Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1J5FMM507KGH9716FW73YN

The standing stones rose from the heather like broken teeth. Rory counted them by habit. Seven. The same seven she had walked past a dozen times in daylight, when the park belonged to dog-walkers and the distant clatter of cyclists on the ridge. Tonight the stones had no audience. Tonight they had her. She pulled her jacket tighter and checked the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone sat against her collarbone, the silver chain cold where it touched the nape of her neck, but the stone itself was not cold. It had not been cold since she had passed the third stone. The glow was faint. She had to angle her chin down to see it, a dim crimson pulse like a heartbeat drawn in miniature. It quickened as she stepped between the fourth and fifth stone, and the air changed. Not temperature. Pressure. The way her ears felt on a descent in a plane, only sharper, as though someone had pressed two palms flat against the sides of her skull and squeezed. She swallowed. The sensation passed. The wildflowers were already underfoot, even though it was October, even though the grass of Richmond Park behind her had been winter-brown and damp. The grove opened ahead of her in a wash of pale moonlight that should not have existed. The canopy above was thick enough to block any view of the sky. The light came from nowhere and everywhere, a silver wash that picked out the small white blooms nodding in a wind she could not feel. Rory had been told to come at night. She had been told, by a voice on a phone that had no caller ID, that the answer to the questions she had been asking would be here. She had not been told what the questions were yet. She walked. The grass was springy, almost bouncy under her boots, and her footprints filled in behind her as she passed. She did not look back to confirm this. She had learned, in the weeks since the pendant had first warmed against her skin, that some things were better noticed and not spoken to. A bird called. Then another. Then silence, the kind of silence that had weight to it, that pushed back against the sound of her own breathing. Rory stopped. She turned her head, slowly, the way you turn your head in a dream when you know something is in the room with you but you do not yet want to give it permission to exist. Nothing. The wildflowers. The pale light. The faint suggestion of trees at the edge of her vision, their trunks too straight, too evenly spaced, like a theatre flat painted to suggest a forest. The pendant pulsed. Once. Twice. Three times in quick succession, like a hand tightening around a small living thing. She took another step. The grass made no sound. Her boots made no sound. The air made no sound, although the leaves of the nearest not-quite-tree moved in a pattern that implied wind, and the pattern repeated, and repeated, and did not change. "Rory." Her name. Her actual name, spoken in a voice she almost recognised. She turned toward it and the grove stretched, the trees at the far end drawing back like curtains, the path before her lengthening by some impossible geometry. She had not moved. She had taken one step and the world had rearranged itself. The voice had come from her left. She was sure of it. She turned back. Nothing. Only the wildflowers, and the pale light, and the standing stones behind her, and between them a strip of darkness that had not been there before. She raised her hand. Held it out in front of her. Five fingers, all present, all behaving. The pendant hung below her collarbone and its glow was brighter now, a small coal burning in the hollow of her throat. She pressed her thumb against it and the warmth spread up her wrist, over the crescent-shaped scar there, a line of heat that traced the old injury like a finger drawn along a groove. "Don't," she said, to no one, to the grove, to the voice that had used her name. "I'm here for a reason. I don't know it yet, but I know I have one." The wildflowers nodded. All of them. At once. A single coordinated movement, like a hundred small heads bowing in greeting, or in warning. She walked. The path beneath her boots was no longer grass but a hard pale surface, smooth as bone, and her steps made the small tapping sound of heel on tile. She did not look down to confirm this. She had decided, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, that looking down would be a concession she was not yet ready to make. The trees drew closer. The trunks were pale, almost white, and the bark was smooth, without the usual furrows and ridges of English oak. They looked polished. They looked, in the back of her mind where the thoughts she did not want to look at lived, like the legs of something large and jointed, bent and waiting. A sound. Small. Close. The sound of a fingernail tapped against glass. Rory stopped. The pendant stopped. The grove, for one long held breath, stopped. Then the tapping came again, and this time it moved. From her left to directly behind her, traveling along the curve of her skull the way a sound can in these conditions, in the dark, in a place that is not quite the place it pretends to be. She did not turn. She held her breath and counted. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. The tapping stopped. Something exhaled, very close to her left ear, a long soft breath that smelled of wet earth and something sweeter beneath it, something like overripe pears left to ferment in a closed room. "Find the door," the voice said, and the voice was hers. Her own voice, her own Welsh-inflected vowels, her own cadence. "Find the door before it finds you." Rory turned. The grove behind her was empty. The pale trees. The nodding flowers. The strip of darkness between the standing stones, which had widened. Which was widening still, a slow patient opening like a mouth preparing to speak. The pendant flared. She gasped, more at the heat than the light, and pressed her palm flat against her chest to hold it there, to keep it from burning through her shirt. It pulsed against her palm in a rhythm she had begun to dread, because the rhythm was not hers, and it was getting faster, and somewhere in the dark between the stones something was matching it.