Run: 2026-09-23-01M36NKKJ3YTN3VXZF16BWBQZ7

The pendant had warmed against Rory’s throat on the bus, then gone cold the moment she stepped off. She stood beneath the Richmond Park sign and watched the dark swallow the path ahead. Behind her, the road shone with recent rain. A car hissed past, its headlights sliding over the iron railings and vanishing. She checked her phone. 11:43. One bar of signal. She had come because the pendant had been pulsing all evening. Not glowing. Not exactly. Just a faint, deliberate warmth, as though someone had tucked a coal beneath the silver chain. It had started while she was delivering food, halfway across town, and sharpened each time she turned toward the park. By the time she reached the gates, she’d convinced herself it meant something. A portal, perhaps. The word sat badly in her mind, too large and theatrical for a piece of jewellery she could hide under her shirt. Still, it had been given to her by an unknown benefactor. It warmed near Hel portals. She knew that much, though she couldn’t have said how she knew it without sounding mad. Rory pushed her hands into her coat pockets and started down the path. The park was quiet in the ordinary way at first. Wet leaves clung to the pavement. Somewhere, a branch creaked in the wind. Her shoes scuffed over gravel. The darkness between the trees seemed no thicker than darkness should be, and that almost disappointed her. She had come expecting a sign. A flash of light. A sudden certainty. Instead, the pendant cooled against her chest. She stopped. A soft sound came from somewhere to her left: three quick taps, like knuckles on wood. Rory turned her head. The trees stood still. Beyond them lay a slope of black grass, then more trees. No one with a torch. No dog. No cottage tucked among the trunks. She listened. Rainwater dripped from a branch. Her breath moved in and out of her nose. Far off, traffic grumbled along the road. She started walking again. The path narrowed. It ought to have led her back toward the main road, but she’d taken the turn because the pendant had warmed as she passed it. Now it rested cold against her skin, and the path beneath her feet had gone from gravel to packed earth. She told herself there was nothing strange about that. Parks had paths. Paths changed. The trees crowded closer. Their branches laced overhead, obscuring the thin strip of sky. Somewhere among them, an owl called once. The note broke in the middle, as though the bird had swallowed the rest. Rory took out her phone and turned on the flashlight. The beam picked out mud, roots, the pale undersides of leaves. It caught a scatter of wildflowers growing at the path’s edge. Small yellow blooms, open to the night. She crouched and touched one with the back of a knuckle. The flower was warm. She jerked her hand away. The light on her phone flickered. When it steadied, the flowers were only flowers: wet petals, bent stems, beads of rain. Rory straightened. Her pulse had begun to move faster, but she made herself breathe through it. Fear didn’t improve a situation. It only made the edges harder to see. She turned around to go back. The path behind her looked longer than it had a moment ago. Not impossibly long. Just enough to make her frown. The trees had closed over it, their dark branches meeting in a low arch. She could still see the pale track of the path, stretching away between them. A sound came from behind her. Three quick taps. Rory swung the light around. Nothing. Her own shadow jumped across the trunks and vanished. “All right,” she said, quietly. “Very funny.” The words went nowhere. The silence took them without an echo. She walked faster. The path dipped, then rose. Her phone showed 11:51. The signal had disappeared. The pendant stirred against her sternum. A faint warmth, then another. It was pulsing now, soft and regular. Rory pulled it from beneath her shirt. The deep-crimson stone rested in her palm, thumbnail-sized, its inner glow barely visible in the wash of her phone’s light. She held it out in front of her. The pulse strengthened. Ahead, between two great oaks, stood a line of stones. They were taller than a person, pale in the dark, their rough faces slick with rain. Rory stopped. She hadn’t seen them on her way in. That didn’t mean anything. She’d been looking at the path, at her phone, at the pendant. She could have passed them without noticing. One of the stones leaned toward the next. Their arrangement made a kind of boundary, though not a complete circle. Beyond them, the trees thinned around a clearing. The