Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X0GAS54FK8YC1SJA7256S

The oak trees swallowed the last of the streetlight about thirty yards back, and after that Rory navigated by memory and the pale bruise of a half-moon overhead. She'd walked this path four times before, always in daylight, always with someone else's hand on her arm pointing the way. Tonight she had neither. Richmond Park at this hour was supposed to be empty. She knew that. She'd counted on it. She pushed through a stand of bracken, the fronds dry enough to hiss against her jacket, and found the first of the standing stones. It rose to her shoulder, the bark long since petrified into something harder and stranger than wood, and she pressed her palm flat against it as she always did — an old habit now, like knocking before entering. The stone was cold. That was normal. She told herself that was normal. The grove opened ahead of her, a rough circle of maybe twenty metres across where the canopy drew back and the sky fell in. Even in October, with every other patch of park turned to mulch and dying things, wildflowers held their ground here — pale clusters of something she'd never been able to name, low to the earth, giving off a faint sweetness that sat at the back of the throat. Rory crouched and checked her watch. Quarter past eleven. She was early by fifteen minutes, which meant she had time to stand very still and feel the specific quality of quiet that the grove always carried — thick, attentive, like standing inside a held breath. She straightened and rolled her shoulders and tried not to think about how far she was from the nearest gate. The pendant moved. Not swinging — there was no wind in the grove, there never was — but she felt it shift against her sternum, a small deliberate weight settling differently against her skin. She reached up without thinking and closed her fingers around it through the fabric of her shirt. Even through the cotton, the warmth was immediate. Unmistakable. A slow pulse, like pressing your fingers to a sleeping wrist. She pulled it free and held it up. The deep crimson of the stone caught the moonlight and held more than its share of it, throwing a thin red cast across her knuckles. It was glowing. Not brightly — she'd seen it brighter — but steadily. Rhythmically. Rory looked around the grove. Nothing. Wildflowers. The standing stones at the treeline. The dark press of the oaks beyond. The pendant only did that near a Hel portal. She'd been told that clearly enough. There wasn't a Hel portal in this grove. As far as she understood anything about where she'd found herself over the last several months, this place and that particular kind of darkness were mutually exclusive. Oil and water. Wrong frequencies. She closed her fist around the stone. A sound reached her from the far side of the clearing. Low, rhythmic. At first she filed it as wind in the upper branches, but there was no wind, and when she tilted her head and actually listened it resolved itself into something more deliberate. A slow repetition. Something dragging. Then it stopped. Rory stood very still. Her eyes moved across the treeline from left to right, the way her father had taught her to watch a courtroom — not at the thing you were interested in, but at the space around it, the air beside it. Movement was easier to catch at the periphery. That was just biology. That was practical. At the eastern edge of the grove, between two of the standing stones, something was standing. She couldn't have said what gave it away. It was darker than the trees behind it, which should have made it more visible, but instead what she noticed was the subtraction — the way it occupied space without contributing to it. Like a hole cut out of the air. She looked at it directly and her eyes slid off, kept wanting to drift left, kept insisting there was nothing to see. She had to fight to keep her gaze on it. It wasn't moving. Rory became aware of her own breathing. She regulated it, slow and deliberate, a trick from a therapist she'd seen for three months in Cardiff. In for four, out for four. She kept her feet planted and did not step backwards, because something in the oldest part of her was absolutely certain that stepping backwards would be the wrong thing to do. The pendant pulsed. Stronger now. She thought about her phone. It was in her jacket pocket and it would do her absolutely no good, because there was no signal in the grove — she'd tried her first visit and every visit after, just to be sure — and the torch function would ruin whatever night vision she'd built up and she was not, she decided, going to illuminate herself standing alone in a clearing just to see slightly better what was already watching her. Watching. She was sure of that now. Something moved at her left, very close to the ground. She snapped her head around and caught — a disturbance in the wildflowers, the faintest tremor of white petals, as though something had passed through them very quickly. By the time she'd looked, it had already stopped. She looked back at the eastern gap between the stones. It was gone. Her pulse lurched and she pressed her lips together hard against the sound that wanted to come out. Gone was not better. Gone was categorically not better. Gone meant it was somewhere she couldn't see. Rory turned slowly, keeping the motion controlled, scanning the treeline in a full rotation. The moonlight fell evenly now; her eyes had adjusted as well as they were going to. The grove appeared empty. The wildflowers lay still. The standing stones stood as they always stood, ancient and impassive. She completed the rotation. Finished where she'd started, facing east. It was there again. Different position — closer to the centre of the gap now, not tucked between the stones but standing in front of them, in front of the grove's threshold. As though it had crossed the boundary while her back was turned. As though it had waited for her to look away. She measured the distance between herself and the western gap — the direction she'd entered. Twelve, maybe fifteen metres. Clear ground. She could cover it in four seconds if she ran. If she ran. The pendant's warmth was climbing her sternum now, spreading up toward her throat, and the glow was bleeding through her clenched fingers. She didn't look at it. She kept her eyes on the thing in the gap. It still wasn't moving. And that was the worst part of it, she realised. Not the sound. Not the light on the pendant or the absence of wind or the flower petals trembling at something she couldn't see. The worst part was how still it was. How patient. The way it occupied the gap like it had always been there, like it would be there long after she was gone, as though her presence were nothing more than a minor weather event to be waited out. Rory took a breath. She took one careful step backwards, heel to toe, and watched. It didn't move. She took another. The bracken at the grove's western edge was ten metres behind her now. She could hear it, still and dry, waiting. The thing in the eastern gap tilted — she had no better word for it, no way to describe a spatial shift in something largely defined by its absence, but there was a definite alteration in how it occupied the air. An angle of attention. A lean. Rory ran. She hit the bracken at full speed and crashed through it without caring about the noise, the fronds clawing at her jacket and her hair, and she put three standing stones between herself and the clearing in the space of a few seconds and then kept running, because she was a practical, clear-headed person and practical clear-headed persons who had just watched a piece of the dark tilt its attention toward them did not stop running until there were lights. Behind her, as the last of the grove fell away and the park opened up to darkness and ordinary October air, she heard something. Carried on a wind that hadn't existed before. Not a voice — nothing so structured as a voice. More like the feeling of being heard. She didn't stop. The pendant went cold around her neck at the same moment the first streetlight hit her face, and she stood on the path at the edge of the park with her hands on her knees and her chest heaving and made herself breathe through it. In for four. Out for four. She had not met whoever she'd come to meet. She was not going back inside to find out if they were still there.