Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9TXCXY0WMT5S2ENGEY9ED

The standing stones were easier to find than Rory expected, which should have told her something right there. Eva's directions had been vague—*past the old oaks, near where the ground dips*—but the moment she stepped off the gravel path and into the dark tangle of Richmond Park, she felt the pull of the place like a hand at the small of her back, guiding her. She hadn't planned on coming at night. But the message from her mystery benefactor—three words scrawled on paper slipped under her door, *tonight, the grove*—hadn't left room for negotiation, and the pendant at her throat had started pulsing the moment the sun dropped below the tree line, a slow heartbeat of warmth against her collarbone that matched nothing in her own chest. The stones rose out of the dark like teeth. Six of them, ancient oak weathered to the color of old bone, arranged in a loose circle that her eyes kept sliding away from, as though the space between them didn't want to be looked at directly. Rory stood at the edge of the boundary and made herself breathe. "Right," she said, mostly to hear her own voice. "In you go, then." The air changed the second she crossed the threshold. Outside, London hummed at a distance—traffic, a siren somewhere, the ordinary white noise of a city that never quite slept. Inside the ring of stones, all of that vanished, cut off as cleanly as a door swinging shut. What replaced it was worse: a silence so complete she could hear her own pulse in her ears, and beneath that, something that might have been wind moving through grass, except there was no wind, and the wildflowers around her ankles didn't stir. Wildflowers. In November. Blooming in the dark like it was the height of summer. She'd been told the grove was strange—Eva had warned her, in that careful way Eva had taken to speaking about fae business, like every sentence was a stone she was setting down on a bridge she didn't trust—but strange and *wrong* were different animals, and this was wrong. Rory could feel it in the same place she felt danger on the street at night, that old animal instinct that had kept her alive through worse than this. She walked further in anyway. The pendant was warm enough now that she could feel it through her jumper. The clearing opened up ahead of her, ringed by trees that were too tall, too still, their branches laced overhead into a canopy that let through no moonlight at all—and yet she could see. Everything had its own faint luminescence, the flowers glowing pale gold at their centers, the grass edged in silver, like the whole grove was lit from some source she couldn't locate. It should have been beautiful. Instead the light made everything look embalmed. "Hello?" she called, and hated how small her voice sounded, swallowed by the quiet almost before she'd finished the word. Nothing answered. She hadn't expected anything to. She made herself walk the perimeter of the clearing, one hand resting on the pendant, waiting for it to do something more than pulse—point her somewhere, burn hotter, anything. It just kept up that slow warm throb against her sternum, steady as a second heart. It was on her third pass around the clearing that she noticed the flowers. They'd turned. Every one of them, the pale gold heads that had been facing outward, toward the trees, now angled inward—toward her. She stopped walking. Told herself flowers didn't do that, that she'd miscounted, misjudged the angle the first time round. But she hadn't. She was sure of it in the same way she was sure of her own name, and that certainty sat cold and hard in her stomach. Somewhere behind her, a twig snapped. She turned fast, breath catching, and saw nothing—just the ring of too-tall trees, the dark spaces between their trunks that the strange light didn't quite reach. She stood very still and listened. There: something moving, low to the ground, a soft displacement of grass that came from her left and then, impossibly, from her right, as though it had crossed the whole clearing in the space between heartbeats. "Eva?" she tried, though she knew even as she said it that Eva wasn't here, had never said she'd be here, had only ever been the one who'd warned her about places exactly like this. The grass moved again. Closer. Rory's hand closed hard around the pendant, and for one unbearable second she thought it had gone cold—but no, it was hotter now, hot enough that she almost dropped it, and beneath her palm she could feel it thrumming, not the slow pulse from before but something faster, urgent, like a warning she didn't have the vocabulary to understand. She backed toward the standing stones. Whatever this was, whoever had left that note under her door, she was starting to think the invitation had not been a kindness. The shape at the tree line resolved itself slowly, the way a word will surface from noise if you listen long enough—not stepping out of the dark so much as the dark itself thinning around it, resolving into an outline both too tall and somehow wrong in its proportions, limbs a fraction too long, head tilted at an angle no neck should allow. It did not move toward her. It simply stood, at the very edge of where the light gave way to shadow, and watched, and Rory understood with total clarity that it had been there the entire time—that she had walked past it twice already without seeing it, and it had let her. She didn't run. Some cold, clear part of her mind knew that running was the wrong instinct here, that whatever wore that shape in the dark was patient in a way nothing human could be, and patience like that did not chase things that stood still. "I don't know what you want," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, "but I'm leaving now." The shape didn't answer. The flowers, all around her, had gone still again—facing outward, as though nothing at all had happened, as though she'd imagined the whole slow turning of their heads. She walked backward until the standing stones rose up dark around her, and only then did she let herself run the last few steps, out through the boundary, out into the ordinary cold November air, the distant hum of traffic rushing back into her ears like a held breath finally released. Behind her, the grove was silent. But she did not look back to check whether it was empty.