Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSJJ3M0NK07PDYPD6A0DV0K

The directions Eva left were scrawled on the back of a receipt, smudged where Rory's thumb had worried at the ink the whole train ride out. Richmond Park, past the Isabella Plantation, where the path forgot itself among the oaks. Look for the standing stones. Wait for the moon to clear the tallest one. She found them at half eleven, three weathered trunks of oak gone grey and hard as iron, arranged in a rough triangle that no forester had planted. The bark had split into faces that weren't faces. Rory told herself that. Just knots and the way the torchlight slid across them. "All right," she breathed. "I'm here. Now what." The grove answered with silence. Not the ordinary silence of a park after dark — that came layered with distant traffic, a fox somewhere, the hum the city pressed against everything like a palm against glass. This silence had edges. It sat inside the ring of stones the way water sits in a held cup, and the moment Rory stepped between two of the oaks, the noise of London simply stopped. She turned. Behind her the path was still there, pale under the moon, and she could see the dark hedge of the plantation. But she couldn't hear it. The wind moved the leaves and made no sound at all. The pendant lay warm against her sternum. She'd nearly forgotten it. The crimson stone had warmed gradually, the way a mug cooled in reverse, and now it pulsed — slow, steady, a second heartbeat keeping time half a measure behind her own. She drew it out from under her collar and the faint inner glow lit the underside of her chin red. "You're supposed to do that near a—" She stopped. Didn't finish the word. Saying it felt like calling something by name. Wildflowers crowded her boots. Foxgloves, primrose, things that shouldn't share a season, all of them open and bright as though it were noon in June and not a freezing midnight in March. She crouched, touched a petal. It was warm too. Warm the way skin is warm. She stood up fast. "Eva." Her voice came out thin. The grove ate the edges off it. "Eva, if this is a joke, I'll throttle you." The torch flickered. Fresh batteries that afternoon — she'd checked, because she always checked — and the beam stuttered down to a brown filament glow and surged back. In the half-second of dimness she saw movement at the treeline. Low. Quick. Gone when the light returned. Rabbit, she thought. Park's full of them. The pendant beat faster. She made herself breathe. In for four, out for four, the way the counsellor had taught her after Evan, after the months she'd spent flinching at the sound of a key in a lock. Cool head. She had a cool head; people said so. Rory who never panicked, Rory who talked her way out of anything. "Right," she said to the empty clearing. "Benefactor. Whoever you are. I came. So show yourself, or I'm walking back to the train." The flowers turned. Not in a breeze. There was no breeze. Every blossom in the ring of stones pivoted at once, the way a field of sunflowers tracks the day, and they all faced her. Hundreds of small open mouths. Rory took a step back and her heel met something that hadn't been there. She spun. One of the oaks stood close behind her — close enough to touch — and she'd have sworn on her father's life it had been three metres off when she walked in. The knot-faces in its bark were deeper now. One had an open hollow where a mouth would go, and from inside that hollow came a sound she felt in her teeth before she heard it. A long, wet exhalation. Patient. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay. Not a joke." She turned for the path. The pale ribbon of it was still there, but further. The hedge had receded, or the grove had grown, and between her and the gap in the stones the grass had thickened into knee-high meadow that she did not remember crossing. Something moved through it. She caught it sidelong — a parting of the grass, a low arrow of motion that came toward her and stopped the instant she looked dead at it. The blades stood up again, innocent. She swung the torch in a slow arc. Empty. Empty. Empty. And then, at the far edge of the beam, two points of light that were not flowers, set close together at a height that suggested a head, low to the ground, watching her over the meadow. They blinked. Rory's whole body went to ice. Not the panic she'd braced for — something older, something animal, the part of her that knew, knew, she was prey and the dark was full of teeth. "I'm not afraid of you," she said, and the lie tasted of copper. The eyes didn't move. But the exhalation came again from the oak at her back, and now another joined it from her left, and a third from somewhere above, in the branches, where the leaves hung dead still and the moon poured down white and wrong. Three breaths. Then a fourth. Then she lost count, because the whole grove had begun to breathe, the slow tidal heave of something vast that had been holding very still while she walked into the middle of it and announced herself. The pendant burned. She closed her fist around it and the heat bit her palm, and in the glow leaking through her fingers she saw, finally, all of them. They stood among the stones where seconds before there'd been nothing. Tall, thin shapes the colour of birch bark and bone, faces smooth as river stones with those paired lights set where eyes should be, and they did not move, did not breathe like the trees breathed, simply stood and faced her with the absolute attention of things that had waited a long time and were no longer waiting. The nearest was close enough to touch. It tilted its head. "You came," it said, in Eva's voice. "We hoped you would."