Run: 2026-10-08-01M4D9Y0C6PF6DQ7ABAZ6PXNPE

The gate at Richmond Park had been locked when she reached it, which should have sent her home. Instead Rory had climbed the railing where the hedge gave way, the way Eva used to when they were sixteen and sneaking out to the river, and she had told herself it was only a walk. The note had said *come before the moon clears the oaks*. It had been tucked under the door of her flat above Silas' bar that afternoon, folded twice, the paper cool as if it had been kept somewhere cold. No signature. Just that line, and beneath it a small drawing of a ring of standing stones. Now the pendant lay against her breastbone on its silver chain, and it was warm. She stopped at the edge of the trees and pressed her palm flat over it. The Heartstone's crimson glow showed faintly through her fingers, a steady inner light, the colour of embers under ash. It had been warm on the Tube. It had been warm when she'd stood in the queue at Golden Empress with a bag of spring rolls going cold in her hands. But this warmth had a direction. It pulled her forward, gently, like a hand at the small of her back. "Right," she said quietly. Her voice came back flat, as if the air had swallowed the edges of it. "Right." The path was gravel for the first hundred yards, then turned to packed earth, then to nothing she recognised. Bracken pressed close on both sides. The oaks grew thicker, older, their trunks so broad that she could not see around them. Moonlight came down in grey bars and lit the undersides of leaves that didn't move. She checked her watch. Eleven forty-one. Somewhere behind her a branch cracked, and she turned so fast the chain whipped across her collarbone. Nothing. Only the path, the bracken, the dark between trunks. She waited for the sound of an animal running, a deer, a fox, anything with a heartbeat. None came. She walked on. Her footsteps seemed to land a fraction after she lifted her feet, a soft echo, and when she stopped, the echo stopped too, a half-beat late, as if it had been listening. *Stress does this,* she told herself. *Sleep deprivation. You've been doing double shifts for a week.* The clearing opened without warning. It was round, perhaps thirty paces across, and ringed by standing stones taller than a man, their surfaces furred with lichen and split by roots. Between them the ground was carpeted with wildflowers: foxglove, bluebell, clusters of pale star-shaped things she didn't have names for. It was October. Frost should have been silvering the grass. Instead the flowers were open and dew-bright, as if spring had been stopped in the middle of a breath and left to wait. Rory stood at the boundary and did not step over it. Her watch read eleven forty-one. She looked at it again. Eleven forty-one. She counted her heartbeats, slow and deliberate, the way her mother had taught her to count during exams. Thirty. Sixty. She lifted her eyes to the moon, which had cleared the oaks now, a white coin hanging above the clearing, and when she looked back at the watch the second hand was not moving. The pendant pulsed against her skin. Once. Warm, insistent. A shape moved at the edge of her vision, between the third and fourth stones. She turned her head and it was gone. She kept her eyes on the place where it had been, and after a long moment the bracken there stirred, though there was no wind, and the stems bent in a line toward the centre of the clearing as if something slender had passed through them and had not stopped to disturb anything else. "Hello?" she said. The word did not carry. It fell at her feet like a dropped coin. Then she heard it: a sound from somewhere beyond the far stones, low and rhythmic. A humming, or a breath drawn and let out through closed lips. It was almost a tune. It stopped the moment she focused on it, and started again when she looked away, always a little closer. She had come here for answers. Whoever had left the note knew her name, or at least knew the name she had been given at the Golden Empress when she'd applied, and they had chosen the one place in London that existed only half in London. Someone had wanted her here. That was the thing she kept coming back to. Someone had wanted her here badly enough to leave the stones unlocked. Her left wrist ached along the old crescent scar, the way it did before rain. She began to count the stones, because counting was something to do with her mind. One. Two. Three. Her breath clouded, though the night was not cold. Four. Five. Six. The humming came again, very near now, just behind the sixth stone, and she realised she had not heard the flowers rustle when she walked past them, and that her footprints in the dew had gone. Seven. She lost count. She turned back toward the trees. The path she had come by was there, a pale ribbon through the bracken, but the trunks had drawn closer together, and in the gap where the gravel should have been, something tall and pale stood very still, its head tilted, watching her with the patience of a thing that had never once in its existence needed to hurry. The pendant burned against her chest. She could feel the heat of it through her shirt, a second heartbeat, urging her forward. Rory did not move. She kept her eyes on the pale shape and her voice level when she spoke again. "I know you're there," she said. "Come out where I can see you." For a long moment, nothing answered. Then, from somewhere behind the seventh stone, in a voice that was almost her own, a voice she had heard only in her own head, someone said, very softly, "You already are."