Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9TT4K9PKSY9RA98PZ4AZY

The standing stones came up out of the dark like teeth. Rory had walked this stretch of Richmond Park a dozen times in daylight, delivering the odd order to the groundskeeper's cottage near Sheen Gate, but she'd never come at night, and she'd certainly never come looking for the oaks that weren't supposed to be there. Eva's directions had been maddeningly vague—*past the third bench, where the path stops making sense*—and Rory had laughed at the time, thinking her friend was being dramatic. She wasn't laughing now. The path had, in fact, stopped making sense about ten minutes ago, folding back on itself twice before spitting her out here, in a clearing ringed by trees too old and too still to belong to any park she recognized. The pendant at her throat was warm. Not body-warm. Warm like a coal banked under ash, warm enough that she'd lifted the chain away from her collarbone twice already to check it hadn't caught fire. The crimson stone pulsed faintly against her palm, a slow heartbeat out of sync with her own, and she told herself that was probably important, probably meant something, and that she should probably not be standing here alone at eleven at night trying to figure out what. She'd come because the note tucked under her flat's door had said *the Grove will open for you on the solstice, wear the stone, come alone.* No signature. She'd assumed Eva. Eva was always doing things like this, half-joking, half-serious, forgetting that not everyone found cryptic fae nonsense charming at midnight in October. Now, standing among the stones, she wasn't so sure. The wildflowers should not have been blooming. She noticed that first, in the wrongness of it—drifts of them silver-blue in the moonlight, foxglove and something that looked like heather but smelled of ash, growing thick around the stones despite the cold that had settled into the park an hour ago. Her breath fogged in front of her. The flowers didn't so much as shiver. *No wind,* she thought. *There's no wind.* She should have turned around then. She knew it even as she stepped further in, boots sinking slightly into ground that felt too soft, too giving, like walking on the skin of something enormous and sleeping. But curiosity had always been her worst habit, the thing that got her into trouble long before Evan, long before London, and some small stubborn part of her wanted to see this through, wanted to know why a stranger had given her a pendant that pulsed like a second heart and told her to come to a place that shouldn't exist. Something rustled to her left. She turned. Nothing—just the tree line, black and close, branches knitted overhead so thickly that the sky above the clearing was a ragged wound of stars, and everywhere else was dark. She stood very still and listened, the way her father had taught her once, half-joking, when she was small and afraid of the noises old houses made. *Listen properly, Rory. Fear lies. Your ears don't.* Her ears told her the rustling had not stopped. It had simply moved. Now it was behind her. She spun, boots slipping on the too-soft ground, and caught only the suggestion of movement at the very edge of her vision—a shape low and pale sliding between two standing stones, gone before she could resolve it into anything nameable. A trick of moonlight. A deer, maybe; Richmond Park was full of them, great dumb velvet-eyed things that didn't startle for anyone. But deer made sound when they moved. Hooves on hard ground, the crack of a twig, the huff of breath. This had made no sound at all, until it wanted her to hear it. The pendant pulsed hot enough now that she pressed her hand flat over it through her coat, as if she could smother the warning. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to, swallowed instantly by the clearing, as though the air itself refused to carry it further than a few feet. That, more than anything, made the hair on her arms rise. Sound should travel. Sound should echo, at least a little, off the ring of ancient trunks. Instead her single word simply died, and the silence that followed felt attentive in a way silence had no business being. She made herself breathe. In for four, out for four, the way she'd learned to do in the months after Evan, when panic used to close its hand around her throat for no reason at all except that he'd taught her fear as a kind of second language. This isn't that, she told herself. This is something else. Worse, maybe, or maybe not worse at all—maybe just strange, fae-strange, the kind of strange Eva always talked about with stars in her eyes. Then why did it feel like being watched by something that had been waiting for her specifically? The flowers nearest her feet bent, all at once, in a rippling wave that had no wind behind it—bent as if something vast and low had passed just beneath the surface of the ground, a shape moving under the meadow the way a shark moves under water, betrayed only by the wake it left. Rory went cold all the way down to her sternum. She backed toward the stones without deciding to, without looking away from the place where the flowers had bent, and her shoulder struck one of the ancient oaks hard enough to jar her teeth. Bark, real bark, rough and cold under her palm. That, at least, was solid. That, at least, made sense. A voice—not a voice, exactly, more the impression of one, arriving in her skull sideways rather than through her ears—said, quite gently, *you're late.* She did not scream. She would be, later, absurdly proud of that. She turned instead, slow, every muscle screaming to run, and found the clearing empty. Stones. Flowers. Dark trees stitched shut against the sky. Nothing moved. Nothing rustled. The pendant burned like a brand against her collarbone, and somewhere far off—outside the ring, outside whatever pocket of not-quite-London she'd wandered into—she heard, very faintly, a church bell toll a single note. She had left her flat at eleven-fifteen. It should not, by any calculation, be midnight yet.