Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE95H3ZPSTXA2B5RXXGWPQ9

Rory pushed through the last screen of bracken and came out into the clearing before she'd meant to, the standing stones rising pale and sudden in the moonlight like teeth breaking through gum. The map Yu-Fei's cousin had scrawled on the back of a takeaway menu had said *Richmond Park, past the old oaks, you can't miss it*, and he'd been right about that much. What he hadn't said was how the air changed the moment she crossed the ring of stones — thicker, somehow, like breathing through a wet cloth. She adjusted the strap of her bag, felt the small hard shape of the Heartstone Pendant against her collarbone through her jumper. It had gone warm an hour ago, somewhere on the Tube, and she'd told herself it was body heat. It wasn't body heat now. It pulsed, slow and insistent, like something with a pulse of its own. "Right," she said, mostly to hear her own voice. "In, find whatever Yu-Fei's cousin lost, out again." The wildflowers underfoot didn't belong to any November she knew. Foxgloves and campanula, blooming fat and violet in the dark, releasing a scent too sweet for the cold that wrapped around her ankles. She'd been told the grove did that. She hadn't quite believed it until her boots crushed a poppy that had no business existing past September. Somewhere off to her left, a branch cracked. She turned, quick, the beam of her phone torch swinging wide across bark and shadow. Nothing. Just the black shapes of trees pressed close together, the kind of dark that seemed to lean in rather than simply exist. She held still and listened. Nothing moved. She told herself it was a deer, London parks were full of them, fat and stupid and unbothered by fences that weren't meant to keep them out. But deer didn't usually go quiet the second you looked for them. She kept walking, the pendant's glow now visible even through her jumper, a faint red bloom like a coal breathing under ash. The standing stones behind her had already gone strange with distance — she glanced back and could no longer tell how far she'd come, whether it had been twenty paces or two hundred. The moon sat directly overhead, too bright, too still, as if someone had painted it there and forgotten to let it move. Something rustled to her right this time. Closer. "Hello?" Her voice didn't carry the way it should have. It came out flat, swallowed immediately by the trees, as though the grove had no interest in letting sound travel further than it had to. No answer. Of course there wasn't. She hadn't expected one, not really, but some old animal part of her brain had hoped for it anyway, hoped for a jogger, a groundskeeper, anyone human to blunt the sharpening edges of her nerves. She made herself keep walking. Yu-Fei's cousin had said there'd be a hollow tree, an old ash split down the middle by lightning, and that whatever he'd lost — he'd been infuriatingly vague about what — would be tucked into the roots. Fifty quid to fetch it. Rory had needed the fifty quid more than she'd needed her evening free, and now here she was, questioning the wisdom of that maths. The hollow tree, when she found it, looked wrong in a way she couldn't immediately name. Too symmetrical, maybe, the split running dead straight down the trunk as if it had been *made* rather than struck. She crouched at the roots and swept her torch beam through the gap, found a small tin box wedged between two knuckled roots, and reached for it. The pendant flared hot against her skin. She froze, hand still outstretched, and became aware — all at once, the way you become aware of a held breath — that the clearing had gone silent. Not peaceful-silent. Silent the way a held breath is silent. She heard her own heartbeat too clearly, the small tick of her wristwatch, and beneath that, right at the edge of hearing, something that might have been breathing that wasn't hers. She didn't turn around straight away. She made herself close her hand around the tin first, made herself stand, slow, unhurried, the way you're meant to move around dogs that might bite. Only then did she turn. Nothing there. Just the trees, the flowers, the moon fixed like a nail in the sky. And yet the space between two of the nearer oaks looked darker than it should, a wrongness of shadow that didn't match the angle of the moonlight, as if something had cut a hole in the dark and stood inside it. "I'm just leaving," she said, and hated how thin it sounded. "Got what I came for." The shape between the oaks didn't move. But she had the sudden, absolute certainty that it had been closer a moment ago than it was now, that it had drawn back to let her believe she'd imagined it, and that certainty settled into her stomach like a swallowed stone. She walked. Not ran — some instinct older than sense told her that running would change something, would turn a waiting thing into a chasing one. She walked, unhurried, every muscle screaming at her to bolt, back toward where the standing stones ought to be, and the pendant burned hotter with every step until it felt like a coal pressed flat against her sternum. Behind her, soft against the wildflowers, she heard footsteps matching her own pace exactly. Not following. Mirroring. She didn't look back again. The stones rose up ahead of her at last, pale and real and blessedly solid, and she went through them at something just short of a run, breath tearing, the tin box clutched hard enough to bruise her palm. The moment she crossed the boundary, the sound stopped. All of it — the footsteps, the too-perfect silence, the wrongness of the light — cut off like a held note finally released. She stood in the ordinary dark of Richmond Park, ordinary trees rustling in an ordinary wind, her breath fogging in front of her, and only then let herself look at her watch. Two hours had passed. She'd have sworn, on anything, that she'd been in there twenty minutes.