Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPQS12KD63P33WCYRAMTSF

The taxi dropped Rory at the Sheen Gate at half eleven, and the driver didn't wait for her to reach the fence before pulling away. "Cheers," she said to the empty road. Richmond Park closed at dusk in winter. The gate was padlocked, the chain thick as her wrist, but the fence beside it sagged where generations of teenagers had climbed it, and Rory went over in one movement, landing in wet bracken. The Heartstone sat cold against her sternum. That was the point. Cold meant no portal, no Hel-thing waiting in the dark with its mouth full of teeth. Cold meant she could do what she'd come for and be home before Silas noticed she'd gone. She'd walked this route in daylight twice. Bog Gate path, then the diagonal across the open grass toward the Isabella Plantation, then off-path at the third bench, thirty degrees left, and after eleven minutes of nothing at all, the standing stones. In daylight it took twenty-five minutes. Now the grass was black and the sky was the colour of dishwater, orange at the edges where London pressed against it, and her torch made a small yellow circle that bounced and jittered and showed her nothing but more grass. The deer were the first thing. There were six hundred of them in the park, red and fallow, and at night they clustered in the low ground near Pen Ponds. She'd expected to hear them — the rustle, the alarm bark that sounded like a man clearing his throat. Instead she got the ponds on her right, flat and still and utterly silent, and not one shape moved on the water or beside it. She stopped. Killed the torch. Let her eyes adjust. The grass rolled away grey and empty in every direction. Half a mile off, the black mass of the plantation. Above her, a plane crawled westward with its lights blinking, and she felt absurdly grateful for it, for the two hundred people in it eating tiny pretzels and watching films. "Right," she said. Out loud. Because the silence had a texture to it, and she wanted to put a scratch in it. Her voice came out flat. No carry. Like she'd spoken into a cupboard full of coats. She switched the torch back on and walked faster. The third bench was where she'd left it, a green council bench with a brass plaque she'd read in October — FOR MARGARET, WHO LOVED THIS VIEW. Rory put two fingers on the plaque out of habit, the way she touched doorframes, and turned thirty degrees left into the dark. Eleven minutes. She counted her steps instead, because counting minutes made her check her phone, and checking her phone ruined her night vision. Four hundred and eighty steps was roughly eleven minutes at her pace. She'd worked it out on a napkin in the Golden Empress with a chow mein going cold beside her, and Yu-Fei had asked her what she was doing, and she'd said maths. At step ninety, she heard the footfall behind her. Not a footfall. A press. The sound of weight coming down on soaked ground and the ground giving. She turned. The torch swung. Grass, bracken, a hawthorn bent by wind into the shape of a running man. Nothing else. "Deer," she said. There were no deer. She'd already established that. She walked on, and at step one hundred and forty the press came again, and this time it came from her left, at the exact moment her own foot landed. So close to synchronised that it could have been an echo, except that grass didn't echo, and open parkland at midnight had nothing to echo off. Rory stopped mid-stride, one foot up. Silence. Long enough that she felt her pulse in the roof of her mouth. Then, out in the black to her left, the press. Once. Alone. As if something had been walking with her and hadn't stopped in time. She stood very still and she thought about the fact that she was one mile inside a locked park with a dead-cold pendant and a torch with about forty percent battery, and that Isolde had said *come alone or don't come*, and that Rory had rolled her eyes at that because Fae loved a bit of theatre. "Isolde?" she called. The word went nowhere. Straight down into the grass like water into sand. She thumbed the torch to its widest beam and swept it slowly across the ground, left to right, the way she'd seen the police do it on the Cardiff quayside the night they dragged the river. The light picked out flattened grass in a line running parallel to her own path. Six feet away. Where a person walking beside her would have walked. The flattening went back the way she'd come and forward the way she was going. Nothing stood in it. Rory made a decision she'd argue with later: she kept walking. Because the grove was ahead and the gate was behind, and whatever was making the flattening had had one hundred and forty steps to do something about her and hadn't. And because if she ran, she'd be running through the dark with something pacing her, and she'd rather walk. She kept the torch on the parallel line and watched the grass go down. Step by step. Down. Down. Neat, patient depressions the length of a boot, appearing a half-beat after her own, and no shape above them, and no sound now at all, because whatever it was had learned she could hear it. At step three hundred she started talking, just to hold her voice in her own throat. "You're doing that on purpose. The timing." Her breath fogged. "You want me looking sideways so I don't look up, or forward, or — " She stopped. Turned the torch forward. Twenty yards ahead, something the height of a man leaned against nothing. Just the leaning. A slant of denser dark, a lack of stars in a shape that had shoulders. The torch light went into it and didn't come out and didn't stop on anything. Rory did not scream. She noted, with the strange clinical part of her brain that had got her through Evan's flat and out of the door with her ribs taped, that her hands had gone completely steady. "Isolde," she said, "if that's you being funny, I'll walk back." The shape didn't move. She counted ten. It didn't move. She counted twenty, and somewhere behind her the grass pressed down once, softly, patiently, closer than six feet now, and the leaning thing ahead of her still didn't move, and she understood in a cold rush that she was standing between two of them. The pendant, dead cold all this time, gave a single flutter of warmth. Like a moth landing on her breastbone. Then went cold again. "Oh, that's just brilliant," Rory whispered. She turned her head — not the torch, just her head — and looked at the place where the pressing had come from, and in the corner of her eye, in that unreliable outer ring where the rods live, she saw it clearly: something tall and thin and folded, close enough to touch, hands hanging past its knees. She looked straight at it. Empty grass, silvered with frost, and a smell like cut ferns and wet pennies. Ahead, the leaning shape had gone. Rory stood alone in the middle of a mile of open ground with the plantation black to her left and the ponds silent behind her, and she made herself breathe out slowly, and she made herself take step three hundred and one. The grass beside her went down at the same moment. At step three hundred and sixty, the wildflowers started. Out of season. Cornflowers and campion, blue and pink and impossible in January, pushing up through frost in a widening path, and forty yards on she saw the first of the oaks — squat, split, older than the city — and between them the light of a place where the sun hadn't finished setting. Something behind her sighed. Not a wind sound. A throat sound. Rory did not look back. She walked into the stones.