Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G6WN66ZVHGCAEZ054V7V6

The gates of Richmond Park had been padlocked for two hours by the time Rory ducked under the fence, her torch angled low against the grass. The letter in her pocket weighed more than paper ought to. Come at moonrise. Come alone. No signature. Just a pressed wildflower inside the envelope — something she hadn't seen since childhood, something her mother had once called heart's-folly. She didn't believe in coincidences. Not anymore. The air tasted different past the tree line. Wetter. Older. She'd been to the park in daylight often enough to know the paths, but the paths weren't behaving. What should have been a straight run from the car park to the stand of oaks near Pen Ponds kept bending beneath her feet, the torch beam falling on bracken she didn't remember passing. She stopped once and turned a full circle. The lights of Kingston were gone. Not dim — gone. The pendant at her throat gave a small, warm nudge against her collarbone. "All right," she murmured. "Point taken." She pressed on until the first of the standing stones rose out of the dark. Oak, not granite — trunks that had been dead for centuries yet refused to rot, their bark silvered in the thin moonlight. Seven of them, she'd been told once. She counted. Seven. Good. At least something still obeyed the rules. Inside the ring, the wildflowers were out. Foxglove, yarrow, things she didn't have names for, colours washed to ash by the dark but unmistakable. In April. In the middle of the night. "Hello?" Her voice went flat, as if the grove had pockets in it that swallowed sound. "I got your letter. I'm here." Nothing answered. The pendant warmed another degree, then cooled. She clicked the torch off and let her eyes adjust. Better to see the whole clearing than a narrow cone of it. Moonlight picked out the grass in a dull pewter shine, and for a long minute there was only the grove and her breath and the slow tick of her pulse in her ears. Then a bird called. A blackbird — the clean, liquid run they make at dusk. At almost midnight. She shifted her weight. The grass didn't whisper back the way grass should. It had the muted give of carpet over floorboards, and when she took a step, the sound of her boot arrived a half-second late, as though the grove were dubbing her footfalls in after the fact. "I don't enjoy being messed about," she said to the trees. Something moved behind the third stone. Not a figure — a shift in the way the moonlight sat on the bark. Here, then there, then gone. She kept her eyes on the spot. It didn't return. The blackbird sang again, closer. Then a second one, further off, picked up the same phrase. Then a third, at a pitch just below it, in perfect unison. Three birds, singing one throat's worth of song, on a night no blackbird should have been awake. "Stop that," she said, and hated how thin her voice came out. They stopped. All three, on the same syllable, as if a hand had lifted from a piano. She turned slowly. The far edge of the ring — the oaks there looked wrong, though she couldn't have said how. Taller, maybe. Or closer. The gaps between them had narrowed. She was sure of it and then unsure and then sure again, and the uncertainty itself was what made her hand drift to the pendant. It was hot now. Not warm. Hot enough that she felt the outline of it through her shirt. "Okay." She spoke evenly, because that was what you did when a dog was working up to a bite. "I'll leave. I'll come back in daylight." She took a step backwards towards the gap she'd come through. The gap wasn't there. She didn't panic. Panic was what she'd trained out of herself in a small house in Cardiff, with a man who'd liked her afraid. She breathed out through her nose and counted stones. Seven. She'd come in between the third and fourth. The fourth was still there. The third was still there. The space between them was oak now, thick and seamless, the bark knotted like it had grown that way for a hundred years. Behind her, something exhaled. Not a growl. Not a word. The soft, unhurried breath of someone who has been standing close enough to touch her for some time. She did not turn. "I'm Aurora Carter," she said. "I was invited." The breath came again, cooler this time, at the nape of her neck. A few strands of her hair lifted and settled. The pendant flared. The crimson light bled through the weave of her shirt and threw her shadow forward onto the grass, and the shadow had the shape she expected — her own, arms at her sides, hair loose. What stood behind the shadow had no shape at all. Just a taller darkness, a smudge in the moonlight where moonlight ought to have landed. "Malphora," something said. She'd never heard the word before. She knew it the way you know your own name being called in a crowded room. It slid into her chest and turned a key she hadn't known was there, and for one giddy, sickening moment she almost answered to it. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper. "My name," she said, "is Aurora." The presence behind her didn't move. Didn't breathe again. She had the keen, animal sense that it was considering her — the way a cat considers a bird through glass, without urgency, because the glass is only a formality. Somewhere in the trees, very far away, the blackbirds began again. Four of them, now. Five. A chorus building under the moon like an orchestra tuning, and each note was the same note, and the note was wrong. The pendant pulsed once, hard, against her sternum, and across the clearing — between the first and second stones, where no gap had been a moment before — a narrow path opened in the oaks. Moonlight poured through it in a pale, clean line. An invitation. Or a lure. She didn't know which, and the thing behind her was still waiting, and the birds would not stop singing. She took the first step towards the light.