Run: 2026-09-23-01M36P4Q8V1N94VN8YJ01WJSPP

The gate stood open when Rory reached Richmond Park. She stopped beneath the iron arch, one hand wrapped around the strap of her delivery bag. No car waited on the road behind her. No cyclist cut through the mist. The park had gone quiet enough that she could hear the chain on the gate shifting against its post. She looked at her phone. 11:47 p.m. The message from Eva sat on the screen. If you still have the pendant, take it to the old stones. Alone. Please. Rory had called twice. Eva hadn’t picked up. She’d sent the message an hour ago, then switched off her phone. “You could’ve picked somewhere with a taxi rank,” Rory murmured. The phone’s light showed a crescent of pale skin at her left wrist, the scar she’d earned as a child. She rubbed it once with her thumb, then stepped through the gate. She had the pendant in her coat pocket. Its silver chain had knotted around itself on the journey, and she’d spent most of the walk untangling it. Now the little crimson stone rested against her palm, warm enough to feel alive. The park path sloped between trees. Their branches knitted overhead, blotting out the city glow. Rory heard a fox bark somewhere to her right. Then the same bark came from behind her. She turned. The path lay empty. A line of lamps had marked her route to the gate, but the nearest one had gone dark. Beyond it, the shadows had swallowed the gravel. “Fox,” she said, as if naming it settled the matter. She kept walking. Eva had once told her about a clearing in Richmond Park that didn’t belong to the park. A Fae-touched pocket, she’d called it, with oak stones at the edge and flowers blooming in winter. Rory had laughed then. Eva hadn’t. That had been before Evan, before Cardiff, before Rory packed one suitcase and fled to London with a bruised cheek and no plan beyond staying gone. Now Eva had sent her to the clearing with no explanation. The path forked. Rory checked her phone again. No signal. The map showed her as a blue dot in the middle of green, rotating as she turned. She chose the left path. A twig snapped behind her. Rory stopped. The sound had come from close by, too crisp to be a branch breaking under its own weight. She faced the trees. “Eva?” Only the wind answered, stirring the leaves high overhead. The ground-level branches stayed still. Rory moved on, faster now. She watched the path and the spaces between trunks, refusing to let her gaze linger long enough for the dark to put a shape in them. Once, at the edge of her vision, something pale slipped behind an oak. When she looked straight at it, there was only bark. A few minutes later, she passed the same split tree for the second time. She knew because a strip of red tape wound around its trunk. She’d noticed it on the way in, thought it might mark a trail. Now the tape hung in frayed strands, damp and blackened at the ends. Rory checked her phone. Still no signal. The time had changed to 11:42. She stared at the display, tapped it twice, then slid it into her pocket. The pendant warmed against her fingers. Its crimson surface caught a faint inner glow, no brighter than a coal buried in ash. “Right,” Rory whispered. “That’s new.” The path narrowed. Trees gave way to scrub and brambles, then fell back all at once. The grove opened around her. Wildflowers crowded the clearing, white and yellow blossoms scattered through the grass. They nodded in a wind Rory couldn’t feel. At its boundary stood a ring of ancient oak stones, each one black with age, roots twisting over their bases like knotted fingers. The place looked the way Eva had described it. That should have brought relief. Instead, Rory felt the silence press against her ears. She set her delivery bag beside a stone and drew the pendant from her pocket. The chain slipped through her fingers. The crimson gem pulsed once, soft and warm. The stones answered. Not with light. With a low vibration that travelled through the ground and into Rory’s soles. One note, held beneath hearing. She felt it in her teeth. She backed away from the ring. “Eva, I’m here. You can stop being dramatic now.” Her voice crossed the clearing and came back thinner, from the trees behind her. I’m here. Rory’s hand closed around the pendant. “That wasn’t funny.” She waited. Her breath fogged in the cold. The flowers kept nodding. A second sound rose from the dark: footsteps crossing grass. Rory turned towards them. Nothing moved between the stones. She swept her gaze along the grove’s edge, searching for a face, a sleeve, any human interruption in the dark. The steps continued. They