Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9MGVJFZBAFPBMQXVH222E

The standing stones came up out of the dark like teeth. Rory had been told the grove was easy to find if you knew where to look, and Eva's directions had been precise down to the paces from the fallen elm, but nothing had prepared her for how the ordinary sounds of Richmond Park simply stopped the moment she crossed between the two nearest oaks. No traffic hum from the road beyond the trees. No distant dog walkers, no night birds, nothing. Just the small sound of her own breathing, suddenly very loud, and the pendant at her throat, warm against her collarbone in a way that had nothing to do with body heat. She'd come because the note tucked under her door that morning had said *the grove, midnight, come alone*, and because the Heartstone had started pulsing that same faint heat an hour before she found it, and because six months of strange gifts and stranger warnings had taught her that ignoring these things cost more than answering them. So she'd told no one, not even Eva, and walked into Richmond Park after the gates were meant to be locked, and found the gap in the fence exactly where the note said it would be. Now she stood in a clearing that shouldn't exist, wildflowers nodding at her ankles in a night too cold for anything to bloom, and she was starting to think that had been a mistake. The flowers themselves were wrong, she decided. Not the fact of them — she'd been told the grove kept its own seasons — but the way they moved. There was no wind. She'd have felt it on her face, on the loose ends of her hair, and there was none, not even the faintest current of air. And yet the flowers swayed, all of them, in a slow unified ripple that traveled from the far edge of the clearing to the toe of her boot and then seemed, impossibly, to keep going past her, into the dark beyond the stones. She pulled her cardigan tighter and told herself it was nothing. Fae places were strange. That was the entire point. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to, swallowed by the clearing almost before it left her mouth, no echo at all, as if the trees on every side were standing too close and drinking up the sound. Nothing answered. She hadn't expected anything to. She made herself walk further in, toward the centre where the grass grew short and neat as a lawn, and the pendant's warmth deepened with each step, not painful, just present, insistent, a low coal against her skin. That was supposed to mean a portal. Silas had told her that much, the one time she'd cornered him at the bar and made him admit what he actually knew about the thing around her neck. *Warmth means a door is near, Rory. Heat means it's open.* It was not yet hot. She stopped in the centre of the clearing and turned in a slow circle, cataloguing what she could see. Nine standing stones, evenly spaced, black against a sky gone strangely starless. The wildflowers, still rippling that same slow wave though there was no wind to explain it. And past the stones, the ordinary trees of the park, birch and oak, the kind that had stood in Richmond for three hundred years and would stand for three hundred more, indifferent to whatever occupied this pocket of ground between them. Except one of them wasn't indifferent. One of them, off to her left, past the third stone, was the wrong shape. She looked directly at it and it resolved into an ordinary trunk, gnarled and split by some old lightning strike, nothing more. She looked away, back toward the centre stone with its crown of moss, and in the very corner of her eye the trunk moved. Not swayed. Not the flower-ripple, uniform and strange but at least explicable as *something*. This was different — a shift of mass, low to the ground, gone the instant she turned her head to catch it, so that when she looked the trunk was only a trunk again, splitting the dark the way it had every night for three centuries. Her heart was beating harder now, high and quick against her ribs, and she made herself breathe slowly through it, the way she'd learned to do in the flat above Silas' bar on the nights the anger came looking for her even in dreams, even here, safe, months and miles from Evan and everything he'd been. *Cool head, Rory. You've got a cool head. Everyone says so.* She turned another slow circle, and this time she counted the stones. Nine. She counted again. Nine. There had been eight a moment ago. She was almost sure of it. The flowers rippled again, that same patient wave, and this time she watched it happen and understood what had been nagging at her about it: the wave did not simply travel outward from some central point. It travelled *toward* something. Toward her. As though the grove itself were leaning down to get a better look, the way you might lean over a rock pool to see what moved beneath the surface. The pendant's warmth spiked, sudden and sharp enough that she gasped and closed her hand around it, and beneath her palm she felt it flare properly hot for one half-second before settling back to its low simmer. Something had opened. Somewhere close. And closed again before she could find it. "I'm here," she said, louder this time, straight out into the dark beyond the stones, because whatever had left that note wanted her here and she would rather face it than stand in this false-still clearing waiting for the next thing to move at the edge of her sight. "You wanted me to come alone. I came alone. So stop hiding and—" The wave in the flowers reached her boots and did not stop. It went through her. Not around, not past — *through*, a ripple of cold that started at her ankles and climbed to her scalp in under a second, gone as quickly as it came, leaving her skin prickled and her breath caught somewhere behind her sternum. Behind her, very close, close enough that she should have heard footsteps in the grass, close enough that she should have heard *breathing*, a voice said her name. Not Rory. Not Aurora. *Malphora.* She spun, pendant blazing hot enough now to burn through the thin cotton of her shirt, and the clearing behind her was empty, flowers still, air finally, finally moving as a real wind found its way between the stones and lifted her hair from her neck — and in that moving air, carried from nowhere and everywhere at once, came the unmistakable, patient sound of something breathing that was not her, and was not far away at all.