Run: 2026-10-09-01M4FXXQRBJ5KED2F1R5XAV0P0

The gate in the railings had been open when Rory reached it, which was the first thing she didn't like. Richmond Park closed at dusk, and the wardens were thorough about it. Beyond the gate the deer path ran dark between bracken and bare birch, and the city's orange haze fell away behind her until there was only the sound of her own boots on frost. She checked the time on her phone. 11:52. No signal. The little bars at the top of the screen had gone hollow, like something had drawn them out. She kept walking. The note had been pushed through the letterbox of the flat above Silas' bar three days ago, folded twice, written in a hand she didn't recognise. *Come to the grove before midnight. Bring nothing you can't carry. Stand inside the stones and wait.* No signature. Silas had found it on the mat and given it to her with a look that said he'd read it and wished he hadn't. She had come anyway. She was good at being cool-headed. That was what everyone said about her, Eva most of all. Rory keeps her head, Rory thinks sideways. It had never occurred to anyone that the head might be the part that talked her into things. The path bent around an outcrop of old oak, and the trees opened into a clearing. She stopped. The standing stones ringed the hollow, eight of them, each one taller than a man and furred with lichen. Between them the grass was thick and green, and in the grass were wildflowers. Foxglove. Campion. Clusters of pale blue scabious, all blooming at once, in a month when every other bramble in England had already given up. The air smelled of honey left too long in the sun, and beneath that, faintly, of cold metal. Her wrist ached where the old crescent scar sat. She rubbed it through her sleeve. The pendant was warm. It lay against her sternum on its silver chain, beneath her jumper, and she felt it before she touched it, a slow pulse of heat, the way a hand feels warm when someone steps close behind you in a dark room. She drew it out. The deep crimson stone gave off its faint inner glow, a colour like a coal turned over in the grass. It pulsed once, gently, and then again, faster. *Near a Hel portal*, she thought, and then wished she hadn't, because she had never once let herself believe the things the benefactor had told her, and now the stone was insisting on them. She stepped between the first two stones. Nothing happened. She stepped between the third and fourth. Still nothing, only the flowers nodding in a breeze she couldn't feel on her face. Somewhere past the trees, a bird began to sing. It was a thin, looping call, and it stopped halfway through, as if someone had lifted a hand from its throat. Rory turned slowly, counting. She had walked the circle without meaning to. Four stones, five. Six. She reached seven, and then she reached the place where eight should have been, and there were eight, and she had counted seven. She looked at the gap in her memory and didn't like what it held. Footsteps sounded on the path behind her. Light, unhurried, matching her pace the way a shadow does. She stood still. The footsteps stood still a heartbeat later. "Hello?" Her voice came out flat, swallowed by the clearing. Nothing answered. She did not look over her shoulder. Some part of her, the part that had read every ghost story Eva ever dared her to, insisted that the moment she turned, whatever was there would have the good manners to be exactly where she expected it. So she watched the trees instead, the dense black ranks of them beyond the stones, and at the very edge of her vision something pale moved between two trunks. It was tall. It was not standing at the height of a person. When she shifted her gaze directly toward it, there was only bark and shadow, and the grass where it had been was bent flat, as though it had been lying there and had only just got up. The pendant pulsed hard against her skin. Once. Twice. Three times, quick as a frightened heart. Behind her, very close now, someone breathed out slowly, the way a person does when they have been holding their breath a long time and are finally, reluctantly, letting it go. Rory closed her fingers around the stone until the chain bit into her palm. She did not run. Running was what they expected. She had come to stand inside the stones and wait, and she was going to keep her head, because keeping her head was the only thing she had ever been good at. "I'm here," she said quietly. "You can stop pretending you're not." The clearing went silent in a way that had weight, and out of that silence, from somewhere very near her left shoulder, a voice she knew answered her in her mother's careful Welsh accent. "Oh, Aurora," it said. "We've been waiting so long for you to turn around."