Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRKCSDBKEFKNW6ZH355WZW

The gate at Sheen had been locked since dusk, so Rory went over the wall where the ivy had pulled the mortar loose, and dropped into Richmond Park with her boots sinking into wet leaf mould and her heart going harder than the climb deserved. She waited there a moment, crouched, listening. Somewhere far off behind her, London hummed — the A307, the last buses, a siren threading through Kingston like a wire. Ahead of her: nothing. Not silence, exactly. Rory had grown up on the edge of a Welsh field and she knew what a night with things living in it sounded like. Owls. The tick and rustle of small creatures moving under bracken. Wind pushing the tops of the oaks around. She got none of it. The park lay in front of her the way a photograph of a park lay in front of her. *Fine,* she thought. *It's late. Everything's asleep.* But she'd delivered enough four a.m. curries across this city to know that nothing was ever really asleep. The instructions had been six words long, written in a hand she didn't recognise on the back of a Golden Empress receipt she hadn't printed: *Moonrise. The stones. Alone. Bring it.* Yu-Fei had found it under the till and handed it over without comment, which was its own kind of comment. Rory had spent the whole afternoon telling herself she wouldn't go. The pendant lay against her breastbone, cool as a coin. She pressed two fingers to it through her jacket and started walking north-east, towards the bracken and the ridge where the ground rose and the oaks grew old and crooked and out of alignment with every other tree in the park. It took twenty minutes. She counted her steps for the first hundred and then stopped, because counting made the quiet worse — it gave the quiet something to keep time with. The standing stones came up out of the dark the way they always did: all at once, as though they'd been somewhere else a second earlier. Eight of them, waist-high to shoulder-high, grey-green with three centuries of lichen, arranged in a ring wide enough to park two cars inside. They didn't look like stones people had put there. They looked like teeth in a jaw that had rotted away around them. Between the stones, the grove. Rory stopped at the boundary and felt the warmth in the air roll over her face like breath from an open oven door. Inside the ring it was summer. It was always summer. Foxgloves stood shoulder to shoulder with cow parsley and bluebells and a low froth of meadowsweet, all of them in flower at once, all of them wrong for October, and the smell of them was so thick and sweet it sat on the back of her tongue. That much was normal. That much she'd seen before. What wasn't normal was that the flowers weren't moving. She stood there for a long moment working out what her body had noticed before her brain had. The grove had its own weather; she remembered that. A little breeze that came from nowhere and went nowhere and stirred the grass in slow patterns, like a hand trailed through water. Isolde had told her once, laughing, that it was the grove breathing. Tonight every stalk stood perfectly upright and perfectly still, thousands of them, and the air against her cheek was as motionless and as warm as the inside of a mouth. Rory took the pendant out and held it up. The crimson stone had its usual faint inner glow, that suggestion of a lit room seen through a keyhole. No warmth. No pulse. Whatever else was here, there was no portal to Hel within reach, and she found that comforting for about four seconds, until she realised how many other things there were to be afraid of that the pendant simply didn't measure. "Isolde," she said. Her voice went out of her and stopped a few feet away, as though it had hit a wall she couldn't see. No echo. No carry. She stepped over the boundary anyway. She'd come this far, and Aurora Carter had a long and well-documented history of walking towards the thing she should have been walking away from. The moment both her feet were inside the ring, the sounds started. Not loud. That was the awful part. They were the sounds a night is supposed to have — a bird shifting on a branch, a dry crackle in the undergrowth, the far-off double bark of a fox — but they were arriving one at a time, spaced out, like someone was working through a list. A moth-flutter of wings by her left ear. Three seconds of stillness. A single cricket, sawing away for exactly as long as it took her to turn her head towards it, then stopping mid-note. *Something is doing that,* she thought, and the thought went through her like cold water down the collar. *Something's making the noises it thinks I want to hear.* She kept very still and let her eyes adjust. The moon was up now, three-quarters full, laying a grey wash over the flowers and the stones. The grove was thirty feet across. She could see all of it. There was nothing standing in it but her. And yet. At the edge of her vision, off to the right, near the crooked stone with the split down its middle, the foxgloves had a gap in them. A person-shaped absence, a place where the flowers leaned out and away as if something had been standing there long enough to press them back. Rory turned her head to look at it properly and the gap wasn't there. Foxgloves shoulder to shoulder, undisturbed, all the way to the stone. She turned back. In the corner of her eye, the gap reappeared, four feet closer. Rory did not run. She was proud of that later, in the way you can be proud of something you don't remember choosing. She stood in the warm dead air with her thumb pressed hard against the facets of the Heartstone and she said, quite calmly, "I know you're there." The cricket started again. It sawed for two seconds, then made a sound no cricket had ever made — a click, and then a wet noise, like a tongue coming unstuck from a palate. Then a woman's voice, small and far away and perfectly pleasant, said, "*Rory.*" Her whole body wanted to answer. That was the horror of it; not the voice, but her own throat rising towards it. Because it was Eva's voice. Eva who was asleep in a flat in Peckham with her phone on silent. Eva who had never in her life come out to Richmond Park after dark, and who, Rory knew with total certainty, could not be standing behind her in a grove where nothing had entered and nothing had left. "*Rory, I'm here.*" The grass at her feet still didn't move. The flowers still stood at attention. Somewhere at the outer limit of what her eyes could catch, the gap in the foxgloves grew wider — wide enough for two now — and the crescent scar on her left wrist began to ache the way it hadn't ached since she was nine years old and hadn't yet learned to keep her hands out of places she couldn't see into. The pendant against her chest was still cold. Rory looked at the ring of stones behind her — eight of them, and the gap she'd walked in through, which she was fairly sure had been between the second and the third — and counted, and found nine. "*Turn around,*" said Eva's voice, kindly, from about a foot behind her left ear. "*It's only me.*" Rory kept her eyes on the stones. She made her mouth move. "No," she said. "I don't think it is." And in the silence that followed — a real silence, at last, one with no borrowed crickets in it — she heard something inhale, very slowly, and settle in for the long wait.