Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMV07F1MHEEDS7XJSDM

Richmond Park at night belonged to a different world. Rory had known that before she came. She'd told herself it didn't matter, that she'd be in and out before midnight, that the pendant would guide her and she'd find what she was looking for without any fuss. She'd told herself a lot of things on the bus ride over, watching the orange blur of streetlamps give way to darker roads, and she believed fewer of them with every step she took into the park. The main gates had been locked, of course. She'd climbed the side wall where the stone had crumbled lowest, dropping down into the wet grass with a sound that seemed to carry for miles in the stillness. She stood there a moment, listening to her own breathing, before she moved on. The park stretched ahead of her in shades of grey and black. The path she knew from daytime visits — the one that curved south past the ponds and into the denser treeline — looked different now. Narrower. The grass on either side rose higher than she remembered, and the distant silhouettes of the old oaks sat hunched against a sky that gave almost no light. Cloud cover had eaten the moon whole. She kept her torch low, aimed at the ground in front of her feet. She'd read somewhere that you shouldn't shine a torch into the dark of Richmond Park at night, that the deer would startle and charge. She wasn't entirely certain that was the only reason she kept the beam pointed down. The Heartstone pendant lay warm against her sternum beneath her jacket. She pressed her fingers to it through the fabric out of habit, and found the warmth had deepened since she'd left the road. It pulsed with a faint, slow rhythm, like something sleeping with a heartbeat distinct from her own. That was good, she reminded herself. That meant she was heading the right direction. The path dissolved into open ground, and she navigated by memory and the pendant's pull, crossing the grass until the treeline closed around her. The oaks here were enormous, older than anything that had a right to still be standing, their roots buckling up through the ground in long arches she had to step over. The beam of her torch swept their bark and found faces in the grooves — not really, she knew, just shadows and pattern recognition doing what brains did in the dark. Just that. She heard the deer before she saw them. A rustle in the undergrowth to her left. Then stillness. She stopped walking and held the torch steady, but there was nothing in the beam. After a moment she moved on. The sound came again, further along, keeping pace. Deer moved quietly but not that quietly, and they moved in groups, and they didn't track along parallel to a person's path for two hundred metres without breaking cover. She told herself this one was curious. Territorial, maybe. A stag — rutting season had been recent enough that a large male might still be jumpy and aggressive. She told herself this and kept walking, and the sound kept moving beside her. When it stopped, the silence felt louder than the footfalls had. She reached the boundary stones earlier than she expected. They stood in a rough arc at the edge of the clearing, ancient oaks split and weathered into shapes that weren't quite natural, their angles too deliberate, their spacing too precise to be the work of anything but intention. Wildflowers grew at their bases in defiance of the season — small white things, and something pale yellow she couldn't name, their petals open as though it were noon in July rather than a November night close to midnight. She crouched beside one and touched a petal. It was soft and entirely real. The Grove sat beyond them, the clearing itself lower than the surrounding ground, cupped like a palm held open. She could feel the air change as she passed the first stone — a pressure shift, like descending in a lift, like the world had adjusted its hold on her very slightly. She went in. The pendant's pulse quickened. She unzipped her jacket and curled her fingers around it, and the warmth spread into her palm like a coal held through cloth. She was looking for a marker, something she'd been told to find. A split stone near the centre of the clearing, half-buried, with markings on its underside. She started towards the middle of the Grove, her torch sweeping slow arcs across the grass. That was when she heard the breathing. Not hers. Hers she could account for — the careful, measured pull and push of someone trying to stay calm. This was different. Slower. Heavier. Coming from somewhere behind her and slightly to the left, near one of the boundary oaks. She turned. Her torch found nothing but the standing stones and the wildflowers and the dark. She stood without moving for long enough that her calves began to ache from the tension of being ready to run, and nothing moved, and the breathing didn't repeat, and she began to construct reasonable explanations. Sound carried strangely in enclosed spaces. She was tired. She'd been frightened coming in and her mind was primed to misread stimulus. She turned back to the centre of the clearing. The torch beam slid across the grass, and she saw the depression in the ground she'd been looking for — shallow, circular, the soil slightly darker — and there was the split stone at its edge, just as she'd been told. She crossed towards it and was almost there when she noticed that the wildflowers around the depression were all closed. Every one of them. Petals drawn tight as fists. The ones at the boundary stones had been open. She stopped. The pendant went cold. Not cooler — cold. Ice-against-skin cold, a sudden drop that made her breath catch, and she pulled her hand away from it and pressed it to her side and stood in the centre of the Grove and understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with reasoning, that something in the clearing had noticed her. She didn't move. She didn't shine the torch to her left, where the grass had begun, very quietly, to bend.