Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GWRKM50AGZRA595PBDRYGD

Richmond Park locked its gates at dusk, but the fence by Pen Ponds had a gap the width of a shoulder blade, and Rory had wriggled through it enough times to manage it with her delivery satchel still on. Frost had silvered the grass. Her breath came out in short white flags, and the moon hung low and orange, streetlamp-coloured, as though it had been dipped in the city. She set off across the open ground with her collar up and the Heartstone warm against her sternum. It had been warm for three days. Warm, then pulsing, keeping a rhythm a shade off from her own heartbeat. She fished it out as she walked: deep crimson stone, silver chain, thumbnail-sized, its inner glow too faint to light her fingers. The thing was meant to wake near a Hel portal, and there was nothing Hel within a hundred miles of Richmond. "Three days." She held the stone up to the moon. "You pick now to grow opinions." Isolde would explain it. Isolde explained everything, and made it sound like Rory's fault into the bargain. Except Isolde had missed the Thursday handoff at the Golden Empress, and the Grove was the only place she went when she wanted not to be found, and she'd told Rory once — fingers closed around Rory's wrist, so there'd be no mistaking it — never after dark. "You said never after dark." Rory tucked the pendant away. "So you'd better be home, because I'm not doing this twice." The boundary oaks rose out of the frost ahead, two of them, trunks wider than doorframes, standing a few strides apart. Ten paces out she felt the change in the air — heat spilling between the trunks like an open oven door, wet and green, June-smelling in November. The frost stopped in a clean line at the edge of their shade. She stepped through. The cold ended on her skin mid-stride. Dry grass under her boots, soil warm through the leather, the air thick with the smell of cut stems. Wildflowers ran to her knees, open in the dark, white and violet and a red so deep it drank the moonlight. Above the canopy the moon sat straight overhead, white and high, when ten steps ago it had been low over the trees. "Isolde?" The grove handed the word back a heartbeat later. Her voice, near enough — except stripped. No cold in it. No Cardiff. She turned a full circle. Trunks, blooms, black netted sky. Nothing between the trees. "It's Rory. Your stone's been misbehaving and I want it off my neck." The echo came back before she finished, folding over her last word, then running on past it into silence. She stood in the middle of it and waited, and the silence waited with her, and it had a texture she didn't care for — the hush of a room where someone has stopped breathing to hear you better. She tested it. "Chromatography." Back it came, whole, perfect, hers. "Polony." Perfect again. She said nothing after that, and the grove said nothing, and her own breath sounded loud and wrong in her ears. She walked toward a flat stone at the clearing's centre — table-flat, moss on its north face, the spot where Isolde held court — and under her crunch came a second crunch, a breath behind hers. She stopped with one foot forward. The other step landed anyway. She lifted her boot. Set it down. The second one came after, half a beat late. On the third stride it stopped being late. It walked level with her, off her right shoulder, and the right side of her body knew it the way you know a hand hovering over the back of your neck. She did not look. Her thumb found the crescent scar on her wrist and pressed there, and she fixed her eyes on the flat stone and counted her strides out loud, because her own voice was better than the alternative. "Four. Five. Six." Wood complained overhead — a long creak, the sound of a bough taking weight. She looked up through the net of branches. None of them moved. One swayed at its tip in small settling arcs, the way a branch swings when something has just left it. Her phone said 23:47. She pocketed it, walked another dozen paces, checked again. 23:47. The second hand ticked against the same second, twitching in place like a moth against glass. She put it away and did not check a third time. Her shadow lay long across the flowers, thrown from behind the treeline, from a direction where no light was. That was wrong twice over — the moon overhead should have folded the shadow under her feet — and at its edge sat a second shape, thin, jointed where joints don't go, which moved when she moved and stopped when she stopped and took a breath to catch up. She raised her arm. Her shadow raised its arm. The thin one followed, late. She dropped the arm and stopped granting the edges of her vision any more glances. Every time she turned her head, shapes stood between the far trunks — tall, narrow, still as the oaks themselves — and by the time her eyes arrived they had never been there at all. "Aurora." Isolde's voice. The vowel shapes, the light lift at the end, note for note — except Isolde had never once used that name. Isolde called her Rory, or girl, or Laila when the deal was serious. "Rory." She kept her eyes on the flat stone. "Nobody in this park gets the full version." The pendant went from warm to hot. It beat against her skin, fast, a bird's heart under her collar, and the glow inside the stone had strength now, staining her shirt red through the fabric. "Aurora Carter." Both names, given and family, spoken with the care of someone reading them off the inside of her skull. "You wore it here to us." The skin between her shoulder blades pulled tight, the way it does under a stare with weight. Not one stare. Several, spaced around the clearing at even intervals, the way people stand around a thing they've caught. She backed toward the boundary oaks, counting aloud. "Three. Four. Five." She had counted five strides coming in. At six she stopped, because there were three oaks in the boundary now. The third stood in the middle of the gap she'd used, young and smooth-barked, no moss, no ivy, its bark still tight, its roots fresh-turned in the earth. The grove went still all at once. The leaf-wind overhead quit. The second footsteps — gone. Even the hush changed, dropping over everything at once, and inside it she could hear the pendant beating hot against her chest. She turned to face the clearing. Every wildflower had turned to face her. Thousands of open heads, white and violet and that deep drinking red, all of them aimed at the place where she stood, and not one of them had been facing her a moment before. The stone bit through her shirt. "There you are," came from the middle of the grove, where nothing stood.