Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTXE5RQ2RDAF7P8BXFEAWZ

The taxi driver wouldn't take Rory past the Richmond Park gates. "Closed after dusk, love. You'll have to walk from here." She paid him, shouldered her bag, and watched the red tail lights bleed down the lane until the hedgerow swallowed them. The wrought iron gate stood ajar, though she was certain the park was meant to be locked. She slipped through. The path was a pale ribbon under a moon that sat too low in the sky. She'd walked this route three times in daylight, following Eva's scrawled map, counting the oaks. Left at the split beech. Past the pond where the herons nested. Into the bracken where the ground rose and the deer tracks thinned to nothing. The pendant at her throat was warm. Not hot — warm, the way skin is warm, and that was somehow worse. "Right," she breathed. "You're fine. You're walking. It's a park." Her own voice came back thin, as though the air had trimmed it. She'd come because Isolde had said to come, and Isolde had said to come alone, and Rory had learned in the last six weeks that when someone in a grove of year-round wildflowers told you to do something, you generally did it, or you paid in a currency you hadn't known you possessed. The Heartstone knocked once against her collarbone, a small pulse, and then settled. A fox screamed somewhere to her left. She knew the sound. Every Londoner did; she'd heard it a hundred times from her flat above Silas' bar, that shredding, woman-in-distress cry that always made her fumble for her phone before she remembered. This one was different. It kept going. Foxes screamed in bursts. This one drew out, folded over on itself, and didn't breathe. Rory stopped walking. The sound stopped too, precisely when she did. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay. That's — that's a coincidence." She took three steps. Counted them. The screaming began again, somewhere behind her and to the left, keeping pace with her, and when she halted it cut off on the same syllable. She did not turn around. She'd read enough, by now, to know that turning around was a choice, and choices in places like this had weight. She closed her left hand around the pendant. Warm. Warmer than before. She kept walking. The path began to do something odd. It wasn't that it changed direction — she would have noticed that — but the trees on either side seemed to have shifted their order, as though someone had taken a deck of oaks and shuffled them while she blinked. The split beech she'd meant to turn at had already passed, or hadn't come yet, and the pond with the herons was absent from any side she looked. Something moved at the corner of her eye. Low, she thought. Low and quick. When she turned her head it was gone, only a fern still swaying where nothing had disturbed it. A rabbit. A badger. A — A shape with too many joints, perhaps, or not enough. She hadn't seen it properly. That was the trouble. Her mind was filling in the gap and her mind had been reading too much Dymas lately. "Isolde," she called softly. Then, louder, because silence felt like drowning: "Isolde, it's Carter. You said tonight." The wood took her voice and held it. No echo. Sound here did not rebound; it was absorbed, like water into dry earth, and the stillness that followed was the stillness of something that had heard. Somewhere off to the right, a twig broke. It was a proper sound — dry, crisp, the weight of a foot. Then another, a little further on. Then nothing. She stood with her pulse beating in the scar on her wrist. The crescent there throbbed, which made no sense, which was a childhood mark, which had not ached in twenty years. "Hello?" Her breath fogged. It hadn't been cold a moment ago. She moved off the path. That was a mistake, probably, but the path had stopped behaving like a path, and the standing stones were meant to lie east of the oak avenue, and east was — she checked the moon, and the moon was not where she'd left it. The bracken hissed against her jeans. Wildflowers here, already, out of season: a drift of foxgloves pale as teeth, a scatter of something small and white that she did not recognise and did not want to name. The Grove's outer skirts. She was close. Something breathed. Not her. Not wind. A long, shallow exhale, three paces to her right, at about the height of her shoulder. The pendant flared against her skin and she bit down on a noise before it escaped her. She did not turn her head. She kept her eyes forward and she kept walking, and the breathing kept pace, three paces right, at shoulder height, matching her stride exactly. When she slowed, it slowed. When she quickened, it quickened. It did not try to hide. That was the worst of it. Whatever was walking beside her wasn't bothering to pretend it wasn't. "I'm expected," she said into the dark. Her voice was steadier than she had any right to. "Isolde of the Grove is expecting me. If you're one of hers, walk me in. If you're not —" She did not finish the sentence. She had nothing to put at the end of it. The breathing laughed. It wasn't a laugh, really. It was a shape her mind pressed onto the sound because her mind required it. A small, amused exhalation, the kind you made at a child saying something clever. She tasted iron at the back of her throat. Ahead, through the black pillars of the oaks, she saw a glimmer — a faint, inner light, not moonlight, green at its edges. The standing stones. She would have wept if she'd had the breath for it. Twenty paces. Fifteen. The thing beside her stopped. She didn't. She walked, and she felt the absence of it at her shoulder like a held breath, and only when her hand came down on the rough bark of the first stone — cold, real, grooved with carvings older than any language she knew — did she let herself turn and look. The wood behind her was empty. The path she'd walked did not exist. And from somewhere inside the treeline, very quiet, very close, something said her name in Eva's voice.