Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA81WVJ1KST9D0AEGH0QR8

The gate had been locked at dusk, which Rory had expected, and the gap in the hedge beyond it had been exactly where the message said it would be. She slipped through with her torch in one hand and her bag strap bunched in the other, and when she straightened on the far side, the park noise fell away so completely that she stopped moving to listen to it go. No traffic. No distant hum from the A3. No wind in the bracken. She switched the torch on. The beam cut a white column through the dark and lit up a clearing the size of a tennis court, ringed by oaks so old their trunks had split into separate trees and then grown back together. Between them stood the standing stones, grey and lichen-scabbed, leaning at angles that looked deliberate. Six of them. She had counted them from the hedge. The pendant under her jumper was warm. Not hot, just a steady, faint pulse against her breastbone, the way a hand feels when someone holds it near your skin. She pulled the silver chain free and let the crimson stone rest on her palm. It gave off its faint inner glow, a dim red ember in the torchlight, and the warmth beat once, twice, then settled. *Near a portal*, the note had said. *It will know when you're close.* "Right," she said quietly. Her voice sounded flat, swallowed by the trees. "Well. I'm close." She walked toward the centre of the clearing. Her boots pressed into moss that was softer than it had any right to be, and she noticed the flowers only when the torch swept across them. Bluebells, pale foxgloves, a drift of white anemones standing open in the cold. It was the second week of November. Every petal was fully open, dew beaded along the edges, as if it were June and someone had forgotten to tell the ground. She crouched and touched one. The petal was cold and slick. Ordinary. That was almost the worst part. Behind her, something stepped on a twig. Rory went still. She waited, one hand flat on the moss, the torch angled down so its light would not spill far. Nothing. She counted her breaths. Four. Five. Then she heard it again, and this time she understood it wasn't a twig. It was a footstep, placed carefully, the way someone walks when they are trying to match another person's stride. She stood slowly and turned. The trees were just trees. Thick trunks, black between the gaps, their branches a tangle that the torch could not reach. She swept the beam left, then right. Nothing moved on the ground. Nothing stood among the oaks. But the pendant had gone hot. Real heat now, pressing into her skin, and she realised it was pointing her. Not toward the stones. Toward the tree line to her left, where the dark seemed a shade heavier than the dark around it. "Hello?" she said. The word vanished. Nothing answered. Then, from somewhere deep among the trunks, a sound like a voice trying out a word it had only read: a soft, wet click, then a long exhalation. It might have been a deer. Rory had seen deer in Richmond Park, had nearly walked into a stag once on the path by Pen Ponds, and she knew what a deer sounded like. This was not that. She took one step back toward the hedge. Her boots made no sound on the moss. She tried again and heard only the faint rasp of her own jacket. Her heartbeat had found a rhythm that matched the pendant's pulse, quick and hard. She made herself breathe through her nose. Cool-headed, her mother used to say, when Rory was small and had been caught with a broken vase or a bloody knee. *Think first. Then move.* She thought. The hedge was twenty metres back. The gate was beyond it. The message had promised answers if she stayed until the clearing changed, and she had not yet seen it change, which meant either it had not happened or she had not been paying close enough attention. She looked at the stones again. There were seven. She was certain there had been six. She had counted them twice in the first thirty seconds, and each time she had landed on six, and the number had felt like a relief. Now a seventh stood at the far edge of the clearing, half-hidden by the nearest oak, its face turned toward her. She had not seen it arrive. There had been no sound of anything moving through the grass. The torch flickered. Only for a moment, a stutter in the beam like a bad connection. In that brief dimness, she saw movement at the edge of the light. Something pale, upright, the height of a person, slipping from one trunk to the next in a way that did not look like walking. She did not scream. She did not run. She stood with her torch raised and her other hand closed around the warm stone, and she waited for the beam to steady. When it did, the pale shape was gone. The seventh stone was still there. Behind her, very softly, someone counted her breaths back to her, one step behind.