Run: 2026-10-13-01M4TA84DVW4C1E4VAWJA5AWAF

Rory climbed the deer fence at the Richmond Park gate and dropped into wet grass on the other side. Her delivery boots from the Golden Empress shift squelched in mud. Cold soaked through her jeans at the knees. She checked the road behind her through the bars. No headlights swept Ham Common. No dog walker rattled the gate chain. The park held black trees and mist and the far hiss of traffic beyond the wall. She pulled the note from her coat pocket and read it under her phone torch for the fourth time. Thick paper. Ink the colour of dried tea. No stamp, no name at the bottom, just the words she had found tucked beside the till after close. "Bring the Heartstone to Isolde's grove. Midnight. Come alone." The Heartstone Pendant hammered heat against her breastbone through her shirt. The deep crimson stone had sat cold for weeks on its silver chain, the size of a thumbnail, a gift with no card and no explanation. That afternoon it had warmed each time she biked west on deliveries. At Kew Road it had burned a coin of heat into her skin. Rory thumbed the phone clock awake. Blood from a split knuckle smeared the screen. "Eleven forty-three. Right. On time for once." She killed the torch and let the dark settle back over the path. Her eyes found the shapes of oaks in stages, bark first, then branch, then the blank spaces between trunks. Her shoulder-length black hair stuck to her neck in damp strands. Breath smoked from her mouth. She set off past the locked cafe and the empty car park, counting lamp posts out of habit, the way she counted house numbers on a delivery run. The path forked at a sign for Pembroke Lodge. The pendant jerked heat in a pulse that matched her steps. Left. Heat. Left again past the fence where the ground fell toward a hollow the maps left blank. Frost silvered the grass in the hollow. Wildflowers stood open among the frost, white and violet heads turned up in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. Rory stopped at the tree line. Petals brushed her boots and left yellow dust on the wet leather. Bees should have slept in their hives. A bee crawled across a flower head with its wings folded, fat and gold in the moonlight, and vanished beneath a leaf that did not move. "Flowers do not open for frost. Noted." She spoke to hear a voice with edges. The words fell flat in the hollow. No echo came back from the trees. The standing stones rose beyond the flowers. Ancient oak trunks, each one broader than a van, stood in a ring with their bark stripped and their wood black with age. Roots knotted the soil between them. The stones from the description Eva had dug out of a folklore blog had turned out to be trees, and the sight of them rearranged something in Rory's gut. Trees grew. Trees died. These had done both and had refused to fall. She stepped between two trunks. The air changed on her tongue. It tasted of copper pennies and crushed green stems. The traffic hiss cut out mid-breath. Her ears popped. The silver chain stuck to her skin with sweat despite the frost crunching under her boots. Rory checked her phone. "Eleven forty-three." She stared at the digits until the screen dimmed. Her reflection stared back, bright blue eyes wide in the black glass, mouth open. She thumbed it awake. "Eleven forty-one. That helps. That helps a lot." She opened the voice notes app and held the phone at her chin while she walked the inside of the ring. Her thumb hovered over the red circle. Pressing it gave the night a task. "Rory Carter, Richmond Park, being an idiot in an official capacity. The note came to the restaurant. Nobody saw who left it. Pendant got hot on the way here. Grove has flowers in frost and a ring of dead oaks. Phone clock has started going backwards. If Evan sent the note as a joke, I will feed him his own teeth." The mention of Evan put his face in her head uninvited, his hand around a door handle, his smile in the Cardiff flat doorway. She rubbed the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist with her thumb until the skin stung. The ring of trunks gave her seven gaps to watch instead of one door. She counted gaps. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven." Seven trunks. She walked the circle with one hand on bark. The wood felt warm. Sap should have run cold and stiff in winter, and the warmth under her palm had a rhythm that matched the pendant on her chest. Thump. Step. Thump. Step. She pulled her hand back and wiped sap, black as tar, across her jeans. At the centre of the ring the grass grew in a spiral. The stalks bent toward a flat patch of earth bare of flowers, bare of frost, bare of leaves. Heat rose off the bare earth in waves that bent the moonlight. The pendant glowed through her shirt, a faint inner light the colour of wine held up to a fire, and cast red onto the underside of her chin. Rory crouched beside the patch. She held her palm above the soil. Warmth pressed back against her skin in pulses. Something under the ground kept time with her heart, and each time she shifted her weight the pulse shifted with her, a fraction behind her own beat. "Portal trick. Pendant wakes up near a Hel portal. That was the sales pitch." No answer came from the soil. She stood and brushed earth from her knees, and a step crunched frost behind her. She turned. The ring stood empty. Flowers filled the gaps between trunks, unbent, unbroken. Her own boot prints marked the spiral grass in a line from the entrance gap to the centre. One line. No second line crossed it. Rory raised the phone and swept the torch beam across each trunk. Bark. Root. Flower. Shadow. Bark. Root. Flower. Shadow. The beam shook in her grip and she locked her elbow against her ribs to steady it. The light caught a shape at the far gap, a shoulder, the curve of a head, gone when the beam centred on it. Her peripheral vision kept the shape. Her direct gaze erased it. "Show the whole face or get lost. I do deliveries in Peckham at night. A shoulder does not scare me." Her voice cracked on the last word and betrayed her. She cleared her throat and tasted copper again. A step crunched frost to her left. She swung the light left. Nothing. A step crunched to her right, behind the trunk she had touched, and bark dust sifted down from above her head onto her hair. She looked up. Branches knotted against the stars without a single bird or squirrel among them, and one branch swayed in air that touched nothing else in the grove. She backed toward the centre. The spiral grass crackled under her heels. Her breath came in short white bursts and the bursts hung in the air longer than breath should hang, each cloud holding its shape, drifting toward the trunks in a row. One cloud reached the nearest trunk and split around it, as if around a body. The two halves rejoined on the other side and thinned into the dark. Rory pressed record on the voice note again. The red dot lit her fingers. "Second note. Sounds in here have a source I cannot see. Steps. One set. Off to the side each time I turn. The pendant has gone cold." She looked down. The glow had cut out. The stone sat dark against her shirt, cold as river rock, and the pulse under the soil had stopped with it. Silence filled the ring in a solid block. No wind in the branches. No bee. No distant traffic seeping back through. Even the frost had stopped crunching under her boots though she kept shifting her weight. Out of the silence, a phone torch clicked on between two trunks. Its beam pointed at the ground and lit a pair of wet delivery boots in a pool of white light. Rory looked at her own feet. Her torch pointed at the sky. She had not moved it. She looked up. The second beam rose in a slow arc and lit black hair, a shoulder, the edge of a jaw, and cut out. Her mouth opened. The voice note caught her breath and nothing else. Across the ring, in air thick with flower dust and copper, her own voice counted from between the trunks with her Cardiff vowels flattened into something wet. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven." Rory mouthed the next number without sound. The voice between the trunks gave it breath. "Eight."