Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA5ZQAKFYTBGXHACV9Q2SM

The gate at the Sheen Gate end of Richmond Park was locked, but the padlock hung open, its shackle rusted to a thin orange thread. Rory noticed that and decided not to think about it. She had come this far on a cold instinct and a pendant that had not stopped humming against her breastbone for three nights. She pushed through the gate and let it swing shut behind her. The park was quieter than it should have been. London at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday in late October should have offered the usual hum of traffic along Roehampton Lane, a dog barking somewhere past the bracken, a jet sliding toward Heathrow with its red lights blinking. Instead she heard only her own boots on wet gravel and the faint tick of her breath. Even the wind had stopped, though the oaks still moved overhead, their upper branches shifting in a slow, silent sway. She slipped a hand into her coat pocket and found the chain. The silver was cool, but the stone beneath her fingers was warm, warm the way a mug of tea stays warm long after the kettle clicks off. Rory drew it out and looked at it. The Heartstone rested in her palm, deep crimson, its faint inner glow brightening and dimming like something breathing. "Right," she said quietly. Her voice came back flat, as if the air had swallowed half of it. "Right, then." The path curved north through a stand of old trees. Rory followed it because the pendant tugged her in that direction, a gentle pressure that felt less like a compass and more like a hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades. Her mind kept producing reasons she should turn around. She had a shift at the Golden Empress at seven tomorrow. Silas would be closing up the bar downstairs from her flat. Eva would have sent a dozen texts by now, each one shorter than the last. She had not told Eva where she was going. She had not told anyone. The path ended at a clearing she did not remember from her one childhood visit, if she had ever been here at all. Ringed by ancient oaks, their trunks split and furrowed like old leather, it held a circle of standing stones, grey and lichen-spotted, each one taller than she was. Between them, in the long grass, wildflowers bloomed. Purple vetch, white yarrow, buttercups the colour of egg yolk. In late October. The petals were fresh and dew-bright, and not one of them had been touched by frost. Rory crouched and touched a buttercup with her fingertip. The petal was cool and soft and perfectly real. She stood again, slowly. The Heartstone had gone hot against her palm. She could feel the pulse of it now, each beat a little faster than the last, and it was pointing, unmistakably, toward the centre of the stones. She checked her phone. The screen showed 11:14 PM, which was correct, but the signal bars had vanished, and beneath the time the date read the same day as an hour ago. Then, as she watched, the numbers flickered: 11:14, 11:14, 11:15, and then, for a single heartbeat, a date three days in the future. She locked the screen and shoved the phone back into her pocket. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She turned her head. Nothing. Only the oaks and the ring of grey stones and the patient flowers. She waited, counting her breaths, the way she had learned to count when Evan's footsteps had come up the stairs and she had needed to decide, very quickly, whether to stay still or run. The movement came again, to her left, between two trunks. It was not an animal. Animals had weight, a rhythm to their passage through undergrowth. This was like a shadow pulled sideways through the dark, too smooth, lingering a fraction too long in each place before it slid out of sight. "Hello?" she said. The word died in the clearing. Then she heard it. Very faint, somewhere beyond the stones, a sound like a child humming a tune she half remembered from nursery school. It rose and fell, rose and fell, and it kept almost perfect time with the pulse of the pendant in her hand. Rory's left wrist ached along the old crescent scar, the one she had got falling against a garden fence when she was seven. She pressed her thumb against it and made herself breathe. The humming stopped. In the silence that followed, she became aware of something else: a second set of footsteps, unhurried and light, circling the clearing just outside the ring of stones. She could not see who was walking. She could only hear them, pacing, matching her own position step for step, always just beyond the reach of the grass where the flowers grew. They were not in a hurry. They had all night. She looked down at the Heartstone. Its glow had brightened until it lit her fingers from within, and it was hot enough now to sting. The footsteps stopped directly behind her. Rory did not turn around. She understood, with a cold clarity that settled in her chest like a stone, that whatever stood behind her had been waiting for her to arrive, and that the thing she had come here to find had been looking for her too. Somewhere in the trees, a voice began to say her name, softly, in her mother's voice, and it did not sound like it was calling her home.