Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR5VVKTEBRHBTJQJBXXWFF

Rory slipped through the iron at Richmond Park, her breath a thin vapor in the November dark. The gate had been chained at dusk, but there was a dog-walker’s gap at the side where the bars had been bent decades ago, a secret kept by generations who couldn’t be bothered by posted hours. She went through sideways, the strap of her satchel catching on a flake of paint and tugging—a small, stupid struggle that set her teeth on edge more than it should have. She swore under her breath and freed herself. Silver lay cold against her throat. The Heartstone hung at the hollow there, thumbnail-sized and heavier than it looked. It had a way of sitting with intention, as if it chose the exact place to rest. She touched it with two fingers as though to check a pulse. The gem was warm in the center, a minuscule ember cupped in stone. She pulled her hand back. Her fingers smelled faintly of rain-wet pennies. Midnight, the note had said. Come alone. Wear the stone. Answers. It had looked like every other con someone dangled in her life until she held the paper to the kitchen bulb and watched the ink rise as if exhaled by the light. Silas had been downstairs closing up the bar, his laughter muddy under the sound of glassware. Eva would have told her not to go—Eva would have sobered on a dime and fixed those cat-sharp green eyes on Rory and said, That’s bait, babes—but Rory had felt the tug of it, not thought and not impulse, something older. She had stuffed her phone into a pocket and the note into the other and left quietly as the pub chalkboard listed tomorrow’s specials to an empty room. The park in daylight wore paths and families and people in athleisure clipping along with headphones. The park now wore itself. Wet bracken brushed like fingers at her knees. Crystal breakings crackled where a skin of frost had seized puddles. Deer opened and closed the night with their soft, enormous steps, bodies indistinct as boulders until one lifted its head and two flat coins of reflected streetlight looked back at her. Farther in, the world’s edges caught and slipped. She passed a blackthorn hedge where white blossoms showed in the dark, small stars blooming out of season. Wildflowers pressed up on both sides of the narrow track, brave little colors of summer insisting on their own calendar. Primroses. The ragged pinks of campion. A scatter of cornflower blue. She felt like an intruder at a party she hadn’t been invited to, all of it present tense around her, living beyond the logic she carried. Beyond the bracken and scrub, the grove waited, where Richmond surrendered to something older. The line of it was obvious once she saw. Ancient oaks stood as sentinels in a ring, each thicker than a hatchback and furrowed deep as water-worn stone. They weren’t stones, and yet they felt like standing stones—their trunks took the moonlight badly, drank it down and held no reflection. Their lowest branches tangled to each other across widths of air. The heart of the space inside was bare ground feathered with leaf mold and a quilt of low flowers that had no business being awake. She paused at the nearest tree, palm out. It was foolish to say hello to a tree. She did anyway. “Hi,” she said, quiet. “I don’t know the etiquette.” No reply, only the tiny noises of her jacket as she shifted. London growled beyond the park’s black mouth—the continuous grind of distant traffic, the occasional wail, the metallic eternity of trains. Even that went soft, like bedding thrown over a radio. The grove took the edges off. Time thinned. Her phone said 12:07. She checked again. 11:42. She licked her lip, tasted iron, and put the phone away without looking a third time. When she stepped between the oaks, the air changed temperature as if she’d crossed in front of a fridge. The warmth from the gem became more present, a small live thing at her throat. She had read fairy tales as a child, not because she’d been a dreamy child (she hadn’t; she’d been the child who argued with teachers and rewrote the ends of stories for fairness) but because her mother collected old books. Those tales had been bone-grim before Disney scrubbed them down. Warnings, mostly. Don’t step into rings. Don’t take food. Don’t give your name. She had too many names. Rory. Aurora. Carter. Her father called her Laila sometimes when he had whiskey in him and his Dublin rose through his Oxford. Eva had once, in a whisper against Rory’s ear in the back room of Silas’ bar, called her Malphora to make her laugh. No one else knew that one. The memory wandered through her head and didn’t sit right. There was a place at the center of the grove where the flowers thinned as if pressed by a regular heel. She walked there, not because the note told her to, but because the heat at her throat tugged like a hand on a string. She looked down and saw a circle of earth laid bare, a dish-dark place edged with green. An old iron ring lay half-buried there, caked with soil, thick as her thumb, the loop of it rising an inch. It didn’t look like anything from this century. Runes or scrapes ran along it, half gone under rust. The ring hummed in her bones, like the low ceiling-sonic of a tube line passing under your feet. “Are you the answers?” she asked. She could hear her own