Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GDP8AXBD364XY1FK3G40K

The gate to Richmond Park should have been locked at that hour, but Rory found it open, the chain hanging loose on its hook like a tongue. She didn't think about that for long. Eva's text had been specific — the oaks by the bracken line, after moonrise, alone — and Eva never asked for anything unless it mattered. She zipped her jacket to the throat. October had put an edge on the air that felt older than weather. The path narrowed past the Isabella Plantation, losing its gravel, losing its sense. She followed the trampled grass by torchlight. Somewhere behind her, deer coughed in the dark, and she flinched before she placed the sound. London kept its wildness in small pockets, easily forgotten. A fox screamed further off. That, at least, was ordinary. The standing stones rose out of the bracken like a row of bad teeth. Seven oaks, ancient, their trunks twisted into shapes that weren't quite trunks anymore — more like knuckles pressed up through the soil. Rory had passed them twice before in daylight with Eva leading the way. They'd seemed benign then, strange in a storybook sense. Tonight they leaned. She stepped between two of them, and the wood around her went quiet. Not silent. Quiet in the way a held breath is quiet. "Eva?" The word came back to her without weight, swallowed before it could travel. She clicked the torch off, then on again. The beam carved a white tunnel that ended sooner than it should have, the trees seeming to drink it. Wildflowers bloomed in the clearing beyond the stones — bluebells, cow parsley, something pale and bell-shaped she couldn't name — all of them out of season, all of them too still. No breeze moved them. No insect worked them. She crouched, brushed one with her fingertip, and the petal was warm, as if a hand had been cupped around it. The Heartstone pendant shifted against her breastbone. A pulse of heat, faint, not her own. She straightened up. "All right," she told the grove, because the sound of her voice was better than the absence of one. "I'm here. Show yourself." Something moved at the edge of her torch beam. She swung the light. Nothing. A tree, a tangle of fern, the suggestion of space between trunks. She held the beam steady until her wrist began to ache, and the grove held still for her, obliging. When she lowered the torch, the movement came again on the other side. Not a deer. Deer had shape and weight; they broke the undergrowth. This had been taller, thinner, and had not disturbed a single leaf. She'd seen the idea of it more than the thing itself — a vertical smudge where the dark had been darker, sliding between two trunks and gone. "Eva, if you're winding me up—" The pendant pulsed again, harder this time, a small warm knock beneath her collarbone. She pressed her palm flat over it through the fabric. The stone felt feverish. Somewhere behind her, a twig snapped. She turned, slow. The torch found the same ring of oaks, the same loose curtain of bracken. Her breath came out white and hung in the beam like something she'd exhaled into water. "Right," she said, quietly. "I'm going." She took one step back toward the stones, and the air thickened. It wasn't a sound, exactly. More the memory of one, pressed into her ear from the inside — a long, considering hum, the way a person hums when they've noticed you across a room and haven't decided yet whether to wave. It faded before she could be certain it had been there. Her torch dimmed. She smacked the barrel against her palm. The beam steadied, then guttered again, a brownish yellow where it had been white. The batteries had been new that afternoon. She'd put them in herself at the flat, sitting on her kitchen counter while Silas complained about the draw on his bar tap downstairs. That thought of him — of the bar, the smell of hops, the ordinary grievance of plumbing — felt abruptly very far away. Something exhaled behind her. She did not turn this time. She could feel the warmth of it against the back of her neck, close enough to lift the fine hairs there, and she understood, with a flat clarity that surprised her, that if she turned and it had a face she would not be able to unlearn the face. The pendant was burning now. Not painfully. Insistently. A second heartbeat set just off-rhythm from her own, and in the gap between its beats she heard, very clearly, a footstep in the grass to her left. She walked. Not ran — she had enough sense left to know running made you prey. She walked, one careful foot in front of the other, back through the gap between the two oaks she'd entered by. The bark scraped her sleeve as she passed. It felt warm too, warm as skin, and she thought she felt it shift under the graze of her jacket, a slow flex like a muscle settling. Outside the stones, the air released her. She realised she'd been breathing shallowly, neck locked, and she drew one deep lungful and let it out and felt her shoulders drop half an inch. The torch brightened in her hand without her touching it. Colour returned to the beam. From the clearing behind her, something laughed. Not loud. A small, pleased sound, the kind you made when a guess turned out to be right. It came from the throat of no animal Rory had ever heard, and no person either, and it was not the laugh of something that had been disappointed to see her leave. It was the laugh of something that had seen enough. She did not look back. She walked the path in long steady strides until the standing stones were out of sight, and then she walked faster, and then, when the deer started up again from the bracken and the ordinary world came back in an untidy rush of sound, she ran. The pendant cooled against her skin by the time she reached the gate. The chain still hung loose on its hook, exactly as she'd found it, and the lock beside it lay open in the grass, and for a long moment she stood there with her hand on the iron bar, listening to the distant sigh of traffic on the South Circular, and she did not, could not, bring herself to pull the gate shut behind her.