Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSK2WCMCYJQ6W1DQHWE8CWA

The standing stones came into view just as the last of the daylight bled out of the sky. Five of them, gnarled oak trunks petrified into something harder than wood, ringing a clearing that no map of Richmond Park acknowledged. Rory pressed her palm against the nearest one and felt the cold travel up her arm. "In and out," she told herself. "Find the thing, leave." The Heartstone hung against her sternum, a dull weight. Eva had sworn the pendant would warm near anything worth fearing. So far it stayed cool, which should have settled her, and somehow didn't. She stepped between two of the stones. The temperature changed. Not gradually — all at once, like crossing a threshold into a room someone had left the windows open in. Wildflowers carpeted the grove, white and violet and a blue that had no business blooming in November. They glowed faintly, catching a moonlight that arrived from no moon she could find overhead. "Right," she murmured. "Pretty. Lovely. Where's the bloody well." Eva had described a wellhead at the centre, old stone, a place where the boundary between here and elsewhere ran thin. Rory needed water drawn from it. That was the whole errand. A favour for a friend, repaid with a favour she couldn't refuse. She picked her way across the clearing. The flowers brushed her shins, releasing a scent like cut grass and something underneath it, sweeter and wrong, the smell of fruit a day past ripe. Behind her, a sound. She turned. The stones stood where she'd left them. The grass between them swayed, though no wind touched her face. "Hello?" Her voice didn't carry the way it should have. It dropped flat at her feet, swallowed before it could reach the treeline. She tried again, louder, and the second word came out smaller than the first. The well sat ahead, just visible — a low circle of pale stone, a wooden frame slumped over it. She made for it and kept her eyes forward, because forward was the only direction that felt safe, and she'd learned long ago not to question why a thing felt safe when nothing around it did. Twenty paces. Fifteen. A laugh. She stopped. It had come from the left, soft and high, the laugh of a child delighted by a secret. She knew there were no children here. She knew it the way she knew her own name, and still her head turned toward it. Nothing. Flowers. The dark margin where the grove gave way to trees that hadn't been there when she arrived — she was nearly sure of that, nearly, and the uncertainty was worse than any tree. The pendant remained cool. "Eva, I swear to God." Rory reached the well. The stone was damp under her hands, slick with a film that wasn't quite moss. She leaned over the lip and looked down into black that gave nothing back. No glint of water. No echo when she dropped a pebble from her pocket and counted — one, two, three, four — and never heard it land. She unhooked the rope from the frame. A bucket dangled at the end, older than the rest, its iron bands eaten thin with rust. She lowered it. The laugh came again. Closer. Behind her now. She didn't turn. She fed the rope down hand over hand and watched her knuckles and breathed through her teeth. "You're not real," she said. "You're a noise. Noises don't hurt people." Something exhaled against the back of her neck. She spun. The bucket dropped, rope hissing through her palms, burning a line across both before she clamped down and stopped it. There was nothing behind her. The grove stretched empty and luminous, and the flowers near her feet had bent flat, a path of crushed stems leading from the treeline to where she stood, as though something had walked the route she watched and left only its passage behind. The breath came again. Closer to her ear this time. No warmth to it. Cold as the stones. "I can hear you," she whispered. "I know you're there." A voice answered, and the voice used her mother's cadence, the lilt Jennifer Carter put on the ends of her sentences when she was tired and forgetting to hide it. "Aurora. You've come such a long way, love." Her stomach turned to water. Her mother was in Cardiff. Her mother had never set foot in this place and never would. "That's not going to work," Rory said, and was proud her voice held. "I know what you are. You're using what's in my head. Stop it." The voice laughed, and it wasn't her mother's anymore, and it wasn't the child's. It was something that had borrowed both and discarded them, settling now into a register that scraped at the base of her skull. "Then I'll use what's in front of you instead." The flowers went dark. All of them, at once, the glow snuffed like a hand closing over a candle, and the false moonlight with them. Black poured into the grove. Rory's eyes strained and found nothing, no stones, no well, no path — only the rope still clenched in her bleeding hands, the one solid thing tethering her to the fact that she had a body and the body was here. Movement, everywhere. The grass shifted in a hundred places at once. Soft sounds, deliberate, circling. Not one of them. Many. The pendant against her chest flared to life. It seared, sudden and fierce, a coal pressed to her skin, and the pain of it cut clean through the fog the grove had laid over her thoughts. She gasped and clutched it and the crimson light leaked between her fingers, painting the dark in front of her in a thin red wash. In that light she saw them. They stood at the edge of the well's reach, a ring of figures the height of children, thin as winter branches, their faces turned toward her and entirely without features — smooth as the inside of an eggshell where eyes and mouths should have been. They did not move while the light touched them. They simply waited, patient, the way water waits behind a dam. "Eva," Rory breathed, backing against the wellstone, the rope cutting deeper into her palms. "Eva, what did you send me into." The nearest figure tilted its blank head, and the grass behind it whispered as more of them came through the trees.