Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQYXVYZ8DB7NFZ2VHKH8HC

The gate at Sheen Cross had been chained since ten, so Rory went over the wall, and the drop knocked her phone out of her hand into the wet grass. She found it face-down, screen still lit, 11:47, no signal bars. Fine. Isolde had said midnight and Isolde had said alone and Isolde had not said anything about being able to ring for help. Richmond Park at night was bigger than it had any right to be. The deer had all drifted somewhere else, and without them the grass stretched flat and blue-grey under a moon that kept sliding behind cloud. She walked with her thumb hooked around the silver chain at her throat, the crimson stone tucked into her fist, cool as a river pebble. "Just a chat," she said out loud, because her own voice was better than nothing. "A chat in a field. Very normal." The bracken swallowed the path and then gave it back. She found the first oak stone where Isolde had described it — not stone at all, a pillar of black oak driven into the earth, the grain worn smooth at hip height by centuries of hands. Rory put her palm on it. Warm. Not sun-warm. Blood-warm, like the flank of something asleep. She stepped past it into the grove. The temperature changed the way a room changes when someone opens an oven. Wildflowers came up to her knees, cornflower and foxglove and campion, all of them impossibly in bloom together in the last week of February, all of them holding their colour in the dark when everything else in the park had gone to charcoal. The grass had been flattened in a wide arc near the centre, as though something large had lain there and only recently got up. "Isolde?" Her voice didn't travel. It stopped about four feet in front of her mouth and dropped. Rory turned a slow circle. Seven oak pillars, black against the treeline, and beyond them the park continued — she could see the ridge, the far-off orange stain of Kingston on the clouds. Everything where it should be. She checked the phone. 11:47. She watched the screen for what she counted as a hundred seconds. 11:47. "Right," she said, and put it in her jacket pocket, and took her hand off it, and took it out again to make sure it was still there. The first sound came from behind her left shoulder. A wet click, three times, like a tongue against the roof of a mouth. She spun and there was nothing but foxgloves nodding, and no wind to nod them. "Hello?" Click. Click-click. Further off now, or nearer — the grove did something strange to distance, folded it, so that the treeline seemed to be forty feet away and also close enough to touch. Rory picked a direction and stood with her back to a pillar, which put four of the others in her sight and hid two, and she found she couldn't stop thinking about the two. The grass moved. Not the tops of it, the way it moves under a breeze. A line through the middle of it, low and quick, tracking from the eastern stones toward the flattened arc at the centre, parting the stems and closing them again. It stopped. She stared at the place it had stopped until her eyes watered and the flowers began to swim. "Fox," she said. "It's a fox." The grass to her right moved. The same low quick line, from a different direction entirely, and this one didn't stop, it went behind her, behind the pillar, and she turned and it was gone and the stems stood up straight and untroubled and something in the treeline let out a long breath. Rory did not run. Running in unfamiliar terrain at night was how people broke ankles, and she had a feeling — cold, specific, delivered to her like a note under a door — that a broken ankle in this grove would be the end of the story. So she walked. Fast, back the way she'd come, toward the pillar she'd touched, the one with the split down its side like a healed wound. She reached it. She put her hand on the split. Then she looked out past it, at the ridge, at the orange stain on the clouds, and she stepped through. The temperature didn't change. Wildflowers to her knees. Seven black pillars. The flattened arc in the centre. "No," she said. She turned and stepped back through and it was the grove again, the same grove, and she did it a third time faster and a fourth time with her eyes shut, and on the fourth she came out with her heart going so hard she could feel it in her teeth and she stood very still and made herself count the pillars. Eight. She counted again. Seven. The eighth was thirty feet off and it was thinner than the others and it had not been thirty feet off a moment ago, and when the cloud slid off the moon she saw that it wasn't black oak, it was dark because it was wet, and it was roughly the shape of a person standing with their arms at their sides. "Isolde." Rory's voice came out level. She was proud of that. "If that's you, this is a rubbish joke." The shape didn't answer. It didn't move either, not while she watched it, and she watched it hard enough that her vision started to grain over. But when she blinked — one blink, half a second, nothing — it was twenty feet off. Same posture. Same slack arms. The pendant went hot. Not warm. Hot, like a coin left on a radiator, and it kept climbing until she had to pull it off her sternum and hold it by the chain where it swung and glowed a dull furnace red between her fingers, throwing her own shadow up huge and stuttering against the flowers. "Okay," she breathed. "Okay. Not fae. Something else." Something laughed. It came from very close to her right ear, close enough that she felt no breath and that absence was worse than breath, and it was a woman's laugh, short, delighted, the exact laugh her mother made at the end of a bad phone call. She swung the pendant like a censer and the light went across the grass and found nothing there. Nothing beside her. Nothing at her shoulder. The wet shape stood ten feet away with its head tilted over, all the way over, ear almost to collarbone. "Rory," it said. Her own name in her own voice. The pitch was right. The Cardiff still in it that eight months of London hadn't sanded off. "Rory," it said again, pleased with itself, testing the shape of the word. "Rory. Rory, love, come here." She backed up. Her heel found the base of a pillar and she pressed her spine to it, and the black oak was warm and it was breathing, a slow swell against her shoulder blades, in and out. Around the ring, one by one, the other pillars leaned in. She held the burning stone out in front of her at the end of its chain, and in the red light she saw the flattened grass in the centre of the grove and understood, finally, what shape had been lying there, and how many of them there were, and that the arc was not a place where something had slept. It was a place where something had been dragged. "Rory," said the thing with her voice, from behind her now, from inside the pillar at her back, "you're going to want to keep looking at me."