Run: 2026-10-06-01M48VRWRMMD3JJQ0FD06TV0AM

The Heartstone pendant hung against Rory's collarbone, warm as a living thing. She'd come to the Grove because the warmth had pulled her here, insistent as a heartbeat, and she needed answers before morning. The delivery shift at Golden Empress had ended at midnight. She'd told Yu-Fei she had a family emergency. The lie sat in her stomach like cold rice. Richmond Park swallowed her whole. No streetlamps reached this far. The oak standing stones rose from the dark like broken teeth, and beyond them the clearing breathed with flowers that had no business blooming in November. Rory stepped through. The air thickened, sweet and wrong, like honey left too long in the sun. Time slipped. She knew this. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. She checked her phone. 12:47. She'd crossed the boundary at 12:30. The Grove should have been empty. Isolde's Grove, the locals called it, though no one spoke of what happened to Isolde. Rory walked the deer paths, her trainers silent on the moss. Wildflowers crowded the edges of her vision—bluebells, foxgloves, things that glowed faintly silver under no moon she could find. The sky above showed stars, but wrong ones. Too many. Arranged in patterns that hurt to follow. The pendant pulsed. Once. Twice. A rhythm. She stopped at the centre of the clearing, where the grass grew in a perfect circle, worn smooth as a dance floor. The Heartstone grew hot against her skin, pressing outward, demanding. Rory pulled it free. The crimson stone caught starlight and threw it back in fractured pieces. Her breath fogged. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in as many seconds. Something moved in the tree line. Rory turned. The oaks stood still, their branches heavy with leaves that shouldn't exist in this season. Between two trunks, darkness pooled thicker than shadow should allow. She waited. Counted to sixty. The darkness held its shape. Her phone buzzed. A text from Eva: *You ok? Evan's asking about you.* Rory's thumb hovered. She typed back: *Fine. Working late.* The lie tasted of copper. The pendant burned now, a brand against her sternum. She followed its pull deeper into the Grove, past the standing stones, into territory the deer paths didn't reach. The wildflowers here grew taller, their stems pale as bone, their petals the colour of old bruises. They turned to face her as she passed. All of them. Hundreds of eyes that weren't eyes. A sound came from her left. Not an animal. Not wind. A wet, rhythmic clicking, like a tongue working against teeth. Rory froze. The clicking stopped. She breathed. It resumed, closer, from her right now. She walked faster. The flowers parted for her, stems bending like courtiers. The pendant's warmth spread through her chest, numbing, almost pleasant. She told herself it was guiding her. Protecting her. The Grove had rules she didn't know, and the Heartstone was her key, her map, her— The clicking surrounded her. Front, back, above. Rory spun, and in the corner of her vision, something tall and wrong unhurried itself from behind an oak and stepped back into shadow before she could turn fully. She saw only the angle of a limb, too long, jointed backward. The smell reached her then. Lilies and rotting meat. "Hello?" Her voice cracked. The Grove answered with silence. She ran. The deer paths had vanished, replaced by a corridor of flowers that closed behind her like a throat swallowing. The pendant blazed against her skin, and Rory understood with horrible clarity that it wasn't protecting her. It had brought her here. The warmth was bait. The pulse was a lure. The clicking converged. She heard breathing that wasn't hers, wet and eager, from everywhere and nowhere. Rory pushed through a wall of foxgloves and stumbled into the circle again, the worn grass, the centre of everything. She fell to her knees. The Heartstone lay against her palm, pulsing in time with something vast and patient moving through the dark beyond the flowers. The stars overhead shifted. Rory watched them rearrange into a pattern she almost recognised, almost— A hand touched her shoulder. She didn't turn. Couldn't. The fingers were cold, impossibly cold, and they pressed down with the weight of something that had waited a long time for someone to come looking. Rory looked at the pendant. It had gone dark. The crimson stone was black now, absorbing the silver light of the wrong stars. "Rory." The voice came from everywhere. From the flowers. From the stones. From the space behind her eyes. "You've been gone so long." She thought of Eva, waiting for a text that would never come. Of Yu-Fei, locking up Golden Empress alone. Of the flat above Silas' bar, the radiator ticking, the city humming its indifferent song. She thought of Evan, who had taught her that love could leave marks, and of her mother in Cardiff, who still didn't know why her daughter had stopped answering calls. The hand on her shoulder tightened. Not painful. Hungry. Rory reached into her pocket and found her phone. The screen showed 12:48. Eighteen minutes since she'd crossed the boundary. Or eighteen years. The Grove didn't care about arithmetic. She typed one message. Her thumb moved without her permission, guided by something that wore her desperation like a familiar coat. *Come find me,* she wrote. *Please.* She hit send. The phone died, black screen, and in the darkness that followed, the clicking stopped. Everything stopped. Rory sat alone in the centre of the Grove, the dead pendant cold against her skin, and waited for the thing behind her to finish deciding what she was.