Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA0NWPA8MN6ZK6CK9843SE

The gate in the park wall had been left open, which was the first thing Rory did not like. Richmond Park closed its gates at dusk, and the keeper's padlock hung from the iron bars, shining in her torchlight, unlocked and swinging a little in the wind. She stood there for a long moment with her hand on the cold metal, then pushed through. The path ran straight for a hundred yards between bracken taller than her shoulders. After that it simply stopped being a path. The bracken gave way to grass, and the grass to a ring of standing stones, grey-green and furred with moss, each one wider than a man's arm span. Oaks rose behind them, black against a sky that had no moon. She had been told to come alone. She had been told not to bring a phone, and she had brought one anyway, switched off, in the inside pocket of her coat. Its weight was reassuring. So was the small pressure of the chain against her collarbone, the Heartstone resting under her shirt where it always rested. Rory stopped at the boundary and waited for her eyes to adjust. The torch beam fell across the grass inside the circle, and she saw flowers. Foxgloves. Clover. A scatter of pale blue harebells. It was late October. Every flower in that clearing was in full bloom, dew beaded on the petals, and not one of them had any business being alive. *Wildflowers bloom year-round,* Isolde had written in the letter. *Do not be startled.* She had not been startled. She had been curious, and then she had been stubborn, and now, standing with one foot inside the stones, she was something else entirely. She clicked the torch off. The dark came down like a lid. For several seconds she could see nothing at all. Then the starlight returned, thin and silver, and the clearing came back into focus, and she realised she could hear the wind had stopped. She had not noticed when it stopped. That was the worst part. There was no sound from the oaks, no rustle from the bracken beyond the stones, no distant traffic from the road. Only her own breathing, and the faint, steady tick of her wristwatch. She looked at the watch. The second hand was moving. The hour hand said twenty past nine. She had left the car at a quarter to. Rory swallowed and stepped inside the circle. The pendant warmed against her skin. It was not the sudden heat of a hand pressed to her chest. It was slow and deliberate, a gentle throb, like something sleeping and turning over. She had felt it do this twice before, both times near places she had later wished she'd stayed away from. She pressed her palm flat over her sternum and kept walking toward the centre of the ring, where the grass was flattened and pale, as if something large had lain there recently. Movement at the edge of her vision. She turned her head. Nothing. A stone, a shadow between two stones, the dark trunk of an oak. She told herself she had imagined it. She kept her eyes on the middle distance, the way her father had taught her to watch a witness across a courtroom, and she counted her breaths. Four. Five. Six. A sound from behind her. Soft, rhythmic. Like someone pacing the ring at a measured distance, bare feet on damp moss. She stopped. The sound stopped. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. Nothing answered. The harebells swayed though there was no breeze. Then they were still again. She turned slowly, scar-pale wrist brushing her coat, and made herself look at each stone in turn. The third one from her left had something carved into it she had not seen before, a spiral of lines that seemed to shift when she stared at it, the way a word does when you repeat it too many times. She looked away. When she looked back, the spiral was just moss. Her mouth was dry. She thought of Eva, who had begged her not to come, and of the envelope with its unsigned note, and of the fact that she had been prepared for a lie or a trap, for a man with a knife, for a cruel joke at her expense. She had not been prepared for this kind of quiet, where every natural sound had been taken away and left something listening in its place. The pendant pulsed again, hotter now. Closer to the centre of the ring, the warmth was almost painful. She knew, with a cold certainty that settled in her stomach, that whatever she had come to find was not going to appear simply because she had waited long enough. Something was standing at the edge of the stones. She could feel it the way you feel a window open in a room you thought was empty. The air shifted against her face, cool and faintly sweet, like lilies left too long in a vase. She did not turn around. "I came because you asked me to," she said quietly. "So say what you have to say." Behind her, very softly, someone began to hum.