Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV1SP6DV8M3BQHN8SY9PSG

Rory killed the engine three hundred yards short of the car park, because the headlights had started bothering the road in a way she couldn't name. Twice, she'd seen the beam catch on something pale between the trees — not the flash of a deer's eye, not a bin bag snagged on a branch, but the suggestion of a shape that chose, at the last second, not to be there. She sat with her hands on the wheel for a long moment, listening to the tick of cooling metal. "Just the park," she said. Her voice came out flat inside the car, like it had nowhere to go. The pendant lay warm against her collarbone. Not the friendly warmth of something that had been tucked under a jumper all evening. A deeper heat, low and steady, the way a kettle felt an hour after you'd boiled it. She pressed her palm to the stone and felt it pulse once, like it was answering her. Eva had told her the standing stones lay past the Isabella Plantation, due east of the Pen Ponds. Come alone, Eva had said, and come before moonrise, and Rory, for God's sake, don't step between the oaks until you know what you're looking for. Rory didn't know what she was looking for. That was the whole point of coming. She got out. The door thunked shut behind her and the sound travelled further than it should have, rolling across the open grass and coming back thinner, as though something out there had caught it and handed it back to her without the edges. Richmond Park at night was never quiet. There were foxes, owls, the dim oceanic mutter of the M3 to the south, the drone of a plane tipping its wings towards Heathrow. She knew this. She'd walked here in daylight a hundred times. Tonight, there was none of it. No wind in the bracken. No distant hum. Her boots on the gravel made the only sound in the world, and even that felt borrowed. She walked. The torch on her phone cut a narrow tunnel through the dark. Beyond it, the park became a suggestion of itself: the black humps of oaks, the paler ribbon of the path, the occasional flash of a puddle lying where no rain had fallen in a week. She kept her eyes on the path and her free hand near the pendant and told herself she was fine. Something moved at her left shoulder. She didn't turn her head. She'd spent enough time in the flat above Silas' bar to learn that trick — you didn't jerk round when something shifted at the edge of your vision, because then whatever it was knew you'd seen it. You kept walking. You let your peripheral vision do the work. The movement came again. Low to the ground, pacing her. A fox, she thought. Please be a fox. She risked a glance. There was nothing there. Only the dark between trunks, and further in, a denser dark that seemed to have a shape if she looked at it sideways and none at all if she looked at it straight on. Rory kept walking. The path narrowed. Bracken brushed her knees and left wet trails on her jeans. The torch caught a flicker of white ahead — a deer, she told herself, just a fallow doe standing broadside on the path — but when she raised the beam properly there was only a birch trunk, peeling, leaning at an angle that looked wrong in a way she couldn't place. She passed it. A twig snapped behind her. Not close. Far enough to be deniable. The kind of sound a badger might make, or a branch coming down under its own weight. She counted to five and kept her pace steady and did not look round. Another snap. Closer. The pendant at her throat gave a harder pulse, almost a kick, and the heat of it made her gasp — a small sound, shamefully loud. She pressed her hand flat over it to muffle the glow bleeding through her shirt. Somewhere off in the trees, something breathed out. It was a long, considered exhalation, the sound of a creature that had been holding its breath for a while and had decided, finally, that it didn't need to any more. It came from her right. It was not the wind. There was no wind. Rory stopped. She stood in the middle of the path with the torch trembling in her hand and listened. Her own pulse filled her ears. Under it, something else — a rhythm that was not her heart, slower, heavier, coming from the ground or the air or the space behind her left ear. "Eva," she whispered, though Eva was miles away and wouldn't have answered even if she'd shouted. "Eva, what did you send me to." The breathing came again. Closer now, though she hadn't heard anything move. As though the distance between her and it had simply decided to be less. She turned the torch, slowly, in a wide arc. Tree. Tree. Bracken. The pale scar of a fallen log. Tree. A gap between two oaks where the path should have continued and didn't, because the path had bent while she wasn't looking, or she had, and — Something stood in the gap. Not a shape. A not-shape. A place where the torch beam went in and did not come out, a column of absence roughly her own height, roughly her own width, waiting at a polite conversational distance in the middle of the track she'd been walking. Rory did not move. The pendant blazed. The not-shape tilted, as if considering her from an angle she couldn't see. And then — and this was the worst of it, worse than the breathing, worse than the snap of the twig — it took one small, deliberate step to the side. Off the path. Into the bracken. Making room. Inviting her through. She understood, with a clarity that arrived whole and unwelcome, that she had been expected. Behind her, closer than it had any right to be, something exhaled a second time, and this breath carried the shape of a word she almost, almost recognised. Her own name, she thought. Or something that had learned to wear it.