Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA4JVJKNZW7BTQ0S4ZX6JP

The park gates had been locked when Rory reached them, so she climbed the low fence beside the old oak and dropped onto the grass with her boots slipping in the wet. Richmond at midnight smelled of cut bracken and cold earth. The deer had gone quiet somewhere past the tree line. She stood still until her breathing settled, then pulled her coat tighter and checked the phone in her pocket. 11:52. No signal. She had expected that. The directions had come in a plain envelope tucked under the door of the flat above Silas' bar, no stamp, no return address. Three lines in careful handwriting: *Follow the path past the bridge. Count seven oaks. Step through on the stroke of midnight, and bring nothing that was not given to you.* She had almost thrown it out. Instead she had read it twice, then touched the pendant at her throat, the one she had never managed to take off since the day it arrived. Now the silver chain lay cool against her collarbone. Then, as she walked, it began to warm. It was small at first, a pressure no larger than a fingertip, the way a hand feels when someone rests it near your skin without touching. Rory slowed. The crimson stone pulsed once, faint and steady, like a heartbeat heard through a wall. She pressed her thumb against it through the wool of her scarf. *Near a Hel portal*, the benefactor's note had said nothing about that. She had looked it up at two in the morning, half-convinced she was wasting her time, and found only a scatter of folklore and a forum thread that had been deleted. Still, she knew what warmth meant when it came from a stone. She had felt it once before, in the grove, and had walked out with her hair full of clover and no memory of the hours in between. She counted the oaks. One. Two. The path curved, and the trees thickened on either side, their trunks grey and split with age. Three. Four. The air changed around the fifth tree. It didn't become colder so much as heavier, the way a room feels after someone has just left it. Five. Six. A sound came from her left, low and rhythmic. Tap. A pause. Tap. Rory turned her head. There was nothing there but the dark shapes of bracken and the pale band of the path. The sound came again, closer to the ground now, as if something small were knocking on a hollow log in time with her own footsteps. She stopped walking. The knocking stopped with her. *Deer*, she told herself. *Badgers. Someone's dog.* She started forward. The knocking started again, a half-beat behind. The seventh oak stood at the edge of a clearing, and the moment she saw its trunk she knew it was the right one. Its bark had been carved, long ago, with a ring of small marks, each one worn nearly smooth. Between the roots, wildflowers bloomed in the moonlight, white and violet and a yellow so bright it looked painted. It was October. There should have been nothing blooming at all. Rory crouched and touched one of the petals. It was cool and damp and perfectly real. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She did not turn her head. She had learned that much in the years since Evan, that the instinct to look straight at a threat only handed it the advantage. Instead she let her eyes drift sideways, slowly, and watched the far edge of the clearing from the corner of her eye. The standing stones there were taller than she had thought. Their shadows fell in the wrong direction for the moon's position. Between two of them, the dark seemed to thicken into a shape that was not quite tall enough to be a man and not quite low enough to be a fox. It was gone when she looked directly. It was there again, two stones over, when she looked away. Her watch had stopped. She noticed that now, her wrist cold where the crescent scar sat pale against her skin. The second hand hung motionless on the twelve. The phone in her pocket, when she slid it out with trembling fingers, showed 11:52 still, though she had been walking for what felt like a quarter hour, perhaps more. The pendant burned against her chest now. Not painfully. Insistently. Like something trying to get her attention. Behind her, very close, a voice said her name. It was not Eva's voice, or her mother's, or Evan's. It was soft and patient and sounded almost fond. "Aurora," it said again, "you came back." She had never told anyone where she had been that night. She had never told anyone her middle name was Laila, either. Rory did not answer. She did not run. She stood up slowly, the chain tight against the back of her neck, and kept her eyes on the flowers at her feet, where the tapping had started again, patient and perfectly in time with her heart.