Run: 2026-10-08-01M4D9WVB8E4AQXC4T5GVX2WJ1

The railings at the Sheen Gate end of Richmond Park had been locked for two hours, which meant Rory climbed them. Her trainers slipped on the cold iron, and she dropped the last six feet into bracken that soaked through her jeans. Somewhere to the east, a stag barked once, then went quiet. She stayed crouched in the ferns until her heartbeat settled into something she could ignore. The pendant lay against her sternum under her jumper. For six nights it had pulsed warm against her skin, a slow thrum like a sleeping animal, and tonight it had gone hot enough to make her flinch in the Tube. She had not told Eva. Eva would have talked her out of it, and Eva would have been right to. She thumbed her phone torch on and swept the beam across the grass. Dew glittered on every blade. Her breath clouded white in front of her face. "Right," she said to nobody. "Just a look. Find the stones, see if they're what the map says, go home." The path bent north through a stand of birch, and she followed it. Within ten minutes the trees thinned into open ground, and the ancient oaks rose out of the dark like the ribs of something buried. Their trunks were split and grey, their lower branches bent low as if bowing. Between them stood the standing stones, eight of them, leaning inward, each one taller than her and crowned with moss. She stopped at the boundary. The grass beyond it was thick and green, and it was starred with flowers. Foxgloves, bluebells, a pale rambling rose climbing one of the stones. It was the second week of October. Nothing should have been blooming. Rory crouched and touched a bluebell with one finger. The petals were cool and slightly tacky, the way they should be. She pulled her hand back and checked her phone. The clock read 11:52. She had checked it at the gate, and it had read 11:52 then too. The seconds did not change when she watched them, and the signal bars had vanished from the top corner of the screen. "Okay," she said. "Okay, that's not a good sign." She stepped over the line of the boundary and waited for the wind to hit her. It didn't. The air inside the ring was still and sweet, like the inside of a greenhouse, and the silence pressed on her ears until she swallowed to clear them. A sound came from the far side of the stones. Three soft raps, then a pause, then three more. Knuckles on wood. Patient and polite, the way someone knocks on a door they expect to be opened. Rory turned the torch toward it. The beam found the trunk of the nearest oak, bark split into deep grooves, and nothing else. "Deer," she said. "It's a deer. Rubbing its antlers on a tree." The knocking stopped. Then, from somewhere behind her, the grass rustled. Not the rush of a startled animal, but the slow, deliberate parting of stems, the way a person walks when they want to be quiet and haven't learned how. She did not turn around at once. She lowered the phone a few inches and let her eyes adjust to the grey light that seemed to seep up from the ground itself. Then she looked. Between two of the stones a figure stood, or a shape that might have been a figure. Tall, thin, the colour of old paper. When she focused on it, it was only a trick of the trunks and the mist. When she looked away, it was still there, at the very edge of her sight, closer than it had been. Rory made herself breathe through her nose. She counted the stones again, slowly. Eight. Still eight. The pendant burned. She pulled it out from under her jumper. The crimson stone glowed from within, a faint ember light, brightening with each beat she counted. It only did that near a Hel portal. Whoever had given it to her had not said so, and she had worked that out on her own, and she had never once wanted to test it. "Brilliant," she muttered. "So I'm standing on one." The glow lit her palm. In its soft red wash, she saw her own footprints in the wet grass, leading in from the boundary. Two neat lines of them, spaced by her stride. Beside them, a third line came out of the shadow of the oak and wound a slow circle around her, the prints deep and close together, as though whatever made them had been walking with its head bowed, listening. They ended exactly where she stood. Rory did not look down again. She kept her eyes on the gap between the two leaning stones, the place where the figure had been. Her own breath caught in her throat and would not come out. Behind her, close enough that she could have reached back and touched it, something exhaled slowly through its nose.