Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2KTHS62CZXTWJWRM87439

The park gates had closed at dusk, so Rory took the fence by Pembroke Lodge, one boot on the crossbar, the insulated delivery bag banging against her hip. The bag still held the ghost of black bean sauce. She had clocked off from the Golden Empress forty minutes ago and never made it home. Eva's text glowed on her phone. *Grove. Now. Please don't tell anyone. Bring the stone.* Below it sat a pin, dropped in the middle of a green blank on the map. Rory pushed through bracken that soaked her jeans to the knee. The path gave out after a hundred yards, and she walked on by torchlight, the beam pale and thin against the black. She counted her steps to keep her head clear. Sixty. Seventy. Somewhere past ninety, she noticed the count had a second voice. Each footfall landed, and a half-beat later another landed with it, a little to the left. She stopped. The second step stopped a moment after. "Funny," she said. Her voice came out flat and small in the dark. She waited. Nothing shifted. A deer, she told herself, or a fox, or a bit of park doing park things. She walked on and did not count again. The oaks thickened. They stood close enough that their branches knotted overhead and swallowed the sky, and the torch beam slid off the bark without finding any depth in it. No owls. No traffic hum from the Kingston road, which she had heard all the way from the fence. The quiet had a texture, like a held breath. She reached for the pendant through her jacket. The Heartstone lay against her sternum, and it was warm. Not body-warm. Warmer, like a mug someone had just set down. "Not now," she muttered, and pulled her collar over it. The standing stones rose out of the dark without warning. Five of them, black oak, each thicker than a man and tall as a bus shelter. They formed an arch she could have walked around, and the grass on either side looked ordinary, damp and grey. Beyond the arch, colour bled through. Poppies. Foxgloves. Something blue and star-shaped. In November. Rory's thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and rubbed it, an old habit. "Eva?" The name went out and did not come back. No echo, no rustle, nothing. She lifted the phone. Eleven fifty-two. She stepped through the stones and glanced at it again. Eleven forty-one. "No," she said. "Absolutely not." She shook the phone as if the numbers might rattle loose. They held. She thumbed Eva's contact and pressed the phone to her ear. No ring. A soft, wet click, like a tongue parting from a palate, and then Eva's voicemail, bright and stupid with cheer. *Hiya, it's Eva, leave it and I'll get back to you—* "It's me," Rory said. "I'm at the stones. I'm in the grove. Where the hell are you? If this is a wind-up, I swear on my mother's teapot I will drown you in the Thames." She swallowed. "Ring me back." She lowered the phone. The flowers moved. Not in a breeze. The air hung dead. The foxgloves leaned in one direction, all together, the way a crowd turns its heads toward a sound, and then they straightened again. Rory moved her torch across the clearing in a slow arc. Flowers and grass, and at the far edge a fallen trunk furred with moss. Nothing else. She kept the beam on the trunk for a count of five. Then something white slid across the edge of her vision, low and quick, left to right, between two trees. She snapped the torch around. Bare bark. A patch of trampled bluebells. "Right," she said. "Right, yeah." Her pulse thudded in her ears, loud enough that she wanted to hold it still. She bent and picked up a fallen branch as thick as her wrist. It felt like nothing. It felt like holding a rolled newspaper against a lion. She held on to it anyway. The pendant pulsed against her chest. Once. Twice. A slow, patient beat, not hers. "You're supposed to do that near a portal," she told it. "That's the whole trick, isn't it? So where is it?" The answer came as a sound. It began behind her and to the right, soft as a page turning. Then it repeated, closer. Wet grass parting. Something stepped, paused, stepped again. The rhythm was almost a person's, but it carried the wrong weight, too light on every second beat, as though whatever walked had learned the pattern from a description. Rory did not turn. She stood with the branch cocked at her shoulder and looked at the stones ahead, at the arch she had come through. The gap between them was black now. Fully black. She could not see the path. "Ror?" Eva's voice. It floated from the far side of the fallen trunk, thin and shaky, and every hair on Rory's arms rose. She wanted to run to it. She had wanted that since the text. "Eva?" She took one step. "Where are you? Are you hurt?" "Over here." A pause. "Aurora." Rory stopped with her weight on her front foot. Eva had never once called her Aurora. Not at school, not at the wedding, not at the hospital in Cardiff with Rory's hand in a bandage and both of them eleven and crying. It was Ror, or Rory, or, when Eva wanted something, *Roro*. "Say that again," Rory said. "Aurora." The voice warmed, smoothed, slipped its stumbles like a coat. "Come and see." "Where's the pizza place we went on your birthday?" Silence. The clearing listened. "Go on," Rory said. "Easy one. Where'd we go?" The trunk sat in the torchlight like a corpse, moss-shaggy, unmoving. Behind it, the dark bulged, just slightly, as if something crouched there and had leaned forward to hear better. "Laila," said the voice. Her name. Not the one she gave baristas or landlords. The other one, the one she had used for six months in Cardiff when Evan's messages would not stop, the one nobody in London had ever heard. Her mouth went dry as chalk. "Laila, come and see." "Piss off," Rory whispered. She backed away. Her heel found a soft spot, and something crunched under it. She looked down. A ring of flowers lay pressed flat in the grass, a wide circle, as if something large had knelt there and stayed a long time. The stems were not broken. They were laid down in the same direction, neat as combed hair, and at the centre of the ring the grass had turned silver with frost. The pendant burned against her skin, hot enough now to sting. The phone buzzed in her fist. She looked at it on reflex. One new message, from Eva. *Don't answer it. Whatever it says. Don't say your name.* The time on the screen read eleven fifty-two. Then eleven forty-one. Then a string of numbers that meant nothing at all. Behind her, so close that she felt cold breath on the nape of her neck and smelled crushed stems and old rain, Eva's voice said, very gently: "Rory." She gripped the branch until the bark bit her palm and kept her eyes on the black arch of the stones.