Run: 2026-10-09-01M4FYKJ0M53H7TD0D0KH6086K

The message had arrived at 11:48 without a sender's name, just a set of coordinates and a single line: *Come before the bells stop.* Rory had read it three times standing in the kitchen above Silas' bar, the bass from downstairs rattling the mugs on the shelf, and had almost deleted it. Instead she'd pulled on her coat, buttoned it to the throat, and taken the Night Bus to Richmond. Now the bus was a red smear fading down the Kingston Road, and she was standing at the edge of the park with the gate's iron spikes cold under her palm. The pendant lay against her breastbone, under her jumper, on its thin silver chain. She had stopped taking it off months ago. Nobody had ever told her who had left it on her doorstep, wrapped in tissue paper with no card, only the deep crimson stone catching the streetlight. Tonight it was warm. Not hot, not yet, just a steady heat like a palm pressed over her heart. *A portal,* she thought. *Or near one.* She told herself the thought was absurd, and then she climbed the fence where the wire was loose, because she was twenty-five and had been called cool-headed by everyone who'd ever known her, and cool-headed people did not turn back over a feeling. The grass inside was too quiet. Traffic from the A3 had been a constant hum at the boundary, the kind of sound a city makes when it forgets you are there. She walked away from it and the hum thinned, then stopped altogether, as if someone had closed a door. She checked her phone. The time read 11:52. She walked for what felt like ten minutes and checked again. 11:52. "Right," she said aloud. Her voice sounded flat, swallowed by the bracken. "Fine." The trees grew closer together. Old oaks, their trunks split and furred with moss, their lower branches bare and hooked like fingers. Between them the ground was carpeted in flowers that had no business blooming in late autumn: primroses pale as candle wax, clusters of blue bells, clover heads open to the dark. Their scent was thick and sweet. Rory's throat tightened around it. She saw the first stone through a gap in the trunks. Then a second. Then a ring of them, grey and leaning, each taller than a man, standing at uneven intervals around a clearing she could not quite see into. The pendant pulsed once against her skin, distinct and warm, and she stopped. Something moved at the edge of her vision, to her left, between two trunks. She turned her head slowly. Nothing. Bark. Moss. A shadow that was only a shadow. She kept her eyes on it anyway, counting her breaths the way she had in the hospital corridor years ago, when her wrist still ached from the glass and her mother had been talking too brightly to the nurse. The movement came again, to the right this time. A pale shape, tall and narrow, sliding behind an oak and not coming out the other side. "Hello?" she said. The wind answered with nothing. The flowers didn't stir. She began walking toward the ring of stones because there was nowhere else to go. The ground was soft, springy, almost warm through her boots. Somewhere ahead a bird began to sing, a long liquid run of notes, and then stopped mid-phrase, as though it had been interrupted. Then, from the trees behind her, came a voice. "Rory." It was her own voice. Not an echo. Not a copy. It was the exact way she said her name when she was tired and wanted someone to stop talking, and it came from about four feet away, at the height of her shoulder. She did not turn around. Her wrist throbbed along the old crescent scar, a dull ache that she felt more than remembered. Her hand had closed into a fist without her permission. She opened it, one finger at a time, and made herself take another step toward the stones. "Rory," the voice said again, softer now, almost fond. "You came back." She had never been here before. She was certain of that. And yet, as she reached the first standing stone and laid her palm against its cold, pitted surface, she knew with complete and sinking clarity that she had counted the stones on her way in, and there had been seven. There were eight now. Behind her, very close, the flowers began to bend, one after another, as if something was walking slowly through them, unhurried, in no particular rush to reach her. Rory kept her hand on the stone and did not look back. The pendant burned against her chest, and she understood, too late, that its warmth had never been a warning. It had been a welcome.