Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR8GXAX00HYVQG9PHSYBVD

Rory slipped between the iron bars of the locked park gate, breath frosting faintly in the air. The metal scraped her jacket with a teeth-on-edge squeal that sounded far too loud in the sleeping dark of Richmond. She dropped lightly to the path on the other side, knees bending, and stayed there a moment, one hand on the cold ground, listening. Behind her, the city was a muffled hum—distant sirens, the low roar of traffic on the A316—all pressed flat as if under glass. In front of her, Richmond Park stretched out as a black sea, the shapes of oaks and chestnuts rising like islands. No lamplight reached this far. No orange sodium glow, no flashing blue. Just the moon, and her. Her phone said 23:58. Two minutes. She pushed herself up, brushing grit off her palms. Her breath came a little faster now, though not from the climb over the gate. Stupid, coming out here alone in the middle of the night. Stupid, following an anonymous text that could easily be some creep with a thing for women who delivered him dumplings twice a week. But the text had included a photo—grainy, blown out by flash, but clear enough. The pendant, cradled in a gloved hand. Her pendant. The same deep crimson droplet, the same silver chain. Hers was currently a reassuring weight against the hollow of her throat beneath her scarf. If you want answers, come alone. Midnight. The old oak circle in Richmond Park. Answers about what, the number hadn’t said. It had stopped replying after that. Blocked, when she tried to ring it back. She tugged her scarf snug, shoved her free hand into her pocket, and set off up the tarmac path. Dead leaves crackled quietly under her boots, the sound swallowed almost at once by the huge, watchful silence of the park. Autumn again but the air tasted wintry. It bit the inside of her nose and carried with it that sharp, dry scent of fallen leaves, of earth going to sleep. Somewhere, unseen, a stag barked—a harsh, tearing cough that seemed too loud, too alive. She caught herself glancing over her shoulder. Relax. This is fine. People jog here at night. Teenagers sneak off for a shag in the bracken. You’re just… taking the scenic route to a very ill-advised meeting. The path wound between silhouettes of trees, each trunk a thicker block of black against the muted sky. The moon rode above the clouds, thin and high, painting the grass in faint silver. Rory’s shadow trotted ahead of her, elongated and spidery. After a while, even the distant smear of the city faded. The hum dropped away, leaving only the soft crunch of her footsteps and the faint rustle of something small moving through the undergrowth. Her hand rose of its own accord to touch the pendant beneath her scarf. It wasn’t warm. Not yet. She checked the directions she’d screenshotted before losing signal: from Pembroke Lodge car park, cut left, follow the path until you see the three broken oaks, then head off towards the depression that always had wildflowers. She couldn’t see any broken oaks yet. Only the endless ranks of trees, standing silent like they were listening. Something moved to her right. The tiniest shiver at the edge of vision—like a shape stepping back as she turned. She halted, heart thumping, and squinted into the gloom. A cluster of oaks, twisted boughs lacing together. The shadowed tangle of bracken. Empty path. Wind, she told herself. Or a deer. Or one of the bloody parakeets that had gone feral out here, though they should be asleep. She waited, listening. Silence. Or not silence, exactly. The absence of obvious noise but the presence of something else underneath it, like a frequency just beyond hearing. Pressure building behind her eardrums. Stop it. You’re psyching yourself out. She walked on. The path sloped gently up, then levelled. After perhaps ten minutes—it was hard to tell; time blurred in the dark—she saw them: three oaks clustered by the side of the path. Their tops had been torn out somehow, long ago, leaving jagged, whitened stumps. In the moonlight they looked like broken teeth. Right. Off the path it was. The dry grass whispered as she pushed through it. Seed heads snagged at her jeans. The air here smelled different—greener somehow, damp and wild despite the chill. Ahead, the land dipped. She came to the edge without quite realising, one more step and she was going down the gentle slope into the bowl of the clearing. The trees ringed it, crowding close, their trunks thick and straight as pillars. In the centre, the ground leveled out into a soft hollow. And it was full of flowers. Rory stopped at the bottom of the dip. Her breath caught. Under the thin moonlight, the flowers glowed pale—daisies and violets and other blossoms she couldn’t name, heads nodding lightly as if in a breeze. But there was no breeze. The air here was utterly still. Her hair lay flat, her scarf hung heavy, unchanged. In October, she thought. In the open, in the middle of the night. Wildflowers. The nameless feeling that had been pricking her spine since she climbed the gate sharpened. This wasn’t right. Not ‘council forgot to mow the lawn’ not-right. Something-else not-right. She stepped forward, the damp earth soft under her boots. As she entered the ring of trees, the world narrowed without her permission. The night sky shrank to a shallow bowl overhead. The distant bark of another stag broke off mid-cough, as if someone had cut the sound away with a knife. No traffic. No sirens. No planes. Just the tiny thump of her own pulse, and the faintest, nearly inaudible hum, like wires singing in a high wind. Except there was no wind. Her fingers brushed the pendant again. This time, it was warm. A delicate, unmistakable warmth, pulsing faintly against her fingertips, like something asleep and breathing. Rory swallowed. “Brilliant,” she muttered, voice small in the stillness. “Of course you’d pick somewhere like this.” She turned in a slow circle, scanning the perimeter. The ring of oaks rose like a wall, trunks placed at strangely regular intervals. Standing stones, she thought suddenly, except they were alive. Their roots must have knotted together under her feet, binding the clearing in a wide, unseen net. No other person. No shadow—save hers—on the damp leaf-litter. She checked her phone. 