Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSK752CPMT891MFSK9RDHC9

The standing stones rose from the dark like teeth, and Rory passed between them with her phone torch cutting a thin blue line through the grass. Her benefactor's note had been specific. Richmond Park, after the gates closed, the oaks that didn't belong. She'd climbed the fence near Pen Ponds an hour ago, scraped her palm on the railing, and walked north until the manicured grass gave way to something older. The pendant at her throat had warmed the closer she'd come. Now it sat against her sternum like a coal someone had pressed there and forgotten. "Right," she breathed. "I'm here. Whatever you wanted me to see, here I am." The grove answered with silence. Not the silence of an empty park—she knew that sound, the distant hum of the city, planes stacking up for Heathrow, the rustle of foxes in the bracken. This was a thicker thing. The kind that pressed against the ears. Wildflowers crowded her ankles. Foxgloves, she thought, and something pale and bell-shaped she couldn't name, all of them open and blooming though it was past midnight in October. Her torch caught the colours and they looked wrong under the blue light, too saturated, like a photograph someone had pushed too far. She crouched and touched a petal. Warm. Faintly damp. Real. The pendant pulsed. Rory straightened. She turned a slow circle, sweeping the torch across the tree line, and the beam swallowed itself in the gaps between trunks. The dark out there had weight. She found she didn't want to point the light too long at any one spot. "Hello?" Her own voice came back to her flat, like she'd spoken into a cupboard. She checked her phone. The signal bars were gone. The clock read 12:11, the same as when she'd stepped through the stones, and she watched it for a full ten seconds, waiting for the colon to blink, for the 11 to become 12. It didn't. "Course it doesn't." She laughed, and the laugh sounded like it belonged to someone else. "Time moves funny. Course it bloody does." A sound, then. Small. Behind her, off to the left, near the stones she'd come through. A footstep in the grass. She spun. The torch found nothing—just the dark trunks of the boundary oaks, the wildflowers nodding though there was no wind to nod them. She held still and listened so hard her ears began to ring. Nothing. "Eva, if this is you taking the piss—" It wasn't Eva. She knew it wasn't. Eva was three miles away and had no idea Rory had climbed a fence to stand in a haunted meadow because a stranger had left a note under her door. Saying her friend's name out loud was just a way of putting something familiar between herself and the quiet. She started toward the centre of the grove, because the note had said *the heart of it,* and because standing still felt worse than moving. The pendant burned hotter with each step. Good. That meant she was going the right way. She fixed on that thought and held it the way you'd hold a handrail in the dark. The footstep came again. This time it didn't stop. One, two, three—a measured pace, matching hers, off to her right now, just beyond the reach of the torch. She stopped. The footsteps stopped. She took one step. One step answered, a half-second late, like an echo that had to think about it first. "All right." She kept her voice level, the way she'd learned to keep it level with Evan when the air in the flat had gone tight and dangerous. Calm was a tool. Calm was sometimes the only tool. "You want me to know you're there. Fine. I know. What do you want?" The flowers moved. A long, slow ripple ran through them, starting at the tree line and rolling toward her, the way grass bends before a thing that walks through it. Except nothing walked through it. The stalks bowed and rose, bowed and rose, and the wave came on, and Rory's body decided before her mind did—she stepped back, and back, and her heel caught a root and she went down hard on one knee. The ripple stopped a metre from her boots. She didn't breathe. She watched the flowers stand, every one of them, pale faces turned toward her in the torchlight. Waiting. Then, at the edge of her vision, something pale slid between two trees. She didn't look at it directly. She'd learned that too, somewhere—that the things at the corner of your eye dissolve the moment you turn. But she felt it. Tall. Thin. Moving with a smoothness that had nothing to do with walking, as though the dark had grown a shape and the shape had grown an interest in her. "I'm not afraid of you," she said, and the lie tasted like copper. The pendant flared so hot she gasped and clutched it through her shirt. And in the half-instant her eyes squeezed shut, the silence broke. A voice. Right at her ear. Close enough that she should have felt breath, and felt none, which was worse. *"Malphora."* The name wasn't hers. She'd never heard it. And yet some buried part of her flinched the way you flinch at your own name shouted across a crowded room—a deep, cellular recognition that bypassed thought entirely. Her stomach dropped through the warm ground. She scrambled up. The torch beam jittered across the trees, the flowers, the stones, finding nothing, always nothing, and the nothing was full now, crowded, the air gone thick as the inside of a throat. "That's not my name," she said. Her voice cracked on it. Soft laughter moved around her in a slow circle. Not cruel. Patient. The laughter of something that had all the time that didn't exist in this place, and knew she had none of it. The flowers began, one by one, to turn their faces away from her—and toward the stones, as if to watch her only exit.