Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V95DAD5KDSGHP3HQ6D5XQ

Richmond Park held its breath at this hour. Rory had come through the east gate just past midnight, the padlock left conveniently open the way the note had promised — a folded square of paper she'd found wedged beneath her flat door three days ago, unsigned, the handwriting careful and slanted as if someone had written it with their non-dominant hand. *Come Thursday. The grove. Midnight. Come alone.* Not a request. Not quite a threat either. Something in between, like the space before lightning when the air goes metallic and your teeth ache. She'd told herself she wouldn't go. She'd told herself that twice on Wednesday and once more on the bus to Richmond, and now here she was, trainers wet from the grass, the park swallowing her in enormous darkness. The pendant lay against her sternum beneath her jacket. She pressed her palm to it through the fabric, more habit than intention, and felt nothing unusual. Cold silver. Inert stone. That, at least, was something. She'd been to the grove twice before, both times in daylight, and the path had seemed obvious enough — through the bracken, past the two bowed oaks that leaned together like old men sharing a secret, then down the shallow slope to the standing stones. At night, the park rearranged itself. The bracken rose taller, or seemed to. Shadows absorbed the landmarks she'd catalogued. Her phone torch threw a pale cone ahead of her and made the darkness on either side feel solid and deliberate. She found the bowed oaks. The relief lasted about four steps. The first wrong thing was the silence. Not ordinary silence — Richmond at midnight still held the distant pulse of the city, the occasional fox bark, the wind in the canopy. This silence was architectural. A structure built to keep something out, or to keep something in. The ambient hum of London cut away so completely that Rory became aware of her own breathing, the soft collapse of each footfall in the grass, the faint creak of her jacket when she moved her arms. She stopped. Counted to five. Started walking again. The standing stones emerged from the dark in a way that felt less like approaching them and more like them deciding to be visible. Ancient oak, the bark so old it had gone silver-grey, each stone taller than her by a full head. She passed between two of them and the temperature dropped four degrees in a single step. Inside the grove, the wildflowers were open. Every one of them, in the middle of the night in October, their petals spread as if tracking a sun that was not there. Small white ones she couldn't name. Something purple and low to the ground. The whole clearing breathed a faint sweetness that was not unpleasant but was entirely wrong for the season. Rory stood in the centre and waited. A minute passed. Two. "Hello?" Her voice landed strangely, absorbed rather than echoed. The clearing was maybe fifteen metres across and surrounded by dense elder and hawthorn, and sound ought to have bounced. It didn't. It just ended. She checked her phone. 12:07. Whoever or whatever she was meeting was late, or she was and the note had been unclear, or nobody was coming at all. All three possibilities felt equally plausible. She was deciding between leaving and sitting on the log she could see at the clearing's edge when she heard the breathing. It came from her left, low to the ground, the slow rhythmic rasp of something large at rest. She turned. Her torch swept the hawthorn. Nothing. The breathing continued for two, three seconds and then stopped, not gradually but instantly, as if whatever made it became aware she'd heard. The pendant warmed. Not the urgent pulse she'd felt near the Hel portal months ago, nothing like that. A gentle, persistent heat, the kind a stone holds after a summer afternoon. She pressed her fingers to it through the jacket. It was definitely warm. It stayed warm. She turned in a slow circle. The flowers nearest the north edge of the clearing — she was nearly certain — had been open a moment ago. Now they were closed, folded tight as fists. She watched the ones nearest her. They stayed open. She looked back to the north edge. All of them closed now. Something moved at the tree line. Not walking — that wasn't the right word. A displacement at the edge of her torch beam, a darkness reconfiguring itself into a different shape, like watching a word you know become a word you don't. She swung the beam directly at it and there was nothing there. Elder trees. The pale undersides of leaves. A gap in the canopy where moonlight fell in a thin stripe. She realised she'd backed towards the centre of the clearing. She didn't remember moving. The pendant was hotter now, unmistakably, and she unzipped her jacket and tucked her hand inside, wrapping her fingers around it. The chain was warm too. The deep crimson stone held its faint inner glow but brighter than usual, a thin light that shouldn't have been visible through her fingers but was, seeping between them in pale red threads. Then she heard footsteps. Not at the tree line. Inside the clearing. Behind her. Slow. Very slow. The particular deliberate pace of something that wanted to be heard. Three steps. Four. She counted them and did not turn and her jaw locked and her whole body had the rigid stillness of an animal that knows it is too late to run but cannot stop the calculation anyway. The footsteps stopped at what felt like two metres. Maybe less. The wildflowers around her feet, every single one of them, closed.