Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAJHZVYAFW6XPXZ68WJCHZ

The gate at the Robin Hood Gate was locked by the time Rory reached it, so she went over the low railing where the hedge had worn thin. Her trainers hit wet grass on the far side. Behind her, the lamps along the road made orange halos in the mist, and then the trees swallowed them. She had told herself she would not come back here. Two years ago she had walked out of this same clearing with her heart hammering and her hands full of wildflowers she could not explain, and she had sworn to Eva that she was finished with it. But the pendant had been warm against her sternum all evening, a faint, patient heat like a hand resting on her breastbone, and when she checked the time on her phone at the Golden Empress, between a rice order and a delivery to Kingston, the warmth had surged. Just once. A pulse, like a heartbeat under a bandage. The phone said 9:47. She put it in her coat pocket and kept walking. Richmond Park at night was a different country. The deer were somewhere out in the dark, she could hear them shifting and coughing, but she could not see them. Her torch made a narrow white tunnel through the bracken, and everything beyond the tunnel had the texture of wet slate. She followed the path she had memorised without meaning to, past the old oak with the split trunk, left at the fallen beech, straight on where the ground dipped toward the water. The standing stones came up out of the mist all at once. Six of them, or seven if she counted the leaning one that had once been a bough. They were not stone at all, she knew that now. They were oak, grown into pillars so old the bark had gone silver and split like paper, and they stood in a ring with the gaps between them black as doorways. She stopped at the edge of the ring and turned off the torch. For a moment there was only the sound of her breathing and the faint drip of condensation from the branches. Then the light came up from the ground. It was not bright. It was the colour of a candle seen through a hand. It came from the clearing's centre, where the wildflowers grew in a dense, impossible carpet: foxgloves, primroses, bluebells, a last stubborn drift of white campion, all blooming together in the middle of November. She could smell them now, sweet and heavy, almost rotten. The pendant was hot. Not warm. Hot, pressing through her shirt, and when she closed her fingers around it through the fabric it pulsed once, hard, and the chain bit into the back of her neck. *Hel*, she thought, and did not know where the word came from. *There's a door here.* She stepped through the gap between two stones. The air changed. It was like walking into a room where someone had just stopped speaking. Her ears popped. The mist thinned around her feet and pooled instead, low and white, and in the pool she could see her own shadow, thrown forward by the glow from the flowers, stretching long and thin across the grass. She checked her phone. The screen was dark. She pressed the side button. Nothing. She tried again, and this time the screen lit with a time she did not expect: 9:47. Still. Exactly still, the numbers unchanged as she watched them, and she realised she had not heard the traffic from the road for a long while, or the deer, or her own footsteps on the grass. She put the phone away very carefully, the way she would put down something that might be hot. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She did not turn her head. She had learned that much two years ago. She let her eyes slide sideways instead, past the nearest stone, into the trees beyond. There was a pale shape between two trunks, upright, about the height of a person. When she looked directly at it, it was only bark and shadow. When she looked away, it was there again, a little closer, the way a face in a dark window is there when you stop trying to see it. A sound came from behind her. Soft, rhythmic. Twig, then leaf, then the faint give of soft ground. Footsteps. Someone walking slowly across the clearing, matching her own careful pace. She stopped. The footsteps stopped. She waited. Her heart went on hammering. The pendant pulsed, and pulsed again, faster now, the rhythm uneven, like something trying to get her attention. "Hello?" Her voice came out thin and flat, swallowed almost at once by the mist. Nothing answered. But somewhere to her left, very softly, someone hummed. It was a tune she almost knew, a lullaby her mother used to sing in Welsh, the melody warped and slowed until it sounded like a memory being played back underwater. Rory pressed her left wrist against her side, over the small crescent scar she had carried since she was seven. The skin there was cold. She made herself breathe in through her nose, the way she did in court-room-style arguments with Eva when she needed to think, and she made herself count. One. Two. Three. On four, the humming stopped. In the silence, the footsteps started again behind her. Closer this time. Not matching her pace anymore. Simply coming, unhurried, across the wildflowers, and each step pressed the blossoms flat with a small, wet sound that she could feel in her teeth. She did not run. Running was what the thing wanted, she was sure of it, the same way she was sure the gap between the stones was the only way out and that the gap was now a little narrower than it had been. She turned around. The clearing was empty. The flowers were still. The mist lay quiet over the grass, and beyond the ring the trees stood like patient people waiting for a bus. But the grass where the footsteps had been was bent in a single long line, leading straight to her feet, and the pendant at her throat burned so hot she could feel the silver chain beginning to blister her skin. Somewhere far off, a deer called out. Then, very close, at the height of her own ear, a voice she had not heard in two years said her name, gently, the way you would call someone in from the garden. "Rory." She did not answer. She reached for her phone with a shaking hand, and the screen was still showing 9:47.