Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX4B97H5ECJBKSK0BR2W5G

“All right then. You win. I’m here.” The trees listened. Their trunks stood close as pillars. Bark ridged like old knuckles. The clearing kept its own light, as if the moon came down through a keyhole. Wildflowers peered up in colours that had no business in October. Blue like kiln flame. Yellow like warning paint. Red that pulled at the corner of vision and ducked away when faced. “You wanted me at midnight,” Rory ran a palm down her coat, found the little pouch against her chest, “you didn’t say it would feel like a church you don’t belong in.” Leaves held their breath. The city had stayed outside the gates. No traffic drift. No plane paths above. A fox barked off in the bracken, then again, closer, then, the same bark a third time, from behind her left ear. “Yeah, no. We’re not doing that.” She nudged a seed head with the toe of her trainer. “You’re an echo away from being clever.” The note had been folded into her delivery run. Tucked under the lid of a carton of dan dan noodles. Neat hand. Bring the Heartstone to the Grove. Midnight. Alone. The sort of request you only honoured if you had a bad habit of walking toward things that wanted you to leave. The pendant had warmed at the first standing oak, the way it always did around the odd doors Eva used to chase. Warm, then warmer. Now it sat against her sternum and thudded with a tiny life that didn’t match her own pulse. She cupped it through her jumper. “All right, you little heater. Do your thing.” The crimson stone answered with a glow from its belly, nothing anyone else would notice. The chain ticked once against the silver zip. She pushed the overgrown bracken to the side and stepped fully through the ring of oaks. Bark had grown into pinnacles, their crowns touching. In the thin space between them lay a grass that never yellowed. The air bent and didn’t bend. Her phone read 00:13, then blinked to 23:59, then found 00:02, like a drunk looking for a step. “Pick a time and stick with it.” She thumbed the torch on. A halo of white bit into leaves and made them glare. “Whoever wrote that note, I’m not going to play sardines. Come out.” A breeze lip-read her words back. The same sentence came from the far tree line. Then again, from the open dark beyond the circle. Not echo. Rehearsal. She drew a line in the dirt with her heel. “You listen better than most.” The line filled with silver as if water had seeped up, though the grass drank it before it pooled. Somewhere near her knee a droplet fell into a bucket. Twice. Then a kettle hissed and knocked off a roll. Her stomach did that old quick drop, the one she’d learned to flatten when walking past Evan’s favourite pub. She pressed flat and full thoughts against it. Name what you can touch. Zip. Buckle. Chain. Roughness of oak bark. The small crescent scar on her wrist itched. “Eva, if you put someone up to this, I’ll nick all your dumplings for a month.” Her own name came back, thickened with Welsh vowels that weren’t hers. “Rory.” She lifted her head. “No, we’re not doing Mum. That won’t wash.” “Brendan,” the dark tried next, and put her father’s careful way of pairing syllables in place. “Aurora.” “Swing and a miss.” She pushed hair behind her ear. She didn’t trust it away from her face, but she wanted it clean of her peripheral vision. “You’ve been eavesdropping. Great. Now you can hear this: I’m here to check a thing and go. Not to chatter.” The Heartstone pushed heat into her palm. She drew it into the light. The cut of it looked like a shard out of a larger stone, broken clean, polished lazy, edges that caught light unless you stared. The silver chain had kinks where her fingers worried it. She held the gem out towards the nearest oak. It grew warmer. She moved it a handbreadth to the right. Cool. Back left. Warm, then almost hot. “So we’re playing hot and cold. You love a classic.” She edged closer to the oak. The bark had knots like eyes. She tried not to arrange them into a face. The wildflowers turned their cups to the Heartstone as if the stone were a sun and their necks could crane. A poppy the size of her palm uncurlled a petal that hadn’t been there a moment before. The smell hit her next—iron and crushed mint and the first strike of rain on dust. Her mouth flooded. Her heel slid, not on mud, but on leaves that had gone slick without dew. A shift in the grass made a shape at the far angle of the clearing. Something tall paused in space that had been empty. A head with a suggestion of antler and a suggestion of hood, the kind of outline your brain made out of three branches and a scrap of fog. She didn’t look at it full on. You learned that with deer. You learned that with men who wanted you to trip on your own gaze. “If you’re meant to be a guide, do less lurking.” She relocated the torch beam with a short flick of her wrist. The light cut across the shape. Branches. Nothing else. Leaves clacked like teeth. Her phone chimed. Her thumb darted without thinking. Message from Eva. Don’t go to the grove. The time