Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G8AP7WZHX7GHYQ96ECVQA

The wrought-iron gate to Richmond Park should have been locked. Rory knew this the way she knew her own surname — because Eva had warned her twice, and because the sign beside the padlock said so in letters too faded to be recent. Yet the gate stood open, hinges slack, as though someone had pushed through moments before her and forgotten to shut it. She slipped the torch from her pocket and clicked it on. The beam went thin and pale against the dark, illuminating wet grass and little else. "Right. In and out," she muttered. "Ten minutes. Eva owes me a pint for this." The Heartstone lay warm against her sternum beneath her jumper. Not hot, not yet. A low, steady pulse, as if some small creature had curled up under her collarbone and was sleeping off a good meal. She pressed her palm flat to it for a moment and felt the faint throb answer her. She walked. The path she took wasn't marked — Eva had drawn it on the back of a receipt, a scribble of arrows past the Isabella Plantation, then left at the old oak split by lightning, then straight. Simple enough in daylight. At ten past eleven on a Thursday in March, with a mist rising off the bracken, it felt less like a route and more like a suggestion the park was choosing whether or not to honour. The first thing that was wrong was the birdsong. A blackbird, somewhere ahead of her. Full-throated, midday bright, cascading through its repertoire as if the sun were up and the worms rising. Rory slowed. She had grown up with blackbirds on the fence of her mother's garden in Cardiff. She knew their hours. They did not sing like this at night. She kept walking. The second thing was the temperature. The mist should have chilled her. Instead, as she passed the lightning-split oak, the air turned soft and close, the way a kitchen goes when a kettle has just boiled. She could smell cut grass and, underneath it, something floral — honeysuckle, maybe, though honeysuckle did not bloom in March. Her torch flickered. She shook it. It steadied. "Come on, Rory." Her voice sounded strange. Flat. As though the trees were absorbing it rather than bouncing it back. "Standing stones. Big obvious standing stones. You can do this." She saw them before she heard herself stop speaking. Seven of them, or eight, or nine — it was difficult to be sure, because counting them once gave her one number, and counting them again gave her another. Oaks, but not oaks. Trees that had grown old standing still on purpose, their bark fissured like the backs of old men's hands. They stood in a loose ring on a rise of ground that had no business being there. The mist parted around their feet, drawn inward, as if the grove itself were breathing in. The pendant warmed. A degree, perhaps two. Rory stepped between the nearest two stones. Inside, the wildflowers were absurd. Foxgloves shoulder-high, primroses in scatters, cornflowers bright as the blue on a willow-pattern plate, all of them in bloom together in a month that should have given her nothing but snowdrops. Her torch beam passed over a cluster of poppies and they seemed, for an instant, to turn their heads toward her before the light moved on. She stopped in the centre of the clearing. "All right," she said, low. "I'm here. Eva said stand here. I'm standing." The blackbird had gone quiet. She became aware of the silence in stages. First the absence of the bird. Then the absence of traffic — the low constant hum of London that she had stopped hearing years ago was gone, and its going made her ears ring. Then the absence of wind, though the foxgloves swayed. Then, under all of that, a thin new sound: a soft, regular pressure against the grass, some way off beyond the stones. Footsteps. Slow ones. Walking the perimeter. Rory turned the torch toward the sound. The beam caught nothing but stone and mist and the pale hands of the foxgloves. The footsteps continued — not hurrying, not stopping — and she understood, in a cold, very specific way, that whatever made them was pacing her ring. Measuring. "Hello?" Her own voice embarrassed her. The footsteps paused. She held very still. The pendant gave a deeper pulse against her skin, a second warmth beneath the first. She pressed her fingers to it through the wool of her jumper and felt her own heartbeat answering it, a fraction too fast. Something moved at the edge of her vision. To the left, past the tallest stone. A shape the height of a tall man, or the height of something pretending to be one. When she turned her head, it wasn't there. When she looked forward again, the shape slid back to the corner of her eye and settled there, patient, like a guest waiting to be noticed. "You're a tree," Rory told it, quiet. "You're a tree, and I'm tired, and I'm going to walk out now, and you're going to be a tree when I come back in daylight." The footsteps resumed. Closer this time. Inside the ring. She did not turn around. Her torch cut a wedge into the wildflowers ahead of her. Where it fell, the blooms looked ordinary. Where it did not, she could not swear to what she had left behind her in the dark. The honeysuckle smell had thickened. Sickly, now. The kind of sweetness that sat on top of something else. She thought of a funeral parlour her father had dragged her through once when she was nine, and the smell of the lilies there, and what the lilies had been covering. A breath moved against the back of her neck. Not wind. She had felt wind, and this was not wind. This was warm, and it was close, and it had the shape of a mouth that was not quite open. Rory's hand closed around the pendant through her jumper. It was hot now, properly hot, a coal against her breastbone. The silver chain bit into her nape. She did not look behind her. She took one step, very carefully, toward the gap between the stones by which she had entered. The foxgloves moved aside for her foot, and then moved back. Somewhere, far off and soft as a held note, the blackbird began to sing again — the same cascade, the same bright midday run of it, but slower now, as if whoever had been working the instrument had grown tired and was playing the tune from memory, a beat behind itself. Behind her, in the grove she had just crossed, something exhaled.