Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9QXMKYXH8SCHCCFDGW7RW

The standing stones came up out of the dark like teeth. Rory had walked Richmond Park a hundred times in daylight, had jogged past these very oaks with headphones in and nothing on her mind but the ache in her calves. But she had never come at night, and she had certainly never come alone, and she had never had a reason to before tonight, when the pendant at her throat had gone warm against her collarbone for the third time that week and she'd finally, stupidly, decided to follow the pull of it instead of ignoring it like a sensible person would. The Heartstone sat heavy against her sternum now, a small coal of heat under her shirt. She hadn't taken it off since the night she'd found it. She still didn't know who'd left it for her, wrapped in tissue paper on her windowsill above Silas' bar, no note, no explanation, just the deep crimson stone on its silver chain and the faint glow that seemed to breathe if she watched it long enough. Warm near a door, she'd worked out. Warm near a way through. There was a way through here, apparently. She crossed between two of the oak stones and the temperature of the air changed, not colder but different, thicker, like walking from a museum hallway into an air-conditioned room that had once, a long time ago, been full of people. The park sounds—the distant traffic hush, the wind combing through the crowns of ordinary trees—fell away behind her all at once, as though someone had shut a door. Ahead, the grove opened into a clearing that didn't belong to Richmond Park, didn't belong, she suspected, to March. Wildflowers stood chest-high in every direction, white and violet and a blue so deep it looked bruised, all of them blooming in defiance of the cold that should have killed them months ago. No wind touched them. Not one stem moved. Rory stopped just inside the boundary and made herself breathe. Off, she thought. Everything about this is off. She'd expected off. Isolde had told her, in that maddening way witches had of explaining nothing while implying they'd explained everything, that the grove kept its own time, that an hour here might be a day out there, or ten minutes, and that she should not linger longer than necessary. Rory had nodded along and privately decided the woman was being dramatic. She was reconsidering that now, standing in a clearing full of flowers that shouldn't exist, under a sky that had no moon in it at all, only stars scattered too densely, in patterns she didn't recognize. She checked her phone out of habit. No signal, obviously. The clock read 11:47. She had no way of knowing if that number meant anything anymore. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd meant it to, and the clearing swallowed it without an echo, which was somehow worse than if it had thrown her own voice back at her. Nothing answered. She hadn't expected anything to. She was here for information, a name, a location—something Isolde's contact was meant to leave for her at the center of the grove, tucked beneath a particular stone, and all she had to do was walk to the middle, find it, and walk back out. Fifteen minutes, tops. She could feel the pendant's warmth pulsing steady and slow against her skin, a heartbeat that wasn't quite her own. She started walking. The flowers brushed silently against her jeans, no rustle, no give, as though they were painted rather than grown. She counted her steps because counting steps was something to do with the part of her mind that wanted to spiral, and she'd learned a long time ago—thank you, Evan, thank you for that particular lesson—how to keep that part of her mind on a short leash. Twenty-three steps in, she heard the first sound that didn't belong. It was small. A rustle, off to her left, low to the ground, the kind of sound a fox might make moving through brush. She stopped and looked and saw only flowers, still and silent as before. She told herself it was a fox. There was no reason a fox couldn't have followed her in, no reason the grove couldn't have foxes of its own. She kept walking. Forty steps. The rustle came again, closer this time, and now it was behind her, and when she turned there was nothing there either, just the pale corridor of flowers curving back toward the standing stones, which she could no longer see. That struck her as important. She had not walked far enough to lose sight of the boundary. And yet the stones were gone, swallowed into a dark that seemed to have thickened behind her without her noticing, the way a room grows dim while you're absorbed in a book and you only notice the dark once you look up. She looked up now. The stars had rearranged themselves. Her heart picked up its pace, matching itself against the slower, warmer pulse of the pendant, two rhythms out of sync. She made herself keep moving toward the center of the grove, because turning back into a dark she couldn't account for seemed like the worse of two bad options, and because Isolde's contact was waiting, and because the alternative—admitting how frightened she'd become in the space of ninety seconds—was not something she was prepared to do, even alone, even with no one to perform composure for. Something moved at the very edge of her vision. Not the rustle this time—a shape, upright, pale, gone the instant she turned her head toward it, the way a shadow will seem to have a shape until you look at it directly and it resolves into nothing at all. She told herself it was nothing at all. She told herself this twice. The flowers around her had stopped being uniformly still. Here and there, in patches, they bent, as if something low and unseen were moving through them on a path that intersected her own, always a few feet off, always just outside the place her eyes happened to be resting. She was being paced. The certainty of that settled into her stomach like cold water, absolute and wordless, arriving before she had the sense to argue herself out of it. Not a fox. Not the wind. Something with a purpose, moving alongside her, matching her stride, waiting to see what she would do. The pendant went hot enough to sting. Rory did not run. She wanted to—every animal thing in her wanted to—but some colder, steadier part of her, the part that had gotten her out of a flat in Cardiff at two in the morning with nothing but a bag and a bus ticket, told her that running was for things that could be outrun, and she did not yet know what this was. So she walked, faster now, toward a center she could not see, past flowers that bent toward a shape she refused to name, while the stars wheeled overhead in a sky that had never been hers to begin with, and somewhere behind her, keeping perfect and patient pace, something breathed.