Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ94WKNPB5GAZB8T92G20T1

The standing stones looked wrong in the dark. Rory had been here twice before, both times in daylight, when the ancient oaks caught the afternoon sun and threw gold across the wildflowers, and the grove felt like a secret the city was keeping for good reasons. Beautiful ones. She'd told herself she remembered the way well enough that the dark wouldn't matter. She'd been wrong about that, too. Richmond Park at eleven o'clock on a Thursday night was not the park she knew. The path from the car park had felt longer than it should have, the tree-line pressing in on both sides with the specific patience of things that have nowhere to be, and the sounds of the road — the A316, the low arterial hum of London at a distance — had dropped away earlier than they ought to have. She'd stopped twice to check her phone. No signal, which wasn't unusual near the grove. The map app had simply shown a blue dot hovering over a green blankness, as though she didn't exist in any place the satellites cared to name. She'd pressed on anyway. She had to. Isolde had sent word through a mutual contact — the word being a single pressed wildflower tucked into an envelope, white petals gone slightly translucent at the edges — and Rory had understood it as a summons. Isolde never used paper otherwise. The standing stones emerged from the darkness like old teeth. Eight of them in a rough circle, each one a gnarled English oak rather than carved stone, their bark deeply furrowed and pale in her phone's torchlight. She swept the beam around and the shadows swung obediently, retreating and then settling back as though they'd simply been waiting for her to finish. The wildflowers were there, as promised by every previous visit — impossible in November, but there they were, yellow and white and a deep vivid purple she couldn't name, their petals showing no interest in the cold. Rory stepped between two of the oaks and into the grove. The air changed. It always did — a drop in temperature, a sudden density, as though the air inside the boundary remembered something the air outside had forgotten. She breathed it in and turned slowly on the spot. The clearing was perhaps thirty feet across. Grass, flowers, a flat central stone she'd always assumed was decorative. Isolde's fire pit, cold and clean as though unused for weeks, placed exactly where she remembered it. No Isolde. She checked her phone. Eleven-fourteen. The contact had said midnight, but Rory had come early out of a habit she'd spent two years cultivating — the habit of knowing the exits before she needed them. Old lesson. She didn't let herself think about where she'd learned it. She moved to the flat central stone and sat. Eleven-sixteen. The grove was quiet. That was normal. Outside the boundary, Richmond Park at night held its share of noise — foxes, wind in the high canopy, the occasional distant siren. Inside, the quiet had a textured quality, like sound-proofed rooms in the recording studios Eva had worked at once. The grove absorbed. Rory had asked Isolde about it once and Isolde had shrugged with the particular elegance of someone who had never found extraordinary things remarkable. She settled in and watched the wildflowers. They moved. Not with wind. There was no wind. They swayed in a rhythm that wasn't quite random and wasn't quite uniform — a slight lean, collectively, toward the far side of the clearing, as though reorienting toward a light source that had just moved. Rory looked at the far side of the clearing. Nothing. Trees, shadow, the thick black between the standing oaks. She looked back at the flowers. They were still again. Eleven-twenty-two. She turned up the brightness on her phone torch and aimed it at the tree-line to her right. A solid wall of old growth, the oaks and their attendant undergrowth pressing against the grove's edge with patient indifference. She swung the light slowly left. More tree-line, more shadow. A low branch she didn't remember noticing before, hanging at about shoulder height — but she'd only been here in daylight, and branches looked different in the dark. She knew that. The Heartstone moved. Not physically — it was tucked inside her jacket, the silver chain around her neck as always — but it pulsed. A single slow throb of warmth against her sternum, like a thumb pressed briefly against the inside of her ribcage. She pulled it free with two fingers. In the phone's torchlight the deep crimson gem sat dormant, showing no glow, nothing remarkable. She held her breath. A second pulse. Faint, like a signal from something very far away. There were no Hel portals in the grove. Isolde had been explicit about that on the first visit, in the specific tone of someone establishing house rules. The grove existed between realms, but it didn't connect downward. It connected sideways. Rory closed her fist around the pendant and stood. The sound came from behind her — from the direction she'd entered, between the two northeastern oaks. Not a footstep. Not quite. Something with a different distribution of weight than a footstep, a sound she couldn't place against any pedestrian memory of ordinary things. It stopped the moment she started to turn. She turned the rest of the way anyway. The space between the northeastern oaks was empty. She stared at it for a long time. The wildflowers in her peripheral vision swayed again — the same slow collective lean, this time toward the far side of the clearing. She didn't look at them. She kept her eyes on the northeast gap, and her heart went on doing what hearts do, and she was aware with the cold precision that sometimes came to her under pressure that the grove felt larger than it had when she'd arrived. Not physically larger. She couldn't point to a measurement that had changed. But the flat central stone, when she glanced back at it, looked farther away than thirty feet. The fire pit looked farther still. The wildflowers, despite their impossible November fullness, looked different — she couldn't say how, couldn't articulate it in the few seconds she spent trying, except that they seemed to occupy more of the grove than she remembered, as though they'd been growing steadily since she sat down and had simply been too quiet about it for her to notice. Eleven-thirty-one. She crossed to the northeastern gap. Stopped two paces short of it and aimed her torch through the gap and into the park beyond. Trees, path, darkness resolving into more trees. The same path she'd come down, or one that looked the same — she wasn't entirely certain she could tell the difference from inside the grove, in the dark, and she didn't like that she wasn't certain. Something white in the undergrowth to the left of the path. She held the light on it. A piece of litter, she decided — something caught on a low branch, paper or plastic, the light making it bright against the dark mass of vegetation. She watched it. It didn't move. Then it did. Not blown by wind. It dropped, slowly and deliberately, from the branch on which it had been caught, and then it was gone beneath the undergrowth, without crumpling or floating or doing anything a piece of litter would do. Rory took one step back into the grove. The pendant pulsed again — three times in close succession, quick and urgent, and warm enough now that she thought she could feel it through the fabric of her jacket. She looked down at her closed fist. When she opened it the stone was glowing. A faint thing, barely more than the suggestion of light, but present and unmistakable — a deep red luminescence that lit the lines of her palm and threw faint shadows between her fingers. She closed her fist again. Behind her — from the center of the clearing now, she was almost certain — came a sound she had no word for. Not a voice. Not breathing. Something with the same structural properties as both, compressed into a single exhalation that lasted perhaps two seconds and then stopped. She stood very still. The grove waited with her. It was eleven thirty-seven, and Isolde was twenty-three minutes away, and Rory had spent two years learning that the worst thing she could do in a room that felt dangerous was let it know she was afraid. She turned around slowly, the torch in one hand and the glowing pendant in the other, and looked at the center of the clearing. The flat stone was empty. The fire pit was cold and clean. The wildflowers were facing her now. All of them. Every stem bent at the same precise angle, petals oriented upward and toward her with the attentiveness of small faces.