Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA1ATFXNPX2Q4SVX2JHVJW

The standing stones rose out of the bracken like a row of broken teeth, black with lichen. Aurora counted them twice before she stepped between the second pair. Nine. She had counted nine last time, or eight, and the ninth had been a trick of the light through the oaks. Her torch beam slid across the grass and failed to find the edges of anything. Richmond Park at half eleven on a Tuesday in October should have been busy with joggers in head torches and the occasional fox trotting across the tarmac. Instead the city had dropped away the moment she passed the gate. No traffic. No aeroplanes stacking over the west. Just the wind combing through the dead fern and the creak of old branches somewhere high up. She pulled the Heartstone from under her jumper. The silver chain was cold against her collarbone, but the stone was warm, a slow thrum against her sternum, like a second heartbeat that had lost its nerve. The last time it had done that, she had been standing in a doorway that shouldn't have existed. She tucked it back under the wool and kept her hand flat over it. "Right," she said. "In and out." Her voice came back flat. No echo off the trunks. She decided that was a mercy. She remembered the smell of the grove from before: crushed mint, cold iron, and something sweet underneath, like apples left too long in a bowl. Now there was only wet earth and leaf rot. The wildflowers should have died off weeks ago, but she passed a ring of foxgloves so fresh their bells still held beads of dew. Their pink was too clean, like someone had painted them and then forgotten to let them dry. She did not stop to look. Something moved at the edge of the beam. A pale shape, low to the ground, there and then not. She swung the torch round. Bracken. Trunks. Two green points of light that flared, blinked, and went out. A deer, probably. Probably. She kept walking. Her boots found the path that wasn't a path, a faint groove worn into the grass by generations of feet that had no business being here. Behind her, something tapped. A soft, deliberate rhythm, like nails on wood. She stopped. The tapping stopped with her. She waited and counted her breaths. Four. Five. Six. Then it started again, but a half beat behind her own footfalls, as if whatever made it had only just learned her step and was still practising. "Who's there?" Nothing. The wind dropped. Even the branches held still. Then a voice answered from somewhere to her left, close enough that she should have been able to see the speaker. It was low and warm and exactly the timbre of her own voice, the rasp she got when she had been shouting at the telly or at Eva over the phone. "Who's there?" it said back, and the words came a fraction too slow, like a recording played at the wrong speed. Aurora's mouth had gone dry. She kept the torch level and angled it toward the sound, but the beam only showed her bracken and a stone with a crescent of lichen across its face. Her left wrist ached along the old scar, the same pale line she'd carried since she was nine and had fallen through a glass panel at home. She pressed her thumb against it until the ache sharpened into something she could hold on to. She took a step back. Her heel found the path. The tapping started again, and this time it came from in front of her, from the direction she had been walking. From the dark between the third pair of stones. She looked down. Her own boot prints ran back the way she had come, dark in the dew. Beside them, in the wet grass, ran a second line of prints, bare and narrow, the toes too long, stopping right at her heel. She had not heard anyone walk up beside her. She had not heard anyone walk at all.