Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXQGCX0G2YW0RVPHX4VZJH

The last train from Waterloo had deposited her at Richmond station just after eleven. By the time Rory crossed through the park gates — the ones that should have been locked at dusk, but weren't, never were on nights like this — the city had gone quiet in that way London only managed when it was pretending to sleep. She told herself the walk was familiar. She'd made it twice before in daylight, once with Isolde guiding her and once alone. The paths were the same paths. The trees were the same trees. Richmond Park didn't change just because the sun had set. Except it did. The Heartstone pendant pressed warm against her sternum as she left the main path and cut through the ungroomed grass toward the eastern woods. Not the sharp, insistent pulse it gave near a Hel portal — just a low, steady heat, the way it always behaved when she approached the Grove. Like a compass needle swinging north. She wrapped her fingers around it through the fabric of her jacket and kept walking. The moon sat fat and pale above the treeline. Rory could see well enough. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the silence. Richmond Park at night should have been full of deer. Hundreds of them bedded down in the long grass, snorting and shifting. She'd read about it. Fallow deer, red deer, descendants of herds that had grazed here since Charles I's time. She should have been stepping carefully, watching for the wet gleam of an eye in the dark, giving them wide berth. Nothing. No rustle of heavy bodies in the bracken. No alarm bark. The grass lay flat and undisturbed as if no living thing had passed through it in hours. Days. She stopped walking. Listened. The pendant ticked its quiet heat against her chest. Wind in the upper branches. The distant motorway hiss that was London's permanent lullaby. And under it — or woven through it, she couldn't tell — something that might have been a voice, or might have been nothing at all. She moved on. The oaks thickened. The canopy closed above her like a hand shutting over a coin, and the moonlight cut down in thin silver ribbons that made the ground a patchwork of light and deep black. Rory walked in the deep black parts when she could. Some instinct she didn't examine too closely. The standing stones appeared twenty minutes in. Ancient oaks, five of them, arranged in a rough circle around a clearing where wildflowers bloomed in defiance of November. Bluebells and foxglove and something low and white that she'd never been able to identify, all holding their color even in the dark. The boundary of the Grove. Rory stopped at the edge. Took a breath. The air tasted different here — sweeter, denser, as if each molecule carried a drop of honey. It had tasted that way before. That was normal. What was not normal was the footprint. It sat in the soft earth just inside the first pair of standing oaks. Fresh. The soil dark and wet where it had been compressed. She crouched and studied it. A boot, larger than hers. The tread pattern unfamiliar — deep chevrons, like something military. The right foot only. No left. She scanned the ground ahead. The wildflowers swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel, and beyond them the clearing opened into that impossible space where the pocket between worlds yawned wide. Isolde had told her the Grove admitted only those it chose. She had never mentioned anyone else. One boot print. One foot. As if someone had taken a single step and been swallowed. Or as if something had taken a single step out. The pendant flared — not warm this time but hot, a sharp bloom of heat that made her hiss and pull her hand away from her jacket. The crimson stone glowed visible through the cloth, a faint red stain over her heart. "Right," Rory muttered. She straightened up and stepped over the footprint. The Grove received her the way it always did: a soft pressure against her skin, a momentary blindness, the sensation of passing through a curtain of warm water. When her vision cleared, she stood in the center of the clearing. The five oak sentinels ringed her. Above, the moon had moved — or rather, it hadn't. It hung in precisely the same position it had occupied from the path, but the light that fell here was thicker, more golden, as if filtered through amber glass. Time behaving badly, the way Isolde had warned. Rory pulled the pendant from under her jacket and held it in her palm. The glow pulsed steadily. Deep crimson. Thumbnail-sized but heavier than it looked, always heavier, as if the stone carried density from wherever it had been forged. She'd come for a reason. Isolde had left her a message — scratched in the bark of the ash tree behind the Golden Empress, of all places, where Yu-Fei stacked the recycling bins. Four words in a language Rory was still learning to read. She'd spent two days translating them with the help of texts Isolde had given her. The message read: *Bring the stone. Midnight.