stamp read 02:04 and lay there stupid, like a wet dog on carpet. “You’re late,” she told the phone, or the park, or an idea of London outside the gates. She shoved it away in a deep pocket. “You’re all late.” Her watch throbbed against her wrist, out of step. The second hand didn’t tick. It smiled and slid. Wind crawled along her sock and went no higher. The whole clearing leaned. Her eyes corrected the tilt. Her stomach lagged. She gripped the Heartstone harder and set her feet as if she stood on the top deck of a bus. “All right,” she told the oak in front of her. “Oldest-looking one gets the honour.” The trunk bowed in a way no tree did. Not movement. The sort of recognition a church pew gave your spine when you sat in your mother’s spot. She put the Heartstone against the deepest seam in the bark. Cold dribbled down her wrist bone. A breath came from the split and raised skin along her forearms. Her mouth opened on a swear. “Don’t. That’s not—” The bark didn’t give. It un-locked. The seam softened under the pendant the way skin warmed under a tea cup. Not wet. Not dry. Something your thoughts slid off. The stone’s heat told her something else stood a hair’s width away on the other side. She had no name for that space. She knew only that she had stood too close to it once before, at a bridge she should have avoided, with Eva laughing and their breath fogging in January, and if she leaned now, she could taste steel. “Hel,” she said into the seam. “If that’s you, I don’t have a bone to throw. I’ve got questions.” The word came back in a dozen mouths from a dozen ages. Not Hel. Her own syllables fell into a throat that wasn’t her own and came out wrong. Hel. Elh. Lhe. “Never loved a chorus,” she told the tree. “One voice will do.” A small hand clapped four times on the other side of the ring, polite, like at a school play. She didn’t move. The flowers rustled without breeze. Her shadow stepped to her left though she hadn’t. Her breath went out and didn’t come back but didn’t choke her, either. It waited. A footstep paired with her own last stride and put weight in the grass that made sense until she counted shoes. “Right,” she said, speaking straight into the seam. Her voice landed on rough texture and stayed. “We’re not alone, then.” “We’re not alone,” the echo agreed, smaller now, voiced by a throat she remembered from nights when she took coats at Silas’s bar. The throat had laughed and blown smoke and asked about Cardiff. It had bought gin with cash. It belonged to no one she trusted because she had trusted it once. “You only practice with names,” Rory told the dark. “That’s your trick? Cheap.” “Rory,” in her mother’s mouth. “Laila,” in her father’s. “Malphora,” into the cut between tree and stone like a knife eased back into a sheath. “Don’t call me that.” The pendant bit. Her hand shook. Heat crawled up her veins. She smelled sea-salt like a cheap seaside arcade. Copper coins on tongue. Train brakes. Someone somewhere zipped a zip that matched the one at her throat and ended in a teeth-click that invoked classrooms and detention slips. She shut her eyes a beat and opened them clean. “Show me what you dragged me out for.” She pressed the stone deeper, enough to scuff bark with silver jewellery. “I’m working lunch shift tomorrow. Make this count.” The grove chose to laugh without noise. Light puddled around her shoes and wriggled away. The ancient oaks leaned again and corrected. Between two of the trunks, beyond the ring, something changed its mind about being a shadow. Two feet stood side by side. No legs attached. The toes pointed inward like a child’s in new shoes. Dew built on the grass around them and then ran backward across blades until it sat where it had been before. Her skin did what it wished. It shrank. She didn’t give it words. “You don’t have to keep scooting about. I can see you.” She didn’t turn. “And I can count. One of me. One of you. No chorus. Quit the copying.” “You don’t have to keep scooting about. I can see you.” The voice behind her did not reach for mimicry this time. It landed. It matched her exactly, down to the rhythm Eva had teased. “And I can count. One of me. One of you. No chorus. Quit the copying.” “Say something new.” “Say something new.” She ground her teeth. It felt childish. It also reset something tight between her ribs. “All right. Different game.” She loosened her grip on the Heartstone just enough to thread the chain once around her knuckles. “Why me?” “Why me?” The twin breathed in, as if to make room for an answer, and gave none. “Not helpful.” She worked saliva back into a mouth gone paper-thin. “If you wanted the pendant, you could have waited until I was asleep. You found my noodle run, you can find my flat.” “You found my noodle run,” the other voice agreed, with her own tilt toward humour, and it made the space behind her ear feel blown on. She had to bite back a flinch. It did not help that the oak carried the sound into her bones. It did not help that the ground under her right heel went hollow and then full again. “Don’t crowd,” she told