Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE95JR7FNZ2AC9VF54FD6TT

The standing stones were exactly where Eva had said they'd be, two rows of ancient oaks turned to something like stone by age and weather, marking a boundary Rory could feel more than see. She'd come to Richmond Park a hundred times in daylight, jogged past these very trees with headphones in and nothing on her mind but the ache in her calves. At night, under a moon gone thin and sharp as a paring knife, they looked like teeth. She checked her phone. No signal, which wasn't unusual for the park, but the battery had also dropped from sixty percent to four in the time it took her to walk from the car park to here — maybe fifteen minutes, maybe less. She frowned at the screen, then pocketed it, because there wasn't much use complaining to no one. The pendant was warm against her collarbone. Not the warmth of skin or fabric, but a low insistent heat, like a coal banked under ash. It had been doing that on and off since she'd left the flat above Silas' bar, small flares of warmth that made her hand drift to her chest without her quite deciding to. She didn't know what it meant yet. She only knew that whoever had left it for her hadn't meant it as decoration. She stepped between the stones. The air changed first. Not colder, not warmer, just different, like walking from one room into another where someone had recently been smoking, though there was no smell of smoke at all. The wildflowers underfoot didn't belong to any season Rory could name — foxglove and something like heather blooming together, impossible in October, impossible really at any time she could remember from her Cardiff summers. She crouched and touched a petal to be sure it was real. It was cold and slightly damp, like everything alive at night. "Hello?" she said, because Eva had told her someone might be waiting, and because the silence had a listening quality she didn't like. Nothing answered. But the grove seemed to draw a breath at the sound of her voice, a stillness that came after rather than before, as though something had paused to consider whether it was worth revealing itself for a word so small. She walked further in. The clearing widened around her, the oaks at its edge standing sentinel, their branches laced overhead in a canopy that let through no sky at all, and yet she could see — not brightly, but well enough, a grey directionless light that came from nowhere she could point to. Time moves differently here, Eva had warned her. An hour could be a minute. A minute could be a week. Rory made a note to herself, the way she always did when frightened, to keep track of small things: the position of a particular twisted root, the shape of a broken branch, anything that would tell her later whether she'd been standing still or walking in circles. Something rustled to her left. She turned fast, the old instinct from three years with Evan surfacing before she could stop it — check the exits, check the hands, check the tone of voice before the words arrive — but there was nothing there. Only a wildflower, swaying though there was no wind she could feel on her skin. "Okay," she murmured, mostly to steady her own pulse. "Okay, Rory." She kept walking. The pendant's warmth deepened, not painful, but present in a way that made her aware of her own heartbeat beneath it, as if the stone had found the rhythm and begun keeping its own kind of time alongside hers. It was the sound that got to her first — not the rustle, which she could explain away, but the breathing. Faint. Wet. Coming from a direction that shifted every time she tried to fix it, first behind her, then somehow ahead, then seeming to issue from the roots of the nearest oak, as though the tree itself exhaled between its gnarled toes. She stopped walking. She made herself stand very still and listen, the way her father had taught her once in a different context — in a courtroom, watching a witness, waiting for the tell. The breathing stopped when she stopped. That was worse than if it hadn't. She became aware, in the way one becomes aware of a held breath, that the grove had grown very quiet around that sound's absence — no birds, though there should have been owls at least, this deep into the dark. No insects. The wildflowers didn't so much as whisper against each other now, as if they too were listening for what she might do next. Rory turned in a slow circle, cataloguing. The stones behind her, dim shapes now at the clearing's far edge. The root she'd marked, twisted like a knuckle, still where she'd left it — good, she hadn't wandered. The oak that had seemed to breathe stood exactly as an oak should, black and patient and utterly still. And yet. At the very corner of her vision, where the grey light thinned toward true dark, something had moved. Not the flowers. Not a branch. Something with a different quality of motion altogether, low to the ground and then not there at all when she turned her head to meet it — always just leaving the space she looked at, as though it knew the exact half-second delay of a human eye and lived inside it. She thought of Eva's voice on the phone, careful, deliberately light: someone will meet you there, Rory, don't be frightened by the quiet. She thought that Eva had not mentioned this — this sense of being observed by something that had learned, patiently, over some span of time she could not measure, exactly how a person moved when they were afraid, and was now testing whether she matched the pattern. The pendant flared hot enough that she gasped and closed her hand around it through her jumper. "I'm not afraid," she said aloud, which was a lie, and the grove seemed to know it, because the breathing started again — closer now, so close she could feel it disturb the small hairs at the back of her neck, though when she spun to face it there was nothing there but grey light and old oaks and the flowers, blooming, blooming, out of all their proper seasons, as if they had never once needed the sun at all.