Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMS6V64CXX6WXAA2EV5

The last bus to Richmond had smelled of chip fat and someone else's misery, and Rory had ridden it alone for forty minutes watching her own reflection dissolve in the rain-streaked window. Now she stood at the park entrance with a torch she'd borrowed from Silas' bar and a note she'd already memorised, her breath making small ghosts in the October dark. The gate was unlocked. She'd expected that. The Heartstone pendant rested against her sternum beneath her jacket, and as she stepped through the iron gate it gave a single, low pulse of warmth. Not the urgent throb she'd felt near the Hel portals. Gentler. Like a second heartbeat checking in. She followed the path she knew — past the car park, past the bench with the broken slat, left where the path forked at the old oak with the split crown. The grove was twenty minutes' walk from the gate on a clear day. Tonight, with the torch cutting a pale wedge through the dark and the treeline pressing close on either side, it felt longer. The park felt wider. She kept walking. Richmond at night was never silent. There were deer. There was distant traffic. Wind in the canopy. The ordinary grammar of a city park after hours. Rory had been here twice before and she knew the sounds. That was why she stopped. Not because something was there, but because something wasn't. The deer that usually moved through this stretch of bracken — she could hear nothing. No rustle, no snapped twig. The wind had died so completely that the treeline stood as solid and still as a painted backdrop. Even the gravel under her boots seemed to absorb itself. She swept the torch in a slow arc. Trees, bracken, path. Trees, bracken, path. She walked on. The first oak standing stone appeared at the edge of her torchlight, moss-dark and chest-high, and the relief she felt at seeing it surprised her. She was close. The stones marked the boundary of the grove, arranged in a loose horseshoe around the clearing's mouth, and between two of them the air held a quality she had no clean word for — denser, maybe, or more present, as though the dark there had more substance than the dark behind her. She stepped through. The grove opened up. Wildflowers that had no business blooming in October pressed up through the grass — white campion, yarrow, something small and purple she'd never been able to name. They were always there. That was normal. What was not normal was that in the torchlight they looked wrong. She crouched and looked more closely. The petals were intact, the stems upright, but they had no moisture on them despite the rain she'd walked through. Bone dry, every one of them, as though something had drawn the damp out of the air directly above the clearing. She stood up and turned a full circle. The clearing was empty. She'd come for a meeting. That was the whole point. Isolde had sent word through channels Rory still didn't fully understand, a folded paper delivered to the Golden Empress with her name on it, no postage, just her name. The note said the grove, the note said midnight, the note said alone. She'd done all three. The clearing was empty and the pendant sat warm and still against her chest and the silence around her had the specific quality of held breath. She checked her phone. Eleven minutes past midnight. "Right," she said, because saying something made the silence retreat by half an inch. Nothing answered. She hadn't expected anything to. She sat on the low flat stone at the clearing's centre — she'd sat on it before, Isolde had sat across from her on the roots of the oak — and she settled her hands in her lap and she waited. The torch she set on the stone beside her, angled outward. A sensible precaution. She heard it at seven minutes past one: a sound at the perimeter. Not footsteps. More like something displacing air in the way that footsteps do, the almost-sound before contact. She turned to look and the torch caught the edge of the standing stones and the long corridor of dark between them and nothing else. She watched that corridor for a full minute. The wildflowers nearest the stones had bent slightly toward each other, their heads touching, though there was no wind. They hadn't been doing that before. She looked at the rest of the perimeter. The flowers there were upright. Only around the stones — only where she'd heard the sound — had they moved. She kept her eyes on that spot and reached for her phone. No signal. She'd had three bars on the path. The pendant pulsed. Not the gentle check-in pulse of arriving. A longer one, deeper, the kind she associated with proximity to something that shouldn't be proximate. She pressed her hand flat against her jacket and felt it beat against her palm — once, and then again, slow and deliberate. The torchlight flickered. She picked the torch up and tapped it against her knee and it steadied, and in the half second before it steadied she saw — or thought she saw — a shape at the tree line that had not been there before. Not in the gap between the standing stones but opposite, behind her, where the clearing gave way to a bank of old beeches. Human in scale. Still. And then the torch held and the beeches were only beeches, bark pale and unremarkable in the light. She didn't turn her back on them. She stood up, slowly, the stone cold through her jeans, and she moved to put the nearest standing stone against her back. The pendant pulsed a third time. The bent wildflowers were still bent. The beeches were still beeches. Somewhere beyond the tree line — far enough that she felt it more than heard it — something exhaled.