Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPP04746YWW4KX0PAP8KMX

The gate to Richmond Park had been chained since dusk, which was fine, because Rory had come over the wall by the Ham Common side and torn a neat line into the knee of her jeans doing it. The tear didn't bother her. The silence did. She'd expected the park to be noisy. London parks were never truly quiet — foxes bickering in the bracken, the far-off complaint of the South Circular, planes stacking up over Heathrow in a slow luminous conga line. But the moment she'd dropped off the wall into the wet grass, all of it had thinned out like a radio losing signal. Not gone. Just receding, as if the city had taken three polite steps back to give her room. The pendant lay cold against her sternum. She kept touching it through her jacket to check, and it kept being cold, and she kept being obscurely disappointed. Warmth would have meant a portal. Warmth would have meant she was in the right place for the wrong reason. Cold meant she was simply here, alone, at eleven-forty at night, trusting an address that wasn't an address: *the oaks that stand like a doorway, past the Isabella, where the deer don't graze.* Eva had written it on the back of a Golden Empress receipt. Eva, who had not answered her phone in two days. Rory walked. The ground went from mown grass to tussock to something older, the kind of turf that had never met a mower, springy and treacherous with rabbit holes. Her torch made a wobbling white coin ahead of her boots. She kept it low. She had the sense — irrational, insistent — that light thrown high would be *seen*. The deer found her before she found the oaks. They were bedded down in a hollow to her left, twenty or thirty of them, red deer, their bodies making dark hummocks in the grass. She saw the shine of eyes catching her torch. Ordinarily deer would flow away from her like water finding a drain. These didn't move. Every head was turned the same way — not toward her. Past her. Northeast, toward the rise where the trees thickened. "Right," Rory said. Her voice came out thin and got smaller as it left her, swallowed before it could travel. "That's not ominous at all." None of them so much as flicked an ear at the sound. She went northeast. The oaks were exactly as Eva had described, which was somehow worse than if they'd been wrong. Two enormous trunks, split-barked and ancient, leaning toward each other so that their upper limbs interlaced overhead into a rough arch. Between them the grass gave way to a smooth apron of moss, unnaturally level, and beyond that — Beyond that, wildflowers. In February. Rory stopped a metre short of the arch and looked at them for a long moment: cornflowers, foxgloves, a drift of something white and starry she couldn't name, all of it standing up crisp and unbruised as though it were mid-June and someone had simply forgotten to tell them. Her breath smoked in the torchlight. The flowers didn't care. She could turn around. That was the thought. It arrived fully formed and reasonable, in her mother's voice: *You've seen it, you know it's real, come back in daylight with someone sensible.* And the answer arrived just as fast, in Eva's: *Nobody sensible is coming, Rory.* She stepped through. The temperature changed. Not warmer exactly — sideways. The air lost its edge, went soft and close, and it smelled of cut hay and something under the hay, sweetish, like fruit a day past ripe. Her ears popped faintly. Behind her the park was still there, she checked, a black tumble of hillside under a sodium-stained sky, but it looked further away than one step should account for. Like looking through the wrong end of something. The clearing was maybe forty feet across, ringed by standing stones she hadn't seen from outside: oak, not rock, six of them, weathered into grey pillars, each one hip-height and rooted in the moss like teeth in a gum. Rory swept her torch across them and got a smear of carvings, whorls and lines, too worn to read. "Eva?" she said. The word went out. It didn't come back. There was no echo in the grove, and she realised she'd been expecting one, because the trees stood close and high and every enclosed space she'd ever spoken in had given her something back. She waited. Counted to thirty. The flowers moved in a breeze she couldn't feel on her face. That was the first thing. She noted it and filed it and kept her breathing even, because panic was a luxury and she'd been taught by an expert that the way you survived a bad room was to stay ahead of it. Observe. Catalogue. Locate the door. The second thing was the singing. It was so faint she thought at first it was her own blood in her ears — that high sweet hum you get in true silence. But it had a shape. Three notes rising, one falling, over and over, and it came from nowhere in particular, from underneath the moss, from inside the stones, from the space just behind her left shoulder. She turned. Nothing. She turned back and the flowers directly ahead of her were flattened in a curved line, as though something had crossed there while her head was turned, something long and low and heavy enough to bend stems. Rory stood very still. "Okay," she said, to the grove, to whatever the grove had in it. "I'm not here for trouble. I'm looking for my friend. Dark hair, my height, talks a lot. She'd have come through here in the last few days." The singing dropped a note. She felt it go through the soles of her boots. And then, from the far side of the clearing, from the deep shadow between two of the oak stones: a small, wet, deliberate sound. *Tick.* Like a fingernail against bark. It came again. *Tick. Tick.* Patient. Unhurried. The rhythm of something that had all night and knew it. Rory raised the torch. The beam found bark, moss, the pale scatter of flowers — and, in the gap between the stones, at about the height of a kneeling child, two points of reflected light that vanished the instant the beam touched them. Not the flat green shine of deer-eye. Something narrower. Something that had blinked, sideways. Her scalp went tight. She lowered the torch slowly, because instinct screamed *don't let it see you looking*, and in the moment the beam swung down she caught motion at the edge of her vision on the *other* side of the clearing. She didn't turn her head. She let her eyes slide. A shape passed behind the nearest stone — tall, this one, tall as her, moving with the loose vertical grace of a man walking, except that it went behind the stone and did not come out the other side, and the stone was not wide enough to hide anything. *Tick. Tick.* The singing stopped. The absence of it was so total that Rory's ears rang. And into that ringing, close — close enough that she felt the stir of air against the fine hairs of her neck — someone exhaled. Not a growl. Not a hiss. A breath let out through the nose, the way you do when you're amused and trying not to show it. Every muscle in her back locked. She did not turn around. She stood in the middle of the grove with the torch pointed at the moss and the crescent scar on her wrist prickling like a struck match, and she made herself think. *Six stones. Time runs strange in here. Eva came in. Eva has not come out. And the thing behind me is waiting for me to look at it, which means looking at it is the mistake.* Against her sternum, without warning, the Heartstone began to warm. Rory closed her eyes. "Well," she said, very calmly, to the breath at her shoulder. "That's inconvenient."