Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAN5YQ25DGPF8QSHXNWMQE

The gate in the iron railings had been left unlatched, which was the first thing Rory noticed and the first thing she decided not to think about. Richmond Park at half eleven on a Tuesday was supposed to be empty. The deer had their own paths and the joggers had gone home to their dinners, and what remained was the wind moving through bracken and the distant orange smear of the city behind the trees. She had told Eva she was going for a walk. She had not said where. The map on her phone showed nothing useful. The grove was not a place a map could hold. It sat in a blank patch between the oaks, a spot her feet had found twice before without her meaning to look for it, and both times she had come out of the trees with no memory of the path back. This time she had come on purpose. She had her torch, a bottle of water, and the Heartstone pendant under her jumper, cool against her breastbone on the silver chain. It had not been cool for most of the walk. Somewhere past the old oak with the split trunk, it had begun to warm, faint and steady, the way a stone holds the heat of a day. She had told herself it was her body heat, or the jumper, or the wine she had not really drunk. The trees thinned. The path ended in a ring of standing stones, grey and lichen-blotched, each one taller than she was. Between them, the ground was covered in wildflowers. Foxgloves, clover, something pale and starred that she did not know the name of. In October. In the dark. They bent slightly toward her as she stepped between two stones, as if they had heard her coming. "Hello?" she said, and her voice came back thin and wrong, a half-beat late. She switched off the torch. She did not know why, only that the light seemed to be making the shadows at the edges of the clearing crowd closer. The moon was a pale thumbprint behind cloud, and her eyes adjusted slowly, the way they did in Cardiff when the power cut out and she had to feel her way down the stairs of the old house. The silence was the first thing that bothered her. Not total silence. The wind still moved. Somewhere far off a car horn sounded and then did not sound again. But the small noises she had been hearing all the way up the path, the rustle of animals in the undergrowth, the tick of insects, had stopped. The whole grove was holding its breath. Then she heard something that was not the wind. It was a soft sound, rhythmic, like fabric being dragged over grass. It came from her left, from beyond the second stone. She turned her head slowly and listened. It stopped. She waited. It started again, closer, and this time it had a cadence to it, a pause and a drag, pause and drag, the rhythm of something that was learning how to walk. "Eva?" she said, though she knew her friend was in bed in Walthamstow with her phone on silent. Nothing answered. The sound stopped. Rory's left wrist ached, the way it did when the weather turned, and she pressed her thumb against the small crescent scar there, the mark she had carried since she was seven and fell through a fence on Cathays Terrace. She had always thought of it as a reminder to watch where she put her hands. Now she found herself counting the seconds between each sound she did not hear, the way you counted the gap between lightning and thunder. She turned on the torch. The beam swept across the foxgloves and the stones and the black trunks beyond. Nothing. Only the flowers, bowing gently, and the grass flattened in a pale line that ran from one stone to the next, as though something heavy had been pulled through it and then lifted away. She followed the beam with her eyes and found the second stone again. Its face was streaked with a dark damp, like rain had run down it, though it had not rained in days. The pendant burned against her skin. It was not painful. It was insistent, a pulse of heat that matched the beat of her heart and then outran it. She pressed her hand over the jumper, and felt through the wool the stone's small hard shape, warm as a cup of tea. She had been told once, by a man in a grey coat who had pressed the necklace into her hands in a dim café off Queen Street and then left without paying, that the pendant would find what it was meant to find. She had laughed. She had not laughed the night the cold came up through the floorboards of her flat, or the morning she woke with grit under her fingernails and no idea how it had got there. Something moved at the edge of the torchlight. She did not see it so much as notice the absence of it, a patch of dark between two trunks that had been there a moment ago and was now slightly less dark, as if a shape had shifted its weight. She swung the beam. The bracken lay still. The trees stood still. The flowers, which had been bowing toward her, were now bowing toward the same place in the trees, all of them, in a slow, unanimous curve. "Who's there?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was something. The silence answered, and then, from somewhere behind her, very close, something breathed out. Long and patient, like someone who had been waiting a very long time and did not mind waiting a little longer. Rory did not turn around. She understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that turning around was the thing it wanted her to do. She kept the torch steady on the trees ahead and took one slow step backward, toward the path, toward the gap between the stones she had come through. The pendant flared hot against her chest. Behind her, the grass began to move again, pause and drag, pause and drag, and this time it was not coming from the left. It was coming from the path she had walked in on.