Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXAXBJ5B2ANT4BQRNHJ5YD

The standing stones rose out of the dark like teeth. Rory ducked between two of them, the ancient oak rough under her palm, and stepped into the grove. Her phone's torch threw a thin cone of light across the grass. Behind her, Richmond Park had been quiet in the way only a city park managed after midnight — the distant rush of traffic, a fox barking somewhere, the wet sigh of London breathing in its sleep. Here, none of that. She stopped. Listened. Nothing. Not the traffic, not the wind, not even the small insect hum she hadn't realised she'd grown used to until it was gone. The silence pressed against her ears like deep water. "Right," she muttered. "In and out." The pendant lay warm against her sternum. It had been pulsing all the way across the park, a slow steady heat she'd mistaken for nerves until she'd cupped it in her hand and felt it answer her like a second heartbeat. The Heartstone had brought her here. Eva had said to follow it. Eva had said a lot of things before she'd gone quiet on the phone three nights ago. Rory swept the torch in a wide arc. Wildflowers everywhere — bluebells, foxglove, things she couldn't name that had no business blooming together, never mind in the dead of a London winter. They didn't move. No breeze stirred them. They stood at attention, every petal sharp in the white light, and the wrongness of it crawled up the back of her neck before her brain caught up to why. Flowers should sway. Even a little. Even with her standing right there breathing on them. These didn't. "Eva?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd wanted. It didn't carry. It dropped from her mouth and died at her feet, swallowed by that thick dark, and she had the sudden absurd sense that something had reached out and caught the word before it could travel any further. She walked deeper in. The grass gave under her boots without a sound. That was the next thing — no crunch, no rustle, just a soft yielding nothing, like stepping on something that had been waiting to be stepped on. She glanced down to check her feet were really there and felt foolish, and kept walking. The torch flickered. She shook the phone. Eighty-two percent. The light steadied, then dimmed again, the beam narrowing as though something were drinking it. She angled it toward the centre of the clearing where a ring of paler grass marked some old burning, or dancing, or worse. A figure stood at the edge of the light. Rory's heart slammed once, hard, and she swung the torch full onto it. A tree. Just a young birch, pale-barked, its branches bare. She breathed out through her teeth. "Get a grip." She moved past it. And as she moved, she would have sworn — would have put her own hand in fire and sworn — that the birch hadn't been there when she'd first come through the stones. She'd looked at this part of the grove. She'd looked right at it. The pendant flared against her skin, hot enough now to sting. "Okay. Okay, I hear you." She turned in a slow circle, holding the stone out from her chest by its silver chain. The crimson glow had deepened, throbbing in time with that buried pulse, and she watched it brighten as she faced the far treeline and dim as she turned away. Brighten. There. Whatever it wanted her to find waited in that direction, in the deeper black where her torch couldn't reach. Something moved. Not in front of her. At the edge — that grey margin where vision frays into nothing. A shape, low and long, sliding between the trunks. She snapped the torch toward it and caught only flowers, still and watchful, and the empty dark beyond. "I'm not scared of you," she said. The dark didn't believe her either. She made herself walk. One step. Another. The grass gave its silent nothing underfoot and the trees crept past on either side, too close now, the clearing narrowing into a throat. She kept her eyes forward, but the movement came again, this time on her left, keeping pace with her. Low. Patient. When she looked, it stopped. When she walked, it walked. "Eva, if this is you—" A sound, finally. From behind. A small, wet click, like a tongue against the roof of a mouth, like someone about to speak who had thought better of it. Rory froze. She did not turn around. Every animal instinct she owned screamed at her to run, and underneath that, a colder voice — her father's courtroom voice, the one that had never once raised itself — said *don't. Whatever it is, it's faster than you. Don't let it know you know.* The click came again. Closer. At the level of her ear, where no mouth that stood on the ground could possibly reach. Her breath fogged in front of her face. When had it gotten cold? The flowers wore a skin of frost now, white and glittering in the dying torchlight, and her own exhale hung in the air a beat too long, twisting, holding a shape before it dissolved. The pendant burned. She closed her fist around it and the heat bit into her palm and she welcomed it, because it was real, because it was hers, because everything else in this place felt like a held breath waiting for her to make the first mistake. Slowly, she turned her head. The birch stood three feet behind her. It had not been three feet behind her. She had left it forty paces back at the edge of the clearing, and now its pale trunk loomed close enough to touch, and along its smooth bark were dark vertical seams she hadn't seen before, paired and even, running top to bottom like a row of closed eyes. One of them opened. Rory ran. She didn't decide to. Her body decided for her, wrenching her around and hurling her toward the treeline where the pendant burned brightest, and the silence shattered behind her into a long dry rattle that was almost, but not quite, the sound of laughter.