Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEA430X08V67244D97ENK74

The standing stones marked the tree line like broken teeth, pale under a moon that seemed too bright for London's smog-choked sky. Rory checked her phone again — no signal, not even the single bar she'd had in the car park. She pocketed it and pushed through the bracken, the pendant cold against her collarbone. Eva had said the grove would help. Eva had said a lot of things. "This had better be worth it," Rory muttered, ducking under a low branch. "I've got a six a.m. delivery shift and a landlord who thinks 'creative deadline' means 'creative excuse.'" The wildflowers gave her pause. Bluebells, foxglove, things that shouldn't bloom in November, all standing straight and defiant against a frost that hadn't touched them. She crouched, ran a finger along a petal. Warm. Not cold like it should be, not damp with dew. Warm like skin. She stood too fast, wiped her hand on her jeans. "Right. Fine. Warm flowers. Not a big deal." Her voice didn't carry the way it should have. It went out into the clearing and simply stopped, swallowed whole, no echo bouncing off the stones behind her. She'd noticed the same thing about her footsteps — she couldn't hear them anymore, though she could feel the give of the earth beneath her boots. The pendant pulsed. Once. A small warmth against her sternum, gone before she could be sure she hadn't imagined it. "Okay," she said, mostly to hear something. "Okay, that's new." She turned in a slow circle. The oaks ringed the clearing like sentries, black against a sky gone the wrong colour of purple, and for a moment she could have sworn one of them had moved — not swayed, not bent in wind, but shifted its position entirely, closer than it had been. She counted them. Nine. She counted again. Nine. "Nine's fine. Nine's a normal number of trees." Somewhere to her left, a branch cracked. She spun, pendant swinging out from her chest, and found nothing but more bracken, more shadow, the silhouette of the path she'd come in on. She told herself it was a fox. London parks were full of foxes, bold little bastards that didn't care if you were standing right there. But foxes made noise when they moved after that. Rustling, panting, the scrabble of claws on frozen ground. This had made one sound and then gone utterly, perfectly silent, the kind of silence that came from something choosing not to move rather than something that had stopped. She kept walking. The grove was supposed to have a heart to it, Eva had said, a centre point where the boundary between here and there went thin enough to touch. Rory just needed to find it, needed answers about the pendant and what it wanted from her, and then she could leave and pretend the last month of her life made some kind of sense. The flowers thickened underfoot as she went, brushing cold-warm against her ankles, and she noticed — she couldn't not notice — that they all leaned the same direction. Not towards her. Away from something behind her. She didn't turn around straight away. She made herself count to five first, made herself breathe, because if she spun around gasping like a woman in a bad film then whatever this was would know it had gotten to her. When she did turn, there was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there. Except the tree line looked different. Closer. And she was fairly sure — not certain, but fairly sure — that she'd walked in a straight line from the standing stones, and yet the stones were nowhere in sight now, no pale teeth marking the way back out. "That's not — that's not how paths work," she said, and her voice sounded thin even to her, stretched too tight over something underneath it. A sound came from directly behind the nearest oak. Wet. Low. Like breath drawn through something that wasn't quite a throat, wasn't quite a nose, wasn't quite anything Rory had a word for. She didn't move towards it. She didn't move away either. She stood very still and watched the shadow at the base of that oak, and the shadow watched her back — she was sure of that too, sure the way you're sure someone's staring at you on the tube, that prickling certainty at the back of the neck that has no evidence behind it and doesn't need any. The pendant flared, properly this time, a burst of warmth so sudden she gasped and closed her fist around it through her jumper. "What do you want," she said, not really a question, more a demand thrown out into the dark to see what came back. Nothing came back. The wet breathing sound simply — stopped. And in the new quiet, worse than the sound had been, Rory became aware of the flowers again. They'd turned. All of them, every bloom in the clearing, had rotated on their stems like a field of tiny pale faces, and they were no longer facing away from whatever stood behind the oak. They were facing her. She backed up a step. The ground didn't feel the same beneath her boot — softer, wrong, like she'd stepped somewhere the earth hadn't quite finished deciding to be earth yet. "Right," she breathed. "Right, I'm leaving. Nice grove. Lovely flowers. I'll just —" Something moved at the very edge of her vision, off to the right, low to the ground and quick, gone before she could turn her head fully towards it. When she did turn, the space where it had been held only darkness pooled between two oaks that she was almost certain hadn't been standing quite so close together a moment ago. She didn't run. Running felt like the wrong thing to do, felt like it would matter to whatever was here whether she ran or not, would give it something to want. She walked. Fast, deliberate, the pendant clutched so hard in her fist that the chain bit into her fingers, back towards where the stones ought to be, where they had to be, because a clearing this small couldn't simply swallow its own exit. Behind her, softly, almost gently, something exhaled.