Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W9KCSQ87M806XTZYNPWW8

Richmond Park after midnight was a different country. Rory had read that once, in a tourist pamphlet of all places, and she'd thought it a ridiculous thing to say about a patch of managed green space in southwest London. Now she walked the outer path with her torch pressed low against her thigh, and she understood completely what the writer had meant. The deer were the first thing. During the day they moved in loose, indifferent herds, occasionally blocking the road, occasionally lifting their heads to stare at passing joggers with their flat amber eyes. At night they were absent. Not hidden — absent. The park held roughly six hundred of them, a fact she knew because she'd looked it up on the bus ride over, the kind of useless anchoring detail her brain reached for when the rest of her was sliding toward unease. Six hundred, and not one visible shape between the dark treelines, not one sound of hooves on frost-hardened ground. The park breathed and held its breath and breathed again, and there was nothing in it but Rory and the wind. She'd been given a note. That was why she was here. It had been slipped under the door of her flat three days ago, written on paper that felt heavier than paper should, in ink the colour of old tea. It named the grove. It named a time. It named her, not as Rory, not even as Aurora, but as a third name she'd only recently learned belonged to her, and that detail alone had been enough to make her come. Someone who knew that name was someone she needed to look at. The standing stones were easier to find than she'd expected. The grove sat in a hollow off the main path, past a long corridor of ancient oaks whose roots had split the footway into ridges and channels. A person could walk the park a hundred times and never find the hollow — she was certain of that, because Eva had tried twice before she'd succeeded. But tonight the path opened ahead of Rory as though it had been waiting, and the eight stones rose from the grass in a rough circle, each one oak, each one older than anything cultivated had the right to be, their bark silver-black in the thin moonlight. She stopped at the boundary. The wildflowers were blooming. Full, open blooms — dog violet, red campion, something pale and cup-shaped she couldn't name — spread across the ground inside the circle of stones and beyond them, into the clearing proper. February. Below freezing on the walk from the bus stop. The flowers didn't know that, or didn't care, or operated under a different set of agreements entirely. The Heartstone pendant sat against her sternum under two layers of clothing, and it pulsed. Not the faint, half-imagined warmth it occasionally gave off. A full, deliberate pulse, like a second heartbeat that had fallen slightly out of sync with her own. She pressed her hand flat against her chest through her coat. The warmth spread to her palm. She stepped between two of the stones. The sound changed. It wasn't silence exactly — the wind still moved through the high canopy, still pressed against the back of her neck — but all the ambient texture of the park outside dropped away, and what replaced it was a quality of listening. The grove didn't go quiet. It paid attention. Rory swept her torch in a slow arc. Empty clearing, roughly thirty feet across. A collapsed log near the far edge, furred with moss. The wildflowers, obscenely bright and open. A single rabbit frozen mid-posture beside the log, one foreleg lifted, its eyes twin amber coins in the torchlight. It didn't move. She watched it for a long moment. It didn't move, didn't twitch its nose, didn't set the foreleg down. She looked away. When she looked back it was gone, and the moss on the log where it had been sitting showed no impression, no parting, no disturbance at all. She stood very still and listened to what direction her instincts were pointing. They were pointing at the tree line to her left. Nothing there. Dark trunks, dark between the trunks. Her torchlight didn't reach far enough to do anything useful, only illuminated a pale column in front of her and made the darkness on either side of it absolute. She turned off the torch. It took three or four seconds for her eyes to begin adjusting, and in that interval the darkness was total and pressing and she became acutely aware of her own breathing — too loud, too regular, a metronome announcing position. She slowed it. Opened her mouth slightly to quiet the inhale. The grove resolved itself slowly: stone shapes, flower shapes, the silver geography of the clearing in dilute moonlight. Tree trunks to the left. Still nothing between them. But there was a smell. Not unpleasant — that was the wrongness of it. Something green and mineral, like rain striking chalk, or the inside of a well. It drifted and pooled around her and then it was gone, and then it was back, and it didn't move the way a smell moved when wind was carrying it. It moved the way a smell moved when something was moving. The pendant pulsed again. Again. Then a third time in quick succession, and the warmth through her coat became heat, and she reached inside instinctively and wrapped her fingers around it and felt it throb against her palm like something with a pulse of its own. She turned in a slow circle. The clearing was still empty. Still silent in that attentive way. The flowers open, the log mossy and unmoved, the stones at the boundary standing their patient watch. She looked at the stones. Seven. She counted again, taking her time, pointing at each in sequence. Seven stones. There had been eight when she entered — she was certain of it, as certain as she was of the cold or the flower smell on her hands. She'd noticed them specifically, had counted them specifically, because counting things was what her brain did when it needed somewhere to put its attention. Seven now. Her back was to the eighth spot in the circle. She didn't turn around immediately. She made herself take one breath, full and slow, fill her lungs and release it, and she pressed the pendant once between her fingers so that the heat of it grounded her in the specific, physical fact of her own hand. Then she turned.