Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEA57SRNQRZD8MJDD3CHG3N

The standing stones were easier to find at night than Rory expected. She'd worried, on the bus out to Richmond, that she'd wander the park for hours in the dark and never locate the grove at all, that the entrance would seal itself against her the way Eva swore it sometimes did. But the oaks seemed to want her to find them. They rose up out of the ordinary trees like something remembered rather than seen, their bark pale as bone in the moonlight, and the gap between the two largest ones breathed cold air against her face the moment she stepped close. She'd come because the pendant had gone warm against her collarbone three nights running, always at the same hour, always for exactly as long as it took her to sit up in bed and press her palm against it. Warm like a held breath. Warm like something on the other side of a door, waiting for her to notice the doorknob turning. She hadn't told Eva. She hadn't told anyone. She'd simply started walking to Richmond Park after her last delivery run, the smell of Yu-Fei's char siu still on her jacket, the Heartstone a small hard weight under her shirt. The grove, when she pushed through the gap in the stones, was wrong in a way she couldn't name at first. It looked right. Wildflowers she didn't have names for nodded in a wind she couldn't feel, silvered by a moon that hung too low and too large above the canopy. The air smelled of crushed grass and something sweeter underneath, like fruit going soft. She remembered Eva telling her about this place — an hour here, a day out there, or the other way round, you never knew until you left and counted the hours you'd lost or gained. Rory had laughed at the time. She wasn't laughing now. She stood just inside the tree line and made herself breathe. It was quiet. That was the first wrong thing, once she noticed it — not the ordinary quiet of a park at night, which was full of small sounds, wind and leaves and the distant hush of traffic, but a quiet that had a shape to it, a held quality, as if the whole clearing were listening back. She turned in a slow circle. The flowers didn't rustle, though the wind clearly moved them. She watched one white bloom bend and straighten and heard nothing at all. The pendant lay still against her skin. No warmth. She almost turned around then — almost decided the whole thing had been her imagination, three nights of bad sleep and stress dreams dressed up as magic — but something kept her feet where they were, some old animal caution that had kept her alive through worse than this. She walked further in. The grove was larger than it should have been, larger than the gap in the standing stones had any right to contain. She passed a shallow pool of black water that hadn't been visible from the entrance, its surface so still it looked solid, like obsidian poured into a hollow. She crouched to look at her reflection and didn't find one. The moon was there, doubled in the water's face, but there was no shape of a woman crouching over it, no black hair falling forward, no bright startled eyes. She straightened up fast enough that her knees cracked and the sound seemed to travel a long way before it stopped. That was when she noticed the flowers behind her had changed color. She was almost sure of it. She'd walked past white blooms, she'd have sworn to it, but when she glanced back the nearest cluster showed dark red petals, red as the stone at her throat, red as something she didn't want to think about too closely. She told herself flowers came in more than one color. She told herself the moonlight was playing tricks. She kept walking, faster now, her hand rising without her quite deciding to touch the pendant, checking it, willing it to warm and tell her she wasn't a fool for coming. Somewhere off to her left, past a stand of birches she didn't remember passing on her way in — because she was fairly sure she had entered from the right, hadn't she, wasn't the pool supposed to be behind her now — something moved. It wasn't large. That was almost worse than if it had been. A low shifting at the very edge of what she could see, gone the instant she turned her head toward it, so that she was left staring at empty grass and doubting herself, and doubting the doubt, until she caught it again a few seconds later, a little closer, a little more to the right. Like something circling. Like something pacing the outside of a fence it hadn't yet decided to jump. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. The word didn't echo. It simply stopped, swallowed by the listening quiet, and she had the sudden unpleasant thought that it had gone somewhere, that quiet like this didn't erase a sound so much as absorb it, take it in and keep it. The pendant warmed. She felt it before she understood what it meant — a small point of heat against her sternum, spreading, and her hand closed over it out of pure reflex. Warm like near a Hel portal, Eva had told her once, half-joking, watching Rory turn the stone over in her fingers in the flat above Silas' bar. Warm like a door about to open. Rory stood very still in the middle of the grove, ringed by red flowers she was almost certain had been white, beside a pool that held no reflection of her, and understood with the flat, sinking certainty of dropped stone that she was not standing here alone. She had not been alone since she stepped through the oaks. Whatever paced the treeline had not been hunting for an opening. It had been waiting for her to arrive. The shape came out of the birches slowly, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world — and here, she thought with a horror that had nothing to do with claws or teeth, it probably did.