Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GDNNC6Z2XA9VXCWC269XM

Rory had told herself she would be in and out before the city finished yawning itself to sleep. That was the plan, anyway. Find the grove, do what Eva had asked, go home. Two hours, tops. The pendant had started warming against her sternum at Richmond station and had not cooled since, a small living weight between her collarbones that pulsed in time with something she did not want to name. She walked with one hand flat to her chest, as if to hold the heat down. The park was closed. She had known it would be; Eva had known it, too, which was why the note had specified midnight and a bent panel in the deer fence off Petersham Road. Rory squeezed through, snagged her jacket, swore softly into the dark, and then the dark took her voice and folded it away into nothing. She stopped, one boot still half-raised. The sound of the road — the low thrum of South Circular traffic, the occasional sigh of a lorry on the A307 — had cut out. Not faded. Cut. As if someone had thumbed a dial. She turned and looked back the way she had come. The fence was there. The streetlamp on the far side of it was there, orange and tired. But it made no buzz, threw no insects against itself, and when she listened hard she heard only her own blood. "Okay," she said, because saying something was better than nothing. "Okay. It's fine." The pendant pulsed, warmer now, almost hot. She moved. The torch on her phone carved a narrow cone through bracken and long grass. The grove was meant to be marked by standing stones — old oaks grown into the shape of pillars, Eva had said, as if the trees remembered being something else. Rory walked for what felt like ten minutes before she saw the first of them, and by then her breath was hanging in front of her face in pale plumes, which was wrong, because it was the warm end of May and the air had been mild five minutes ago. The oak loomed out of the dark like a body turned sideways. Its bark had the slick, wet look of something recently peeled. She gave it a wide berth. The second stone came a few paces on, and the third, and between the third and the fourth she realized that the wildflowers at her feet were all in bloom at once — foxgloves beside snowdrops beside poppies beside things she could not name — and none of them should have been flowering together, and none of them were moving, though she could feel a small wind on her cheek. She stepped between the stones. Inside the grove, the temperature tipped again. Warmer now. Close. Like standing in a greenhouse that had been left shut through a summer afternoon. Moonlight lay on the grass in a perfect silver disc, too round, too even, as if it had been poured from a jug. There was no moon above to pour it. The sky through the canopy showed only black and a scatter of stars she did not recognize. "Right," Rory said to the silence, which was listening. "Right. Eva, I owe you a serious conversation." She crouched and set down her bag and began to unpack what Eva had told her to bring: the small iron nail, the twist of red thread, the bread wrapped in paper. She was meant to lay them at the centre of the grove and speak a single name and leave. That was all. Eva had been insistent. Don't look at anything twice. Don't answer if something answers. Don't run. Rory was threading the nail through the red cord when she heard the footstep. It came from behind her and to the left, a soft press of something living into the wet grass. She did not turn. The hairs along her forearms rose all at once, an animal response older than thought. The pendant against her sternum was burning now, not painful yet but insistent, a second heartbeat she had not asked for. Another step. Closer. Whatever made it was taking its time. She kept her hands moving. The nail, the thread. Slowly. Her breath was loud to her own ears, obscene in the quiet. She listened past it, and heard — she was almost sure she heard — the faint, dry click of something drawing breath through teeth. Don't look at anything twice, Eva had said. Rory let her eyes drift, just drift, to the edge of her vision. There was a shape between two of the oaks. Tall. Thinner than a person. It was not moving, but it had not been there a moment ago, and the angle of it was wrong in a way she could not articulate — as though it had been cut out of the dark and pasted in slightly off, its edges not quite meeting the world. She looked back at her hands. The shape did not step closer while she watched her hands. She understood, with a clarity that made her mouth dry, that it had been stepping closer only while she wasn't watching. "Malphora," she whispered, because that was the name Eva had given her, and her own voice sounded like a stranger's. She laid the nail and the thread and the bread on the silver grass. The grove inhaled. That was the only word for it — a long, slow drawing-in, as if the air itself had lungs. The wildflowers bent, every one of them, toward the centre where she knelt. The pendant flared white-hot against her skin and she gasped and pressed her palm over it, and in that half-second of closed eyes she felt breath on the back of her neck. Warm. Patient. Too close to be anything that should have been able to cross the distance. A voice, very soft, very near her ear, said her name. Not Rory. Not Aurora. The other one. The one she had not yet learned she owned. She did not turn. She did not answer. She stood, slowly, the way you stand in front of a dog that has not yet decided, and she walked — did not run, did not run — back between the standing stones, and with every step the grove exhaled behind her, long and slow and almost, almost, like laughter.