Run: 2026-10-09-01M4G1GM8RWEXGAHNK74V3MXQ1

The park gate had been locked when Rory arrived, but the padlock hung open on its chain, as if someone had expected her. She stood a moment at the iron railing with her phone in one hand and the torch in the other, listening to the wind move through the bracken. Deer, she told herself. Richmond had more deer than sense. The path she wanted was not on any map she had ever seen. She had found it the way she found most things lately, by following the pendant. The Heartstone lay against her breastbone under her coat, on its silver chain, and for the last two miles it had grown steadily warmer, like a coal someone was breathing on. Now it was almost hot. She switched off the torch. Her eyes adjusted slowly. The city glow over the trees faded behind her, and the dark thickened into something with texture, the shapes of birches, the pale scatter of ground mist. The path bent left, then right, then left again, and she realised she had not seen the gate in several minutes. She looked back. There was only the trail, narrow and pale, running between the trunks. "Right," she said quietly. Her voice came out flat, as if the air had soaked up the sound. The grove announced itself with a ring of oaks. They stood in a loose circle, enormous and old, their bark furrowed like the knuckles of an old man's hands. Between them, standing stones rose waist-high or taller, grey and lichen-spotted. She counted seven before she stopped counting, because the number kept changing when she looked away and back. Inside the ring, the ground was carpeted with flowers. Bluebells, primroses, a wash of white anemone, foxgloves tall as her shoulder. It was October. Not a single petal should have been open. The scent hit her a moment later, sweet and heavy, and under it something cold, like a cellar. She stepped over the nearest stone. Her boot came down on soft moss. *You came*, a voice said. Or perhaps it was the wind, moving through the oak leaves in a long, sibilant breath. Rory stopped. She turned slowly in a full circle. Nothing. The flowers swayed a little, all in the same direction, the way grass bends under a hand. "Hello?" she said. The silence answered her, and it was not empty. It had the particular density of a room where someone has just stopped speaking. She took out her phone. The screen showed 11:52. She stared at it, then tapped it, and the display went blank for a second before it returned: 11:52. The seconds did not move. She pressed the side button, and the phone woke with the same time, the same frozen digits, as though the minute had decided to stay. Her pulse ticked in her throat. She made herself breathe in through her nose, the way she did before a difficult conversation with a client or a landlord. Think. The pendant was hot now, burning through her shirt, and she was almost certain it was pointing her somewhere. Between two of the oaks, something moved. It was low down, near the roots, and it was gone before she could fix on it. A pale flicker, a smear of grey, like a hand drawn across a dusty window. She kept her eyes on the spot. A minute passed. Then another. Nothing. Only the foxgloves, the stones, the dark shapes of the trees. When she glanced away to the left, she caught it again at the edge of her vision: a tall shape standing exactly where the trunks were thickest. She turned her head to look straight at it. It was a tree. Just a tree, the bark split and hollow, a knot of shadow in its trunk. She did not remember the tree being there before. "Right," she whispered again, and this time her voice shook. A sound came from behind her, to the north, where the path had been. Soft and regular. A rhythm like fingers tapping on wood. Tap. Tap. A pause. Tap. Then a second rhythm answered it from the south, slightly off-beat, as if something were listening and trying to match her. Rory did not turn around. Some instinct told her that turning around would give the thing something it wanted. Instead she shifted her weight, slowly, until she could see both paths from the corner of her eye, and she kept her hands loose at her sides. The pendant pulsed. Once, twice, a warm throb against her skin, bright as a heartbeat. Its light leaked through the cloth of her shirt, faint and crimson, and she saw, on the ground beside her boot, the outline of her own shadow cast in that red glow. Her shadow was a little late in moving when she shifted her foot. Only a fraction. A breath of delay, as though it had to remember how. She did not look at it. She looked at the trees. Something stood between the oaks, close enough now that she could have reached out and touched it. It did not step forward. It did not make a sound. It only waited, the way a held breath waits, and the flowers at its feet turned their faces toward her, all at once, like an audience that had been expecting her for a very long time. Rory swallowed. Her throat was dry. Her hand found the pendant through her coat and closed around it, and the warmth flared up under her fingers, insistent, not comforting. "I'm not staying," she said. The tapping began again, close now, directly behind the stone at her left shoulder. It kept time with her heart. She did not run. Running, she understood with cold clarity, was the one thing that would make the grove stop being patient. So she stood very still in the sweet, cellar-cold air, counting the wrong number of stones, and waited for the thing in the trees to decide what she was worth.