Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1HKC35DKF5VQCTBKER1RGN

The standing stones caught the moonlight first—five oaks petrified into grey, their bark turned to something harder than wood, ringed around the clearing like teeth in an open mouth. Rory stepped between two of them and the night changed. She felt it on her skin before her mind named it. The traffic that had followed her across Richmond Park, the distant grind of the city—gone. Not muffled. Gone, as if someone had reached down and pressed a thumb against the world's throat. "Right," she whispered. Her breath didn't fog, though the December air should have made it. "I'm here. Show yourself." The pendant lay cool against her sternum. She'd half expected it to wake, to throb with that warmth it gave near the thin places. Nothing. Just a stone the colour of dried blood, dead as a button. Wildflowers grew at her feet. Foxgloves, cornflowers, things she had no name for—all of them blooming in the dead of winter, all of them turned toward her like an audience. She knelt and brushed a finger across a petal. It was warm. Body warm. She pulled her hand back. The note had told her to come at moonrise. A scrap of paper slipped under her door, ink the wrong shade of brown, the handwriting too neat to be human. *The Grove. Alone. The pendant will explain.* She'd told herself she was clever enough to walk in and out of a trap. Standing here now, with the silence pressing against her eardrums, the cleverness felt thin. "Hello?" Her voice didn't carry. It fell off her lips and dropped into the grass like something thrown down a well. A sound came back. Behind her—a soft, dragging shush, the way long fabric moves across stone. She turned. The gap between the two oaks she'd entered through showed only the park beyond, the dark slope of grass, a sky bruised purple at its edges. No one. "I don't have time for games." The grass to her left moved. Not a breeze—a single line of motion, a furrow pushing through the wildflowers as though something low and unseen slid between the stems. It stopped three feet from her boot. Rory's pulse climbed into her ears. She made herself breathe. Eva had taught her that, after the worst nights with Evan—name what's real, hold to it. The stones were real. The cold was real. The thing in the grass— The furrow was gone. The flowers stood straight again, undisturbed, as if she'd imagined the whole crawling line of it. "Okay." She drew the word out, low. "Okay." She walked toward the centre of the clearing, where the grass gave way to a ring of bare earth. Her shadow stretched ahead of her, long and black under the climbing moon. She watched it slide across the ground. It had the wrong number of arms. She froze. Counted again. Two arms, her arms, swinging at her sides exactly where they should be—and a third, faint, pooled off her left shoulder, reaching. She spun. Empty air. The moon hung clean and indifferent above the oaks. When she looked down, the shadow was only hers. A laugh built in her chest, the kind that comes before panic, and she swallowed it. "You're trying to spook me." She said it loud, to the trees, to the flowers, to whatever watched. "It's working. Congratulations. Now tell me why I'm here or I'm leaving." The answer came as a smell. Crushed green things, and beneath that, sweeter—rot, the cloying ferment of fruit left too long. It rolled over her from every direction at once. She covered her nose with her sleeve and turned a slow circle. The standing stones had moved. She was certain. When she'd entered there'd been a wide gap, the path back to the open park clear between two oaks. Now the stones crowded closer, the gaps narrowed to slits a body could barely fit through, and she couldn't find the one she'd come by. Five identical grey teeth, and her, soft and small, in the centre of the bite. "That's enough." Her own voice cracked. She started toward the nearest gap and her foot caught—the grass had grown, threaded itself around her ankle, thin green wire that tightened when she pulled. She bent, tore at it. The stems wept a clear sap that stung her fingers, and from somewhere close, so close she felt it move the hair beside her ear, came a sound she'd never heard from any living throat. It was almost a word. Almost her name. "*Aurora.*" She wrenched free and ran. The clearing stretched—she'd swear it stretched, the gap between the stones pulling away from her with every stride, the bare earth lengthening like pulled toffee. The flowers turned their heads to follow. The smell of rot thickened until she tasted it. And the third shadow was back, she could feel it now rather than see it, a weight off her left side that moved when she moved, gaining. "*Aurora. You came.*" The voice was kind. That was the worst of it. It carried a warmth the night didn't have, the gentleness of someone who'd been waiting a long while and was glad, so glad, to finally be found. The pendant flared. Heat bloomed against her chest, sudden and fierce, and she gasped and clutched it through her shirt. The crimson stone burned like a coal—and in its light, thrown up against the inside of her closed fingers, she saw the clearing properly for one heartbeat. Saw what stood at the treeline where she'd been about to run. Saw the shape of it, tall and patient and almost human, the way a mannequin is almost a person. Then her hand reached the gap between two stones and the warmth of the pendant pulsed once more, harder, dragging her forward like a hook behind the ribs. "Wait—" the kind voice said, and now it wasn't kind at all. "*You're not finished.*" She threw herself between the oaks.