Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2DPD4DCQKV8ADQ8426BKM

The note had come folded inside a takeaway bag, tucked beneath a carton of Yu-Fei's salt and pepper squid. Block capitals, no signature. *RICHMOND PARK. THE OAKS. MIDNIGHT. BRING THE STONE.* Rory had read it twice under the streetlamp outside Silas' bar, then a third time in her flat with the kettle going cold. Nobody sane followed instructions like that. She pulled her boots on anyway. Now she stood at the park's edge with her bike leaning against a bin and the gates locked behind her. She had climbed the railing and dropped into wet bracken. Her breath clouded. The Heartstone lay against her sternum, cool as a coin. "Right," she muttered. "Oaks." The path swallowed her torch beam after ten feet. Frost furred the grass on either side, each blade rimmed white, and the whole park held the stillness of a held breath. No fox screamed. No traffic hummed from the Kingston Road. She checked her phone. 11:52. One bar of signal, then none. She walked. Her boots crunched on the gravel, and for a while the crunch was the only sound. Then it wasn't. A second set of steps fell in behind her, half a beat late. She stopped. The echo stopped a moment after. "Funny," she said. Nothing answered. She turned a slow circle with the torch and lit only trunks, black and wet, and a low mist crawling between them. She started walking again and set her pace deliberately, one, two, one, two. The second set of steps matched her for ten paces, then slipped, then matched again, as if it were learning. She left the gravel and cut across the grass. The frost cracked under her. The following footsteps did not come with her. The oaks stood in a ring ahead, six of them, or seven, ancient and squat, their trunks wider than a car. Rory counted them twice and got a different number each time. Between them the air looked wrong, too clear, like a windowpane wiped clean of a smear she hadn't noticed until it was gone. The Heartstone warmed against her skin. She pressed her palm over it. "Not now," she told it, and felt like an idiot for talking to jewellery. She stepped between two of the trunks. The cold fell off her like a dropped coat. Warm air, thick with the smell of cut grass and honey, wrapped her face. Her torch beam swept across a clearing full of flowers. Foxgloves. Cornflowers. Poppies, red as fresh paint. It was the last week of November. "Hello?" Her voice sounded flat, as though the grass had drunk the echo. "I got your note. Whoever you are, I've got about four minutes before I stop finding this charming." A wind moved through the clearing. The flowers did not bend with it. She checked her phone again. 11:52. She watched the screen for a full minute, and the numbers stayed put. "Okay." She tucked the phone into her jacket. "Okay, that's fine." Something shifted at the edge of her vision, low and to the left. She swung the torch. Poppies, still. A dark patch between the stems that might have been a shadow or might have been a shape crouched small. When she stepped toward it the patch was just soil. She turned back and the sound started. Faint, from the far side of the ring, a rhythmic scrape and clatter. She knew it. She had heard it every working night for two years. A wok spatula on a steel rim, the ring of it, the rattle and thump as the cook knocked the wok against the burner. "No," she whispered. The Golden Empress sat six miles away. The clatter went on, unhurried, and under it came a low chatter of Cantonese, the rise and fall of Yu-Fei scolding somebody for something. The words never resolved. The rhythm was right and the sense was missing, like a song hummed by someone who had only heard it through a wall. She walked toward it because she could not think what else to do. The flowers brushed her knees. They felt dry as paper. Halfway across, the sound cut off. The silence that replaced it had weight. Rory stood with the torch aimed at the ground and her heartbeat in her ears, and she made herself breathe out through her nose, slow. *Cool head. You've done this before.* She had walked out of Evan's flat with a bag and forty pounds. She could walk out of a field. "Rory." The voice came from behind her, soft and warm, with the lilt of the valleys in it. Her mother's voice. She did not turn. Her hand tightened on the torch until the knurling bit into her palm. "Rory, love. It's cold out here. Come away in." "You're in Cardiff," Rory said. Her own voice came out thin. "You're in bed. You go to bed at ten." "Come away in, cariad." The word landed wrong. Her mother said *cariad* with a crisp tap of the *d* at the end. This voice slid over it, soft, the way a tongue slides over a tooth it has never owned. Rory took one step forward, away from it. "That's it," the voice said, closer, though she had heard no footsteps. "That's my girl." "Don't." "Don't what, love?" "Don't use her." Her throat ached. "Whatever you are. Say what you want in your own voice or shut up." The clearing held still. The poppies did not sway. Somewhere among the stems, a long slow rustle ran from left to right, the sound of a large body moving low through grass, and every hair on her arms stood upright. The torch flickered. She thumped its base against her thigh and the beam steadied, but it had shrunk to a pale, tired circle, and beyond its edge the dark had thickened. The oaks at the perimeter looked farther away than they had a minute ago. She counted them. Five. Four. She stopped counting. The Heartstone burned now, a hot coin against her breastbone, pulsing in time with something slower than her heart. She dragged it out on its chain. The crimson glowed from inside, faint and angry, and each pulse lit her fingers red. "You brought it," said a voice. Not her mother's now. Not anyone's. It came out of the ground and out of the air at once, dry and layered, like many throats speaking a half-second apart. She faced forward again. The rustle had stopped. Every flower in the clearing had turned its face toward her, foxglove bells and cornflower heads and poppy cups, all tilted the same degree, all still. Rory closed her fist around the stone. The heat did not let go. "Yeah," she said. "I brought it. Now show me who's asking."