Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DYZ48E7MG0ZV9PZ4HS0PRZ

The gate at the edge of Richmond Park had been locked when Rory reached it, so she climbed. The iron was cold under her palms and her trainers slipped on the wet top bar before she dropped onto the grass on the far side. Nobody had seen her do it. The road beyond the trees hummed with the occasional car, and then even that faded, the way sound did when you walked far enough from a city. The directions in the letter had been brief. *Past the old oaks, where the ground stops being ground. Come alone. Come before the second bell.* She had read it four times in the Golden Empress kitchen between deliveries, Yu-Fei watching her over a pan of hot oil, and each time she had told herself it was a prank. Then she had felt the pendant warm against her breastbone, and she had stopped telling herself anything. The Heartstone hung on its thin silver chain beneath her jumper. Usually it was cool, a dull weight the size of her thumb's nail. Now it throbbed with a faint, patient heat, like a coin left in a pocket on a summer afternoon. She pressed her hand over it and kept walking. The oaks came first. They were enormous, older than any records she had read about the park, their trunks split and furred with moss. Between them stood the standing stones, grey and leaning, arranged in a loose ring that she could not quite see the end of. She counted the first six and lost count at seven. The ground beyond them was carpeted in wildflowers. Foxgloves, clover, a pale blue scatter of harebells, all in full bloom. It was January. Frost should have been silvering every blade of grass. Instead the flowers opened their faces to the dark as if it were noon, and the air smelled of honey and wet stone. Rory stopped at the boundary and looked back. The trees behind her were there. She could see the gap in the oaks where she had come through. Her footprints marked the grass, dark where the dew had been crushed. She took out her phone. The screen showed 11:52, and then, when she looked again a moment later, 11:52 still, though the second hand she could not see moved at no speed she could measure. She switched it off. The battery icon had been full all evening. Now it read four percent, then dropped to two as she watched, and the screen went black before she could decide what to make of it. "Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant. The flowers swallowed it. Nothing answered. Then, somewhere to her left, a sound: a soft, deliberate tap, like a fingernail against wood. Then another. Then a pause, and a third, nearer. She turned. The stones stood where they had been. The grass was still. But at the very edge of her vision, where the light from the flowers gave out, something pale slid behind a trunk. She did not see it so much as notice the absence of the dark where it had been, a shape the wrong height, too narrow, moving the way a person moves when they are trying not to be seen moving. She did not run. Some sensible part of her, the part that had argued her way out of two years of Pre-Law essays and one terrible marriage of a relationship, kept her feet planted and her breathing even. Running would make her a rabbit. Rabbits were easy. She walked toward the stone nearest her, slowly, keeping the trunk of the nearest oak in view. The pendant burned now, a steady warmth that pressed against her skin. Ahead, in the gap between two stones, the air had begun to shimmer, faintly, the way heat rises off tarmac in August. Through the shimmer she could make out a second ring of stones, identical to the first, but their tops were lost in a pale fog that did not move with the wind. *Hel portal*, something in her thought, unbidden, the phrase arriving from nowhere she could trace. The pendant pulsed once, hard, in answer. Then she heard the humming. It was low and tuneless, a woman's voice or something that had learned to be one, coming from the fog between the stones. It rose and fell. It seemed to be counting, though she could not make out the numbers. Somewhere behind her, closer now, the tapping resumed, in rhythm with the humming, as if whoever made it was keeping time. "Who's there?" she said. The humming stopped. The silence that followed was total. No insects, no wind in the oaks, no distant engine on the road she could no longer hear. Even her own pulse seemed to pause. Then, very softly, from directly behind her left shoulder, close enough that she felt a breath stir the hair at her neck, a voice said her name. Not Rory. Not Aurora. "Laila." Nobody had called her that since she was nine years old, and only one person had ever known to use it. Rory did not turn around. She fixed her eyes on the pale fog between the stones and felt the scar on her left wrist ache, the old crescent of it cold beneath her sleeve. Slowly, she lifted her hand and closed it around the Heartstone. It was hot enough to hurt, and it was pulling her forward.