Run: 2026-09-23-01M36VAE6K37WQYVYVXANQ6C9X

The bolt on the Richmond Park gate had rusted through months ago, and the panel swung wide without protest when Rory shouldered it. Beyond the fence the grass ran silver under a moon half-eaten by cloud, and the park stretched away in a silence so complete it seemed manufactured. No dogs barking from the kennels. No traffic bleeding through from Petersham Road. She checked her phone: 11:47, no signal, one bar of battery. The pendant sat warm against her sternum. It had been warm since Tuesday, a dull ember she kept pressing with her thumb through her coat, and every evening the heat had pulled a little further west, away from the flat above Silas' bar, away from the smell of fryer oil and gin, until tonight it had pulled due south and kept pulling until she stood here with the gate at her back. She followed the heat. Her torch cut a white tunnel through the dark, catching seed heads and the low ribs of a fallen oak. The temperature had dropped since she'd left New Cross; her breath came out in ragged curls that the torch caught and shredded. She counted pylons the way her father had taught her to count barristers in a room — one, two, three — a trick to keep the mind occupied so the feet could work. Twenty minutes in, the wildflowers started. She stopped. Torch beam dropped to the ground. Chickweed and yarrow and something blue she had no name for pushed up through frost-rimed soil, every head open, every face tilted toward her light as though the beam had weight and pushed them back. She crouched. The petals were real — cold, wet, veined — and the frost around their stems held perfectly still while the grass beyond shivered in a wind that never reached her. She stood and kept walking. The pendant quickened. The heat climbed from ember to fever, a pulse she felt in her teeth, and the trees ahead opened into a ring of standing stones she had read about once, years ago, in a Cardiff library where her mother taught, half-asleep over a book of local curiosities. Oak, all of them. Rough as unstripped timber, black with age, taller than the doorframe of her flat. She counted them as she stepped between the two widest. Six. A ring with a gap where the seventh should have been. Inside, the silence changed texture. It pressed at her ears. Her footsteps went soft on moss that looked like velvet and felt like sponge, and the cold left her hands. She turned once, to mark the gap she'd entered through, and found the stones numbered differently. Five now, the gap shut, the ring closed but for a hairline seam she could have put a fingernail into. She walked the circumference. Six stones. The seventh stood where it always had, and the seam she'd seen was a knot in the wood. Her phone read 11:12. She pressed the screen until it went black, then lit it again. 11:12. Twenty-six minutes behind her, then, or ahead of her, and either way the number sat there refusing to move. Something cracked in the dark beyond the ring — a branch, or a foot set down wrong on dry ground. She killed the torch and stood very still, and the dark closed over her like water. When the sound came again it was closer, on her left, a slow grinding of bark against bark. "Eva?" she said, and heard her own voice go out and not come back. No echo. The grove swallowed it whole. She raised the torch. Light fell on moss, on the base of a stone, on the blue flowers standing in a ring with their faces turned inward, away from her now, all of them, every head. The phone vibrated against her palm. A number she didn't recognise, the digits rearranging themselves as she stared, three becoming eight becoming nothing. She answered because silence had become worse than whatever would be on the other end. "Rory." The voice was her father's — the Cardiff vowels flattened, the pacing too even, each word laid down like a brick. Brendan Carter never said her name that way. He rolled it, always had, the Irish coming up through the Welsh like weed through concrete. "You're up late," the voice said. "Who is this?" A laugh that started and stopped in the wrong place. "You walked a long way for warmth." The line died. Not a click — the sound simply ended, the way a word ends when whoever's saying it opens their mouth wider than before. She held the phone to her ear a few seconds longer, listening to a room tone that wasn't any room she'd stood in. The pendant had gone cold. She pressed it. It sat against her skin like a coin left out in winter, and the absence of heat left a shape behind, a pressure where the warmth used to be, and that shape pointed deeper into the ring, toward the seventh stone. She walked. At the stone, she laid her palm flat. Oak, cold, ridged with lichen that felt like damp paper. Her torch picked out a carving she was certain hadn't been there when she counted — not runes, not script, a figure no taller than her hand, straight-haired, one arm raised, standing inside a circle of smaller figures. The figure's face had been worn smooth. Every other line in the carving held its edge. Behind her, the grass gave a single slow sigh. She spun. The torch beam swept the ring and found nothing but the blue flowers and the seam between two stones — the seam that hadn't existed a minute ago, the hairline gap widening as she watched, a mouth opening between oak and oak. Beyond it, a dark that her light refused to enter. The beam died. Not the battery. The screen still glowed when she glanced down, 11:12, full bars of nothing. The torch simply stopped being a torch, and the dark came in and stood close enough that she felt it on the backs of her hands. She backed up a step and her heel found a footprint that wasn't hers — the moss compressed, deep, the shape of a bare foot with too many toes pressed into the sponge. Beside it, another. Beside that, her own boot-print, fresh, the tread clear. The prints led in a circle. Hers among them, spaced the way she walked, stride for stride, each one placed ahead of the last. Something breathed in the gap between the stones — a long, wet, patient draw of air that ended before it should have. Rory stopped breathing herself to hear it better, and the breathing went on without her, slower now, matching nothing in her chest. She said nothing. She stood with the cold pendant against her ribs and the prints at her feet and the carved figure with the erased face watching from the stone, and the certainty settled in her ribs like a second, heavier heartbeat: the grove was not empty, and whatever filled it had been waiting in the dark longer than the dark had been there.