Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSJVTJFN3NSZWGF7RBD4CAG

The standing stones leaned toward each other like old men sharing secrets, and Rory pushed through the gap between them with her phone torch cutting a thin blade through the dark. She'd come for answers. The pendant against her sternum had been warm all evening, warmer than her skin, and the note Eva left on the kitchen counter had said only one thing: *Richmond Park. The oaks. Midnight. Come alone.* Foolish, all of it. She knew that. But Eva hadn't answered her phone in three days, and the silence frightened her more than any clearing in the woods. Inside the ring of stones the air changed. Warmer, thicker, scented with something floral that didn't belong to October. Wildflowers spread across the grass in colours her torch couldn't quite name — blues that slid toward violet, reds that pulsed like something alive. She'd read about places like this in her mother's old books, the ones Jennifer kept on the high shelf and never explained. "Eva?" Her voice fell flat against the trees. No echo. That was the first wrong thing. She'd shouted across enough empty fields growing up to know how sound should behave. Here it simply stopped, swallowed the instant it left her mouth, as if the grove had hands and had closed them around the word. Rory swept the torch across the clearing. Empty. Grass and flowers and the dark wall of trees, and beyond them nothing she could see. "This isn't funny. You said midnight." She checked her phone. The clock read 11:58. Then she blinked and it read 12:46, and she hadn't felt the minutes pass at all. The torch flickered, steadied. Forty-eight per cent battery, then somehow fifty-one. She stared at the number until it hurt. The pendant burned now. Not the gentle warmth from her walk through the park but a real heat, the crimson stone glowing through the cotton of her shirt like a coal pressed to her chest. She pulled it loose and held it up. The inner light throbbed in a rhythm, slow and deliberate. Like a heartbeat. Not hers — hers was racing. A sound came from the treeline. Soft. The careful displacement of grass under weight, there and gone. "Eva, I swear to God." She turned the torch toward it. The beam found trunks, the gaps between them, the deeper black past the edge of the light. Nothing moved. But the certainty settled into her anyway, cold and absolute, the way you know a room has changed when someone walks in behind you. She was not alone. She'd stopped being alone some time ago, and only now had the grove decided to let her feel it. "Hello?" The flowers nearest her feet had closed. All of them, petals drawn tight, while the ones across the clearing still opened wide. A line ran between the closed and the open, and the line was moving toward her, flower by flower folding shut, as though something walked across the grass and the blooms shrank from its passing. Nothing was there. The grass didn't bend. But the petals kept closing, closer, six feet now, four. Rory stepped back. Her shoulder met one of the standing stones and she gasped — it was warm too, warm as flesh, and when she jerked away she could have sworn the bark beneath her hand had given like skin. "All right," she breathed. "All right. I'm leaving." She turned for the gap she'd come through. It wasn't there. Two stones stood where she remembered three, and the space between them showed only more trees, more flowers, the same impossible glow. She spun, torch wheeling, counting the stones. Five. There'd been five when she entered. She was sure. Nearly sure. The certainty she'd carried in with her had begun to rot at the edges, and the grove seemed to know it, seemed to lean in closer to watch. A laugh drifted across the clearing. Light, musical, a woman's laugh — and so much like Eva's that her chest seized. "Eva. Where are you?" "*Here,*" the voice answered, from the left. She turned. "*Here,*" it said, from the right, identical, overlapping the first by half a beat. "*Here,*" said a third, behind her, lower, and this one didn't sound like Eva at all. It sounded like it was learning to. The torch died. Not flickered — died, full black, and the dark that rushed in wasn't the dark of a park at night. No moon, no city glow, no stars between the branches. Just the grove and the crimson pulse of the pendant, throwing red light a few feet in every direction and no further. Within that small ring, the closed flowers. Beyond it, the slow patient sound of grass yielding to weight, circling. Rory pressed her back to the warm stone and held the pendant out like a candle. "What do you want?" The circling stopped. Directly ahead of her, just past the reach of the red glow, something exhaled. She felt the air of it move across her face, cool and damp, smelling of earth turned over and something sweeter underneath, the sweetness of fruit a day past ripe. "*Aurora,*" it said. She hadn't given her name. She'd called for Eva, only Eva. No one in this place should have known the name on her birth certificate, the one her father used when he was angry, the one her mother whispered. "*We've waited,*" the thing said, and now the voice had texture, layered, a dozen tones braided into one. "*The stone called and the stone came. Come closer, Aurora. Let us see the face that carries Dymas' heart.*" The pendant flared white-hot. She bit down on a cry and the light surged, pushing the red ring wider — and in the half second before it settled, the expanded glow caught the shape standing in front of her. Tall. Too tall. Pale where the light touched it and wrong in every place between, with a stillness no living thing should hold. Then the dark folded back over it, and it took a single step toward her, and the nearest flower closed.