voice and hear the way the space took it and laid it flat, as if pressing flowers. It came back to her with a second syllable tacked on at the end, almost invisible. Ssss. She knelt, the damp creeping through the weave of her jeans. The knee of her trousers drank a mark from the mud. She reached toward the ring and stopped with her fingertips a hair’s breadth off. Cold sat on the iron like a residue. She wasn’t stupid. Her father had used that tone with her too often for her to ignore it now when it rose from inside her own head, the sensible version of her older than law school and delivering noodles at midnight. Don’t. Stand up, walk away, go home. Make tea, text Eva, tell her you almost did a thing, let her roll her eyes and call you a muppet. The Heartstone pulsed—a minuscule beat that wasn’t hers. She felt it through her collarbone as much as her finger. It warmed, then cooled, warmed again. The rhythm didn’t match her heart’s. She pulled her hand back as if the ring had flashed a tooth at her. “It’s nothing,” she told herself, which was the kind of thing people said right before it became something. She was cold and the moon was high and she had left the safer parts of night behind. That was all. Anxiety could make anything breathe. A sigh moved through the grove that wasn’t wind. The flowers tilted, a subtle lean, as if something very large had passed among them. The oaks made no sound at all. She stood fast. The instinct to run opened like a parachute. She didn’t. You didn’t run in a courtroom when you had two questions for the witness and the jury was still with you. She drew her breath into her ribs and held it until her eyes watered. When she let it go, it steamed and hung in front of her, then… reversed? For a fraction of a second, the vapor folded back toward her face against the law of every day. It smudged the line of her nose with cold. She swallowed down bile. Footsteps. Soft. Four steps to her left, five paces beyond the first oak. A staggered timing, not a person. A deer? She turned her head slow. Her hair caught at the collar of her coat. A something moved at the edge of her vision and didn’t become a thing when she looked full at it—just a slip of darker dark among the trees. Her bright blue eyes had always done well in dim rooms. In this place they lied to her. Edges softened. Lines merged. She could make nothing resolve. “Hello?” she called again, because it felt arrogant to assume the emptiness was because she was important. Rory, the grove said, almost like a question. Aurora. Laila. Carter. The names braided through each other as if dragged on a net. Malphora, something else said from the far side of the ring, clear as if spoken against her skin. She turned all the way then, boots grinding grit. She kept her hands at her sides to keep them from shaking. The name was nothing. It was a private joke. Eva had made it because of a typo on a takeaway menu: Malphora Prawns. They had laughed about it for days until it attached itself to Rory’s tongue. No one else—no one—should have had it. She made her face empty. “That’s not my name.” Names, the not-wind sighed, pleased with itself. She took a step back. The oaks seemed closer than they’d been. The sky had shifted too. Clouds gone. A thickness of stars like salt spilled on velvet. She couldn’t pick out the Plough. The moon had a ring around it the color of old bruises. If time did weird inside the grove, what did that make the hour? If she walked out now, would she find dawn? The next week? Two minutes gone and Silas still drying pint glasses downstairs? She took her phone again because she needed a fact, any fact, and because touching something from the other world might anchor her to this one. The lock screen lit her hands bone-pale. 12:07. When she looked again without meaning to, 3:13 blinked back. Her own face floated there in the return of light, black hair a mess, eyes too wide, the small crescent of scar at her left wrist pale against the dark. She put the phone away without checking a third time. The small plastic weight of it was insulting. Pointless. An itch grew at the base of her skull. She turned without moving her feet, eyes scanning between trunks where the moon couldn’t go. Something stood there then, or had always been, a vertical suggestion half a head taller than the tallest person she had ever met. If she tried to count fingers it became branches. If she softened her gaze it became a woman whose hair moved as if under water though the air here was still. The shape watched her. Rory watched it back. She lifted her chin a hair because her mother had taught her to make the same gesture at faculty who’d wanted to be kind to the Irish girl with the wrong vowels. The pendant gave another beat, patient and inevitable. “Who asked me here?” Rory said. “Why?” The woman-branch shape didn’t answer. A second shape found itself opposite the first, leaving Rory bracketed. Then a third. The ring of them, at the edges of her sight, not quite where she could count them. Shadow congregation. Her chest grew tight and her breath came in like someone else’s. Had the circle always been this small? The oaks packed the periphery, bark ridges like wrinkled knuckles. She wasn’t claustrophobic. She knew now what claustrophobia felt like. Somewhere in the leaf mold, a small insect