Run: 2026-09-23-01M37PPF2FW86MD6AHC36YXZ0A

The deer stopped chewing when Rory dropped from the wall. There were a dozen of them, clustered under the chestnuts near Sheen Gate, grey shapes against greyer grass. Every head turned her way. She waited for them to bolt the way deer did, all white tails and panic, but they held their ground and watched her with the flat patience of cattle at a slaughterhouse fence. "Evening." She brushed moss off her palms. "Don't mind me." None of them moved. Rory tugged her hood up and set off across the grass. Isolde's note had come folded inside a Golden Empress takeaway bag, wedged between a carton of salt-and-pepper squid and a flattened bag of prawn crackers. Yu-Fei swore she hadn't packed it. The handwriting leaned hard to the left, green ink, the letters looped like bindweed: *Midnight. Come alone. Bring the stone.* No signature. None needed. Only one person Rory knew wrote in green ink and treated full stops like a luxury. The Heartstone sat under her jumper, a thumbnail of crimson against her sternum. For the first mile it stayed cool. Richmond Park at night had none of the orange smear that hung over the rest of London. The dark here had weight. It pooled in the bracken and sat in the dips of the land, and the paths she had walked a hundred times in daylight rearranged themselves into strangers. She kept the Pen Ponds on her left, their surfaces pewter under a clouded moon, and counted her steps to keep her mind from wandering. Four hundred and twelve. Four hundred and thirteen. Somewhere behind her, a twig broke. Rory kept walking. Foxes. Badgers. The deer, finally deciding she was worth following. She counted to twenty, then turned. Empty grass. A bench with a brass plaque she couldn't read in the dark. The deer had gone from under the chestnuts, all of them, and she hadn't heard a single hoof. "Right," she told the bench. "Brilliant." She found the Grove the way Isolde had taught her: not by looking, but by walking toward the place her eyes kept sliding off. A copse of oaks east of the ponds that the maps called nothing at all. Her gaze skated left of it, then right, the way a tongue avoids a mouth ulcer. She fixed on the gap between two trunks and pushed through. The air changed. It always did — a pressure in the ears, like the moment a train enters a tunnel — but tonight it came with a taste. Copper and crushed stems. She swallowed and it stayed on the back of her tongue. The standing stones ringed the clearing, seven slabs of ancient oak so old the wood had gone to something harder than wood, black and ridged and cold to the touch. Wildflowers crowded the grass between them. Foxgloves. Campion. Harebells nodding on stalks thin as hair. In daylight they blazed with colour. Now they stood in ranks of charcoal and bone, and every bloom faced the centre of the clearing, as though a sun burned there that Rory couldn't see. "Isolde?" Her voice went nowhere. No echo, no bounce off the trees. The clearing swallowed it the way wet sand takes a footprint. She checked her phone. 23:58. One bar of signal, flickering. "I got your note. I'm here. Stone and all." The flowers didn't sway. There was no wind — she had felt it on the walk, a thin November breeze nipping at her ears — and yet something rustled in the bracken beyond the stones. A slow, dragging sound. Not footsteps. Something heavy being pulled across leaf litter by something patient. Rory stepped to the centre of the ring and made herself stand still. The rustling stopped. Against her chest, the Heartstone warmed. It started as body heat, nothing more, the kind of warmth a coin picks up in a pocket. Then it climbed. By the time she fished it out on its silver chain, it glowed like a coal banked for the night, and the heat of it pulsed against her fingertips in a slow, steady rhythm. A heartbeat. Not hers. Hers was running twice as fast. "No." She turned a full circle, pendant raised like a torch. "No, no. Not here. You don't open here." The stone had only ever done this twice before. Once in a flooded underpass in Deptford. Once in the cellar beneath Silas' bar, the night the walls had sweated. Both times, something had come through. She looked at the phone. 23:58. She waited. Watched the digits. They didn't change. At the edge of her vision, between the third and fourth stones, a figure stood among the foxgloves. Tall. Narrow. Pale as a peeled branch. It stood with its head bowed and its arms hanging long at its sides, and it did not move, and when Rory snapped her head toward it there was nothing there but flowers and the black gap of the trees. She breathed out through her teeth. Counted the stones. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. "You're tired," she said. "You've been on the bike since ten this morning. You've had half a spring roll and three coffees. This is what brains do." From the bracken, in a voice she knew better than her own, someone called her name. "Rory?" Eva. Eva's Cardiff lilt, the way she stretched the O, the little upward hook at the end she'd had since they were eight years old and trading stickers in the school yard. Rory's throat locked. "Rory, love, where'd you go? I can't see you." It came from behind the fifth stone. Then, without any sound of movement between, from behind the second. "Eva's in Hackney." Rory kept her voice level, the way her father used to in court when a witness started lying. "She's on nights at the hospital. She texted me at nine to moan about a bloke who swallowed a key." Silence. The flowers leaned inward. "She'd never come here," Rory went on. "She thinks Richmond is for people who own Labradors." "Rory." The voice dropped lower. Softer. "Rory, it's cold. Let me in." The Heartstone pulsed. Hot enough now that she shifted it to her other hand, and the crescent scar on her left wrist throbbed in time with it, a line of ache she hadn't felt since she was six years old and bleeding on her mother's kitchen floor. She should leave. Every sensible cell in her body said so. Walk out the way she'd come, climb the wall, get a night bus, go home and lock the door and sit with her back against it until the sun came up. But Isolde had asked her here. Isolde didn't ask for things. Isolde traded, and bargained, and hinted, and sulked, but she had never once written *come*. If she left, whatever was out there would still be out there. And Isolde would still be missing. Rory turned slowly, keeping the pendant high. The glow painted the nearest flowers a wet, arterial red. The figure stood between the sixth and seventh stones now. Closer. Head still bowed. She could see, in the edge of her sight, that its fingers reached past its knees. She didn't look at it. She looked at the stone beside it instead, and counted again, lips moving. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. The eighth stood where no stone had stood a moment ago, directly behind her original path through the trees. It was the same black oak as the others, ridged and ancient, furred with lichen. It rose taller than the rest. And when she held the Heartstone toward it, the light caught on a surface that wasn't bark at all — something smoother, something that shone the way skin shines stretched tight over bone. The phone in her pocket buzzed once. She didn't take her eyes off the eighth stone. She fished the phone out by feel and glanced down for half a second. 23:58. One new message. From Eva. *where are you* When she looked up, the eighth stone had moved a foot closer, and the foxgloves at its base had turned to face her.