Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTZ0RVR7DVYPTA7HXYPYPA0

The last bus from Richmond had dropped her at the edge of the park forty minutes ago. Rory walked the gravel path with her phone's torch cutting a pale wedge through the dark, the Heartstone pendant a faint coal of warmth against her sternum. She had memorized the route from the hand-drawn map Isolde had left folded inside a takeaway napkin at the Golden Empress — third oak past the Isabella Plantation fence, then due north until the ground softened. Simple enough in daylight. At half eleven on a moonless October night, every oak looked the same. She shouldn't have come alone. She knew that. Eva would have said so, loudly, with hand gestures. But the note had been specific: *Come at the dark of the moon. Come without companions. The Grove remembers debts, Aurora. It will not open for a crowd.* A branch cracked somewhere to her left. Not underfoot — further off, among the bracken. The sound was sharp, deliberate, the way a green limb sounds when something bends it past its tolerance. Rory stopped walking. She swept the torch in a slow arc. Ferns. The pale scar of a fallen birch. Nothing that moved. She counted to thirty, listening. Wind sifted through the canopy with a papery rattle, and beneath it — nothing. No foxes screaming. No owls. Richmond Park at night should have been a chorus of small, furtive lives, and instead it offered her a silence so complete she could hear the blood in her own ears. She kept moving. The pendant grew warmer with each step north, and she pressed her fingers around it through her jacket. Not hot. Not yet. Just that steady, tidal pulse, like a second heartbeat seated below her own. She had learned not to ignore it. The crimson stone had its own vocabulary — warmth for proximity, cold for danger, and a strange vibrationless hum when it wanted her attention for reasons she hadn't yet catalogued. Tonight it only pulsed. Steady. Patient. The ground softened underfoot. She felt it before she saw it — gravel giving way to loam, then to something springy and damp that swallowed the sound of her boots. Moss. She was close. Then her torch flickered. Not the low-battery stutter she'd seen a hundred times. The beam contracted to a pinprick, flared wide enough to bleach the nearest tree trunk bone-white, and died. The screen behind it went black. She thumbed the power button. Nothing. She held it up and saw her own reflection in the glass, blue eyes wide and unblinking, and behind her reflection — movement. A shape that passed between two trees, fluid and unhurried, too tall to be a deer. Rory spun around. The darkness had texture now, a granular thickness that pressed against her face like velvet. She could see nothing. She could hear her own breathing, faster than she wanted it to be, and beneath that the pendant's pulse had quickened to match. "Hello?" Her voice came back wrong. Not an echo — Richmond Park was too open for echoes — but a return, as if something had caught the word and handed it back to her with the inflection changed. The second *hello* rose where hers had fallen. A question turned into a greeting. She took a step backward. Her heel found a root and she caught herself, one hand against rough bark. Oak bark. Ancient, deeply furrowed, and warm. Not the ambient warmth of a living tree. Warm the way skin is warm. She pulled her hand away and rubbed her fingers together. Dry. No sap, no moss. Just that impossible warmth fading from her palm. The standing stones would be close now. She had read about them — or rather, she had read Isolde's oblique descriptions, scattered through three separate napkin notes like a scavenger hunt designed by someone who found clarity personally offensive. *The oaks that are not oaks. They stood before the Romans and they will stand after the last light goes out. Walk between them and the Grove will decide if you deserve entry.* Rory made herself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way her mum had taught her before maths exams, before court visits with her father, before every small crisis that had preceded the real ones. She pressed the pendant flat against her chest. Its warmth steadied her the way a hand on the shoulder might. She walked forward. Not because she wasn't afraid. The fear sat in her stomach like a stone, dense and cold, and her body wanted nothing more than to turn south and find the gravel path and the bus stop and the fluorescent safety of the District line. She walked forward because she had promised, and because promises meant something in the places between worlds — Isolde had been very clear about that. The trees thinned. She felt the change in the air before she understood it — a dampness, floral and green, the smell of growing things in a season that should have killed them. Wildflowers. She couldn't see them but she could smell them, a sweetness so heavy it sat on her tongue. And through that sweetness, something else. Something chemical and burnt, like heated copper. The pendant flared. Not warmth now — a spike of heat so sudden she gasped and pulled the chain away from her skin. The crimson stone glowed through her jacket, a dull red heartbeat visible through two layers of fabric. She held it out by the chain and it swung, pointing left, and in the light it cast she saw the first of the standing stones. It was oak, as Isolde had said. Or had been, once. The trunk rose from the earth without roots, without taper, a column of petrified wood as wide as a doorframe and twice her height. Its surface was covered in grooves she wanted to call natural — the whorls and fissures of a tree that had grown for centuries — but they aligned too neatly, curved too deliberately. They were letters. Or something that had been letters before English, before Welsh, before anything she had a name for. She found the second stone ten paces to the right. A third beyond it. They formed a rough arc, half-swallowed by bracken and shadow, and in the red glow