Run: 2026-09-23-01M37NVE72FVHK6PH1KT6H3KGY

The deer had gone. Rory noticed that first, before the cold, before the quiet. On the walk in from Sheen Gate she had passed a whole herd of them bedded down in the bracken, their breath smoking under the sodium glow from the road. Forty heads had turned to track her. Now, a quarter mile on, the grass lay flattened in shallow ovals where they had been, still steaming, and not one animal stood in sight. She thumbed her torch on. The beam found bracken, a crisp packet, the pale trunk of a birch. Nothing else. "Right. Fine. Good." Her voice went nowhere. No echo, no carry. It dropped at her feet like a stone into mud. Isolde's message sat folded in her jacket pocket, three words in green ink on paper that smelled of crushed nettles. *Midnight. Come alone.* Rory had read it at half six in the back of the Golden Empress with a bag of prawn crackers in her other hand, and she had laughed, because who wrote like that? Now she wanted to take the note out and read it again, and check that she hadn't invented it. The oaks rose out of the dark ahead of her. Standing stones, Isolde called them, though they were wood, grey and furrowed and older than the city. Nine of them in a ring, each one thick as a car. Rory had walked between them four times before, and each time the air on the far side had tasted of honey and rain, and the wildflowers had turned their faces towards her like a crowd hearing its name called. She stepped through. No honey. The air carried a flat, mineral smell, the smell of a cellar flooded and drained. The wildflowers still grew, bluebells and campion and foxgloves shoulder-high, but every bloom had closed, petals clenched tight as fists. The torchlight slid across them and they did not stir. "Isolde?" The name died the same way her voice had outside. Rory swallowed. Under her collar the Heartstone lay against her sternum, and she pressed two fingers to it through her T-shirt. Cool. Just a stone on a chain. She checked her phone. 23:58. One bar of signal, then none. Fine. She was early. She'd wait. She picked a spot near the centre, where a flat rock broke through the grass, and sat with her back to it. From here she could see all nine oaks. Old habit, from the years with Evan: find the wall, face the door. She clicked the torch off to save the battery, and the dark swung in so fast she flinched. Her eyes adjusted. Starlight. The pale smudge of cloud over London. The oaks, black on black. A footstep. Rory held her breath. Soft, behind her and to the left, the sound of weight settling onto grass. She waited for the next one. It didn't come. "Isolde, if that's you, it's not funny." Nothing. She shifted her heel against the ground, and there it came again, the same soft press, from the same place, a half-second after her own movement. She did it once more, harder. Her heel. Then the other. Her own footstep, returned to her late, from somewhere she wasn't. She stood up. She didn't decide to. Her legs made the choice and her hands followed, fumbling the torch on and sweeping it over the flowers at her back. Closed bells. Closed campion. A gap in the foxgloves where the stems parted, as if something had pushed through, though the stems stood straight and unbroken. Phone. 23:58. She stared at it. She had sat on that rock for at least five minutes. She tapped the screen and watched the numbers hold, the colon between them blinking, blinking, the minutes refusing to turn. "Time moves differently." She said it aloud because Isolde had said it to her once, laughing, trailing her fingers through the grass. "An hour in here can be a day out there. That's all this is." The words came out thin. She tucked the phone away. At the edge of her vision, between the third and fourth oak, something tall leaned out from behind the trunk and drew back. Rory didn't turn her head. She knew that trick, knew that if she looked straight at it there would be nothing, only bark and shadow, and then she would start doubting her own eyes, and she needed her eyes. So she kept her gaze on the flat rock and let the corner of her sight do the work. The oak. The dark beside the oak. The dark hanging a shade too long, a shade too narrow, like a coat left on a hook. It didn't move again. It didn't need to. Her pulse ticked in the scar on her wrist. She pressed her thumb over the little crescent the way she had as a girl, when the thunder over Cardiff kept her awake. "Who's there?" The wind came up. It carried no smell of grass or rain, and it didn't touch the flowers. Not one stem swayed. It moved across her face and through her hair and nowhere else, as if it had come all this way for her alone. Then, from the far side of the ring, a woman's voice, warm and tired and full of Swansea vowels: "Aurora, love. You'll catch your death out here." Every muscle in Rory's back locked. Her mother's voice. Her mother's exact voice, the one that had called her in from the garden a thousand times, the one that went up at the end of *love* like a question. It came from the dark beyond the sixth oak, and it sounded like it was smiling. "Mam's not here." Rory's lips had gone numb. "Mam's in Cardiff. Mam's asleep." "Come on, now. Come in. I've put the kettle on." The voice moved. Rory heard no footsteps. The sound slid from the sixth oak to the seventh, patient and easy, keeping the same distance from her the whole way round. The Heartstone warmed. She felt it through the cotton, a slow bloom of heat against her skin, like a palm laid flat on her chest. She hooked the chain with one finger and drew the pendant out. Crimson light seeped between her knuckles, faint and pulsing, a heartbeat that was not hers. It had done this twice before. Both times, something had been coming through. "Aurora." Closer now. The eighth oak. The voice had dropped all its warmth, and what remained sounded like her mother reading a word off a page in a language she didn't speak. "Aur. Or. A." Rory backed up until the flat rock hit her calves. The torch beam shook across the ring and she couldn't make it stop. Oak. Oak. Flowers. Oak. She counted without meaning to, the way you count stairs in the dark. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. She stopped. She swung the beam back to the start and counted again, slower, lips moving. One, the gap she had walked through. Two. Three, four, with the narrow shadow gone from between them. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. The tenth stood between the ninth and the first, where the gate should have been. Grey. Furrowed. The same girth as the others. Its bark ran in long vertical seams, and when the torchlight crossed it the seams did not throw shadows the way the other trunks did. The light lay flat on it, like light on a painted wall. The pendant beat against her fist. Faster now. "I'm not coming in," Rory said. From somewhere behind the tenth oak, in her own voice, low and steady and a half-second late, something answered. "I'm not coming in."