Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H58219VX0SG5PPM5QFF876

The gate to Richmond Park had been locked for hours, but the gap in the fence by the rangers' yard was where it always was, and Rory slipped through it with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing things she wasn't supposed to do since she was nineteen. Her torch cut a thin cone through the dark. The city hummed somewhere behind her — distant traffic, the amber smear of light pollution over the treetops — but the sound stopped mattering about two hundred metres in, the way it always did, as if the park swallowed noise the way it swallowed people. Her breath came out in white curls. November cold, though the forecast had said nine degrees, and it felt more like three. The pendant shifted against her sternum, warm through two layers of jumper. That was why she was here. The Heartstone had been pulsing on and off since Tuesday — a faint, rhythmic heat, like a second heartbeat pressed against her skin — and it pulsed hardest whenever she faced north, toward the old oak stands in the middle of the park. She'd told Eva she was working a late delivery. She'd told herself she was being sensible, scoping it out in advance, doing reconnaissance. She hadn't told anyone the truth, which was that the stone had led her to Isolde's grove once before, and that the last time, time had come apart inside it like wet paper. Just a look, she told herself. In, confirm whatever's waking the thing up, out. The trees thickened. Her torch beam found the first standing stone earlier than she expected — an ancient oak, dead and black and hard as iron, its bark furrowed deep enough to lose fingers in. She didn't remember it standing quite this close to the path. She didn't remember the path at all, actually, but her feet kept moving, and the ground tilted gently downward, and the wildflowers started. Wildflowers. In November. White petals glowing faintly in the torchlight, a carpet of them, unfurling between the roots in defiance of every calendar she'd ever trusted. The air changed too — warmer by a degree, then two, carrying the green smell of growing things and underneath it something sweeter, heavier, like overripe fruit left too long in a closed room. "Okay," she said aloud, just to hear a voice. It sounded small and flat and didn't echo the way sound should. She stepped between the oaks. The grove opened around her the way it had before — not gradually, but all at once, as if the clearing had been waiting just behind the trees for her to notice it. The standing stones ringed the space. Above them, the sky was wrong. Not covered, not clouded — just wrong, a deep velvet dark with too few stars, and the ones that showed sat motionless in a way that made her eyes ache if she looked too long. She kept her gaze down and checked her watch. 11:47. She'd give herself twenty minutes. Whatever the grove did to clocks, twenty minutes inside was manageable. Probably. Last time she'd learned not to trust probably, but she was here now, and the pendant was beating against her chest like a tiny panicked bird. She walked the ring. Slowly, methodically, torch sweeping the grass. The Heartstone pulsed faster as she circled, peaking when she faced the centre of the clearing, where nothing stood but wildflowers and a flatness to the air — a faint shimmer, like heat haze in December, roughly man-shaped and roughly man-sized and absolutely still. Her mouth went dry. That hadn't been there before. She was almost certain. She'd looked at the centre twice already, hadn't she? Or had she looked at the stones, at the flowers, at everything except the middle, the way you don't look at the middle of a room when something in the middle is watching you? "Hello?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I'm not — I don't want trouble. I'm just looking." The shimmer didn't move. But the grove responded. Somewhere behind her, at the far edge of the ring, a branch cracked — a clean, deliberate sound, like something heavy putting its weight down and lifting it again. Then another. Then another, moving clockwise, patient, spaced at intervals that felt less like footsteps and more like counting. Rory turned her torch toward the sound. The beam touched nothing. Bark, shadow, flowers. But when she swept it back across the ring, one of the oak standing stones was facing her differently. She was sure of it. The furrows in its bark had rearranged into something like a closed eye, wide and lidless, and the something like a mouth beneath it. She stopped sweeping the torch. She held it on the ground in front of her boots and breathed. It's the grove. It does things to perception. Isolde warned — no, Isolde hadn't warned her, Isolde had laughed about it, which was worse. Time moves differently. Things move differently. Don't take anything, don't eat anything, don't answer if something calls your name. Her name arrived on cue. "Rory." Faint. Female. Coming from the centre of the clearing — from the shimmer — in a voice she knew, and hated knowing, because it belonged to Eva, and Eva was in Kennington, in bed, and definitely not standing in a pocket between worlds at midnight in November. "Don't answer if something calls your name." She said it out loud, and her voice cracked on the last word. "Rory, I can't find the way out. It's dark, Rory. Come here, it's warmer here." The pendant was scalding now. She pressed her palm flat against it through her jumper, and the heat grounded her, pain and warmth at once, and she thought: Eva doesn't know about the grove. Eva has never known about the grove. Whatever this is, it read the wrong file. The footsteps — the counting — had stopped. The silence that replaced them was worse, a held-breath silence, and in it she could hear the flowers growing. An actual sound, a dry rustling whisper, thousands of stems lengthening by millimetres, the whole clearing creeping toward her at the speed of botany. She backed toward the gap in the stones where she'd entered. The gap was there. The gap was definitely there, she could see the black trunks of the park beyond it, could smell the cold — but the distance seemed longer going than coming, and her watch said 11:52 when it should have said 11:55, and she decided not to think about that either. "Rory." Closer now. Not from the centre. From just behind her left shoulder, and she hadn't heard anything approach, and she walked faster without turning, because turning felt like the worst possible idea, like the one rule that mattered. "You left me here. Last time. You left me here and walked out and it was so cold, Rory—" "Wrong file," she said through her teeth. Her hand found the oak. Bark under her fingers, real bark, freezing cold — and then the warmth closed around her like stepping through a curtain, and the grove was behind her, and she was standing among dead bracken under a normal November sky with clouds and no stars and the distant orange wash of the city, her heart slamming, her breath sawing. 11:49. Eleven minutes. She'd been inside eleven minutes, or hours, and her watch had gone backwards, and she was shaking so hard she had to sit down on the frost-stiff grass. The pendant had gone cold. Entirely, absolutely cold, for the first time in a week. That was the thing she thought about, sitting alone in the dark park with the trees around her holding very still, listening to something that might have been wind moving slowly along the fence line, keeping pace with her breathing. Not what had called her name. Not the eye in the stone. The fact that the stone had stopped warning her. Like whatever lived in the grove had gotten what it wanted. Like the door was already open.