pendant warmed in her hand. There it was. The reason she had come. Whatever she’d expected, she had found the place the pendant wanted her to find. Rory moved toward the stones. The grass inside the clearing was silvered with rain. Wildflowers covered it, bright and delicate in the dark, yellow and white and a vivid blue she couldn’t name. They bloomed as if it were summer. At the centre stood a low, twisted tree. Its bare branches spread over the clearing like a hand reaching down. No wind stirred the leaves outside the boundary. No leaves stirred inside it, either. She stepped through. The night changed. Not in any way she could have pointed to. The air stayed damp and cool. The flowers still smelled faintly sweet. Yet the ordinary dark she had walked through seemed to fall away behind her, leaving the clearing sealed in a deeper kind of quiet. Rory turned. The stones stood at her back. Between them, the path should have been visible. Instead she saw trees, crowded close together, and a darkness without depth. Her phone clock read 11:48. She stared at it. It had been 11:51. She tapped the screen, but the numbers held steady. A glitch, she thought. A bad connection. Something simple, something explainable. A branch cracked behind her. Rory spun. The tree in the centre of the clearing stood exactly as before. Its branches were still. The flowers had bowed their heads, though there was no breeze to bend them. She swept the flashlight across the ground. No animal. No person. Then, at the far edge of the clearing, something moved between the stones. A shape, tall and narrow, slipping behind one of the ancient oaks. Rory lifted the light. The beam struck the stone’s rough face. Nothing stood beside it. She backed toward the boundary. The sound came again—three quick taps, this time from the tree in the centre of the clearing. She stopped. The tree’s trunk was split halfway up, a black seam running through the pale bark. A small hollow opened at its base. Rory couldn’t see inside it. She held the phone out, steadying her wrist with her other hand. A pale flower lay on the grass beside the hollow. It had not been there a moment ago. Her mouth went dry. She could feel the little crescent scar on her wrist where her sleeve had ridden up, the familiar roughness of it under her thumb. She pressed the pendant into her palm until its edge hurt. “Who’s there?” The clearing offered no answer. The phone clock changed to 11:43. Rory’s stomach tightened. She looked at the screen, then at the stones. Her breath sounded too loud. She was counting seconds without meaning to. One, two, three. The numbers on the phone did not change. A whisper brushed the back of her neck. It wasn’t a word. It was the intimate murmur of someone leaning close enough to speak, though no one stood behind her. She spun around, and the flashlight beam found only flowers. Something shifted at the edge of her vision. To the right. A dark shape between the stones, just beyond the boundary. Rory turned the light toward it. There was nothing there. She moved the beam left, then back again. The shape was closer. She saw it this time: a long, pale face, half hidden behind the leaning stone. It had no features she could make out. No eyes catching the light. Only the suggestion of a face turned toward her. Rory ran. She reached the stones and threw herself through the gap. Her shoulder struck rock. Pain flashed down her arm. She stumbled into the trees and kept going, the phone light bouncing wildly ahead of her. Roots grabbed at her shoes. Branches whipped her cheeks and caught in her hair. Behind her came the three taps. Then the sound of footsteps, careful and unhurried, matching her pace. Rory didn’t look back. She pushed through the trees, lungs burning, until the path widened beneath her feet. The air loosened around her. Somewhere in the distance a car passed, its tyres hissing on wet road. She stopped at the edge of the main path and bent double, hands braced on her knees. Her phone said 11:44. Her pendant lay cold against her chest. She waited until her breathing slowed. She listened for footsteps. For taps. For any sign that something had followed her out. Nothing. Rory straightened and looked back. The trees stood black and still. The path she’d taken into the park was plain to see, curving away beneath them. There were no standing stones. No clearing. No flowers shining in the dark. She started toward the road. After a few paces, she felt the pendant warm again. Not pulsing. Not yet. Just a small, patient heat against her skin.