Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GD6XF5RJDMN1G2B4825MP

The tube had spat her out at Richmond just before ten, and by the time Rory crossed the last stretch of path into the park, the sky had gone the colour of old bruises. She'd walked this route in daylight twice. In the dark, it refused to behave like the same place. The pendant lay warm against her sternum. Not pulsing — not quite — but ticking with a slow heat, like a radiator cooling in an empty room. That was what had brought her out here. Silas had told her to stay put. Eva had rung twice. Rory had thumbed the phone to silent and gone anyway, because the Heartstone had been humming all evening and she'd rather find out why on her own terms than wake up to whatever it was announcing. She found the oaks where the map in her head said they'd be. Seven of them, their trunks older than anything in this park had a right to be, arranged in a ragged circle that tried to look accidental and failed. Wildflowers nodded at their roots. Foxgloves. Bluebells. Things that had no business flowering in late October. "Right," she muttered. "Hi. I'm here." Nothing answered. That was fine. That was what she'd expected. She stepped between two of the stones — trunks, stones, whatever they were — and the air changed. The cold went first. Not gone, exactly. Displaced. Replaced by a still, close warmth that smelled of turned earth and something sweeter underneath, like fruit left too long in a bowl. The traffic noise from the A307 cut out as if someone had closed a door. Rory stopped with one foot raised and set it down carefully, the way you set a foot down on ice. "Okay." She listened. There was birdsong, which shouldn't have been happening at this hour. A thrush, she thought, though she wasn't country enough to swear to it. It stopped when she held her breath and picked up again when she let it out, and she told herself she was imagining the pattern. The grass in the clearing was silver. Not grey, not frost — silver, as if someone had painted each blade. She crossed to the centre. The pendant had warmed another degree. She pressed her palm flat over it and felt, under the heat, a rhythm that wasn't her pulse. Slightly off-beat. Patient. A twig broke behind her. She turned. Nothing. The oaks stood where they'd stood. Between two of them, the path she'd come in on had gone hazy, the way a photograph goes hazy at the edges. She could still see it. She couldn't quite make her eyes settle on it. "I can wait," she told the grove. Her voice came out flat and small, swallowed before it could carry. "I've got all night, if that's what you want." Another twig. To her left this time. She kept her head still and slid her eyes. Something white had been there, at knee height, and now wasn't. A flash of colour like the inside of a shell. "Fox," she said aloud. "You're a fox." The thrush went quiet. She didn't like that. She liked the birdsong when she couldn't explain it, and she liked it less when it stopped. Rory turned a slow circle. The warmth from the pendant was climbing her throat now, and the wildflowers at her feet had tilted, very slightly, all in the same direction — towards her, or towards something just past her shoulder. She couldn't tell which and didn't want to find out by checking. A breath on the back of her neck. Cool. Deliberate. She did not turn around. She had learned, somewhere along the way — from Evan, maybe, from the years before she'd left him — that sometimes the worst thing you could do was flinch first. She stood with her chin level and her hands loose at her sides and counted to four. Nothing touched her. When she did turn, there was only grass and the silvered air and, at the base of the furthest oak, a small pale shape she hadn't noticed before. She walked towards it with steps that felt borrowed. It was a shoe. A child's shoe, buckled, the leather gone soft with age. It sat upright as if its owner had stepped neatly out of it and walked on. "No," Rory said, to no one. "No, thank you." She backed away from it and her heel came down on something that gave under her weight with a tiny wet sound. She looked. A bluebell, crushed. When she lifted her foot, the stem straightened itself, petals and all, and went on standing as though she'd never been there. The pendant thumped once, hard, against her breastbone. Like a fist. From the edge of the clearing, someone was humming. It was a low, pretty tune, the kind of thing her mother had hummed over marking in the kitchen when Rory was eight. It was tuneless enough to be accidental and tuneful enough not to be. It was not coming from any direction she could pin. It moved. She tracked it from one oak to the next and then it was behind her again and she was turning and turning and her breath had gone shallow. "Stop it," she said. The humming stopped. In the quiet that followed, she heard her own name. Not spoken. Suggested. The way you hear your name in the hiss of a kettle or the hum of a fridge, when you're tired enough. Rory. Rory. Almost her name, and then almost another name, one with more syllables, one she didn't know and her mouth nearly remembered. She took a step backwards towards the path. Then another. The grass under her boots didn't crunch. It didn't do anything. It gave, and righted itself, and gave again, as though she weighed nothing, as though she weren't really here at all. Something moved at the corner of her eye, tall and thin and the wrong kind of still between two of the oaks. She did not look at it directly. She kept it at the edge of her vision, where it seemed to prefer to be, and she walked — not ran, walked — towards the place where the path had been. The pendant burned. The humming started again, closer now, and this time it knew the tune.