Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEA0S4B4CN7344YWM291KVJ

The oaks marking the grove's edge stood black against a sky gone the colour of a bruise, and Rory counted them as she passed—one, two, three—the way her mother taught her to count sheep, except these weren't for sleeping. They were for knowing she was still in the world she understood. She'd come for the pendant. That was the whole of it. Silas had said the grove sometimes gave back what it took, that time slipped sideways in there and maybe, just maybe, the pendant that had gone cold and lightless three days ago would wake up again if she brought it to where it started. Aurora didn't believe half of what Silas said on a good day, but the Heartstone hadn't so much as flickered since Tuesday, and that felt like its own kind of warning. The grass didn't crunch under her boots. That was the first wrong thing, though she didn't clock it as wrong until she was well past the standing stones and the crunch simply wasn't there, like someone had muted that particular frequency of the world. "Right," she said, mostly to hear her own voice do something normal. "Wildflowers in November. Sure." They bloomed anyway, pale things closed up tight for the night, and she didn't remember them being this close to the path last time. Or maybe the path had moved. She held the pendant in her fist, willing warmth into a stone that gave her nothing back, not even its usual faint glow, just a dead weight on a chain. The clearing opened the way it always did, sudden and complete, like the trees had never been arranged any other way. Rory stopped at its edge and made herself breathe out slow through her nose. Somewhere off to her left, a sound started up that she almost recognised—a rhythmic, wet clicking, like teeth chattering underwater—and then it stopped the second she turned her head toward it. "Funny," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. She walked the perimeter first, because that was what you did, wasn't it, in places like this—you mapped the edges before you trusted the middle. The moon hung low and orange through gaps in the canopy, except it didn't move the way moons moved, sliding smooth across the sky. It jumped. She'd glance at it near one break in the branches, look at the pendant, look up again, and it'd be somewhere else entirely, too far to have travelled in the time she'd taken her eyes off it. Something rustled in the ferns to her right and did not stop rustling. She'd have called it a fox, once. Foxes made that kind of sound, low to the ground, unbothered. But foxes didn't keep pace with a walking person for a full minute without breaking, matching her stride exactly, and when Rory finally stopped dead in her tracks and stared hard at the black tangle of undergrowth, the rustling stopped a half-second after her, like an echo arriving late. "Right, no. Nope." She backed toward the centre of the clearing instead, where the grass grew soft and pale and the flowers, at least, seemed content to stay flowers. The pendant sat heavy against her palm. She held it up, turned it in the strange stuttering moonlight, looking for any hint of that deep crimson pulse, any warmth at all. Nothing. A branch cracked somewhere behind her—not near, but not far enough either—and she spun, boots skidding slightly on grass that still refused to make a sound. Nothing there. Just the black wall of oaks, and beyond them the darker wall of whatever wasn't oaks anymore the longer she looked, shapes that held still exactly as long as she watched them and no longer. Her breath fogged in front of her, and that struck her as odd too, because the air hadn't felt cold going in. It felt cold now. "Isolde?" she tried, because Silas mentioned that name once, some caretaker of this place, half-myth even to him. "If you're about, I could use a word." The clicking sound started again, closer now, off to her right, and this time it didn't stop when she turned. Three sharp clicks, a pause, three more, patient as a clock. She held very still. The flowers near her feet, the ones that had been closed tight, folded like fists—she was almost sure, wasn't she, that a moment ago there'd been more of them. Now there were fewer. Not fewer as if they'd wilted. Fewer as if something had gathered them up and taken them away while her back was turned, stem and root and all, leaving small dark hollows in the soft earth like fresh graves for something the size of a fist. She counted the hollows. Six. She didn't remember there being six. The clicking stopped. In the new silence, she heard breathing that wasn't hers. Low, even, patient, coming from a direction she couldn't quite place—not from the treeline, not from the ferns, but from somewhere closer, somewhere that made the hair along her arms lift despite the pendant's dead weight and her own dead calm. She'd learned, with Evan, how to go still and small and unnoticed, how to let her body do the thinking her mind was too frightened to manage. She did that now. Stood like a fencepost. Breathed like she wasn't breathing at all. The moon jumped again, and in the half-second flash of new light she caught something at the treeline—not moving, just there, tall and thin and wrong in its proportions, elbows too high, head tilted at an angle a neck shouldn't allow—and then the light shifted and it wasn't there, or she couldn't find it again, which struck her as somehow worse. The pendant, against her palm, gave one small, cold pulse. Not warmth. Not the glow she'd hoped for. Just a pulse, like something deep inside the stone had noticed her fear and decided to acknowledge it. She turned for the standing stones without deciding to, her feet choosing for her the way they'd learned to choose back when choosing quickly had meant the difference between a bruise and a scar. Behind her, soft as a held breath finally let go, something exhaled.