circled her. Slow, measured, never quite close enough to see. Grass bent in a wide arc around the stones. One patch flattened, then another. Rory’s shoulders tightened. She gripped the pendant until the chain cut into her palm. “Show yourself.” The circling stopped. In the far side of the grove, a woman stood between two stones. Rory’s breath caught. The figure had long hair and a pale coat. She was too far away to make out a face, but Rory knew the angle of her head, the slight drop of one shoulder. “Eva?” The woman lifted a hand. Rory took one step forward. Then the figure tilted its head the wrong way. Not far. Just enough to make the neck look broken. Rory stopped. The woman’s hand remained raised. The fingers opened one by one. The pendant went hot. Rory hissed and dropped it. The gem struck the ground without a sound. Its silver chain coiled in the grass. A dull red glow spread across the stones, catching the rough edges of their carved surfaces. The figure vanished. Rory crouched and snatched the pendant from the ground. It had cooled. Her fingers shook against the chain, so she wound it around her fist. “Not Eva,” she said. A voice came from behind her, close to her ear. “Rory.” She spun, swinging the delivery bag by its strap. It hit empty air and thumped against a stone. No one stood there. The voice had sounded like Eva. Not a recording, not an imitation. The familiar scrape at the end of her name, the breath she always wasted before speaking. Rory’s skin tightened along her arms. “Eva, if you’re in there, get out here.” “Rory.” This time, the voice came from the trees. From the path she’d used to enter the grove. She turned towards it, keeping the stones at her back. “I’m not playing.” A small laugh answered. It came from above her. Rory looked up. A black shape clung to the crooked branch of an oak, folded tight around it. Her eyes tried to make sense of the shape. Head, shoulders, knees tucked to chest. It shifted, and the branch groaned. Then it dropped. Rory flinched. The branch bounced empty in the dark. She ran for the path. The clearing stretched. The trees at its edge seemed to retreat with each stride, their trunks slipping sideways behind one another. Her bag thumped against her hip. The pendant knocked against her knuckles. The oak stones stood ahead, blocking the way out. Rory veered towards a gap between two of them. She had passed through that gap on the way in. Now a wall of roots filled it, thick as ropes, fused together between the stones. She struck them with her shoulder. They gave nothing. Behind her, footsteps crossed the grass again. She looked back. The pale-coated figure stood at the centre of the grove. Its face remained turned away. One arm hung long at its side, the hand nearly brushing the ground. Rory felt for her phone, though she knew it had no signal. The screen lit beneath her fingers. The time read 11:47. The same minute as when she’d entered the park. A sound came from the pendant. A slow, faint pulse against her palm. The figure took one step towards her. Rory looked at the nearest stone. Its surface carried shallow cuts, lines worn almost smooth. Beneath them, the roots bent around the base, leaving a strip of bare earth. She dropped to one knee and dug her fingers into the soil. The ground was soft and warm. She scraped until her nails struck something hard beneath the roots: a flat stone, no bigger than her hand. She pulled. It shifted, then came free. The vibration in the clearing stopped. The figure froze. Rory shoved the pendant against the exposed earth. Its glow flared through the grass, a deep red seam in the dark. The pale-coated figure turned its head. Rory saw no face. Only a hollow where one should have been, smooth and dark as a closed eye. The roots between the standing stones loosened. They sank into the soil, uncoiling with a wet rustle. Rory shoved through the gap and reached the path. She didn’t look back. The grove’s silence broke behind her with a sound like a hundred people drawing breath at once. She ran until the trees thinned. At the fork, she stopped and bent over, one hand braced on her knee. Her lungs burned. Her palm had a narrow red line where the chain had cut it. The phone in her pocket vibrated. Rory pulled it out. A message from Eva filled the screen. Don’t go to the grove. I’m sorry. Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you. The timestamp read 11:47 p.m. She looked at the dark path behind her, then at the message. A new line appeared. I’m at the stones. Where are you? From somewhere between the trees, Eva called her name.