Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ91SKSD3K3T7NNZ8PYJRQZ

The stone markers rose out of the dark like broken teeth. Rory stopped at the boundary of the grove and checked her phone: 11:47 PM. The screen's light was the only clean thing in the world right now, everything else swallowed by the kind of dark that Richmond Park did better than anywhere else in London. No streetlamps reached this far in. The trees closed ranks against the sky, and the sky itself was a low, smeared grey, whatever moon existed buried somewhere behind it. She'd been here twice before in daylight. It had felt strange then — the wildflowers that had no business blooming in November, the way sound seemed to hush itself at the standing oaks, the persistent sense that the air here was slightly thicker, slightly warmer than it had any right to be. Isolde had called it breathing. Rory had called it unsettling and left it at that. Now, at nearly midnight, it was something else entirely. She tucked her phone into her jacket pocket and stepped between the oaks. The temperature shifted immediately. Not warmer, as she'd expected from her daytime visits — colder, actually, by a degree or two, which was wrong. The wildflowers were still there, pale smudges in the darkness, bluebells and something white she couldn't name, their colours leached away but their shapes still stubbornly present. She crouched briefly and touched a petal. It was soft. Real. She stood back up. The pendant shifted against her sternum. She pressed two fingers to it through her shirt — that thumbnail-sized piece of deep crimson stone, still on its silver chain, still warm the way it always was when it was telling her something. But this wasn't the pulsing warmth she'd felt near the Hel portal two weeks ago. This was something steadier. Watchful. She had come here for a reason. That was what she kept telling herself as she moved deeper into the clearing. She had a reason. Isolde had sent word — well, sent a note, actually, delivered by an actual literal sparrow that had tapped on her kitchen window at half eight with a small cylinder banded to its leg, which was a thing that had apparently become normal — telling her to come to the grove before midnight and to bring the pendant. There was something Isolde needed to show her. Something that couldn't wait. The note had not mentioned coming alone. In retrospect, that was the detail she should have asked about. The clearing was perhaps forty feet across, and she could see the whole of it now that her eyes had adjusted. Long grass in the centre, the wildflowers scattered through it. The ring of oaks at the perimeter. Nothing else. No Isolde. Rory checked her phone again. 11:52. She'd made good time from the car park. She was a few minutes early. She told herself that, and the telling helped, and then something moved in the trees on the far side of the clearing. She went still. It wasn't much. A branch swaying where there was no wind. She watched the spot and the branch was motionless now, the surrounding trees motionless, the whole grove held in a complete and total quiet that she only noticed because it had become so abrupt. She had been hearing things without registering them — the low ambient chorus of the park at night, distant traffic, the occasional bird — and now all of it was gone. Not faded. Gone. Like someone lifting a needle from a record. She became aware of her own breathing. She turned slowly, doing a full survey of the tree line. Oaks, oaks, oaks. Darkness between them. The long grass at her feet was perfectly still. Her left wrist itched. It always did when she was nervous — some phantom memory living in the crescent scar, a souvenir from a garden wall she'd fallen off at age seven. She rubbed it absently against her jacket seam and kept watching the trees. Nothing moved. That was the thing. Nothing moved, and the silence continued, and she couldn't shake the feeling that both of those facts were a performance. That the stillness was deliberate. That something was being very careful. She pulled out her phone and typed quickly. Running a few minutes behind — already at the grove, where are you? She sent it to Isolde's number and watched the screen. No delivered notification. She switched to signal bars. One. She took three steps to the left and watched it drop to nothing. Right. She put the phone away. Eleven fifty-four, she estimated. Six minutes. She would wait six minutes and then she was going back to the car and she was going to sit in the car with the doors locked and she was going to call Eva and tell her everything, every last impossible strange detail of the last month of her life, and if Eva thought she'd lost her mind then at least she'd have said it out loud to another human person. A sound. Low. Rhythmic. She had to hold her own breath to be sure of it. It was coming from the grass somewhere to her left, from the centre of the clearing, and it took her a long moment to understand what she was hearing. Footsteps. Not loud. Not fast. The careful, deliberate press of weight onto soft ground, the whisper of grass blades against something solid. Moving in a slow arc. Circling. Rory turned toward the sound and saw nothing. The clearing was empty. The grass was still. But the sound continued — she could track it now, triangulating by ear — moving from her left to somewhere behind her, slow and unhurried, the way a thing moves when it isn't trying to reach you, when reaching you isn't the point. The point was something else. The point was to be known. The pendant flared. Not pulsed. Flared — a sudden bloom of heat against her sternum that vanished as quickly as it came, leaving behind a residual warmth like a palm pressed flat to skin. She grabbed it through her shirt without thinking. "Isolde." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "If that's you, this isn't funny." The footsteps stopped. In the silence that followed, Rory heard something else — or rather, she heard the absence of something. She'd been breathing through her nose, quietly, and she'd been smelling the grove the way she always did: rich soil, the faint sweetness of the wildflowers, the particular ancient greenness of old oaks. That smell was gone. What replaced it was nothing. A blank. An olfactory void, as if the air had been emptied of everything it was supposed to carry. The back of her neck went cold. Don't run. She knew enough by now to know that. Movement invited pursuit, and pursuit in a Fae-touched space followed rules she hadn't finished learning. She kept her feet planted and made herself look, slowly and systematically, at every part of the clearing she could see. Still nothing. Still empty. But the grass to her right had a depression in it that she was almost certain hadn't been there sixty seconds ago. A shallow indent, roughly the size and shape of a large footprint. Another one beside it, half-formed, as though whatever had made it was midway between the act of stepping and the act of simply existing. The pendant pulsed again. Steady, this time. Slow as a heartbeat. Slow as a warning. She stood in the cold empty silence of the grove and waited, and the night watched her back, and nothing happened, and the nothing was worse than anything she could name. She had come here for a reason, she reminded herself. The problem was that she was no longer sure the reason had been hers.