Run: 2026-09-10-01M25DJAA6DE40DFDD4WHEPXX5

The pendant warmed against Rory's sternum before she reached the gates. Forty minutes from Richmond station, past the dark bulk of the park, along the road that curved and curved and gave nothing back. The gates were padlocked. A maintenance gap in the fence on the Roehampton side stood open, or she'd found one that had always been open. She couldn't remember which. She climbed through, coat snagging on wire, and started across the grass. Her phone read 11:47. The screen lit her face, then died. She pocketed it. Somewhere left of her, bracken shook. Deer, most likely. Richmond Park at night ran thick with deer. She waited for hooves, for the wet cough of them tearing at grass. Nothing came. The bracken went on shaking long after the animal should have moved on. She kept walking. The Grove sat in a hollow north of Pen Ponds, though no map marked it. She'd been twice before, once with Eva, once alone, both times in daylight. Wildflowers had carpeted the ground in February. The air had tasted of honey and cold iron. The six standing stones at its edge were oak, not stone, though everyone called them stones anyway: trunks blackened and gnarled, grown in a ring no one could explain. The pendant pulsed. Warm, then warmer. "Alright," she said. Her voice sounded thin in all that open dark. "Alright." Then the trees. They rose ahead, shapes she knew even in the dark. The bent one on the left like a man with a broken back. The tall one on the right that split into three at the crown. The ring of oaks. She walked toward it and the grass changed under her feet. Softer. Springy, like moss over stone. She stopped at the boundary. Inside the ring, the wildflowers stood open. Bluebells. Wood anemones. Something pale and trumpet-shaped she'd never named. They gave off a faint light, or seemed to. Moonlight, she told herself, though the moon sat behind cloud. The air inside the ring ran warmer than the air outside. She felt it on her cheeks, on her hands, the way you feel a doorway in winter. The pendant burned. Rory stepped through. The quiet came first. Richmond Park at night was always quiet. This was something else. Wind had moved through the trees all evening. She'd heard it on the walk over, that long low shush. Now the wind was gone, and the trees still moved. Not all of them. The ones at the edge of the ring swayed as if a breeze passed through, though nothing touched her hair, her coat, her face. Leaves whispered. She heard them. She did not feel them. She turned a slow circle. The path back to the fence had vanished. Grass stretched away from the ring in every direction, silver under cloud, flat and featureless. No bracken. No deer trails. No road beyond. Just grass, and the dark line of trees farther off, and above them a sky with too many stars. "Okay." The word fell into the quiet and didn't come back. The pendant pulsed. A slow heat against her chest, a second heartbeat. She lifted it clear of her collar. The crimson stone glowed, red light spilling through the cracks in her fingers, and she felt it pull. No visible mechanism. Just a tug at the sternum, toward the far side of the ring. She followed. Something moved behind her. Rory stopped. Turning meant confirming. She stood with the pendant hot in her fist and listened, and heard bare feet on moss. Soft. Wet. One. Two. Three. Then nothing. She counted to ten. To twenty. Her heart worked at her ribs. She turned. The ring stood empty. No flower bent. No print in the moss. Just the six oaks in their slow sway, and beyond them the endless silver grass. "Hello." Her voice held steadier than she did. "I know someone's there." The trees didn't answer. The wind picked up instead. Hard, sudden, a gust that threw her hair across her face and stung her eyes. She raised an arm. The wildflowers flattened around her, and in the gust she heard a woman laugh. Low. Close. Just behind her left shoulder. Rory drove her elbow backward. Hit air. The wind died. The flowers stood back up, one by one, as if nothing had touched them. She needed to leave. The thought sat in her chest, heavy and cold. Leaving the ring was the sensible thing. But she'd come for a reason. The pendant had led her here, and the pendant had come from someone, and the note with it said find me where the flowers never die. She'd kept the note. One line, in ink that never dried. She took a breath. "I'm here." The grove answered. A sound rose from the far edge of the ring, out past the flowers and the oaks, in the dark grass. Footsteps. This time they didn't stop. They came. Slow, bare, deliberate. One. Two. Three. Closer. Rory backed toward the centre of the ring. The pendant blazed. Heat enough to sting her palm, red light spilling between her fingers. The light reached the flowers, and the flowers reached back, pale petals tilting toward it like sunflowers tracking the sun. She held it up. The footsteps stopped. Long moment. Nothing. She stood with her arm raised, the pendant lighting a small red circle around her, and watched the grass beyond the ring. Then she saw it. At the very edge of the light. A shape. Tall. Thin. Standing at the boundary of the six oaks. Not human. Too narrow. The head was wrong. Too small, or too large. She couldn't fix it. Every time she looked straight at it, it slid to a different proportion. "Who are you?" The shape tilted its head. And the head wasn't there. It had never been there. What she'd taken for a head was the dark space where her eye expected one, and inside that space something moved. Slow. White. Wrong. The underside of a mushroom, turning. Her legs quit. She couldn't make them go. The shape took one step forward. Onto the moss. Into the ring. The flowers under its feet didn't bend. They withered. Bluebells curled and blackened and slumped in a spreading ring around its step. The moss paled to grey. The pale trumpet-shaped flowers dissolved into white dust that hung in the air and did not fall. Rory stared at the dust. Then she ran. The ring went on forever. She ran east, toward where the fence should be, toward the road, toward the lights of Roehampton past the trees. She ran until her lungs gave out and her thighs locked, and when she stopped, gasping, the six oaks stood around her. The same bent one. The same three-crowned one. The same flowers. The pendant still glowed in her fist. And from the far side of the ring, the footsteps began again. Slow. Bare. Deliberate. "You're not real. You're a trick of the light. You're — " The footsteps stopped behind her. Close. Close enough for the wet of the moss under each one, the slight drag between them, the long slow breath that wasn't hers. A hand settled on her shoulder. Cold. Dry. Light. The fingers were wrong. Too many joints, bending where fingers didn't bend, the thumb curling back the way a thumb shouldn't. Every joint ticked as it closed, one after another, like a metal clasp being fastened. Rory stood without moving. The pendant burned against her palm, hot and useless. "I came. I came. Just like you asked." Behind her, the woman's voice, low and amused: "Not yet, love. You didn't come. You were brought." The fingers tightened. She tried to scream and found no air for it. Far off at the edge of the park, a siren started up, then stopped. The trees went on swaying. Rory stood in the ring of oaks with her mouth open and nothing left in her. The footsteps began again.