00:03. No signal bars, not even an emergency call logo. The date glowed back at her in cold white text, utterly unbothered by anything she was feeling. Thursday. Still Thursday. “You’re late,” she said to the empty air. The joke sounded brittle to her own ears. “Very mysterious of you.” Her voice didn’t bounce back. There was no echo. The words went out and vanished, swallowed whole. The pressure behind her ears increased, just a touch. Not enough to be painful. Enough to notice. She folded her arms against the chill and waited. A minute passed. Or five. It was hard to tell. The moon inched behind a streak of cloud, the light in the clearing dimming by a degree. The flowers stayed bright, their colours oddly saturated even in the gloom. She heard it then: a soft crunch, almost exactly like the sound of her own boots on leaf mould. Directly behind her. Every muscle in her body locked. Air froze halfway into her lungs. Don’t turn around. It’s nothing. It’s— Another crunch. Closer. The breath burst from her chest. She spun, heart kicking hard. Empty space. The gentle curve of the clearing’s edge. The ring of oaks, unmoving. No branches low enough to step on, no long shadows breaking free to show the shape of someone else. There was nowhere for a person to hide. Not really. Not unless they stood directly behind one of the trunks and pressed themselves flat, or lay in the flowers like a corpse. She took a step towards the sound’s location, peering down between the white nodding heads. Dark earth, slick leaves. A beetle, sluggish and glossy. No footprints but hers. She checked, forcing herself to be methodical, to override the unease. Two parallel lines of prints, in and out from the slope. Nothing crossing them. Nothing newer. “Fox,” she said aloud. “Or a deer. Something small. It ran off before you turned, you muppet. That’s all.” Her pendant throbbed once, a sharp, hot pulse against her skin. She flinched. “Okay, that’s… not helpful.” She pulled it out from under her scarf. The chain slid coldly over her fingers, but the gem itself glowed faintly, an ember in the centre of her palm. No actual light—if she held it up, it didn’t cast any on her skin—but a sense of brightness, as if her nerves perceived more than her eyes. It beat, another gentle surge of warmth. Almost in time with her pulse, but not quite. A half-step off. Syncopated. The humming in her ears rose a fraction. It felt like the air before a storm. You wanted answers, didn’t you? She did. About why a stranger had pushed this pendant into her hand three months ago outside Silas’s bar and faded into the Soho crowd before she could ask a single question. About why it heated whenever she got within spitting distance of the strange, sharp angles of Yu-Fei’s back room. About why sometimes, in dreams, she saw a red light shining through cracks in the world and woke with the ghost of that same warmth against her throat. The clearing watched her. That was nonsense, she knew it was nonsense, and yet the thought took root and would not leave. The trees were too still. The wildflowers too poised, in their eternal half-nod. Even the moon seemed hesitant, caught in a hanging moment. Another sound came then, from the left this time: a scrape, different from the crunch of steps. Like bark dragged against stone, slow and deliberate. Rory pivoted, every nerve screaming, pendant clenched in her fist. The nearest oak loomed a few yards away. Its bark was deeply furrowed, ridges catching silver light. She could see, very clearly, the uneven spirals and whorls where branches had once been cut away or broken. They seemed to form shapes. A curve like a mouth. A hollow like an eye. If she stared any longer she was going to see it blink. Her scalp prickled. Her skin crawled with the urge to back up, to put something solid against her spine. She held herself where she was. “Whoever sent the message,” she called, “you’re starting to piss me off. Come out or I’m leaving.” Her breath smoked in front of her like she was in a freezer. The words went out, were eaten again. For a while, there was nothing. The hum under the silence and the pounding of her heart. Then, as if the clearing had to think about it, a voice. “Rory.” Her own name, carried on almost no air at all. Whispered. It seemed to come from somewhere above her head, as though spoken just behind her ear by an extremely tall person. The hairs on the back of her neck shot upright. She didn’t dare move. Couldn’t. Another breath, closer. “Aurora.” It knew. Whoever—whatever—was out here, it knew both names. Her parents’ choice and the one she’d given herself. Her hand closed tighter around the pendant. The warmth had spread now, radiating up into her palm and wrist, prickling hot under the skin like pins and needles. Its beat had quickened, or hers had slowed. She forced herself to talk. Talking meant you were still in control, or at least pretending to be. “So you do exist,” she said, and winced at the slight wobble in her voice. “Great. That saves me the embarrassment of telling my flatmates I snuck into a park at midnight because of a prank text.” “Laila,” the voice sighed. That dragged the air out of her lungs. No one called her that. No one in London, at least. Laila was a name from Cardiff, from schoolyards and sunburned summers. Her father half-drunk in front of the rugby on telly, calling her his “little Laila” in an accent thickened