Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV0BWVPJTFDRHQTZ6EPEQP

The Tube had spat Rory out at Richmond nearly forty minutes ago, and she still couldn't shake the feeling that she'd missed a stop somewhere between stations. Not a wrong one — a real one, a silent carriage that pulled up alongside hers for half a breath and then vanished into the black. She'd been thinking about it the whole walk up, her boots crunching gravel, the Heartstone warm against her sternum beneath her jumper. Warm. That was the other thing. It had been warm since Sheen Gate. Richmond Park at night was not supposed to feel like this. She'd walked it in daylight a dozen times, following Eva up to the Isabella Plantation on Sunday afternoons when the light came down through the rhododendrons in lazy gold shafts. At night it should have been the same park, only darker: grass, trees, the occasional eyeshine of a deer, the distant hum of the A316 like a tide. Reasonable things. Instead, the hum had gone. Not faded — gone, as though someone had closed a door behind her. Rory stopped at the edge of a bracken sea and listened. Her own breath. The small, guilty creak of her jacket. Beyond that, the kind of silence that had weight to it, that pressed itself against her eardrums like cupped palms. "Okay," she said, because saying things out loud was a small act of defiance she had learned to make since Evan. "You wanted the grove. This is the grove bit. This is what the grove is like." She didn't believe herself. She didn't think the grove was listening, either, but she could not entirely rule it out. The pendant pulsed. Not loud — just a steady, patient heartbeat between her collarbones, exactly the tempo of her own, and then, horribly, a little faster. She put two fingers under the collar of her jumper and touched the stone. The deep crimson was visible through the weave of the wool, a red lamp inside a lantern. When she lifted it out, the silver chain caught what little moonlight there was and she realised there should have been more light than this. The sky above was clear. There was a moon. She had seen it half an hour ago, low and fat and yellow over the deer enclosure. She looked up. There were stars. There was no moon. "Right," she said. The oaks made themselves visible about twenty paces further on, the way things do in dreams — she had been walking toward them, she thought, but they stepped into place rather than growing nearer. Four of them, she'd been told. Standing stones of living wood, older than any stone, their trunks rising thick and fluted and motionless as pillars, their crowns lost somewhere above her. Between them, a gap. Beyond the gap, the faint, impossible suggestion of wildflowers in bloom. In November. She stopped at the boundary. The Heartstone throbbed against her hand. Something moved on her left. She did not turn her head. She had learned, at twenty-two, in the flat she was no longer allowed to think about, that there were some things you did not turn toward quickly. You looked sideways. You used the pane of a darkened window. You used the curve of a kettle. You let the movement come to you or not, and you did not give it the gift of your full attention until you had decided what it was. So she kept her eyes on the nearest oak and let her peripheral vision do the work. A shape, low. About the size of a fox. The wrong gait — too many pauses in it, like a thing stepping through a film played one frame at a time. Then nothing. She breathed out through her nose. "Isolde?" she called, softly, into the gap between the trees. "Is that you having a laugh?" The grove did not answer. Grove-silence was different from park-silence; grove-silence felt furnished. She took a step forward, between the oaks. The cold went first. The November in her bones, the damp of her jeans against her calves, the ache that had been building in her left wrist where the little crescent scar always complained about weather — all of it stopped at the threshold like coats left at a door. Warm air came up to meet her, smelling of cut grass and thyme and something beneath it that was not quite either. Wildflowers, pale, luminous, opened around her boots as if her weight pressed them into being. Behind her, a twig snapped. She turned. The oaks were there. The gap was there. Beyond the gap was Richmond Park, dim and bracken-dark, exactly as she had left it. Nothing stood between the stones. Nothing she could see. But the twig had snapped on this side of the boundary, and her own feet had not moved. "Hello?" she said. Her voice did not carry the way it should have. It went out about three feet and dropped, as though the grove were holding it. The pendant, against her skin, had become uncomfortably hot. She took another slow step deeper into the clearing and turned a full, careful circle. Ferns. Flowers. The four oaks, standing guard. No other figure. No fox-shape. The stars overhead wheeled in a pattern she did not recognise and she chose, firmly, not to look at them again. And then, from somewhere very close — closer than the oaks, closer than her own shadow should have allowed — a breath. Not hers. It came in, long and considering, as if someone were smelling her hair. It let out again, and she felt the faintest warm stir against the back of her neck, exactly where the clasp of the silver chain lay. Her hand closed around the Heartstone so hard the setting bit her palm. She did not run. She had learned, at twenty-two, that running was sometimes the thing a watcher was waiting for. "I know you're there," Rory said, very quietly, to the empty air at her back. "I've brought what I was asked to bring. So either show yourself, or stop playing." The grove held its breath with her. Somewhere in the trees, something began, softly, to laugh.