Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRJ7Q59DTN4QWDD0TXTYW1

The gate at Sheen Cross had been chained since ten, so Rory went over the wall where the brick had crumbled into a step, and dropped into wet grass on the other side. Richmond Park at half one in the morning was bigger than it had any right to be. She'd walked it a dozen times in daylight, tourists and dogs and the ice cream van by the car park, and none of that geography helped her now. The dark had swallowed the paths and put something else in their place — long grey slopes, black stands of oak, the far-off orange bruise of Kingston glowing over the treeline like a fire someone had forgotten to put out. Her phone said 1:37. Her phone also said no service, which was a lie it had been telling since she'd cleared the wall. The pendant sat warm against her sternum. Not hot. Warm the way a mug goes warm when you've left it too long, that just-above-blood heat that made her keep touching it to check it hadn't cooled. "Right," she said. "Isolde. You'd better actually be here." Her voice went nowhere. That was the first thing that struck her as wrong, and she couldn't say why for a good thirty seconds — then she got it. No echo. No carry. Open parkland, six hundred hectares of it, and her words dropped dead at her feet like she'd spoken into a wardrobe full of coats. She kept walking. The deer were the second thing. She found them in a hollow below Sawyer's Hill, thirty or forty of them, close enough that she could hear the tear of grass. Except she couldn't. They stood in a rough ring with their heads all up and turned, and not one of them was eating, and not one of them was looking at her. They were all facing the same direction — northwest, toward the trees she was headed for — with the stiff, cocked attention of dogs at a door. "Oi." She clapped once. "Go on." Nothing moved. A hind's ear twitched and that was all. Their eyes caught what little light there was and threw it back green. Rory went around them, wide, and told herself the tightness in her chest was the wall she'd climbed. The grove sat behind a screen of hawthorn that hadn't been there in September. She was fairly sure of that. She'd come in daylight with Eva and they'd found the standing stones easily, four of them, black oak trunks so old they'd gone mineral, planted in a square that didn't line up with anything. Now the hawthorn came to her shoulder and its thorns caught her jacket like fingers testing fabric. The pendant flared. One good pulse, a slow squeeze of heat, and she stopped dead with her hand flat over it. "That's not what you're meant to do," she whispered. "You do that near Hel gates. This isn't—" It pulsed again. She stood in the hawthorn for a long moment, and the honest part of her brain said *go home, get the bus, ring Silas*, and the other part — the part that had got her out of Cardiff with two bags and a train ticket — pushed the branches aside and stepped through. Inside the stones, the wildflowers were out. Of course they were; they always were. Cornflower and ragged robin and something white with a throat like a bell, all of it colourless in the dark but blooming, in January, ankle-deep and swaying. There was no wind. Rory watched the flowers move. They leaned east, held, came back, leaned east again, a long tidal rhythm, and the air against her face was as still as a held breath. She lifted her hand and felt nothing at all, not even the cold she should have felt, and it occurred to her that she'd stopped being able to see her own breath somewhere back with the deer. "Isolde." Louder. "Isolde, it's Carter. You left a message. In my sink. Which — we're going to talk about that." The flowers leaned east. Held. Came back. Behind her, in the hawthorn, something took a step. She turned fast. Nothing. The gap she'd come through had closed itself into a solid wall of thorn — no, that was panic, that was her eyes; she found the gap two feet left of where she'd thought it was, a black ragged mouth in the hedge. It was fine. She could get out. Something took a step to her right. Rory didn't turn this time. She stood very still and let her eyes slide, the way you did on a night bus when you didn't want to be looked at back, and at the outer limit of her vision, past the second standing stone, the dark went a shade darker and stayed that way. Tall. That was all she got. Tall and thin and upright, the height of the stone beside it, and utterly without detail, like a figure someone had cut out of the night and forgotten to fill in. She turned her head. It wasn't there. The stone stood alone with the flowers moving round its base. "Okay," she said, to the stone. "Okay." That was when the sound started. It came from underneath — under the flowers, under the soil — and it was so ordinary that her stomach turned over. Someone humming. A woman, tuneless, three or four notes going round and round, the sound a person makes doing washing-up or folding a sheet. Domestic. Bored. Beneath thirty feet of Richmond clay. Rory crouched and put her palm on the ground. She felt it come up through her hand and into her wrist bones, right where the little crescent scar was, and the scar went cold in a way nothing had made it go cold in twenty years. The humming stopped. "Rory," it said. Her name. In her mother's voice, in Jennifer Carter's flat Bridgend vowels, coming out of the dirt. She got up. She got up too fast and her heel caught and she went down on one hand into the flowers, and something under the petals gave beneath her palm — dry, jointed, hollow — and she snatched her hand back and did not look, absolutely refused to look, and stood up with her fist closed tight. "You're not her," she said. Her voice came out steadier than her legs. "Nice try. She'd never say it like that. She says Aurora when she's cross and *cariad* when she's not. She doesn't say Rory. Nobody in my family says Rory." Silence. Long enough that she heard her own pulse in her ears, hard and quick, and under it a sound like a great many small things settling. "Aurora," said the ground. Rory's whole body went to water. "No," she said. "No, that's — that's just you learning. That's not clever, that's just—" Two of the standing stones had moved. She was sure of it. The square had been a square. Now the four black trunks sat in a shape that wanted to be a triangle, with her at the middle of it, and the gap in the hawthorn was gone from where she'd last put it. She turned a slow full circle and the hedge went round with her, unbroken, thorn on thorn, waist-high and rising. The pendant beat against her chest like something alive and frightened. At the top of the slope beyond the stones, one by one, the deer came to the crest and stood looking down. Thirty or forty of them, silent, in a neat curved line. Watching. Not one of them made a sound, and their eyes threw back green, and they had all arranged themselves so as not to block anyone's view of her. Rory reached up and closed her hand around the crimson stone, and felt it pulse, and behind her — close, close enough that the hair moved on the back of her neck — something breathed out. It smelled of cut grass and old pennies. "Don't," she said, to the dark at her shoulder. "Don't you dare."