Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2C96KDKK5T2C7W1ZRSEKG

Rory left the last bus stop behind her at ten past eleven and did not look back at it, because if she looked back she would see how small its light had become, and she might decide to go home. The park gates were open. That was the first wrong thing. Richmond Park closed at dusk in winter, and the gates were always chained, but tonight one stood ajar, its iron bars beaded with cold. She slipped through the gap and the tarmac gave way to gravel, then to wet grass that soaked through her trainers within a dozen steps. The note had been simple. It had been tucked into the bag of her last delivery, under a receipt from the Golden Empress, in handwriting she didn't know. *The oaks at the edge of the deer field. Come alone. Bring the stone.* No name. She had turned the paper over three times looking for one. The pendant lay against her breastbone now, under her jumper. She had put it on out of stubbornness more than belief. The silver chain had warmed against her skin on the walk, which meant nothing. Bodies warmed things. She pressed her thumb against her left wrist, over the small crescent scar, a habit from when she was small and something frightened her. Then she made herself stop. "Right," she said aloud. Her voice sounded thin in the dark. "Oaks. Deer field. Have a look, go home." The deer field was a pale expanse under a moon half-swallowed by cloud. She had expected deer. Richmond was full of them, dark shapes standing in the mist and chewing, indifferent. Tonight the field was empty. No hoofprints marked the frost, no dung, nothing. The grass lay flat and silver and undisturbed, as if no living thing had crossed it in years. She walked along its edge, keeping to the tree line. Somewhere behind her, a twig snapped. Rory stopped. She counted five slow breaths before she turned, and there was nothing there but trunks and the black spaces between them. Foxes, she told herself. Deer after all, somewhere out of sight. She started walking again, a little faster. The snapping came again. It was not quite behind her now. It was to her left, in the trees, and it kept pace with her. When she slowed, it slowed. When she stopped, there was a small, attentive silence, the kind that comes when someone holds their breath. "I can hear you," she said. Nothing answered. But the quiet changed. It did not feel like the absence of sound so much as a pressure, like standing in a lift as the doors close. She made herself keep walking. The oaks appeared out of the mist sooner than she'd expected. There were seven of them, or perhaps eight, standing in a rough ring, enormous and black and older than the park, older than the walls around it. Their trunks were furred with moss, and between two of them the air looked faintly wrong, the way a road shimmers in August. Her breath, which had been clouding in front of her all the way from the gate, stopped clouding. Against her chest, the pendant pulsed. It was not a strong sensation. A soft, slow warmth, like a hand laid flat over her sternum, and then gone, and then back. She drew it out from under her jumper. The crimson stone had a faint inner glow, a dull coal light that she was certain had not been there at the bus stop. It brightened as she stepped toward the gap between the oaks, and dimmed when she stepped back. "Okay," she whispered. "That's not nothing." She should have gone home then. Later she would know that, in the cold, unhurried way you know things about a room after you've left it. But the note had said *Bring the stone*, and somebody knew she had it, and that was a question she couldn't leave unasked. She stepped between the oaks. The change was gentle, and that was what frightened her. There was no lurch, no rush of wind. The mist simply thinned, and the cold let go of her skin, and she stood in a clearing under a sky far clearer than the one she'd left. Wildflowers grew around her ankles, pale and luminous, foxglove and something like bluebell, though it was January. They swayed, though there was no breeze. The Grove was beautiful. She thought that first, and distrusted it at once. "Hello?" she said. The flowers went still. Every one of them, all together, as though at a signal. Her phone was in her back pocket. She pulled it out and the screen lit her face: 11:42. She had checked it at the gate and it had said 11:20. Twenty-two minutes, and she had walked for what felt like forty. She watched the display a moment longer. The minutes did not tick over. Then, all at once, they jumped, 11:51, 12:06, 12:30, the numbers stumbling forward like a drunk, and she put it away with fingers that no longer felt entirely hers. *An hour inside can be minutes or days outside.* Where had she heard that? Eva, maybe, half-joking, over wine. It hadn't sounded like a warning then. At the edge of her vision, something moved. She didn't turn her head. She had learned that from somewhere, that the thing you look at directly goes still. She let her eyes slide sideways instead. A shape stood at the far side of the clearing, tall and narrow, no wider than a sapling, and she was almost sure it was a sapling until it was not where it had been. It had shifted a few feet to the left. There had been no sound, and the flowers had not bent. She looked at it properly, and it was a sapling. "Not funny," Rory said, and her voice cracked on the second word. Behind her, softly, close enough to stir the hair on her neck, something exhaled. She did not scream. She stood absolutely still while the pendant burned against her palm, hot now, almost painful, and the wildflowers around her began, one by one, to turn their faces toward her. Somewhere in the trees, a voice that was very nearly her own began to hum the tune her mother used to sing in the kitchen in Cardiff. The oaks were ten steps behind her. Ten steps, and a cold January field, and a gate that would be chained by morning. She counted her breaths again. One. Two. On the third, the humming stopped, and the voice said, kindly, "There you are, Laila." Nobody had called her that in years.