* It was past midnight. The Grove was empty. Rory turned in a slow circle. Wildflowers nodded at her feet. The standing oaks stood unmoved, their bark so deeply furrowed it seemed carved by a hand rather than grown. Nothing out of place. Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. Then why did her shoulders feel like piano wire? She held still and counted her breaths the way her therapist had taught her back in Cardiff. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The technique was designed for panic attacks on public transport, not for standing alone in an interdimensional clearing at midnight, but it slowed her heart all the same. On her third exhale, she heard it. A tap. Light. Rhythmic. Like a fingernail striking glass. It came from the oak to her left — the largest of the five, the one Isolde called the Watcher. Rory turned toward it. The bark was dark and still. The tapping stopped. She waited. It started again. From behind her now. The oak she'd just been facing. Same rhythm. Same light, patient tap-tap-tap. As if the sound had moved the moment she turned her back. "Isolde?" Her voice sounded thin. She swallowed and said it again, louder. "Isolde, if this is some kind of—" The tapping stopped. All five oaks stood silent. And then something breathed. Not wind. Breath. Warm and close, just behind her left ear, carrying a smell like turned earth and copper and something sweet underneath that she recognized with a lurch — the honey-smell of the Grove itself, concentrated and wrong. Too much. Like perfume sprayed to cover rot. Rory spun. Nothing there. The clearing stretched behind her, empty and moonlit and still, wildflowers swaying in their phantom breeze. Her eyes swept the ground. Her own footprints. The grass pressed flat where she'd walked. And there, barely visible, a second set of impressions in the soil. They circled hers. Close. Tight, concentric loops, the way a predator circles sleeping prey. No tread pattern. No boot mark. Just smooth, even depressions, as if whoever — whatever — had walked barefoot with soles of polished stone. The Heartstone pendant burned against her palm. She looked down. The crimson glow had deepened, taken on a quality she'd never seen before. Not pulsing. Flickering. The way a candle flame flickered when something moved the air around it. "I can see your prints," Rory said to the empty clearing. She kept her voice flat, conversational. The way she'd learned to speak to Evan on his bad nights — calm, neutral, nothing to grip. "I know you're here. I know you've been walking around me." The wildflowers stopped swaying. Every stem, every petal, frozen mid-nod. The silence that followed was not the absence of sound but its opposite — a pressure, a held breath, the Grove itself listening. Then the nearest foxglove bent toward her. Not from wind. The stem curved deliberately, the way a sunflower tracks light, and its purple bell tilted until it pointed at the space over her right shoulder. Rory did not turn around. Her heart was a fist pounding against her ribs. The pendant seared her palm. Every nerve ending in her body screamed the same message: something stood behind her, close enough to touch, and it was waiting to see what she would do. She stared at the foxglove. The foxglove stared back with its spotted throat. "I brought what was asked for." She lifted the pendant, arm extended to the side, the crimson stone catching the amber moonlight. "If you're Isolde, take it and stop this. If you're not—" A hand closed around hers. Cold. Not the cold of weather or metal but the cold of deep water, of caves below the frost line, a cold that didn't just touch the skin but leached through it, sucking heat from the blood beneath. The fingers were long and wrapped fully around her fist, enclosing the pendant. She could feel the shape of them — too many knuckles, each one a hard ridge pressing into her flesh. The pendant's heat died. Snuffed like a match. For the first time in months, the stone against her palm felt inert. Just a gem. Just a rock on a chain. Whatever was behind her leaned forward. She felt its presence the way you feel a building when you stand in its shadow — massive, vertical, blocking out the light. The breath came again, against the crown of her head this time, slow and measured and carrying a sound inside it. A word, maybe. A name. Not hers. The fingers tightened around her fist. Then they released. The warmth slammed back into the pendant like a wave breaking. Rory gasped. The wildflowers resumed their swaying. The tapping started again — from all five oaks simultaneously now, faster, urgent, a staccato that sounded less like fingernails on glass and more like a warning. She turned. The clearing behind her was empty. The smooth footprints in the soil had vanished. The circling tracks, gone, as if they had never been pressed. Just her own boots in the soft earth, alone. But on the bark of the Watcher oak, high up where no person could reach without climbing, something glistened wet and dark. Letters, carved deep and fresh, the sap still running. Four words. In a language she was still learning to read. Different words than before.