Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9H0RD4ZA37PG9B7PX343E

The oaks marking the grove's boundary stood black against a sky gone the colour of old bruises, and Rory almost turned back twice before she reached them. Almost. The text from Eva had been three words — *found something, come* — sent an hour after Eva knew full well Rory finished her shift at the Golden Empress, and Rory had spent the bike ride telling herself that Eva wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. Richmond Park emptied out fast after dark. No dog walkers, no joggers, just the deer somewhere off in the bracken making sounds like breathing. Rory locked her bike to a fence post that had no business being this deep into the park and walked the rest on foot, phone torch cutting a thin blue tunnel through the grass. The standing stones came up sooner than she remembered. Always did, in this place. She stepped between two of them and the temperature dropped enough to raise gooseflesh on her arms, though there was no wind to carry the chill. "Eva?" Her voice didn't echo. It didn't do anything, actually, just fell flat into the wildflowers that shouldn't have been blooming in November, that never seemed to stop blooming regardless of what month it was outside these stones. The Heartstone Pendant sat cool against her collarbone, no warmth in it, which meant no portal nearby, which meant this was just an ordinary bad idea and not a supernatural one. She told herself that. She kept telling herself that. "Eva, I swear to God, if this is you jumping out at me—" Nothing jumped out. The grove sat there being a grove, moonlight pooling silver on flowers that had no right to their colour in this light, reds and purples too saturated, like someone had turned the contrast up on the whole clearing. Rory walked toward the centre, where a fallen oak made a natural bench, because that's where Eva always wanted to meet, and that's where Eva wasn't. Her phone had one bar. She texted **here, where are you** and watched the little wheel spin and spin and never resolve into *sent*. Something rustled off to her left. She swung the torch and caught nothing but stalks swaying, though nothing else around them moved, no breeze touching the higher grass, only that one patch settling like something had just stood up out of it. "Ha ha," she said, to nobody, because saying something out loud felt better than the silence after. She sat on the fallen oak. Waited. Checked the phone — still no bar worth trusting, still no reply. Time did strange things here, she knew that, an hour outside could be a day in, or the other way round, and she'd learned the hard way not to trust her own watch inside the boundary stones. That thought didn't help. If Eva's *found something, come* was an hour old by the time Rory got the bike sorted, God only knew how long ago it had actually been sent, relative to whatever hour the grove had decided to run on tonight. The rustle came again. Further round, behind her this time, and closer. Rory stood up too fast, torch swinging wild, catching only oak trunks and shadow and the pale smear of flowers bending away from a wind that wasn't there. "Okay," she said, low. "Okay, this isn't funny." Nothing answered that either, but something changed. The quality of the quiet changed, the way a room changes when another person walks into it even if they don't make a sound. Rory's skin knew it before her brain caught up, a prickle up the back of her neck, and she found herself turning in a slow circle with the torch held out like it might do more than light things up. A branch cracked. Not near her feet, not from wind — up, from somewhere in the canopy, the kind of crack that meant weight, meant something had shifted its balance on a limb that shouldn't hold much of anything. She didn't look up. She wanted to and she didn't, some animal part of her insisting that if she just kept walking toward the boundary stones, whatever this was would stay wherever it was, would let her go if she didn't acknowledge it. "Eva, this isn't funny," she said again, louder now, because loud felt like armour. "If you're hiding, I'm going to kill you." The flowers by the fallen oak had stopped swaying. All of them. Every stalk in the clearing gone dead still at once, like the grove itself had drawn a breath and was holding it, and that stillness was so much worse than the rustling had been that Rory's mouth went dry. She made for the stones. Not running — running felt like the wrong move, some old instinct told her that running was for things that already knew you'd seen them — just walking fast, torch beam jumping ahead of her boots, catching the standing stones at the edge of the clearing, close now, closer. Something moved between two of them. Not stepped. Moved, the way a shadow moves when a cloud crosses the moon, quick and boneless and gone before her torch beam settled on the spot, leaving her staring at empty grass and one stone slightly darker than the others where the light hit it wrong. She stopped ten feet short of the boundary. Her heart was doing something arrhythmic and unpleasant against her ribs. The pendant at her throat sat as cold as it had all night, no portal, no fae signature, nothing her one supernatural early-warning system thought worth flagging, and somehow that made it worse, because it meant whatever had just crossed between those stones wasn't the kind of thing the Heartstone cared to warn her about. "Eva," she said, and her voice had gone thin and small in a way she didn't like. "This isn't funny anymore." The grass to her right bent, slow, deliberate, in a line — like something walking a wide circle around her, keeping just outside the torchlight, patient, unhurried, in no rush at all to be seen. Rory turned with it, tracking the bent grass, and somewhere behind that slow procession of moving stalks she thought she heard, very faintly, someone breathing that wasn't her.