Run: 2026-07-09-01KX40Q9ZNXARD3CNF5WH953ZZ

Aurora reached the oak boundary at eleven minutes past midnight. Her phone marked the time in clean white digits. 00:11. No signal. Forty-seven per cent battery. Behind her, Richmond Park rolled away beneath a skin of mist, its paths and grass silvered by moonlight. London stained the far clouds orange, but none of that light crossed the ring of standing oaks ahead. They rose from the earth like columns hacked from a single blackened tree, each trunk broad enough to hide three people shoulder to shoulder. No branches. No leaves. Just wet bark and blunt tops lost against the night. Rory slipped her phone into her coat pocket. “This had better be worth it.” Her voice carried past the oaks. It did not come back. The message had arrived at the Golden Empress during her final delivery run. No number, no sender, only an address that led nowhere and a photograph of the Heartstone Pendant lying against bare skin. Beneath the image, one line: MIDNIGHT. THE GROVE. COME ALONE IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO GAVE IT TO YOU. She had deleted the message. It had returned before she put the phone down. Now the pendant rested under her jumper, its silver chain cold against the back of her neck. The crimson stone itself gave off a low, steady heat. Not enough to burn. Enough to feel like a second pulse tucked between her ribs. Rory took out her phone and opened Eva’s contact. The call failed before the first ring. “Fine.” She held down the button to record a voice note. “Eva, I’m in Richmond Park. Before you start, yes, alone. No, I haven’t been kidnapped. If I don’t text within an hour, call Silas and tell him I went to the grove.” The waveform crawled across the screen as she spoke. Behind her voice, thin green spikes appeared at regular intervals. Rory stopped recording. She had heard nothing. She played it back. “Eva, I’m in Richmond Park. Before you start, yes, alone.” A click sounded behind the recording. Then another. A third. “No, I haven’t been kidnapped.” Click. “If I don’t text within an hour—” Click. She paused the message. The noise resembled someone tapping a fingernail against glass. Rory turned towards the open park. The mist lay undisturbed. A bench crouched beside the path, slick with damp. Beyond it stood a cluster of thorn bushes and the pale trunk of a birch. No one moved between them. A deer barked somewhere in the dark. The sharp cry broke the silence, and the muscles along her shoulders loosened. “Wildlife. Thrilling.” Something tapped the back of her phone. Rory dropped it. The handset struck the grass face-up. Its screen shone across empty ground. She stared at her own hand. Rainwater gleamed on her knuckles, though no rain fell. The crescent scar on her left wrist looked white beneath the moon. The phone emitted another tap. Not from the speaker. From beneath the glass. Rory crouched without taking her eyes off it. The screen still showed Eva’s paused voice note. She picked it up by the edges. A wet print marked the display. Five long fingers. Narrow palm. Too small to belong to her. “Right.” She wiped the mark on her coat. “This is the part where a sensible woman goes home.” The pendant warmed through her jumper. Its pulse came once, strong and deliberate. Rory looked between the path behind her and the standing oaks. She had worn the Heartstone for six weeks. It had heated only twice before, both times near places where the air seemed to fold in on itself: an abandoned stairwell beneath Charing Cross and a bricked arch behind a church in Southwark. She had learnt enough since then to recognise the warning. A Hel portal lay close. The text had brought her here because its sender knew that. She stepped between the oaks. Sound rushed back all at once. Water trickled nearby. Leaves whispered overhead. Insects chirred in the grass with the frantic rhythm of summer, though the night outside had carried the first bite of winter. Wildflowers crowded her boots—bluebells, poppies, foxgloves, white blooms she could not name—each open beneath the moon. Rory stopped. The clearing stretched perhaps thirty metres from end to end. The standing oaks formed a dark wall around it, though she could no longer see the gap through which she had entered. A narrow stream split the grass. At its centre stood a flat stone table furred with moss. No person waited beside it. “Midnight. Grove. Come alone.” Her words vanished under the insect chorus. “I managed all three. Your turn.” The chirring stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Rory held still. Water continued to run over stones. Leaves shifted high above, though the clearing contained no trees apart from the branchless oaks at its boundary. Something crossed behind her. She caught a smear of white at the edge of her sight and spun. Foxgloves swayed beside the nearest oak. Their bell-shaped flowers nodded one after another, tracing a path through the bed. Nothing stood among them. Rory pulled her phone out again. The screen