by whiskey. She hadn’t written the name down on any form since she was eighteen. “…Who is this?” she demanded. Silence. Then a new word, unfamiliar, curling around her like smoke: “Malphora.” The sound of it made her stomach twist. Too close to her name, but wrong. Like a reflection that refused to move in time. She turned then. Slowly, because something in her gut told her that sharp movements would be a mistake. She scanned the ring of oaks, the shadows between them, the pale scatter of flowers. No figure. No face. Only the slight darkening where the spaces between trees opened onto the wider park. She could walk out, if she chose. Her footprints still marked the damp soil. She could follow them, climb the slope, find the broken oaks, the path— Her shoulders itched. Her back felt horribly exposed. “Show yourself,” she said. The trees creaked. That was all. Wood settling. Old trunks flexing microscopically in the cold. Except… the sound didn’t carry properly. It didn’t come from one place. It slid around the clearing, here then there, as if the noise were circling her faster than any physical thing could move. The moon slipped free of the cloud. The light in the clearing brightened, and for a heartbeat she could have sworn the oaks had shifted. Just a little. Leaning inwards. Branches now lacing tighter overhead than they had when she arrived, tipping the bowl of sky towards a funnel. She blinked. They were back where they’d been. Hadn’t they? Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Rory nearly dropped the pendant in fright. She fumbled the device out, thumb already swiping. No signal logo, still. But a notification bar slid down from the top: 00:03. Again. Her insides went cold. She checked the time app. 23:58. Watched as it ticked over, calmly, to 23:59. Then 00:00. Then, without warning—no transition, no second spent at 00:01—it jumped straight to 00:03. The numbers didn’t flicker. They simply… changed. The tiny digital colon pulsed, steady, indifferent. The hum in her ears became louder, clearer. Not just a pitch now but layered with something like… voices. Many, many voices, whispering over one another just below comprehension. The air felt thick, viscous. Breathing was suddenly an effort, like pulling air through wet cloth. The pendant was almost hot enough to hurt. She stuffed the phone back into her pocket and swallowed hard. “I’m leaving,” she said. “This little freak show? Not working for me.” She turned towards her own footprints and walked. Each step felt heavy, as if the earth were reluctant to let go of her boots. The air pressed against her from all sides, dense as water. The slope up out of the hollow seemed steeper than it had a half-hour—five minutes—ago. She climbed anyway. Her breath came faster, misting the air. She reached the top and— And looked down into the clearing again. The flowers. The ring of oaks. Her own footprints, fresh and dark, leading down the slope. Her stomach dropped. She whipped around, heart hammering. Behind her: the trees, yes. But not the broken oaks by the path. Not open park. Just more trunks, evenly spaced, their roots diving into the same unseen circle. She was still inside. Something laughed. Soft, delighted, in no particular direction. The sound threaded through the hum and the whispering, high and low at once, like dozens of throats trying on the idea of amusement. “Rory,” it murmured. “Aurora. Laila. Malphora. You came.” She couldn’t pinpoint the source. Every instinct told her it was right behind her, leaning in, its mouth beside her ear. But if she turned, there would be nothing. She knew that with awful certainty now. Her left wrist ached suddenly, sharp and bright. The old crescent scar there—the one from when she’d fallen off her bike onto the pavement at seven—burned like it was fresh. She glanced down. The skin looked perfectly normal, pale and smooth, but the phantom sting tugged at her memory: gravel under palms, blood smeared on handlebars, her mother’s face gone white. “Why?” she whispered, not sure who she was asking. The hum surged. The pendant’s heat flared, a spike of pure, almost unbearable warmth against her sternum. It chimed against her ribs in a rhythm that wasn’t human. In front of her, where the flowers parted just slightly, the air rippled. Not like heat on tarmac. Not like mist. More like the way light bent in deep water, warping what lay behind. For an instant, she saw something between the trunks: a vertical line of red light, impossibly thin and impossibly long, stretching up and down beyond sight. It wasn’t bright, not really, but it stabbed at her eyes with the intensity of a color she had no name for. Then she blinked, and it was gone. The clearing was just a clearing again. The flowers, the trees, the bowl of dark sky. Only the afterimage remained when she closed her eyes: that thin, patient wound in the world. “You brought it,” the many-voiced whisper said, with a satisfaction that made her skin crawl. “Good girl.” She wanted to deny it, to throw the pendant into the grass and stamp on it, but her hand had curled protectively around it again, fingers locked tight. Her body betraying her. The air thickened further. The hum resolved, for a heartbeat, into the shape of a word. Not English. Not Welsh or Irish, though it caught at the back of her tongue with the familiarity of both. A name, maybe. Or an invitation. The flowers all turned their heads at once. Not towards the moon, or some rational source of light, but towards her. Every petal angled, every tiny face lifted, as if they were trying to see her properly. Rory stood very still, the world closing in, and understood with the cold clarity that comes in the worst moments that she had not come here to meet someone. She had been brought. And whatever else was in the grove with her had been waiting a very, very long time.