Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXPPCXSTHPQVX2PV7HKMPZ

The last train to Richmond had been nearly empty, and Rory had taken that as a kindness. Fewer faces to remember her, fewer questions later if anything went wrong. She'd told no one where she was going. Eva would have called it reckless. Eva would have been right. The note had come folded inside the delivery bag at the Golden Empress, tucked between a receipt and a carton of egg-fried rice, written in a hand she didn't recognize. *Richmond Park. The oaks past the Isabella Plantation. Midnight. Bring the pendant.* No signature. Just the smudge of something that might have been ink and might have been soot. So here she was, past midnight, the gates long closed behind her, picking her way through wet grass that soaked the cuffs of her jeans. The pendant lay cold against her sternum. That was the first thing she noticed, and the first thing that was wrong. It had been warm on the train. Faintly, the way it always was, that small inner heat she'd stopped questioning months ago. Now it had gone cold as a river stone, and the deeper she walked into the dark, the colder it grew. Richmond Park at night was a different animal than the one she knew. By day it was joggers and prams and the distant nodding heads of deer. Now the grass stretched gray and endless under a moon gone thin, and the trees stood in clusters like people who had stopped talking the moment she appeared. She kept to the path she half-remembered, the pendant a small dead weight, and told herself the cold was just the season. She reached the oaks without quite deciding to. They didn't look like the other trees. She knew it the way you know a wrong note in a familiar song — some part of her recognized them before her eyes did. Five of them, vast and ancient, their trunks split and gnarled into shapes that suggested faces if she let them, arranged in a rough ring around a clearing she was certain hadn't been there a moment ago. The standing stones, she thought, though they were wood, not stone. The boundary. The wildflowers were the second thing wrong. They grew thick inside the ring, pale and luminous in the moonlight, and they were blooming. All of them. Foxglove and bluebell and things she had no name for, fat-petaled and trembling, in the dead middle of a London November. The smell of them rolled over her, sweet and heavy and just slightly turned, like fruit a day past ripe. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. Nothing answered. But the silence had a texture to it, a held-breath quality, and she became aware that she could no longer hear the city. No distant motorway hum. No planes stacking over Heathrow. Nothing but her own pulse and the small wet sounds of the grass settling behind her. She stepped over the threshold of the oaks. The cold of the pendant became a burn. Not warmth — she knew its warmth, had felt it pulse like a second heart more than once — but a deep aching chill that radiated outward through her chest. She pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket and felt it thrumming, fast and irregular, a frightened thing. *Near a portal,* some buried part of her supplied. *It pulses near a portal.* But this wasn't pulsing. This was screaming, in the only language it had. A sound came from across the clearing. It was such a small sound. The brush of fabric, perhaps, or a foot setting down with great care into wet grass. She turned toward it and there was nothing — only the wall of the far oaks, the flowers nodding, the moonlight lying flat and silver across the empty ground. "I got your note," she said. Steadier now. Anger helped. "So here I am. You want to come out, or are we doing this the rude way?" The flowers stilled. All of them, at once, as though a wind had passed — except there was no wind, and the stilling was wrong, because they didn't sway first. They simply stopped, mid-tremble, like a film paused. And in the new and absolute stillness she heard the sound again, closer now, off to her left this time, where she had just been looking and seen nothing. She did not look at it directly. Some animal wisdom kept her eyes forward. But at the edge of her vision, in the soft gray smear where detail failed, something stood among the oaks that had not been standing there before. Tall. Too tall, and too thin, with a stillness that was not the stillness of a person waiting but the stillness of a thing that had never needed to breathe. When she moved her eyes to it, it wasn't there. When she looked away, it was. Rory's mouth had gone dry. The pendant burned against her skin, and she understood, with a clarity that arrived from nowhere and felt like falling, that it had not gone cold to warn her of a portal. It had gone cold because something here was *drinking* its warmth. Something that fed on the small heat of living things, and had been patient enough to write a note in a hand it borrowed, and wait. "You're not who sent the note," she said. Her voice barely carried. "There wasn't anyone. You wrote it yourself." At the edge of her vision, the thing tilted. A long slow incline of where a head should be, as if it were pleased she'd worked it out, as if cleverness were a flavor. The flowers began to bloom again — faster now, the pale petals unfurling in a rush, more and more of them, climbing the trunks of the oaks, and she realized the smell had changed entirely. The sweetness had rotted through. Beneath it lay something cold and mineral, the smell of deep places that never saw the sun. She took one step backward, toward the threshold she'd crossed. The grass did not give beneath her foot. It was as if the ground itself had thickened, had decided to hold her here a little longer, and she remembered, distant and useless, what Eva had told her once about this place. *Time moves differently. An hour inside can be minutes outside. Or days.* The thing at the edge of her sight took a step toward her. She did not see it move. She only knew that the gray smear where it lived had grown nearer, and that the cold in her chest had spread to her fingers, and that somewhere very close, soft as a lover's whisper, something had begun — almost gently — to laugh.