Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ93AQAZ3RA00AQGJJ112RE

The standing stones were wrong. Rory had been to the grove a dozen times now, enough to know the particular way the ancient oaks arranged themselves at the boundary — the slight lean of the westernmost trunk, the moss that clung to the north-facing stone in a shape that, if you were tired or imaginative, resembled a sleeping face. She knew the way the air changed at the threshold, that subtle pressure shift like stepping into a room where someone had just stopped talking. She knew all of it. She'd catalogued it the way she catalogued everything that made her uneasy: methodically, thoroughly, until understanding blunted the edge of fear. But standing at the tree line with Richmond Park dark and empty behind her, she knew the grove was wrong tonight. She couldn't have said precisely how. The oaks stood where they always stood. The clearing beyond them was full of wildflowers, pale and luminous in the October dark — moonflowers and something white she'd never learned the name of, blooming obliviously as they always did regardless of season. The air had done its familiar pressure-shift thing when she crossed the boundary. Everything was exactly as it should be. Everything was exactly as it should be, and her hindbrain was screaming. She pressed two fingers against her sternum, feeling for the Heartstone through the thin fabric of her jacket. It was there. Warm — warmer than it should have been from body heat alone, but not the pulse-and-flare she'd come to associate with something genuinely wrong. Not a portal. Just warmth. She let out a slow breath and stepped fully into the grove. The wildflowers rustled around her ankles. There was no wind. Rory went still. She waited. The flowers settled. Somewhere far outside the grove, a fox called — that sharp, almost human shriek that still made her flinch no matter how many times she heard it. The sound died, and the silence that followed was very large. She'd come because Isolde had sent word. Or something that wore Isolde's handwriting had sent word — a note slipped under the flat door, the familiar looping script asking her to come to the grove tonight, that there was something Rory needed to see. Something about the pendant's origin. Something Isolde claimed she'd finally found. Rory had almost not come. She started across the clearing, keeping her footfalls soft out of old habit, the habit of a person who had learned that quiet was usually safer. The heart of the grove was marked by a flat stone — a natural thing, she'd been assured, nothing placed — and she made for it now, using it as an anchor point in the dark. She was halfway across when she heard the sound. It was low. Lower than low, really — less a sound she heard than a sound she felt, a subsonic tremor that moved up through the soles of her boots and settled somewhere behind her back teeth. It lasted perhaps three seconds and then stopped. Rory stopped with it. She turned a slow circle, scanning the tree line. The grove's canopy was dense enough to block most of the ambient glow from the distant city, and what light reached her came from a partial moon and the flowers themselves — that faint, sourceless luminescence that she'd stopped trying to explain. Shadows pooled between the oaks. Deep shadows. The kind that could hold anything. Nothing moved. She turned back toward the flat stone and kept walking. The second sound was different. Higher. It might have been wind — would have been wind, if there had been any wind — a long, thin note that rose and then bent, like something trying to approximate a melody it had only heard once and only partially remembered. It came from her left, from the direction of the oldest oak, the one with the hollow in its base. Rory did not look at the hollow. This was a decision she made consciously, deliberately, in the span of about half a second: if there was something in the hollow, looking at it would accomplish nothing except confirming that there was something in the hollow. She already knew there was something in the hollow. The Heartstone had shifted from warm to hot against her sternum, and that was confirmation enough. She reached the flat stone and turned so her back was to it. The hollow was at her ten o'clock. She kept her eyes at twelve, at the far edge of the tree line, and she watched. For a while, nothing. The flower-light. The motionless trees. A silence so complete it had texture. Then, at the very periphery of her vision, something moved. It was not a large movement. It was not dramatic. A shadow separated slightly from the shadow of the hollow's edge — an inch, maybe two — and then was still again. As if something had leaned forward to look at her and then thought better of it. Her mouth had gone very dry. "Isolde," she said. Her voice came out level. She was unreasonably proud of this. Nothing answered. "I know you left that note," she said. "I'd like to talk about what you found." The shadow at the hollow shifted again. Still subtle. Still that unbearable almost-movement, the thing that was somehow worse than a charge or a lunge would have been — the patience of it. The suggestion of something that had time. That had all the time it could ever need. The Heartstone pulsed once, sharply, and she felt it like a small fist against her ribs. No portal, she thought. So what, then? She became aware, with the particular cold clarity that came to her when fear burned itself down to something usable, that she could not see the boundary stones anymore. She could see the oaks, or shapes that were oak-shaped, but the familiar lean of the westernmost trunk was gone. The moss face on the northern stone was gone. The boundary she'd crossed to enter the grove was simply — absent. Replaced by undifferentiated dark. The grove was larger than it had been. Or she was somewhere in it that she hadn't been before. She pressed her thumbnail into the crescent scar on her left wrist, an old grounding habit, feeling the familiar ridge of it. Real. She was real. She was here. The something in the hollow breathed out — long and slow, a sound like silk pulled across stone — and Rory made herself stand very still and think.