Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1GFXS6VAVGR0VJJTWVV0BY

The text on her phone had been four words: Come to the grove. No name. No number she recognised. But the Heartstone had grown warm against her sternum the moment she'd read it, and Rory had learned to trust the pendant more than she trusted most people. So she'd taken the last train to Richmond, climbed the fence where the park gates had long since locked for the night, and walked until the manicured paths gave way to bracken and the kind of dark that swallowed torchlight whole. The standing stones found her before she found them. Ancient oaks, gnarled into shapes that shouldn't hold, marking a boundary she couldn't see but could feel — a pressure behind her teeth, like the air before a storm. She stepped between them. The grove opened up. Wildflowers blanketed the clearing, pale and luminous, swaying though there was no wind. Foxgloves in November. Bluebells beside late roses. They had no business blooming together, and yet here they were, every season crammed into one impossible meadow. Moonlight pooled in the centre, too bright, too white, as if the moon hung closer here than it did in London. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "You texted me. I came. So show yourself." Nothing answered. The Heartstone pulsed once, a slow throb of warmth, then went still. Rory pulled her jacket tighter and stepped further in. Grass brushed her shins. Somewhere off to her left, water trickled over stone — a brook she couldn't see. She turned toward the sound, and the trickling stopped. Just like that. As though someone had clamped a hand over its mouth. She stood very still. The silence that followed wasn't empty. It had texture, weight, the held-breath quality of a room where someone waited just behind a door. "Eva?" She tried the name though she knew Eva wouldn't be here, wouldn't know how to get here. "If this is some kind of joke—" A flower closed. She caught it at the edge of her vision — a foxglove folding its petals tight, the way they did at dusk, except all the others stayed open. Then the one beside it closed. Then another. A ripple moving through the meadow, blossoms snapping shut in a line that curved around the clearing's edge, encircling her, a slow tightening noose of darkness as the luminous petals winked out one by one. "Okay." She backed toward the centre, toward the light. "Okay. Not funny." The moon brightened. It shouldn't have, but it did, the white glare swelling until her shadow stretched black and thin across the grass and pointed, like an arrow, toward the treeline. She didn't want to follow it. Every animal instinct she owned told her not to. But her shadow had three companions now where she had cast one, three long shapes fanning out from her feet, and only one belonged to her. Rory spun. The grove stood empty. Flowers, stones, that aching impossible light. No one behind her. No one anywhere. When she looked down again, her shadow was alone, single, ordinary. Her heart slammed against the pendant. "I know you're there," she said, and hated how the words trembled. "I can—I can feel you watching." The trickling brook started up again. Closer now. To her right, where before it had been to her left. As if the whole clearing had quietly rotated while she'd had her back turned, and she was no longer facing the way she'd come in. She searched for the standing stones. The two oaks that marked the entrance. She found four. Then six. Gnarled silhouettes ringing the grove at intervals, more of them than there had been, their twisted limbs reaching inward like fingers cupping a held thing. She couldn't tell which gap she'd walked through. They all looked the same. They all looked wrong. A sound drifted across the meadow. Singing. Not words — a melody, wordless and high and sweet, a woman's voice humming a tune that tugged at something behind Rory's ribs. It came from the treeline her shadow had pointed to. It was beautiful. That was the worst part. It was so beautiful that her feet carried her two steps toward it before she caught herself, grass cold and wet now, soaking through her trainers, though a moment ago it had been dry. "No," she breathed. "No, I'm not—I'm not doing that." The singing stopped mid-note. The silence that replaced it pressed on her eardrums. She could hear her own pulse, the rasp of her breath, the tiny dry sound of flowers somewhere still folding shut. And under all of it, faint, patient — footsteps. Soft in the grass. Circling. Always at the periphery, always behind whatever stone or shadow she wasn't looking at, a presence that moved when she moved and stopped when she stopped, learning her, the way a cat learned a cornered bird before it bothered with the killing. The Heartstone flared hot. Not warm — hot, a brand against her skin, and she clutched it through her shirt and gasped. The crimson glow leaked between her fingers, brighter than she'd ever seen it, throwing red light across the meadow. And in that red light, just for a heartbeat, the empty grove was not empty at all. Shapes. Tall, thin, too many joints, standing motionless among the closed flowers. A dozen of them. More. All facing her. All so still that her eye had read them as more standing stones, more crooked oaks, until the pendant's glow caught the wet shine of eyes set in faces that were almost, almost human. She blinked, and they were gone. Stones again. Trees again. Innocent dark. But she'd seen. And whatever stood out there in the meadow with her — it knew she'd seen. The footsteps quickened. From every direction now, soft and overlapping, no longer one set but many, closing the circle the flowers had drawn, and the moonlight guttered like a candle in a draught, and the brook ran backwards up its own bed with a sound like a held breath finally, terribly, releasing. Rory turned in a slow circle, the pendant burning in her fist, her back to nothing because there was nothing left to put her back to. "What do you want?" she whispered. The grass stopped moving. Every flower, every blade, went still at once. And in the absolute quiet that followed, close enough to stir the hair at her ear, a voice that was not a voice answered her. *You came when we called.*