scraped with exaggerated sound. A moth unhooked itself from a petal and shook powder from its wings with the seriousness of a priest. When it rose, it seemed to hang too long between flaps, suspended by attention rather than motion. The tug at her throat became insistence. Heat radiated from the stone into the shallow of her chest like a second heartbeat trying to write over her own. She clapped her hand over it. It was hot enough to sting. She could refuse. She could tear the chain, throw the little thing into the dark, watch the figures break, leave the way she’d come. Her fingers found the clasp instinct with the memory of other necklaces. The catch should have been simple, a priest’s fervent tiny hook. Her fingers slid over metal she could not find. The chain didn’t move. It was as if the clasp had soldered itself shut, as if the chain had grown, had been there since she was born. She pulled harder. The fine links bit. The crescent of scar on her left wrist ached like new work. Don’t, said the part of her that still thought the world was a machine and could be pried open with a screwdriver. You don’t know what you’re opening. The ring of iron in the ground looked old enough to know more than she did. There had been rings like that in pictures in library books, always with someone dead around them. She closed her eyes for a beat and counted as if she were back in the back hall of the bar, forcing her lungs to slow. One, two— Malphora, breathed and breathless at her shoulder, intimate as Evan’s voice had been when he’d come up behind her in the flat and laid a hand on her elbow and said her name like it included her. The place in her—the small cave she’d sealed off after leaving him—went raw. She turned, most of her wanting to hit him and the rest wanting not to see him. There was no man. Only the oak, which looked at a distance like a man with both hands behind his back, and her own shadow on the ground. The voice had been private. Close to the ear. Familiar with the shape of her. She shivered, revulsion crawling her back in tight stings. “I know what you’re doing,” she said, not sure which you she meant. “You’re poking for soft spots. You won’t find any good ones.” Aurora, something else sighed, patient as an aunt. Laila. Carter. Rory. Malphora. All your doors. She wanted to laugh and couldn’t sell it to her lungs. “Pick one,” she said. “I won’t answer to all of them.” The iron ring in the earth lifted, minuscule. It didn’t break free. It did not need to. The smallest movement changed the geometry. A smell came up off the dirt then, not rot, not damp, a distinct, old scent like a cellar you weren’t supposed to go into. Cold ran along her shoulders and nested beneath the bones. The stone thumped. It was not a sound she heard with ears. It was a thing pressing against her insides. She looked down. In the dish of dark soil, the black went glossy. It was like looking into the underside of a puddle, a skin stretched across what wasn’t water. Something shifted below it, slowly, as if turning in sleep. Hel, the word arrived, not in the grove’s borrowed voices, but in her own mind, with the same foreign proper noun taste the note had had. No one in her life said that word except in crossword puzzles. It had weight here. The gem at her throat warmed further—searing now, her eyes stinging as if she stood too close to a grill. Tears leaked sideways uninvited. No gore, she told the part of her brain preparing images of hands. No horror movie theatrics. Don’t give it what it wants. “Do you want this?” she asked the thing in the ground, or the grove, or whoever had sent the paper and made sure her feet found the gap in the gates. “Do you want me to put this down there? Is that your clever plan?” The flowers leaned. The woman-branch shadows stilled. From somewhere that wasn’t a direction came a sound like a chime struck underwater. It didn’t form a yes. It didn’t form a no. It set her teeth on edge with the concept of assent. “You could just ask,” she said, and the courage in her voice almost made her believe it. “Use your words. That’s what we do where I’m from.” Where are you from, came back, curious now, a small child settled at a stranger’s knee. “Cardiff,” she said. “London.” Blood, something intended to supply, needling. She bit the inside of her cheek and tasted iron again. An infant’s trick. Distract pain with sharper pain. “Say please.” The answer was the opposite of please. A pressure swelled at the soles of her feet, not pushing her upward, pushing up through her into the world. It met the heat at her chest and made a wick of her. For a second she was a candle, and the candle was a thing that wanted to be lit. Her knees didn’t go. She made them stay. The iron ring lifted another fraction as if drawn by the same capillary thirst. She was twenty-five. She had a job that paid cash in a red envelope and a friend who cut the lemon with the same knife she poured the Guinness with and a father who still sometimes said he’d pay the tuition if she’d just go back, just try law school again and finish the right way. She liked small jokes. She did the crossword Monday to Wednesday and then folded the paper for the cleverer people. She kept a plant alive by talking to it once a week. She did not open gates. “I’m not your key,” she said, and wanted the sentence