Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VV8BSQ2HCPETNDGTG2BPC

The last dog walker had left Richmond Park an hour ago. Rory had watched from a bench near the car park, her hood pulled low, her fingers turning the pendant over and over beneath her jacket until the silver chain bit a groove into the back of her neck. She'd waited until the woman and her arthritic spaniel had disappeared beyond the rise, and then she'd waited ten minutes more, because the smart thing was never the first thing. Now she stood at the edge of the treeline with her phone torch pointed at the ground and the certain, bone-deep knowledge that she should not be here. She went in anyway. The reason was simple. Three nights running, the Heartstone had woken her at two in the morning — not with the faint, companionable warmth it gave off when she carried it through Southwark or rode the bus past Battersea, but with a sharp, insistent heat, like a coal pressed flat against her sternum. Three nights of sitting upright in her narrow bed above Silas's bar, listening to the thump of bass through the floorboards and the pendant's silent demand. Each time, the warmth had pulled in the same direction: southwest. Richmond. The grove. Someone — something — wanted her attention. The path through the oaks was one she'd walked twice before, both times in daylight, both times with company. Alone and in the dark, the wood felt like a different country. Her torch caught the bark of the nearest tree and made it shine wet, though it hadn't rained in days. The leaf litter was soft and silent under her trainers. She could hear her own breathing and, beneath it, the ambient murmur of the park at night — foxes, wind, distant traffic on the A307. Normal sounds. Sounds she knew. She followed the pendant's warmth like a dowsing rod, angling off the path and into the undergrowth. Brambles caught her jeans. A branch swung back and clipped her temple, and she swore under her breath and kept moving. The oaks thickened around her, their canopy closing overhead until her torch beam was the only light, a pale cone that made everything beyond it blacker by contrast. The standing stones appeared sooner than she expected. They rose from the earth at irregular intervals, five of them, each as tall as her shoulder and carved from ancient oak so old it had petrified to something harder than heartwood. In daylight they looked like a curiosity, an art installation someone had forgotten to plaque. At night, under the thin wash of her phone's LED, they looked like figures standing with their backs to her. Rory stopped at the boundary they described and made herself breathe. The pendant was almost uncomfortably hot against her chest now, its crimson glow visible through the fabric of her shirt — a dull red pulse, steady as a second heartbeat. She pulled it out and held it in her palm. The thumbnail-sized gem threw faint light across her fingers, and she watched the glow intensify, fade, intensify, fade, each cycle slightly faster than the last. She stepped between two of the stones. The temperature dropped. Not gradually, not the way autumn chill settles in. One step, and the air was ten degrees colder, and the sounds of the park — the foxes, the wind, the traffic — stopped. Not faded. Stopped. As if someone had pressed a mute button on the world beyond the stones. The silence was so complete that she could hear blood moving in her own ears. In front of her, the grove opened up: a clearing perhaps forty feet across, ringed by oaks so massive their branches interlocked overhead like the vaulting of a cathedral. Wildflowers carpeted the ground — bluebells and foxglove and something pale and star-shaped she didn't know the name of — all of them in full, impossible bloom despite it being the dead of November. They should have been beautiful. They were beautiful. But beauty and wrongness are not mutually exclusive, and Rory had learned, over the past several weeks, to trust the difference between something that looked right and something that felt it. This did not feel right. She swept her torch across the clearing in a slow arc. Nothing moved. The flowers didn't sway, because there was no wind. The branches overhead didn't creak, because there was no air current to flex them. The stillness was absolute, and it pressed against her skin like water pressure, like the grove was holding its breath. Or holding hers. The pendant pulsed. Hot, then hotter, then hot enough that she nearly dropped it. She curled her fingers around it and hissed through her teeth and took three steps into the clearing, because that was what she'd come here to do — to answer whatever was calling, to find out why the Heartstone wouldn't let her sleep. That was when she heard the sound. It came from her left, low and rhythmic, and for a disoriented moment she thought it was her own footsteps echoing back at her. But she was standing still. The sound continued — a soft, measured tread through undergrowth, the compression of leaf litter underfoot, pace steady, unhurried. Circling. Something was walking the perimeter of the clearing. Rory turned her torch toward the tree line. The beam caught trunks and shadow and nothing else. The footsteps didn't stop. They didn't speed up. They maintained their patient, circling rhythm, and she tracked them with the light — left to right, past the gap between two oaks, behind a stand of bracken, around the curve of the clearing's edge — and saw nothing. Not a shape, not a reflection, not even the displacement of a branch. The sound moved, and the source of the sound did not exist. Her mouth had gone dry. She swallowed and tasted copper. "Hello?" Her voice came out level. She was grateful for that. Cardiff vowels carrying across the silent clearing, absorbed by