Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD5XAJYS06VJJMYCGR6PWYH

Richmond Park after dark bore no resemblance to the maps. The gate stood open. Rusted iron, cold to the touch. Rory pushed through and the hinges gave no sound at all. Her torch threw a thin cone across the path. Mud sucked at her trainers. The trees crowded close on both sides, black bark and blacker gaps between. Somewhere far behind her a dog barked once and cut off. She tugged the silver chain up from under her collar. The Heartstone Pendant sat in her palm. Thumbnail-small, deep crimson, with a light trapped inside that moved when she did not. It burned. Not bright. Not hot enough to brand. A steady, low throb of heat against her skin, in rhythm with something that was not her pulse. "You left the pin. Grove. Midnight. What else was I supposed to do?" Her voice sounded wrong in the open air. Too sharp. It did not carry. She let the pendant drop. It knocked against her jacket zip and held its glow. Eva had sent the location at 22:14. No text. Just a dropped pin in the middle of the park and a photo of an oak with white marks carved into it. Rory knew that oak. Isolde's grove. The place the runners avoided even in daylight. The place where the city seemed to forget itself. The path ended. One moment packed dirt under her feet, the next soft ground that gave. Wildflowers. In November. White and yellow heads, open wide in the dark, heads turned up though no sun existed to see. The air changed. The wind that had tugged at her hair all the way from the Priory stopped. Sound stopped with it. No distant traffic from the A3. No planes. The torch beam caught motes that hung too still. Rory stepped between two standing stones. Ancient oak, not rock. Someone had driven them into the earth upright, roots still tangled at the base, bark grown over deep cuts. The inside of the circle was wider than it should have been. The trees outside the stones did not line up with the trees inside. The pendant flared. Heat lanced up her forearm. She flinched and her left wrist turned. The small crescent scar there caught the red light. "This isn't funny, Eva." No answer. The flowers did not move. She had come because Eva never dropped pins without words. She had come because the last time Eva went silent for three days, Rory found her in a flat above Silas' bar with the door locked and all the lights on. She had come because the pendant had started to warm in her pocket at work, while she stacked takeaway boxes for Yu-Fei Cheung, and she knew what that heat meant. A door near. Hel portal. Thin places. The benefactor who gave her the stone had warned her with no name attached. Just a note in plain ink: When it warms, stay away. She had not stayed away. In the centre of the grove, the grass was flat. As if something large had lain there. The depression was man-shaped but too long. The torchlight shook. Rory held the light with both hands to steady it. The edge of the light moved on its own. Not the torch. Something at the border of the circle, just beyond the oak stones. A flicker, like a person stepping from one trunk to the next when she looked left. She snapped the beam toward it. Nothing. Bark. Wildflowers. The standing stones sweated dark sap. "I'm here now. So come out." Her breath came out white though the air felt warm. Too warm for November. The warmth rose from the ground, from the flowers, sweet and rotten at once. A sound started under the grass. A soft, wet click. Like a knuckle popping underground. Then again, further to her right. Click. Click. Click. It circled. Rory turned in place, torch up. The beam caught no source. The clicks kept time with the pendant. Each throb of heat matched a click in the dirt. Straight black hair stuck to her neck. She pushed it back with a damp hand. Bright blue eyes wide, not from panic. From calculation. Cool-headed to a fault. That was what Silas called her when she fixed his accounts without being asked. Find the pattern. Break the pattern. The pattern was this: the grove was bigger on the inside. The flowers faced her, not the sky. The clicks came from below and the heat came from her chest. The clicks stopped. In the new quiet, she heard breathing. Not hers. Hers was short, through her teeth. This was slow, deep, from the flat place in the grass. In and out. Too long an inhale. Too long a pause before the exhale. As if whatever lay there had lungs the size of rooms. The pendant changed. The faint inner glow steadied, then pulled. Like iron to a magnet. The chain tugged forward. Rory braced her feet. "Okay. Okay, you want it. Take it then." She yanked the chain over her head and held the stone out at arm's length. The crimson light threw her shadow huge against the standing stones. Her shadow had no head. She looked down. Her shadow on the flower bed had no head. The cold that had waited beyond the stones rushed in. At the edge of vision, between two oaks, the dark folded. Not a shape appearing but the absence of shape rearranging. The wildflowers bent toward it though no wind moved. The flat place in the grass rose an inch. Just an inch. Soil cracked. Rory dropped the pendant. It hit the soft ground and did not sink. It sat on top of the grass and burned brighter, a coal in wet earth. The breathing stopped. For a heartbeat the grove held perfect still. Then the breathing started again, right behind her. She spun. Nothing stood there. But the air where nothing stood was dented, as if something invisible leaned close to examine the back of her neck. Her skin goosefleshed. The scar on her wrist itched. A voice came from the direction of the pendant, though no mouth made it. It used Eva's cadence, Eva's accent, but the words were spaced wrong, with that too-long pause between. "Rory. You came." The torch died. The red light of the Heartstone remained, and in that tight, bloody light the standing stones looked less like trees and more like legs.