it. “If I turn and you’re wearing my face, we’re done. I’ll smash the stone and sort out the mess later.” Something that wasn’t wind passed through the circle of trees and nudged her jacket at the shoulder, where a moth had chewed a hole through the lining last spring. The touch found the hole and slid in with a weight like a fingertip. Not pain. Knowledge. Her stomach wanted to untie itself and drop into the grass. She called breath back with an old trick: look harder, name five. The oak. The crack. The heartstone. The silver of her zip. The way the flower heads had all turned, not just some. That last one landed like arithmetic. “You like light,” she told the space pressed to her ear. “You like heat.” “Like heat.” It tried a different drag on the second word. Less Rory. Someone older. Jen from the post office. Aunt Sinead. Women who smelled of washing powder and had strong opinions about shoes. “The stone’s for doors.” She pulled the pendant back an inch. The seam cooled. The pressure behind her ear slackened and then returned twice, petulant. “You can’t open this one. You need a hand. That’s why I’m here.” A knuckle rapped on wood from inside the oak, once. It sounded like a room with no furniture. A kettle began to boil and then removed itself from heat before steam could lift the lid. A child giggled like water hitting hot oil. The ring of oaks acted like a throat clearing. “What’s on the other side?” She made the question work and hated that it came out softer than the rest. Not pleading. Open. She’d avoided that tone for two years. It came too easy here. “Tell me true.” “True.” A new voice. Lower. Timed to the moment she remembered her father’s laugh when football went wrong and three men shouted as if they stood in her garden. It had the weight of radio static and lift. It tried to be kind. It failed. Rory kept her eyes on the seam. “You’ll have to do better.” The flowers rustled again. Stems split and made space where there had been none. A ribbon of air colder than the night slithered out of the seam and crossed the back of her hand where her wrist scar sat. The scar sang—not pain. A memory of it. Heard the snap of the garden gate she’d caught it on. Smelled the marigolds her mother had planted. Saw the shine of antiseptic, mirror-round in a spoon. Then nothing. The sore itch died back. The new breath that lay between worlds throbbed with a rhythm that was not her own, not the High Street at closing time, not trains on wet rails. Something old in it. Not slow. Even. She leaned into it a hair. “I know that beat.” “We know that beat,” at her shoulder, into the wool of her coat like an earpiece. She let herself laugh, sharp and single. “You’re trying to make me think of my own heart. How sweet. Waste of effort.” The twin breathed. If breath had fingers, it would have gone to her throat just then and traced where a bruise had lain last winter, yellow under scarf. It did not touch. It hovered. It made her throat keen to swallow. Her jaw wanted to grind again. She opened her molars and set them apart. “Enough games.” She tightened the chain until it bit her knuckles. “I’m touching this to the door. If you don’t want me to, use words that aren’t mine.” The pause tried to be a test. It stretched. It bent. It snapped. “Please,” the other Rory put out, in a voice exactly hers and not hers at all, because her own voice knew where to put that word to make a room look at you, and this one placed it wrong. Too light. As if dropping it on the kitchen table from a height, not carrying it. “Better,” Rory allowed, because it got the tone right. “Why?” “Cold,” in that same voice. Not her voice. Not any woman she knew. It carried the flake and glitter of a field in hard frost. Not a complaint. A label. “Shut.” Rory considered the seam and the heat in the Heartstone and the way the oaks stood like a set of judges waiting to see who would blink. She wanted to go. She wanted not to be the person whose name got written into requests tucked under takeaway lids. She wanted Eva to climb the fence and barrel in laughing and call her an idiot. She wanted a cab home and the grump of a driver who hated Richmond Park at night. She wanted ten impossible things, all at once. “You want me to open it.” It didn’t need to be a question. She made it one anyway, for her own spine. “Yes.” That voice again. The one with winter in it. The one that didn’t pretend to be her mother or father or Eva or a barman. One syllable that meant business. “Open.” Rory put her breath on her teeth and held it there so it wouldn’t fog up the thought. She looked at the ring, at the places where oaks had grown together over centuries into a near-wall. She found the emptiness between their roots where shadows went thick. She moved her thumb over the warm stone and counted down from five under her breath, not aloud. On two, she set the gem back to the split. “Tell me what you want,” she said to the space, level. “Tell me now.” She pressed the Heartstone against the yielding bark and felt it answer with a thud that lined up with nothing she recognised.