Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1HJXKK14DAYJW5TQWF82E2

The text Eva had sent was three words long: Richmond Park. Midnight. Rory had read it a dozen times on the bus out from the city, until the letters lost their meaning and became only shapes, the way a word does when you stare at it too long. Now, standing at the edge of the tree line with her phone dead in her pocket and the gates of the park long shut behind her, she wished she'd asked more questions. She'd asked one, at least. Why there? And Eva had answered, in that bright voice that never quite hid the thing underneath it: Because it's the only place he can't follow. He. They never said his name aloud anymore. Evan. Even now the syllable made something tighten in Rory's chest, a reflex she'd thought she'd trained out of herself in London. She pulled her jacket closer and stepped past the last of the maintained lawn into the older part of the park, where the grass grew long and the oaks stood like men who had stopped walking a thousand years ago. She found the standing stones almost by accident. They weren't stones, not really — they were oaks, but oaks gone wrong, their trunks twisted into pillars and arranged in a rough ring, bark grey and smooth as old bone in the moonlight. Between them the air seemed to thicken. She'd been here once before, with Eva, in daylight, and it had felt like stepping into a held breath. Now, at midnight, it felt like the breath was about to be let out. "Eva?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. No answer. Only the wind moving in the high branches, except — she stopped. The wind was moving in the branches, but it wasn't touching her face. The leaves above her hissed and rolled like surf, and down here the air was perfectly, glassily still. Rory told herself there were a hundred reasons for that. Wind shadow. The lay of the land. She wasn't a scientist; she didn't have to understand it. She stepped between two of the pale trunks and into the grove. The temperature changed first. Not colder — warmer, a soft summer warmth that had no business in a London October, and with it came the smell of flowers. She looked down and saw them: wildflowers, hundreds of them, blooming in the dark as though it were noon in June. Foxglove and meadowsweet and others she had no names for, their petals glowing faintly with their own light. It should have been beautiful. Some animal part of her brain read it as wrong, and the hair rose along her arms. "Eva, this isn't funny." Louder now. "I came. I'm here. Where are you?" The flowers swallowed her voice. That was the only way she could describe it — the words left her mouth and did not travel, did not echo, did not seem to reach even the nearest tree. It was like speaking into a pillow pressed against her face. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She turned fast. Nothing. Only the ring of pale trunks and the glowing meadow and the moon, too large and too low, hanging just above the treetops like it had come down to look at her. She breathed out slowly. A deer, maybe. The park was full of them. She'd seen the herds on the drive in, their eyes flashing in the headlights. But deer made noise. Deer rustled, snorted, crashed away through the bracken. Whatever had moved had done it in absolute silence, the way only the dead and the patient move. The pendant at her throat grew warm. She'd nearly forgotten she was wearing it — the deep red stone on its silver chain, the one that had arrived at the flat above Silas' bar in a plain envelope with no note, no sender, nothing but her name in a hand she didn't recognize. She wore it because it was beautiful and because some superstitious corner of her had decided it was lucky. Now it sat against her breastbone like a coal newly raked from a fire, pulsing — actually pulsing, she could feel it, a slow throb in time with nothing she knew, certainly not her own galloping heart. She closed her hand around it. The warmth bled up through her fingers. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay. I'm leaving." She turned to go back the way she'd come, and the grove was wrong. She'd entered between two trunks with a forked split in the left one, like a tuning fork. She was certain of it; she made a habit of being certain, of noticing exits, a habit Evan had carved into her without ever meaning to teach her anything useful. The forked trunk was gone. The ring of trees had closed seamlessly around her, a wall of pale pillars in every direction, and beyond them the long grass of Richmond Park had become forest — dense, black, breathing forest that went down and down into a dark no city should be able to hold. Behind her, something laughed. It was a soft sound, almost tender, and it came from very close. She spun. The grove was empty. The flowers glowed. The pendant burned. "Who's there?" Her voice shook now, and she hated it, hated that the old fear came back so easily, that her body remembered being small and cornered. "I know someone's there." A shape detached itself from the deepest shadow between two trunks. It was tall — too tall — and it did not so much walk as resolve, the darkness around it thinning until there was a figure standing where there had been only night. She couldn't make out a face. She didn't think she wanted to. It had the rough outline of a person and the wrongness of something wearing a person the way she wore her jacket. "Aurora," it said, and it said her full name, the one almost no one used, the name her mother gave her in a Cardiff hospital twenty-five years ago. "You came." "Where's Eva?" she managed. The shape tilted what might have been its head. The flowers near its feet curled shut, one by one, as though the dark of it touched them. "Eva," it repeated, and there was something like amusement in it, and something like hunger. "Is that who called you here? How clever of her. How careless of you." The pendant flared so hot she gasped. And in its sudden crimson light she saw, for one heartbeat, the thing's true shape — and she understood, with the cold clean certainty that had carried her out of every locked room of her life, that she was not going to talk her way out of this one. She ran.