the canopy above. No echo. The word simply stopped existing the moment it left her lips. The footsteps stopped too. The silence that followed was worse. Before, the quiet had been ambient, a condition of the place. Now it was attentive. She could feel the quality of it change against her skin, the way you feel someone's gaze on the back of your neck in a crowded room. Something was listening. Something nearby was standing very, very still and listening to her, and the Heartstone in her palm was burning like a lit match, its crimson glow now bright enough to throw her shadow long and stark against the wildflowers at her feet. She turned in a slow circle. The torch beam carved across the trees. On her second rotation, she saw the flowers. Not all of them. Just a patch, perhaps six feet from where she stood, slightly to her right. The bluebells there were bent. Not trampled — bent, pressed gently sideways, their stems bowed in a pattern she recognized because she'd been looking down at her own feet a moment ago. It was the impression of a footprint. Then, as she watched, the flower beside it bent. And the one beside that. Slowly, deliberately, the way grass flattens under an invisible weight. Something was walking toward her. Rory took a step backward. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist ached — an old, childish injury that had no reason to hurt but did, the way old things sometimes wake when new things go wrong. She held the pendant out in front of her like a talisman, and its light threw crimson across the approaching trail of crushed flowers, catching petals as they folded, stem by stem, closer. Ten feet. Eight. Six. The air in front of her thickened. Not visibly — there was nothing to see, no ripple, no outline, no cinematic shimmer. But she could feel it. A density. A presence occupying space the way a held breath occupies a chest. It radiated cold, a focused, directional cold that prickled the skin of her face and throat, and beneath the cold there was something else, something that operated below the register of sensation and above the register of thought. A pressure against the inside of her skull. An invitation. Or an inspection. The pendant's glow peaked — a single, brilliant pulse of crimson that lit the entire clearing for half a heartbeat, turning everything the colour of old blood. In that flash, she saw something. Not clearly. Not in a way she could describe afterward. An impression of height. An impression of angles that didn't correspond to any anatomy she knew. An impression of attention so vast and focused that it felt like standing at the base of a dam and hearing the first crack. Then the light receded, and there was only darkness, and she was alone, and she was absolutely not alone. The flowers at her feet were flat now. Whatever stood in front of her had stopped less than an arm's length away. Close enough that she could feel its cold on her lips when she exhaled. Close enough that if she extended her hand, she would touch it. She kept her hand at her side. She did not extend her hand. Seconds passed. Ten. Twenty. The pressure inside her skull shifted, and she had the sudden, vertiginous impression of being read — not her thoughts, not her memories, but something more fundamental, something structural, as if whatever stood before her was examining the architecture of what she was. The pendant cooled by a single degree. Then another. Rory held still. She did not speak. She did not breathe. The flowers to her right bent. One, then the next, then the next — a trail leading away from her, back toward the tree line, measured and unhurried. The pressure receded. The cold retreated by inches, like a tide pulling back from shore. The footsteps resumed their soft, rhythmic tread, and this time they moved away, around the clearing's edge, past the standing stones, and into the dark between the oaks. She listened until she couldn't hear them anymore. She listened for two minutes after that. The ambient sounds of the park filtered back slowly — first the wind, then a fox's bark somewhere to the north, then the faint, blessed hum of traffic. The air warmed. The pendant dimmed to its usual faint glow, a drowsy coal against her sternum. She looked down and saw that the wildflowers around her were upright again, every stem pristine, every petal unbruised. No trail. No impression. As if nothing had walked here. As if nothing had stood so close she could have counted its breaths, if it breathed. Rory's legs gave out, and she sat heavily among the bluebells. She pressed both palms to the ground and felt the cool earth and the damp and the roots of small living things beneath her fingers, and she sat there until her hands stopped shaking. Then she stood, and she walked back through the standing stones, and she did not run, because running felt like the kind of thing that might attract attention. She moved through the trees toward the path, and the path toward the gate, and the gate toward the road outside Richmond Park, where a lone night bus groaned past with its interior lights blazing, full of strangers going home, and the sheer mundane beauty of it almost made her cry. She rode the bus back to Southwark with her hand around the pendant and her back pressed flat against the seat. Her reflection stared at her from the dark window — blue eyes wide, black hair tangled with bits of leaf and bracken, face the color of chalk. She looked like someone who'd seen something. She hadn't. That was the worst part. She hadn't seen a damn thing. But something had seen her. Something had come close enough to read her like a page and had chosen, for reasons she did not understand, to walk away. The pendant lay cool and quiet against her chest, its crimson light extinguished, offering nothing.