Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VZ16TJJPKQKE9PBFMCKWW

The pendant had been warm for three days straight. Not uncomfortably so — not like a burn — but steady and insistent, the way a mug of tea felt cupped between both palms. Rory had pressed her fingers to it a dozen times that Tuesday, feeling the pulse of it through her jacket, and each time she'd looked down at the deep crimson stone it had seemed fractionally brighter than the last. By Wednesday she'd stopped sleeping properly. By Thursday night she found herself standing at the edge of Richmond Park at quarter past eleven, the iron gate cold under her hand, telling herself this was a reasonable thing to do. She'd been here once in daylight, three weeks ago with Silas, who'd pointed out the oak stones like he was showing her a postbox. Entirely unremarkable, he'd said, unless you knew what to look for. She knew what to look for now. Or she thought she did. The park after closing was a different country. The paths she remembered — wide and chalky pale in afternoon sun — were barely visible suggestions in the dark. The oaks that had seemed stately and separate during the day pressed together into one continuous mass, and the sky between the canopy was a deep, lightless grey, the kind that came before rain. No stars. The torch on her phone threw a thin white oval ahead of her that made everything outside its reach more absolute. She kept to the path she'd mapped on her phone that morning, the route marked with a dropped pin where she thought the clearing sat. The pendant stayed warm against her sternum. She counted that as direction enough. The first thing she noticed was the silence. Not natural silence — not the kind a city park produced at midnight, which was really just traffic thinned to a murmur and the occasional fox bark. This was silence with weight to it, the kind that pressed on the ears like altitude. No wind through the grass. No rustling in the undergrowth. The moths that had been batting at her phone screen since the gate had simply stopped, somewhere around the second bend, and she hadn't registered their absence until this moment, standing very still on the path, realising the air itself felt held. She walked on. The oaks appeared sooner than she expected. Seven of them, arranged in a rough arc, their bark silvered and almost white in the torchlight. Older than the trees around them by the look of it — the root systems had buckled up through the ground in great knuckled ridges that she had to step over carefully. Between them, the clearing opened, and even in the dark she could see that the grass inside was different: longer, softer-looking, and dotted with small white flowers that had no business blooming in October. She stepped through. The pendant flared. Not visibly — not a flash — but it went from warm to hot in the space of a single heartbeat, and she pressed her hand flat over it and stood very still until it steadied back to its former low pulse. The flowers gave off a faint sweetness she couldn't name. The silence, if anything, deepened. She crouched and set her bag down beside one of the oak roots and pulled out the folded paper Silas had given her. A diagram. Symbols she didn't fully understand but had been told to trace into the earth at the centre of the clearing, and then to wait. For what, he hadn't been entirely specific about. She worked carefully, using a piece of chalk, pressing hard so the marks held on the compressed soil. The shapes came out cleaner than she expected. She sat back on her heels and looked at them in the torchlight and felt, for the first time, a flicker of something she didn't want to name. Then she heard it. Breathing. Not close — somewhere at the tree line, just outside the oak boundary, irregular and shallow. She turned her phone slowly, letting the light sweep the edge of the clearing. Nothing. Just the oaks, their bark throwing long shadow-bars across the grass, the flowers white and still. She exhaled. A fox, probably. A deer. She turned back to the diagram. The breathing had moved. It was behind her now, still at the perimeter but shifted — she was certain of it the way she was certain of the ground under her knees. She turned again, faster this time, and the torchlight caught the edge of the tree line just as something pulled back into the dark. Not a fox. The movement was wrong for a fox — too upright, too deliberate. A person, then. Someone out walking their dog, someone using the park illegally, exactly as she was. "Hello?" Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. Silence. Not even a retreating footstep. Whatever it was had simply stopped, and the absolute absence of sound that followed felt far worse than an answer would have. She faced the diagram again. She was here for a reason. She would finish what she'd come to do and she would leave, and whatever was standing in the trees would either turn out to be someone's insomniac spaniel or it would not, and she would deal with that when she had to. She pressed her palm to the innermost symbol as Silas had instructed. The chalk was cool and slightly damp. She waited. A minute passed. Two. There was movement again — not at the tree line this time. Closer. Inside the boundary of the oaks. Her torch caught it: a long swaying of the tall grass thirty feet away, a slow displacement. Too slow for wind. Too low for a person standing upright. She watched the grass and the grass watched back and nothing came through it, nothing resolved into a shape she could identify, and the pendant had gone from hot to something past that and she was suddenly, brutally aware of how small the circle of her torchlight was, and how much dark there was in all directions around it. She kept her hand on the symbol. The grass stopped moving. Somewhere just beyond the nearest oak — no more than ten feet away, close enough to hear breath if there was breath to hear — a single twig snapped.