Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA260QER492TRXV6D4C6MT

The gate at the south end of Richmond Park had been left unlatched, which Rory took as a small mercy. She pushed through it with her shoulder, boots crunching on gravel that had gone soft with the week's rain, and the iron hinge gave a single dry complaint behind her. The path ran downhill between bracken taller than her hips. Her phone showed 11:52 and one bar of signal, then none. She tucked it into her jacket pocket without looking at it again. "Right then," she said to the dark. "Nobody's watching. Let's be quick." Her voice came back to her flat and small, as if the trees had swallowed the edges off it. The bracken gave way to beech, then to oak, and the oaks grew older the further she walked. Their trunks were split and grey, wider than a car, and their roots lifted out of the ground like knuckles. She counted the standing stones at the boundary the way Isolde had taught her, one hand brushing each one as she passed. Eleven. Twelve. The thirteenth had toppled at some point and lay half-sunk in the moss, its face carved with a spiral that had worn almost smooth. The pendant against her breastbone was warm. She stopped. Pulled the silver chain free of her shirt and let the Heartstone rest in her palm. It was the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson, and its faint inner glow lit the lines of her fingers. Warm, yes, but not hot. Not yet. She had felt it heat in the flat above Silas' bar once, when a man in a long grey coat had stood outside the window for twenty minutes doing nothing at all, and that had been enough to make her pack a bag. "Come on," she murmured. "Don't do this to me here." She closed her fist over it and kept walking. The clearing opened out ahead like a held breath. Wildflowers covered the ground in drifts of white and violet, flowering in the cold as if it were June, and their scent hit her all at once, sweet and green and a little rotten underneath. Isolde had called it the Grove, and had called it nothing else, and had said that a person could spend a night inside and come out having lost a week or a decade depending on how much they had wanted to leave. Rory had come for an hour. Exactly one hour, and then she would walk back through the gate and go home. She stood at the centre of the clearing and waited. Her breath clouded in front of her and hung there, and the pale petals at her feet did not stir. Then a sound came from the far side of the stones. A small clicking, like a fingernail tapping a tooth. It stopped. She turned her head slowly and listened. Nothing. Only the wind moving high in the oaks. She let out a breath and the clicking started again, closer now, and it was not a tooth. It came in a rhythm, patient and even, the way someone might knock on a door they expected to be opened. "Hello?" she said. The clicking paused. Then it went on. She did not reach for her phone. She had known better than to bring the torch on, because light in the Grove drew attention, and Isolde had been very clear about that. Instead she kept her left hand low, the scarred wrist turned toward her body, and she eased her weight onto the balls of her feet. Something moved at the edge of her vision, between two trunks. Pale and low to the ground. She turned her whole body toward it, and it was gone. A ripple in the bracken, perhaps. A fox. Her heart said otherwise and she let it talk. The pendant pulsed against her palm. Once. Warm enough now that she felt it through the skin. She looked down at her hand and then back up, and the clearing was not quite the same. The stones seemed nearer than they had been. There were more of them. She was almost certain that the toppled thirteenth had been lying on its back, and now it leaned upright, facing her, its carved spiral catching a light that came from nowhere she could name. She counted the stones again, slowly, touching nothing this time. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. "That's not right," she said quietly. Her own voice sounded like someone else reciting a lesson. Behind her, something exhaled. Long and slow, the way a sleeping animal breathes when it is only pretending to sleep. Rory did not turn around. She kept her eyes on the fourteenth stone and her fingers closed around the warm crimson weight in her fist, and she listened to the footsteps that were not footsteps, drawing a careful circle around the edge of the flowers.