Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV1Z9NJ5NP0C6BQD4Z2VXQ

The tube dropped Rory at Richmond just past eleven, and by the time she'd walked the long arc of path into the park, her phone had lost signal. She checked it anyway, thumb swiping at nothing, the screen casting her face in that blue-dead light that made everyone look like a corpse. "Brilliant," she muttered, and pocketed it. The pendant at her throat was warm. Not pulsing, not yet — just a steady heat against her collarbone, the way a mug felt through a jumper. Eva had told her to go at moonrise. Eva had also told her to bring iron, to step only between the oaks, and not, under any circumstance, to answer if someone called her by her full name. Aurora Carter, Rory thought, and the warmth against her skin ticked a degree higher, as though the stone could hear her. The grove sat where Eva had said it would, tucked past a bramble hedge that didn't look like it had been there that morning. Nine oaks. She counted twice. On the second count there were eight, and then when she blinked, nine again. Her mouth went dry in a way that had nothing to do with the walk. "Right," she said, to hear a voice. Hers came out thin. She stepped between the stones. The quiet hit her first. Not the absence of sound — Richmond Park was never truly silent, there were always deer shuffling, foxes coughing, the distant hush of the A316 — but a scrubbed-out, padded quiet, as if someone had pressed a palm against the world. Her own footsteps came back wrong. Too soft. Soaked into the grass. Wildflowers bloomed at her ankles. Bluebells in October. Cornflowers. A thistle head the size of her fist, purple and swollen, turned towards her as she passed. She told herself it was a trick of the wind. There was no wind. She knelt where Eva had said to kneel, at the centre, where a flat grey stone lay half-swallowed by moss. The Heartstone under her shirt pulsed once. A slow, deliberate beat, like a second heart borrowed from something larger. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay, I'm here." She was supposed to wait. That was the whole of the instruction. Wait, and don't speak first, and don't look at the trees for too long. She looked at the trees. The nearest oak had a face. Not carved — she was sure of that, almost sure — but grown, the bark folded into the suggestion of a brow, a closed eye, the long pull of a mouth. She turned her head and the face went with it, staying just at the edge of her sight. When she snapped her gaze directly to it, it was only bark again. Knotwork and lichen. Something moved behind her. She didn't turn. Eva had been specific about that too. Rory kept her eyes on the grey stone between her knees and listened. A rustle, low, at waist height. The soft crush of grass under something that had weight but took its time placing it. Three steps. A pause. Two steps more. Her breath fogged. It hadn't been cold a moment ago. The rustle circled her. She tracked it by ear — behind her, to her left, in front, and then, impossibly, above. A creak of wood, as though a body had settled into branches that shouldn't have taken its weight. A leaf drifted down and landed on the back of her hand. It was black. Not autumn-black, not rot, but ink-black, and when she tried to brush it off it smeared like wet paint and was gone. "Nice try," she said to the grass. Her voice didn't carry. It fell off her lips and stopped. The warmth at her throat climbed. She could feel the Heartstone now through the cotton of her shirt, a slow hot throb that matched nothing in her own chest. Her pulse was going faster than that. Much faster. A child laughed. It came from the tree line, left of her, a small clean giggle like a kid at a birthday party. Rory's stomach clenched so hard she tasted copper. There were no children in Richmond Park at this hour. There were no children within a mile. The laugh came again, closer, and this time it was doubled — two voices, perhaps three, overlapping in a way that mouths couldn't quite manage. "I'm not looking," she said, low, more to herself than to anything out there. "I'm not looking at you." Something breathed near her ear. Not a wind, not imagination. A breath, warm and damp, with a smell under it like turned earth and old honey. She felt a strand of her hair lift and settle, as though fingers had considered it and decided against. The pendant flared. Proper warmth now, almost a burn, and she heard herself make a small sound that wasn't a word. "Aur—" She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to bleed. The voice at her ear had started to say her name and stopped, as though it had tasted the iron on her tongue before the syllables had finished. It tried again. "Rory." She closed her eyes. Eva hadn't said anything about Rory. Rory was a nickname. Rory was the name her mam used at the kitchen table, the one Eva shouted across a pub. Rory wasn't on any birth certificate. "Rory, look up." The voice was kind. That was the worst of it. It sounded like someone she'd known for years, someone with her best interests lodged in their chest. There was a tug behind her sternum, a genuine want to do as it said, and she understood, with a clarity that made her cold all the way to her feet, that if she lifted her face, she wouldn't be the one deciding to lift it. She pressed her palms flat against the grey stone. The moss was wet. Her crescent scar, on the bone of her left wrist, prickled as though she'd dipped it in snow. "Say it properly," she whispered, eyes shut, "or sod off." The grove held its breath. Somewhere above her, in branches that had no business holding anything at all, something shifted its weight and settled in to wait.