of the Heartstone she could count seven before the light gave out. She stopped between the first and second stones. The burnt-copper smell was stronger here. She breathed through her mouth and tasted it on the back of her teeth, metallic and old. The pendant's glow dimmed to its usual faint luminescence, a candle behind stained glass, and with it the standing stones sank back into darkness. But something had stayed in the light. Not between the stones. Behind them. In the space where the Grove should have been — that hidden clearing Isolde had described as *a breath caught between two worlds* — something stood. Rory saw it the way you see a word on the tip of your tongue: not the shape but the knowledge of the shape, the certainty that it was there. Tall. Still. Watching with an attention so focused it had weight. "Isolde?" The name fell into the dark and didn't come back. No echo. No returned greeting. Just absorption, as if the silence had opened a mouth and swallowed the sound whole. The pendant went cold. Not cool — cold, the kind of cold that burns, that makes fingers clumsy and slow. Rory wrapped her fist around it and felt frost crystallize against her palm. The crescent scar on her left wrist ached in sympathy, a phantom pain she hadn't felt since the night she'd left Cardiff. Something exhaled. She heard it — a long, measured breath released from lungs that were not hers, from a mouth she couldn't see, close enough that if there had been warmth behind it she would have felt it on her face. But there was no warmth. The exhalation carried the cold of deep earth, of cellars, of places where the sun's existence was a rumor. Rory didn't move. Every instinct she had was screaming in two directions at once — run and stay, flee and freeze — and the contradiction locked her in place as effectively as a hand on her collar. She stood between the standing stones with the dead phone in one hand and the frozen pendant in the other and stared into the dark where the shape stood and the shape stared back. It shifted. Not moved — shifted, the way a picture shifts when you adjust the angle of the frame. The dimensions of it rearranged. She caught the suggestion of limbs — too many, and too long, bending at joints that had no anatomical basis — before it settled again into that pillar of focused attention. "I came because I was asked." Her voice was smaller than she wanted. Steadier than she expected. The words hung in the air, and for a terrible, drawn-out moment she thought they too would be swallowed. Then the wildflowers at her feet began to bloom. She felt them before she saw them — soft petals brushing against her ankles, stalks rising through the moss with a sound like whispered conversation. The pendant warmed, slowly, degree by degree, as if whatever had frozen it was retreating. The red glow returned. It caught the petals closest to her boots — white bellflower, purple foxglove, flowers she couldn't name with colors she had no words for, all opening in a tide that swept outward from where she stood toward the standing stones and beyond. The shape behind the stones hadn't moved. But the Grove was opening. She could feel it — a change in pressure, like the pop of altitude in an airplane cabin, and with it a sound so faint she wasn't sure she heard it at all. A hum. Not the pendant. Not the wind. Something older, embedded in the stone and the soil and the impossible flowers, a frequency that resonated in the spaces between her ribs. Rory took a step forward. The blooming followed her. Another step. The pendant swung on its chain, pointing straight ahead through the gap between the first and second stones, and its light caught something she hadn't seen before — a path, narrow and worn, leading into the clearing. The shape was gone. Or had repositioned itself beyond the reach of the crimson glow. She couldn't tell. The feeling of being watched remained, tattooed on the back of her neck, but its quality had changed. Less predatory. More evaluative. As if whatever stood in the dark had asked her a question and was still deciding whether her answer satisfied. She walked the path. The standing stones passed on either side, their carved surfaces catching the pendant's light in fragments — a curve here, a straight line there, symbols that tugged at comprehension without granting it. The air between them was heavy and still, the way air feels before a storm, charged and expectant. Three steps past the last stone, the ground dropped away. Not physically. Her boots still found purchase. But the world tilted on an axis she couldn't name, and for a disorienting moment she stood on the skin of something vast and breathing, a landscape that was also a living thing, and the sky above her — she could see the sky now, though it held no moon and no stars she recognized — was the color of old bruises, purple-black and faintly luminous. The Fae Grove spread before her. Wildflowers in every direction, knee-high and trembling, and at the center of the clearing a single tree that was not an oak, was not any species she could name, its bark silver-white and its branches bare and its roots gripping the earth like fingers laced in prayer. The pendant pulsed once — warm, steady, almost reassuring — and went still. Rory stood at the edge of the Grove and listened. The silence here was different. Full, not empty. The silence of a held breath, of a room waiting for someone to speak first. Behind her, the standing stones had sealed the path. She felt it without looking — the closure, the quiet click of a lock turning in a door she could no longer see. Something rustled in the flowers to her right. Low and quick and gone before she could turn her head. Then again, to her left. A third time, directly ahead, between her and the silver tree, and this time she saw the flowers part and close as something moved through them — something that left no trail and cast no shadow and disturbed nothing except the blossoms it passed through. It was circling her.