Run: 2026-09-03-01M1K4T2NA1AQA3ZGSEW5TV7Q3

Richmond Park shut its gates at dusk and Rory went over the fence by the horse path. She dumped her delivery bike in the bracken and looped the lock through the back wheel out of habit. The city hum fell away behind her. Traffic on the A roads thinned to a single red thread of brake light, then to nothing. The dark under the trees had weight. It pressed against her cheeks and the backs of her hands. The Heartstone Pendant sat hot against her sternum. It had stayed cold for months, a thumbnail of deep crimson on a silver chain, a gift with no note left in her pigeonhole above Silas' bar. Tonight on the last drop for Golden Empress, the soup leaking a little at the lid, the stone woke and burned through her T-shirt while she cut across Richmond. Heat, then a tug. North. A pull with a direction, the way a magnet finds iron. She ditched the thermal bag in a bush and followed it. "You have got to be joking." Her breath fogged. She rubbed the crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb and stared at the treeline. September stripped the chestnuts and left the paths slick with mast. The air smelled of wet bark and diesel from the road. Under that, sweet. Heavy. Wildflowers. Rory clicked on her torch and swept the beam across the verge. Clover and vetch and dog rose, open wide at midnight in the cold, their petals black at the rims with frost that had no business forming. Bees should have worked them in daylight. No bee touched them now. The heads nodded though the air held still. She stepped off the path. Oak roots rose through the leaf litter in broad knuckles. Her trainers found each one. She counted paces under her breath to keep her head straight, twenty, forty, sixty, and tied a torn strip of delivery receipt to a low branch when the path vanished behind her. "Twenty quid tip says I lose signal." She pulled out her mobile. No bars. The clock read 23:41, then 23:39, then a row of blocky zeroes. She thumbed the screen off and on. The zeroes stayed. She slipped the mobile back in her pocket and kept the torch low. The grove opened without path or sign. One stride she walked under plantation oak, close set and dripping, the next she stood in a clearing twice the size of her flat. Ancient stones ringed it, each one shoulder high and split with age, lichen crusting their flanks in orange rosettes. Between the stones grew oaks older than the park, their trunks twisted into hollows a child could hide inside. The wildflowers carpeted the ground to the stone feet, a riot of colour too vivid for torchlight, poppy red and cornflower blue and a yellow that hurt her bright blue eyes. Rory killed the torch beam for a second to let her vision settle. The dark rushed in. The pendant glowed. A faint inner core, ember red, lit the hollow of her throat and threw her shadow long across the flowers. "Alright. I came. What do you want?" Her voice went out and did not come back. No echo off the stones. The words dropped a foot from her mouth and died in the flower scent. She cleared her throat and spat to the side. The spit hit a leaf with a tick too loud for the space. She forced her shoulders down and walked the ring. Her fingers brushed each stone as she passed. Cold sank into her palm, deep cold, the kind that lives in river water in March. The third stone bore fresh scratches at waist height, three parallel grooves in the lichen, the green flesh curled back to show pale rock beneath. She crouched and ran her nail along one groove. Dust caked under her nail. She sniffed it. Iron and cut grass. A twig cracked behind her. She spun, torch up. The beam shook across empty flowers. The stalks trembled in a circle the size of a dinner plate, though no wind moved the rest of the clearing. A single petal lifted, turned over, and settled. "Who is kipping out here? Show yourself. I bruise easy and I bite back." Nothing answered. Her straight shoulder-length black hair lifted off her neck though the air stayed dead. Static crawled over her scalp. She tucked the hair behind her ears and rolled her neck until it popped. She checked the receipt strip tied to the branch. Gone. The branch stood bare ten yards off, the twine a pale curl on the ground beneath it. She had tied a reef knot. Her dad Brendan taught her that knot on a boat in Cardiff Bay when she was nine and she tied it in her sleep. The twine lay cut, not frayed, the ends pinched clean. Rory picked up the twine and pocketed it. She pulled a pen from her jeans and drew a cross on her left palm in biro, then a second cross on the nearest stone. Mark and countermark. Her old Pre-Law revision trick. She set her jaw and walked the diameter of the clearing, heel to toe, counting. "One, two, three—" A sound cut through the count. High and thin, from above the oaks. A child humming a football chant with the words sucked out, three notes up and two down, off key. It stopped mid bar. Rory tracked the torch up into the canopy. Branches latticed the sky and blocked the stars. Between two limbs a shape shifted, darker than the bark, long limbed, too still. She held the beam on it until her arm ached. Bark. Knot and shadow. It resolved into bark. The humming started again from ground level by her left knee. She jumped back. Flowers closed over her trainer prints and sprang upright, erasing each tread as she made it. The scent thickened until it coated her tongue, honey and milk and something under, like a plug left in a sink. The pendant pulsed against her skin in time with her blood, heat flaring with each beat until sweat pricked her hairline. She yanked the chain out from her shirt to let cold air under it. The crimson stone threw red light over her hands. The biro cross on her palm had smeared into a blue slash. While she stared, another line bled out from the first, thin as a hair, and hooked at the end into a crescent that matched the scar on her wrist. "Oh, no. No. You do not get to do that." She scrubbed the mark with her thumb. Ink and sweat smeared but the crescent stayed, white and raised, old scar tissue, not fresh ink. She pressed it hard enough to whiten the skin around it. Pain shot clean to her elbow. Leaves rustled at the far stones. Not a gust. A passage. Stem by stem, the flowers bent in a line from the oak hollow to the centre of the ring, as if a foot pressed each one and lifted. The line stopped three yards from her. The last flower in the line, a tall poppy, bent double and stayed bent. Rory backed a step and her heel hit stone. She turned. No stone stood there a moment before. A seventh marker jutted from the flower bed, raw and unlichened, its face wet. Her torch beam slid over it and caught her own reflection warped in the damp sheen, tall and narrow, eyes all pupil. Behind her reflection the flowers stood upright again, every head turned to the centre. The mobile buzzed in her pocket. One hard vibration. She fished it out. The screen glowed white. No number. No text. The clock cycled fast through hours, 23:59, 00:00, 01:14, 04:44, then back. The zeroes returned. The vibration came again, longer, and travelled up her arm into her teeth. The humming rose from the oak hollows now, from all of them at once, three notes up and two down. The air in the clearing thinned. Each breath pulled short. The torch dimmed though the battery icon showed full. Red pendant light overpowered the white beam and painted the stones the colour of gums. Rory planted her feet and swung the torch in a full arc, left to right, forcing her wrist steady. "Last call. Step out where I can see you. I am done playing hide and seek in the dark." The beam caught movement at the rim of light between two stones. A pale hand, fingers too long, withdrawing fast around the rock edge. A bare foot among the flowers, the toes pressed together. A shoulder blade sliding behind a trunk. Each glimpse vanished when the light landed square. The cold off the stones reached for her ankles and climbed her calves. The bent poppy in front of her straightened with a snap.