Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA3DVPDRMHQDWRRSZG79JH

The gate Rory had climbed over at a quarter to midnight was still behind her, but the Richmond ground had stopped feeling like London the moment she stepped through the ring of oaks. The city's hum had gone. No traffic, no distant sirens, no planes sliding down toward Heathrow. Only the wind moving through the bracken, and her own breath. She stopped at the first standing stone and rested her palm on it. The bark had been weathered into something close to bone, but it was warm, the way a sleeping animal is warm. She took her hand back and wiped it on her coat. *Come alone. Come before the turn of the night.* The message had arrived on a card with no stamp, tucked under the door of the flat above Silas' bar, the handwriting neat and slanted and utterly unfamiliar. She had told herself it was a prank. Then she had lifted the Heartstone from her drawer, the silver chain cool against her fingers, and she had known it wasn't. The pendant sat against her sternum now, under her jumper. She could feel it through the wool, a faint, steady warmth that had nothing to do with the coat or the walk. The clearing opened ahead of her like a held breath. Wildflowers covered the ground in drifts: bluebells, foxgloves, pale yellow primroses, and something with petals the colour of old wine that she didn't recognise. It was February. There should have been frost on every blade of grass. Instead the air smelled of honey and crushed stems, sweet enough to coat the back of her throat. She took out her phone. Ten past midnight, the screen said, and then, as she watched, the numbers blurred and rearranged themselves into *11:52*, and then nothing at all, a black square with no signal bars. *Fine*, she thought. *Fine. Just find the stone, see who's waiting, leave.* The grove was larger than it had any right to be. She had walked perhaps twenty paces past the oaks, and the trees behind her had thinned to silhouettes. Ahead, the ground rose toward a circle of taller stones, and in the middle of the circle something pale was standing very still. She stopped. It was a deer, she decided. A roe, maybe, a young one, its head lowered as it grazed. Rory let out a breath and walked forward, slow, measured, keeping her steps light on the flowers. The deer lifted its head. It had no face. Where its eyes should have been, the skin simply continued, smooth and grey, stretched over bone that was too long and too finely shaped. It watched her without moving. Then it turned, unhurried, and walked into the trees on legs that didn't bend quite the way legs should. Rory realised she had stopped breathing. She started again, shallow and careful. Somewhere to her left, a bell rang. Once, low and clear, the sort of sound a hand-bell makes in a country church. The echo rolled through the grove and did not fade so much as sink into the ground. She turned slowly. Nothing. Only oaks, and the bracken, and the flowers swaying in a wind she couldn't feel on her face. Then, at the very edge of her vision, something moved between two trunks. Pale. Tall. There and gone before she could fix on it, the way a shape vanishes when you look straight at it in a dark room. She did not look straight at it. She kept her eyes on the middle distance, the way her mother had taught her to watch a dog that wasn't sure of you. *Don't give it the satisfaction.* The pendant pulsed against her chest. A warmth, then a second warmth, quicker, as if something had knocked on a door inside it. Hel, she thought suddenly. The word surfaced from somewhere she hadn't been looking. A portal. The Heartstone warmed near them. Somebody had written that down in one of the old books she'd skimmed in the library and dismissed. She had brought a thing that answered to something under the grass, and now it was telling her it was close. She started to walk back toward the oaks. Her steps sounded wrong. Too loud on the damp ground, and then, a half-beat late, a second set of footfalls answered them. Not an echo. An echo would have come from the trees. This came from behind her left shoulder, almost at her heel, matching her rhythm exactly. Rory stopped. The second set stopped with her. She did not turn around. "Hello?" Her voice came out thin. It did not carry. The grove swallowed it whole. From somewhere close, a woman said, very softly, "Laila." Nobody had called her that since Eva. Nobody who knew it had any reason to be out here. And the voice was not a stranger's. It was almost hers, the vowels worn at the edges the way she'd sound after a week without sleep. Her left wrist burned, the old crescent scar pulling tight as though something was tracing it with a fingernail. "Who's there?" she said. The answer came, patient and close, from a point just beyond her shoulder, where no one with a face could possibly be standing. "You are," it said. "You came back." Rory's hand closed around the pendant, and it was hot now, almost painful, and the grass at her feet was beginning, very slowly, to bend away from her, as if something beneath it had started to turn over in its sleep.