sensation, older and deeper than reason, the same instinct that made prey freeze before the predator struck. The back of her neck tightened. The small hairs on her arms rose. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to turn and walk, to run, to leave this place and never come back. She didn’t move. The fissure in the standing stone seemed to widen. She couldn’t tell if it was the light from the pendant playing tricks, or if the stone was actually splitting, the bark peeling back like a wound. The blackness within it was absolute. Not the absence of light—the presence of darkness, thick and layered, a weight that pressed against the air. Her breath came faster. Too loud. The silence of the grove amplified every exhale, turned it into a ragged, panicked sound that echoed off the invisible walls of the clearing. She tried to steady it, to slow her heartbeat, but the pendant was pulsing in rhythm with the ground now, a steady thrum that she felt in her teeth. A whisper. Not a voice—something else. The sound of dry leaves scraping across stone, but there were no leaves, only dust. It came from behind her, low and close, as if someone had leaned into her ear without making a sound. She spun, heart hammering. Nothing. But the dust at her feet had shifted. A trail, fresh and sharp, leading from the edge of the clearing to the base of the cracked standing stone. A trail made by something that had moved while she was looking away. Rory’s hand went to her pocket, where she kept the small folding knife Silas had given her. She didn’t pull it out, but the weight of it against her palm was a small comfort. The pendant’s glow flickered, and for a moment the grove was plunged into near-total darkness. The standing stones vanished. The ground disappeared. The only thing she could see was the faint red gleam of her own reflection in the blade of the knife. She held her breath. In the dark, something breathed back. It was not her breath. It was deeper, wetter, a sound that came from the fissure in the stone, from the dust on the ground, from the air itself. A long, slow inhalation that rustled the dead flowers and stirred the grey ash into tiny spirals. Rory felt the air move past her face, cold and sour, carrying a smell like damp earth and iron. The pendant flared. Light exploded across the grove—not steady, but pulsing in waves, each beat of the Heartstone sending out a crimson pulse that lit the clearing like a slow-motion camera flash. In that strobing light, she saw something at the base of the cracked stone. A shape. Not human, not animal, but something caught in between—a suggestion of limbs, of a face turned sideways, of eyes that opened and closed in places eyes shouldn’t be. She saw it for less than a heartbeat. Then the light died, and the darkness rushed back in, heavier than before. Rory didn’t wait. She didn’t think. She turned and ran, feet pounding through the ash, the pendant now cold against her skin. The grove stretched around her, bigger than it should have been, the hedge boundary impossibly far away. She could feel the wrongness following, not with footsteps, but with a pull, a gravity that dragged at her coat, her hair, her lungs. She broke through the hedge without feeling the thorns, stumbled onto the path, and kept running until the park gates grew from the shadows ahead, solid and real and utterly indifferent to what she had left behind. She didn’t stop until she hit the streetlamps of Richmond Hill, and even then she didn’t look back.