Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1HV2DTA5RZF3PBJTNX49R2

The standing stones loomed out of the dark before Rory saw the path, six ancient oaks worn smooth by centuries, their bark grey as old bone under the moon. She'd left her bike chained to a railing at the Richmond Park gate forty minutes ago. The walk should have taken twenty. She checked her phone. No signal. The time read 11:47, then blinked and read 11:47 again. "Right," she said to no one. "That's not unsettling at all." The pendant lay warm against her sternum. Not the gentle warmth it gave off near a portal, the one that felt like a coin left in sunlight. This was a deeper heat, a slow pulse that matched her own pulse and then, somewhere between one breath and the next, fell out of step with it. She pressed her palm flat against it through her jumper and felt the crimson stone throb under the cloth like something with a heartbeat of its own. Eva had told her to come here. *Wait for me by the oaks,* the message had said, *I'll explain everything.* That had been two hours ago. Rory had read it three times on the train, certain each time that the words had shifted slightly, that the spelling of her friend's name had been wrong and then corrected itself. She stepped between the stones. The air changed. Outside the ring, November had stripped the park to mud and bare branches and the far-off orange smear of London's light pollution. Inside, the grass stood lush and green, and wildflowers nodded in a breeze she couldn't feel on her skin. Foxgloves, she thought, and something pale that she didn't have a name for, petals folded shut against the night. The clearing opened ahead of her, ringed in trees, and the moon hung directly overhead though it had been low and behind her at the gate. "Eva?" Her voice didn't carry. It dropped at her feet like a stone into water, no echo, no answer. She walked to the centre of the clearing and stopped. The silence had a texture to it. Not the absence of sound but the presence of something holding its breath, a held note just below hearing that made her teeth ache. She turned a slow circle. Trees, flowers, the bright cruel disc of the moon. Nothing else. Then, from the treeline to her left, a sound. Small. A wet click, like a tongue against the roof of a mouth. She spun toward it. The flowers there swayed, settling, as if something had passed through them. "Hello?" Click. To her right this time. She turned again, slower, and caught movement at the very edge of where her eyes could reach, a shape that wasn't there when she looked at it directly. Tall. Thin. Gone the instant her gaze landed on it, dissolved back into the gaps between the trunks. The pendant burned now, hot enough that she flinched and pulled the chain away from her skin. The crimson glow had brightened, casting a faint red wash up under her chin. In its light she saw her own breath fog the air. Cold. When had it gone cold? The flowers still bloomed as if it were June, but her exhale hung white in front of her face and she could no longer feel her fingers. "Okay," she whispered. "Eva's not here. I'm leaving." She made for the stones. The gap she'd come through stood twenty feet away, the dark of the ordinary park visible between two oaks like a doorway. She walked toward it. The grass dragged at her ankles, longer than it had been, tangling. The doorway didn't get closer. She stopped. Looked down. Her own footprints pressed into the dewy grass behind her, a neat line, and the stones stood exactly twenty feet ahead, no nearer for all her walking. The click came again. Directly behind her now, close, at the height of her ear. She didn't turn. Every animal part of her brain screamed not to turn, that turning was what it wanted, that the thing standing at her back was patient and had been patient for a very long time and would wait as long as she made it wait. She felt warmth against her nape that had nothing to do with the pendant. Breath. Slow and deliberate, stirring the small hairs there. "You're not Eva," she said. Her voice came out steady. She didn't know how. The breathing stopped. In the silence that followed she heard, faint and far away and unmistakably wrong, a voice using Eva's exact cadence. *Wait for me by the oaks.* The same words. The same warmth in them. But underneath the warmth ran something else, a second voice layered beneath the first, speaking the same words a half-beat behind, and that voice was old and dry and amused. Rory moved. She didn't run for the stones. She ran for the foxgloves, because the foxgloves had moved when the thing passed and she wanted to know which way it had gone, wanted anything between her and the breathing. She crashed through the flowers and the moon went out. Not a cloud. The disc simply vanished, snuffed, and the clearing dropped into a black so total she couldn't see her own hands. Only the pendant remained, a single coal of red light at her chest, and in its glow she saw the grass at her feet, the green gone grey, the flowers shut tight, and a long pale shape lying among them that she had walked straight toward. It was the length of a person. It did not breathe. As the red light touched it she saw that it was made of the same pale petals as the unnamed flowers, folded over and over into the suggestion of limbs, a torso, a face turned up toward where the moon had been. The face had no features. Only a smooth folded blank, waiting. The pendant pulsed once, hard, and in that single throb of light the blank face opened its eyes. They were Eva's eyes. "There you are," it said, in two voices, and behind her, all around her, the wet clicking started up again, dozens of them now, a tide of small soft sounds closing in from every dark edge of the clearing at once.