Run: 2026-09-23-01M36WF8N19K87JVDXTDD2VT4R

The standing stones were wrong before she'd counted them. Rory stopped at the edge of the clearing, delivery bag still slung across her chest, and did the count again, slowly, running her finger along the strap the way she used to tap out citations when her father drilled her on tort law. Seven oaks. There had been seven in daylight, gnarled and silvered, marking the boundary of Isolde's grove like a fence made by something that thought fences were a joke. Now, in the thin blue dark, there were eight. The eighth stood where the gap should have been, and it was not silvered. It was wet, black and glistening, and its bark ran with something that caught the moon and held it wrong — too smooth, too slow, like oil on water. She told herself she had miscounted the first time. That was the reasonable thing. Rory had always been the reasonable one, the cool-headed one, the one who talked Eva down at three in the morning and talked herself out of Evan's flat with nothing but a rucksack and a crescent scar on her wrist that still ached in cold weather. Reasonable was a muscle she had trained. She counted again. Eight. The Heartstone at her throat had led her here. It had been warm when she left the flat above Silas' bar — not the honest warmth of a hand pressed to skin, but something slower, a pulse that matched nothing in her body. Deep crimson, thumbnail-sized, faint inner glow: Yu-Fei had seen it once and asked, politely, whether she'd bought it in Camden. She hadn't bought it anywhere. An unknown benefactor — that was the phrase the police had used, in Cardiff, when someone left an envelope of cash in an unmarked locker for a woman leaving an abusive address. Unknown benefactor. Someone wants you to have this and won't say why. The pendant pulsed again as she stepped between the stones, and the wrongness arrived with it: a smell, faint and sweet, like wildflowers left too long in a vase. The grove bloomed year-round, Isolde had told her — foxglove in January, snowdrops in July, a season that couldn't be bothered with calendars. But the flowers Rory could see were closed. Every head bowed, every petal folded in, as though the clearing had decided, tonight of all nights, to go dark. The grass gave under her trainers without sound. That was the second wrong thing. Richmond Park in November was a wet, sucking chorus — mud, leaves, the distant traffic on Petersham Road — but here the ground took her weight and gave back nothing. She might have been walking on cloth. She had come for a reason. She reminded herself of it the way she used to remind herself of why she'd left Evan: out loud, in the dark, in a voice that did not shake. She had come because the pendant had been warm for three days straight, because the warmth had developed a direction, and because Isolde had said — had said it lightly, over tea, with a smile that didn't reach her eyes — that the Grove would tell her what Dymas meant when it was ready. Rory had waited for the Grove to be ready. She was no longer sure that was what was happening. A sound, low and deliberate, at the far edge of the clearing: the soft, patient noise of something being pulled through grass. Not an animal. Animals do not pause mid-pull. Rory turned her head. The eighth stone stood exactly where she'd left it, and beyond it the tree line was a ragged black wall against a sky that had too many stars and not enough of them in the right places. She had lived in Cardiff long enough to know the winter sky. Orion was not supposed to be that low. She took a breath and kept walking, because stopping would mean listening, and listening would mean confirming. The pendant was warmest at the centre of the clearing, where the old oak had dropped a great spiral of leaves that had not decayed. They lay in rings, crisp and amber, each leaf whole, each vein visible, as though the tree had been shedding them for an hour instead of a season. The rings went outward from the trunk in even increments. Rory counted those too. Eleven rings. She did not know what eleven meant and did not want to. From the flat above Silas' bar, she had learned that the city had sounds it only made at night: the水管 knock of old pipes, the particular scrape of a bin lorry at four, Silas closing up with the gentleness of a man handling something that could break. The Grove had no city. It had, now, a sound of its own: a faint, rhythmic creak, like a rope over a pulley, coming from directly above the oak. She looked up. Nothing moved in the canopy. The branches were bare — she'd never seen the oak bare before — and they were arranged, she realised, with a deliberateness that made her stomach drop, in something that almost resolved into a shape and then didn't, the way a word sits on the tip of the tongue and refuses. The creak came again, unhurried, and this time she felt it in her molars. The wrongness was no longer building. It had arrived, and it was standing very still, waiting to see what she would do. Rory unslung the delivery bag. Inside, beneath the thermal pouch and the last of Yu-Fei's spring rolls, was her phone. The screen lit the clearing in a small white rectangle, and the light did something strange: it fell a metre short of the eighth stone, as though the darkness between them had thickness. Signal: none. Of course. She'd had a bar on Petersham Road and none here, and she'd told herself that was the park. She put the phone away and made herself look at the ground. There were footprints in the leaf spiral. Not hers — she was still standing at its outer edge — but pressed into the amber rings, going outward, one set, small and bare, arriving at the trunk and then apparently continuing into it. Or from it. She could not tell the direction, and the inability to tell unsettled her more than the prints themselves. The toes were pointed outward all the way to the last ring, and the last ring's print was clean, whole, as though the foot had simply stopped existing where the leaves ended. Somewhere behind her — behind the stones, behind the wet black eighth one — a branch snapped. The sound was enormously loud and completely natural, and that was what made her hand go to the Heartstone. Natural sounds in an unnatural place were the worst ones, because they were the ones that meant something was close enough to be ordinary. The pendant flared hot against her sternum, a single hard throb, and the flowers opened. All of them. Every bowed head in the clearing snapped upright in the same instant, and the sweet smell doubled and then tripled, thick enough to taste, and the petals were the wrong colour — not the foxglove pinks and snowdrop whites she'd seen in daylight but a uniform, waxy, meat-coloured red that the moonlight did nothing to soften. They faced inward. Every stem in the clearing had turned, without moving, without bending, to face the centre where she stood. Rory did not run. Running was Evan's answer to everything, running and then the door and then the sorry, and she had trained herself out of it the way her father trained a barrister out of a flinch. She stood in the leaf spiral with her hand on the pendant and made her breathing even, and she looked at the trunk of the oak, because the footprints had led there and because the creaking had stopped and stopping was worse. In the bark, at eye level, was a hollow she had never seen in daylight. It was narrow and vertical and just wide enough, and it was not dark inside. It held a faint, patient, crimson light that pulsed in time with the stone at her throat, and as she watched, the light inside the hollow dimmed — as though whatever made it had just closed its eyes. Then, from the hollow, in a voice that was almost her mother's and was not her mother's at all, very softly: "You took your time." The grove exhaled. The flowers closed again, one by one, in a slow ripple that went outward from the trunk, and the creaking resumed overhead, and the eighth stone behind her was no longer black and wet but silvered and dry, exactly as it should have been, as though it had never been anything else. Rory stood very still and did not turn around, because the footprints on the ground had been bare, and the thing that had made them had been small, and she understood — with the cold, clear certainty that had always been her gift and was now, she thought, the thing that would get her killed — that the reason she had not heard it approach was that it had never been behind her. It was in front of her. It had been in front of her since the stones. The hollow pulsed once, warm and crimson, and waited.