Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA9JN8662SA7V74C55HGFA

The gate on the Sheen Gate Road was locked when Rory reached it, so she climbed the railing where the iron had rusted through and dropped onto the wet grass on the far side. Her trainers sank an inch. Her phone showed 11:52 and one bar of signal that flickered like a dying match. The note had slid under the door of the flat above Silas' bar three days earlier. No envelope, just a square of cream card in a looping hand she didn't recognise. *Come to the oaks before the bells. Bring nothing that isn't yours.* She had nearly burned it over the hob. Instead she had fastened the pendant around her neck, felt the silver chain settle cold against her collarbone, and checked the night bus times. The park swallowed the streetlights within a hundred metres. Deer shapes moved at the edge of the bracken, pale rumps flicking, then gone. Rory kept to the path, though the path itself seemed to thin the further she walked, the tarmac giving way to packed earth, then to something softer that gave under her feet like moss over a mattress. She checked the phone again. 11:58. The first thing she noticed was the smell. Not rot, not the sour mulch of the leaf piles along the fence, but something sweet and green, like crushed stems and honey left too long in the sun. Then she noticed the flowers. Bluebells lined the path. In November. Their heads hung heavy with dew, and beside them foxgloves stood tall as a child, spotted throats open to the dark. Rory crouched and touched one. The petal was warm. She straightened too fast. The pendant lay against her breastbone, and she felt it before she understood it: a slow pulse, like a second heartbeat, warming the skin beneath the silver. It was the same warmth she had felt in the stairwell of the Golden Empress the night the dumpling delivery went wrong and the back door opened onto a corridor that had not existed a moment before. She had shut that door. She had not asked questions about it. "Right," she said, mostly to hear a voice. "Where are you?" The wind didn't answer. There was no wind. The leaves overhead stayed still, yet somewhere to her left, a branch creaked under weight and then settled, the way wood does when something has stepped off it. Rory turned her head slowly. Oaks rose ahead of her in a rough ring, their trunks black and fissured, and between them stood stones, grey and taller than a man, leaning inward like old men sharing a secret. The boundary, she thought. That was the word the note had used, though it hadn't used any word at all. She had simply known it, the way she knew which cupboard in the flat held the good tea. She stepped between the first two stones. The air changed. It thickened and quieted, and the distant hum of the A3 vanished so completely that she heard her own pulse in her ears. Somewhere past the ring, a child began to hum. The tune was lilting, unfamiliar, and it stopped the moment she stopped walking. She waited. The humming started again, closer now, and she realised it had no particular direction. It came from the trunks, from the bluebells, from the gap between her own ribs. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She drew it out. The screen read *No Service*, and beneath it the clock had frozen at 12:00. Above the clock, a single notification sat on the lock screen: a text from Eva, sent four minutes ago, which was impossible because Eva had been asleep in Cardiff for hours. *Rory, don't stand in the middle.* She lowered the phone. The grove lay exactly as it had before, the bluebells, the foxgloves, the stones, but something was different and it took her a moment to name it. Every bloom faced the same direction, heads bent inward, toward the centre of the clearing where she could not quite see. A shape moved at the edge of her vision, left side, low to the ground. She turned. Nothing. Only the stones and the dark between the oaks. She turned back, and the shape was there again, a fraction closer, a pale thing that folded itself behind a trunk the instant she looked straight at it. She had spent three years learning the difference between a sound she imagined and one she heard. The humming was real. The creak was real. The frozen clock was real, and so was the text that sat on her lock screen like a stone dropped into still water. Rory's breath fogged in front of her face, though the night was not cold. Her fingers closed around the pendant. It burned now, steady and insistent, pointing her toward the oak at the far edge of the ring. Behind the nearest standing stone, something exhaled. The sound matched her own breath exactly, a half-beat behind, as though it had learned the rhythm by listening.