to be true on more levels than this. Something laughed at the edges, the way water laughs—sly, not mean. The figures between oaks leaned in. The air tasted green as if it had been stored under moss. The pulsing at her throat had rhythm now. There was an appeal in it, a promise of relief if she would just follow, if she would just stop dragging her feet. She had felt that same promise in men’s hands before and in the mouths of institutions. She made herself hold that irony and use it as a weapon. In the soil, something pressed against the membrane of black and then withdrew slow. Not a hand. Not any part she could name. It was worse. It was possibility. The worst of all hands. She swallowed because saliva happened whether you wanted it to. “I won’t,” she said, and then, steadying, “You’ll have to take it.” The pressure backed off, a step. Not forever. Coy. Considerate. An invitation rescinded to make her ask for it back. The grove would outwait her. The grove could measure waiting in rings. Her own waiting would end with sunrise, or Tuesday, or white hair. She had no way to measure. There were a hundred soft ways to lose. What was the hard way? She put her palm flat against the iron ring. The cold bit, honest. She thought of the rootedness of the oaks, how they had grown through change after change and held their own counsel. She held the ring the way you hold the edge of a table when a wave moves the floor. “You can keep your answers,” she said. “I’m not here for them anymore.” She made herself say the magic phrase that got a lot done in the regular world. “I revoke my permission.” Silence answered in a ripple, a flicker through the flowers, through the dark. The thin membrane trembled, the way a pond will when a stone chooses not to land. The figures at the edge of her sight went tall, then thin, like trick mirrors aligning and unaligning. The pendant burned, a brand through her palm where it lay pressed. She kept her hand there until she smelled something like caramelized sugar and realized it was her skin. She took her palm away. The heart beat at her throat slowed a hair. The small room behind her rib cage opened a fraction, like someone had cracked a window on a lorry in a fumes-choked tunnel. She became aware again of the pedestrian sounds of the park—the faraway beat of a late cyclist on loose gravel, an owl that didn’t hoot right but tried anyway, the argument of two foxes sorting out territory by the bins. The wrongness didn’t leave. It lay down and watched her. “Okay,” Rory whispered to nothing, or to everything. “Okay.” She stood, knee damp cold, ringed by trees that had decided for tonight not to kill her. She stepped back from the circle. The oaks stepped aside. That was the only way she could describe it—nothing moved and everything moved. She put one foot after the other across the leaf mold. The path out was a stitch she had to unpick, her breath the thread. The pendant cooled in fits. It would not go back to entirely cool. It had learned something. So had she. At the threshold, where the grove’s air and the park’s air met like two different seas, she paused because it felt wrong to cut her back to it without acknowledgment. “If you’re looking for me,” she said softly, “you already know where I live.” Down the slope, the city presented itself again like a television turned up: taxis, a siren, a drunk arguing with the night in a voice like a broken horn. She slipped through the bent gate the way she had come. She didn’t look over her shoulder. The iron left a line of cold across her ribs where she squeezed. She walked up the road to the night bus stop with her hands in her pockets and stones in her boots and the feeling that time was stuck like chewing gum to her heel. She took out her phone at the shelter and let the light cut up at her chin. The lock screen said 12:08. She didn’t try for a second glance. On the bus, she sat with her back to the driver and watched the fat purple bruises of London light move over the silver chain where it disappeared into her shirt. The stone lay quiet now, not sated, not asleep—alert under her skin like a hound told to stay. She could feel the ring under her palm still, a perfect circle of absence where her body belonged to something else for a minute. When the bus hissed and knelt at her stop, she stood, throat tight, and stepped down. Silas had written his specials in careful chalk. The cover was down over the front door. The alley smelled like yeast and cabbage and the breath of a long Friday night. She let herself in the side and climbed the stairs to the flat. In the kitchen, under the bulb that made everything look hemorrhaged, she folded the note slowly until the edges met. The words on it lifted like fish in shallow water. She put it in the drawer with elastic bands and takeaway menus. Eva’s voice waited on her phone, half a dozen messages from earlier in the night, all of them versions of Be safe. She typed two words back—Got home—and left the rest unsaid because she was not ready to put any of it into any shape that made the world hold still. In bed, in the murk before sleep found her or didn’t, she heard a chime that could have been a heating pipe complaining. She did not dream about hands. She dreamed about an old iron ring under earth and a room inside her with all the windows open.