read 00:11. The seconds did not move. She pressed the side button. Darkness swallowed the display. When she woke it again, 00:11 remained. “Expected that.” Her mouth had gone dry. She switched on the torch. The beam cut across the clearing and found the stone table. A pale object rested on its mossy surface. There had been nothing there a moment ago. Rory kept the light fixed on it and walked closer. Wet grass brushed her jeans. The scent of crushed mint rose around her boots, thick enough to sting her nose. The object resolved into an envelope. Cream paper. No seal. Her name written across the front in dark blue ink. AURORA CARTER. The handwriting belonged to her. Not similar. Not a good imitation. Hers. The capital A leaned too far to the right, and the crossbar on the final t ran through the e. Her father used to circle that habit in red on every essay draft she left at home. Rory stopped an arm’s length from the table. “No.” The stream gurgled behind her. She reached beneath her jumper and closed her fist around the Heartstone. Its heat bit into her palm. The faint crimson glow seeped between her fingers. The envelope looked dry despite the moss beneath it. Rory angled her torch around the table. No wires. No footprints in the mud near the stream. No depression in the grass apart from the trail she had made. A drop of water struck the stone. Then another. They fell from somewhere above the table, each one black in the torchlight. Rory raised the beam. There was no canopy overhead. The moon hung above her, broad and colourless. A third drop landed on the envelope. The paper absorbed it. Blue ink bled from the R in her surname, spreading through the fibres like a tiny branching vein. From the other side of the clearing came a cough. Rory wheeled round. The torch beam skated over flowers, grass, oaks. “Who’s there?” A cough answered from her left. It sounded muffled, as if someone had pressed a sleeve over their mouth. Rory backed against the stone table. Its edge dug into her thighs. “This meeting was your idea. Stop pissing about and show yourself.” Silence pressed down over the grove. Then came the soft scrape of a shoe behind the nearest standing oak. A black toe appeared beyond the trunk. Rory raised the phone, centring the beam on it. The shoe remained still. Plain leather, rounded at the front, damp soil caught in its seams. “Come out.” The shoe slid back behind the oak. Rory crossed the space in six strides, Heartstone clenched in one hand, phone in the other. She approached from the side rather than head-on, widening the angle until the beam reached behind the trunk. Empty flowers. She stopped two metres away. The oak’s bark bore fresh scratches. Four parallel lines, shoulder height. Pale wood showed beneath the cuts. Sap gathered in each groove, dark and glossy. From the far side of the trunk came a shallow breath. Rory shifted left. The breath shifted right. She lunged round the oak. Nothing. Her torch illuminated the clearing beyond. The stone table waited at its centre, the envelope bright against the moss. A woman stood on the other side of it. Rory’s beam struck straight black hair, a grey coat and a pale left hand resting on the stone. The woman faced away. She matched Rory’s height and build, down to the scuffed heels of her boots. Rory’s chest locked. “Turn round.” The woman lifted her right hand. She held a phone. Its torch shone across the grass towards Rory. “Put it down.” The woman bent her head. Black hair slid across the collar of her coat. Her left sleeve pulled back, revealing a crescent-shaped scar on her wrist. The Heartstone gave a violent throb in Rory’s fist. The woman opened the envelope. Paper crackled across the clearing, loud as a snapped bone. “Don’t.” The woman removed a folded sheet. Rory advanced one step. “I told you to put it down.” The other woman began to read. At first, no sound came from her. Then Rory heard a whisper threaded beneath the stream’s murmur. The voice carried the soft Cardiff edges she had spent years sanding from her own speech. “Eva, I’m in Richmond Park.” Rory stopped. The woman’s shoulders rose with a breath. “Before you start, yes, alone.” The words came in perfect time with the recording Rory had made outside the grove. “No, I haven’t been kidnapped.” A tapping noise travelled around the ring of oaks. One trunk. Then the next. Click. Click. Click. Rory’s phone vibrated. Eva’s paused voice note had started playing in her pocket. “If I don’t text within an hour, call Silas and tell him I went to the grove.” The recording ended. Across the table, the woman lowered the page. Rory held the torch steady despite the tremor in her wrist. “Turn around.” The woman obeyed. Her face remained in shadow, though the moon shone full upon it. Where her features should have caught the light, darkness clung like wet cloth. Only her eyes showed. Bright blue. Rory’s eyes. The woman raised one finger to her lips. From behind every standing oak, Rory heard herself whisper: “Don’t let it hear you.”