Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTZJ434T4YATB2871QQQFK

The message had come through at 9:47 in the evening, tucked between a delivery confirmation and an advert for train fares. Three lines, no signature. *The grove remembers what you've forgotten. Come alone. Before midnight, or not at all.* Rory told herself, as she stepped off the last bus and began the long walk into Richmond Park, that only an idiot would follow instructions from a sender she couldn't trace. She told herself this with the same patient exasperation she might have used on a stubborn child. The problem was that the Heartstone had begun to pulse the moment she'd opened the message — a slow, blood-warm beat against her sternum, as if it had been waiting for this particular summons. And the Heartstone had never been wrong. The park at this hour was a different country. The iron gates still yawned open; whoever closed them must have missed the footpath that curled off toward the older acres. A sodium-lit sign pointed toward car parks and toilets, but Rory turned her back on its orange cheer and walked into the dark. The moon was the kind that showed you just enough to be sorry. High and thin and rag-cloud-smeared, it lit the grass in streaks and left the rest blotted in ink. She moved along a deer path she'd walked in daylight half a dozen times and didn't recognise now. Bracken reached for her calves. Somewhere off to her right, a fox screamed, and the sound was so human she stopped with her hand on the pendant before her brain caught up. *Fox,* she said silently. *Just a fox.* The Heartstone thrummed under her palm. She walked on. The oaks of the grove were meant to announce themselves at a quarter mile — eight of them, ancient, ringed in a crooked circle, each as thick as a car. She kept her eyes on the low horizon for them. The first prickle of wrongness came when she realised the horizon itself had stopped moving. No matter how long she walked, the treeline ahead stayed exactly where it was. The ferns underfoot, though — those kept passing. She was covering ground. She just wasn't arriving anywhere. She stopped. Turned a slow, careful circle. The path she'd come up was gone. Not overgrown, not hidden by the dark. Gone. In its place stretched the same unbroken sweep of moonlit grass in every direction, as though she had been dropped into the centre of a plate. "All right," she said aloud, because speaking steadied her. "All right, Rory. Think." Her voice came back to her flat and small, and she had the sudden, cold sense that something had listened to it and filed it away. The Heartstone gave a harder pulse. Warmer. She turned toward the warmth the way a diver follows a line, and there — *there* — the oaks stood, where a moment ago the grass had been empty. Eight black shapes ringed like a jury. She had not walked to them. They had walked to her. The wildflowers inside the ring were open, though no bee in Britain would be awake for them. She stepped between two of the trunks, and the air changed against her face — a half-degree warmer, denser, faintly sweet, like a room where someone had been sitting a long time. The hair on her arms rose and stayed up. "Hello?" she called. The word died three feet from her mouth. Nothing answered. Of course nothing answered. And yet the silence had a shape to it, the way a held breath has a shape. She stood very still in the centre of the grove and listened, and the listening pressed back against her. Then, off to her left, a footstep. Soft. Grass-muffled. She spun. Empty clearing. Flowers nodding at a breeze she could not feel. Another step, behind her now. She turned again, slower this time, keeping her hands open and low. The crescent scar on her wrist, that old white mark from a childhood she mostly remembered fondly, gave a sudden hot itch, as though the skin there recognised something she did not. "I'm here," she said to the empty grove. "You sent for me. Show yourself." The air thickened. She felt it in her ears first, the soft pop of a pressure change, and then in her lungs, which had to work harder for the next breath. At the very edge of her sight, between the furthest two oaks, something moved. Not a figure — a smear. A place where the moonlight bent the wrong way. When she looked directly at it, it was only bark. When she looked away, it was there again, a little closer, patient. The Heartstone was hot now. Not warm; hot. She could feel the crimson of it against her breastbone like a coal wrapped in silk. *An hour inside can be minutes or days outside.* Eva had told her that once, half-laughing, as if repeating a nursery rhyme. Rory had not laughed. She'd filed it away the way she filed everything that sounded mad and proved, eventually, not to be. How long had she been in the ring? Two minutes? Twenty? Her watch, when she lifted it, had stopped at 10:11. The second hand quivered in place, trying and failing to advance, like an insect pinned through the thorax. Behind her, very close, something exhaled. It was not a breath she could have mistaken for her own. It was lower, and slower, and it carried a faint note of something sweet and rotted, like fruit left in a bowl a day too long. It came from about the height of her ear. She did not turn around. Some instinct older than her held her spine rigid and her eyes forward. Turning, she understood without being told, would be an invitation. Turning would be permission. "I came because you asked," she said, and was proud of how level her voice stayed. "I came alone. So speak, or let me go." The exhale came again, closer. And this time, under it, threaded through it like a wire through silk, a sound that might almost have been her own name — not *Rory,* not *Aurora,* but something older, something that fit her mouth in a shape she had never used. Something that made the scar on her wrist burn white. The Heartstone, against her skin, began to scream its silent heat. And in the dark between the oaks, patient as a gardener, whatever had called her here took one more soft step forward.