Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA9B71S2GA9HS0J9RVVSJS

The park gate had been locked, so Rory climbed the low railing past the sign warning visitors that the deer were dangerous in rut. She landed badly on the far side, palms scraping gravel, and stayed crouched a moment listening. Traffic hummed somewhere beyond the trees, a dull, distant surf. Then even that thinned out, and she realised she could no longer hear it at all. She stood and brushed off her hands. Her phone showed 11:52. Good. Midnight was when the old oaks were supposed to be most open, according to the one page on the internet that had got the directions right, written by someone who had clearly been very frightened when they wrote it. The path bent left, then right, then left again, following the old boundary bank. Bracken brushed her jeans. The air smelled wrong, too sweet, like cut stems left too long in a vase. Halfway along, she stopped at a patch of ground beside the path and crouched. Foxgloves. Wild thyme. A cluster of white campion, all of it in full bloom. It was the second week of November. Frost should have been silvering the grass by now, but the petals were unbruised and open, and the bees, if there had been bees, would have been drunk on them. She didn't touch them. The pendant shifted against her breastbone. She had worn it for four months now, since the envelope had appeared through the letterbox of the flat above Silas' bar with nothing inside but the silver chain and the deep crimson stone, and a note in careful handwriting that said only *you will need this*. Most days it was cold, a dead weight of metal. Tonight it had been warm since the gate, a faint, steady heat, like a hand resting on her sternum. Rory had told herself that was the walk. She was not sure she believed it anymore. She reached the first standing stone just after midnight by her watch. It was taller than she had expected, grey-green with lichen, and it leaned slightly, as if it had been listening to something for a very long time and had grown tired of it. Oak had been carved into its surface in a pattern of knots that might have been accidental, except that when she looked at them directly they seemed to rearrange themselves into the suggestion of a face, then didn't. She put her palm flat against the bark of the next oak in the ring and held it there. It was warm. Not sun-warm, which was impossible, but blood-warm, the way a sleeping animal is warm. *Stay on the path,* the page had said. *Do not answer your name.* She had laughed at that when she first read it, lying on her bed above the bar with the bass from downstairs coming up through the floorboards. She was not laughing now. The clearing opened ahead, a rough circle of pale grass under the bare arms of the trees. At its centre sat a flat grey stone, and beside it the fallen trunk of a great oak, its root plate lifted and raw. The wildflowers grew thickest here, a tide of blue and white. Rory's breath fogged in front of her, and she watched it hang in the still air, not drifting, not dispersing. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She turned her head slowly. Nothing. Trees, bracken, the pale shapes of the flowers. But when she looked back at the clearing, there was a figure standing by the fallen trunk, and it had not been there a moment before. Tall, narrow, the colour of birch bark. It was turned away from her, head tilted, as though listening to the stone. Rory did not move. She counted her breaths, the way she had done as a child in Cardiff when her father's voice rose in the kitchen. In. Out. Hold. The figure did not turn. Her watch said 12:07. Then, when she glanced at it again, 12:19. The second hand was moving, but the numbers kept sliding, as if the minutes were being poured from one glass into another without her being allowed to see the join. *An hour inside can be minutes or days outside,* she thought, with the dry, precise part of her mind that had once been destined for courtrooms. *Which means I could be missing a week right now. Or I could be missing the last ten minutes. Or I could already have been missing for years.* Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She did not take it out. She knew who it would be. Eva would be asleep in the flat with the lights off, and she would have set an alarm for 3 a.m. to check the messages, the way she had since Rory left Cardiff. Behind her, very softly, a voice said her name. Not *Rory*. The other one. The one nobody used. *Do not answer.* The pendant burned against her skin now, so hot it was almost painful, and she understood with a cold drop in her stomach that it was not warming her because she was safe. It was warming because something on the other side of the trees was waiting for her to step into the clearing, and the heat was the thing pointing the way. She heard footsteps on the leaf mould behind her. Light, unhurried, measured to match her own. Rory stopped counting breaths. She turned, very slowly, keeping her hand flat against her chest, and looked back down the path she had come. The stone on the path was no longer there. The gate was no longer there. Where the boundary bank should have run, there was only a long, unbroken line of oaks, each one leaning a little toward the centre of the grove, as though they had been standing that way for centuries and had only now decided to notice her. The footsteps stopped. In the clearing, the figure by the fallen trunk finally lifted its head, and she heard it breathe in, the way someone does when they have caught a scent.