Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEACJD4GDGZMAFKMGCRAM59

The standing stones marked the edge of the grove like teeth, pale under a moon that seemed too bright for London's usual sky. Rory had walked this stretch of Richmond Park a hundred times, but never at night, never alone, and never because the Heartstone Pendant against her collarbone had gone warm enough to feel through her jumper. It had started buzzing an hour ago, back at Silas' bar, while she stacked glasses and tried not to think about Evan's name showing up on a mutual friend's Instagram. The pulse had been faint then, a heartbeat under fabric. Now, standing at the threshold of the grove, it throbbed like something alive. "Right," she said, to no one. "In and out." The wildflowers didn't care about the season. Bluebells and something that looked like foxglove but glowed faintly grew tangled together, blooming in defiance of October. Rory stepped between two oak stones and the temperature dropped, not cold exactly, but different — pressure change, like descending too fast in a lift. She checked her phone. No signal, obviously. The screen read 11:47. She'd entered at half past eleven. The path Isolde had described wound left past a fallen log shaped like a sleeping dog. Rory found it exactly where it should be, and that unsettled her more than if it hadn't been there at all. Everything matched. Too precisely. Somewhere behind her, a twig snapped. She turned. Nothing but the stones, dark against a sky that held stars she didn't recognize, clusters that didn't belong to any constellation she'd learned in school. She exhaled, watched her breath fog, and kept walking. The second sound came from ahead — a low hum, almost musical, like wind through a bottle's neck. She followed it because Isolde's note had said follow the sound of the grove's heart, and because turning back now meant admitting she was afraid. The hum stopped the moment she stepped into the clearing proper. Rory stood still. The silence afterward had texture to it, thick and expectant, the kind of quiet that came after someone finished speaking and waited for a response. She looked around. Empty clearing, empty trees, wildflowers bending though there was no wind to bend them. "Hello?" Her voice didn't echo. It should have — the clearing was ringed with trees close enough to bounce sound — but it just fell away, swallowed whole. The pendant flared hot enough that she pressed a hand to her chest. Something moved at the treeline. Not a shape, not quite — more an absence, a patch of darker dark sliding between two trunks. Rory's eyes tracked it and found nothing when she looked directly, only a suggestion of it lingering at the edges, gone the instant she turned her head. She'd read about this. Peripheral things. Things that existed only in the spaces you weren't looking. She made herself breathe slow. "I'm looking for the portal," she said, louder now, aiming the words at the trees like a password. "Isolde sent me. I'm not here to—" The words died because she heard breathing that wasn't hers. It came from close, close enough that she felt it might be behind her shoulder, except when she spun there was only grass, flattened in a rough circle like something had recently stood there and left. The wildflowers near her feet had wilted. Just the ones in the circle. Black at the edges, curling in on themselves, and the smell that rose off them was wrong, sweet and rotten together, like fruit left too long in a bowl. Rory backed away from the circle. Her heel caught a root and she stumbled, caught herself against a standing stone that hadn't been there when she'd walked this path a minute ago. She was sure of it. She'd have noticed a stone that size. She looked up. The oak trees had rearranged themselves, or she'd lost track of direction, or the grove had decided to fold around her like a hand closing. Time moves differently here, Isolde had told her. Minutes outside, hours inside. Or the other way round. Rory had nodded along without really absorbing it, the way you nod at warnings that feel theoretical until they aren't. The humming started again, closer. This time she recognized a rhythm to it, something almost like breathing set to music, in and out, and beneath it, softer, a second sound — wet, deliberate, footsteps in the sort of mud that didn't exist on solid grass. "Whoever's there," Rory said, and hated how thin her voice came out, "I'm not scared of you." A lie, obviously. The dark between the trees rippled, like heat off tarmac, like something enormous shifting its weight without moving its feet. The pendant burned white-hot against her skin, bright enough that she could see its glow reflected in the grass, and beneath that light she saw them — footprints, forming in real time a few feet ahead of her, sinking into ground that had been undisturbed a heartbeat before. Bare, too long, toes curling wrong. Walking toward her without a body attached. Rory didn't scream. She'd trained herself out of screaming a long time ago, back when screaming only made Evan angrier, made things worse. Instead she stood very still and watched the last footprint sink two feet from her boots, and felt the air where a face should have been, breath ghosting warm and rank across her cheek. "I don't want trouble," she whispered. The grove answered by going utterly silent — no hum, no wet footsteps, no wind through wildflowers that shouldn't bloom in October. Just her heartbeat, and the pendant's glow dimming as whatever stood in front of her leaned close enough that she felt the shape of its attention, patient, curious, in no hurry at all.