Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WAMR3EN01NZ9CGXNEATVQ

The oaks appeared before any of them spoke about it. Richmond Park had gone quiet a hundred metres back — the distant hum of traffic, the scattered calls of birds, all of it swallowed up as though a door had closed somewhere behind them. Rory noticed first. She stopped, turned, and found the treeline they'd passed through looked no different from any other stretch of woodland. But the air ahead carried a weight to it, something cool and mineral, like water running over old stone. Nyx drifted closer to her left shoulder, their silhouette thickening in the grey afternoon light. "Something's watching us," they murmured. "Everything in here watches." Isolde didn't look back. She moved between the trees the way smoke moved — no effort, no sound, her silver hair catching no wind because there was none. Her feet left nothing in the damp autumn earth. "Whether it means you harm depends entirely on what you brought with you." "That's very reassuring," Rory said. The standing stones emerged from the undergrowth so gradually that Rory almost didn't register the moment she first noticed them. Seven oaks, ancient enough that their trunks were wider than she could span with both arms, arranged in a rough circle. The bark had grown into strange configurations — not carved, not deliberate, but somehow shaped, the wood curling and reaching in patterns too regular to be accidental. Moss ran up the north faces in long vertical strips like the teeth of a comb. Between the roots, wildflowers pushed through the frost-hardened earth. Snowdrops and dog violets and something else entirely — a bloom the colour of bruised skin with a faint yellow centre. She crouched beside one and reached out. "Don't pick it." Isolde's voice carried no urgency, only certainty. "What grows here belongs here. Take something and the Grove takes something back." Rory pulled her hand away. The flower's petals trembled as though she'd breathed on it, though she hadn't. They passed through the ring of oaks and the world changed. Not dramatically. No crack of thunder, no curtain of light. The colour simply deepened — the pale winter sky overhead warmed to something amber-edged, the same quality of light that arrived in late summer just before sunset, though the sun was nowhere visible. Sound arrived differently too, as if her ears had adjusted to a new pressure. She could hear water somewhere, a brook or spring, but beneath it ran something else. A low, harmonic resonance, not quite music, not quite wind, that she felt more in her sternum than heard with her ears. "Right," she said quietly. Nyx paused at the boundary before stepping through. Their edges blurred as they crossed, the shadow-form flickering, dispersing in patches like ink dropped in water. Rory watched them reassemble — the process took a full three seconds and left Nyx standing with their head bowed. "The space between here and elsewhere is thin." Their voice had dropped lower. "I can feel both sides." "Does it hurt?" "Like standing on a bridge when a train passes beneath." Nyx lifted their head. The violet glow in their eyes pulsed once, twice. "Unsettling. But manageable." The grove opened further as they walked. Rory had expected something enclosed, a clearing the size of a room. Instead the interior felt vast, the canopy overhead impossibly high for the trees she'd seen from outside, arching branches interlocking in a lattice so dense it caught the amber light and scattered it in fragments across the ground. Beneath her boots the earth gave way to something softer — not quite moss, but something between moss and carpet, springy and pale green, unmarked by footprints except her own. Isolde moved towards the centre of the clearing where a broad flat stone sat flush with the ground. Water collected in its surface in a shallow pool no deeper than a finger's width, perfectly still despite no visible source. Rory's chest grew warm. She pressed one hand across the pendant through her jacket. The Heartstone pulsed against her palm — not the sharp, insistent pulse she'd felt near a Hel portal, but slower, more considered. A second heartbeat running half a beat out of sync with her own. "It's reacting." "This place sits at a convergence." Isolde knelt beside the stone and passed her fingertips just above the water's surface without touching it. "The Veil here has been worn thin for centuries. Beings from several realms have passed through this particular stretch." Her pale lavender eyes lifted. "Your pendant has memory. It recognises old crossings." Rory pulled her jacket open and looked down. The small crimson stone sat against her shirt, its inner glow a slow red pulse. She'd grown accustomed to its warmth, but here it felt alert in a way she couldn't account for. She let her jacket fall closed. Nyx had drifted to the edge of the clearing where a thicket of silver-barked trees grew in a loose cluster. They stood motionless before one of them, head tilted. "There are names in this bark." Rory crossed to them. The bark was smooth and pale as birch but with a faint iridescence that shifted blue to green depending on the angle. Nyx was right. Not carved names — grown ones, the grain of the wood itself forming letters, or something like letters, in a script she didn't recognise. Column upon column, running from root to the lowest branches. "What language is that?" "Several." Isolde appeared beside her with no sound of approach. "Those who passed through the Grove left impressions. The trees record them. A name, a reason for crossing, a debt paid or owed." Her finger traced the air beside one sequence of marks without making contact. "This one is very old. The language died before the Norman Conquest." "What does it say?" A pause. Not hesitation — more like consideration, the careful shaping of which truth to offer. "A bargain struck." Isolde lowered her hand. "The terms not recorded. Only that both parties kept them." Rory turned a slow circle, taking in the scope of the clearing. Trees ringed it on all sides, the silver-barked ones interspersed with darker varieties she couldn't name, and between their roots the same unnameable flowers bloomed in clusters. Butterflies with wings like stained glass moved between them — too large, their wing patterns too geometric. One landed on her sleeve and she held still. Its wings beat slowly, each beat producing a faint chime, high and clear and deliberate. She stared at it. "Is everything here—" "Alive in ways your vocabulary hasn't prepared for, yes." Isolde watched the butterfly with something that might have been fondness. "The Grove doesn't distinguish between what your world considers animate and inanimate. The stones breathe here. The water thinks. The trees remember." A pause. "They are watching you both very carefully. They have seen very few mortals in the last hundred years." The butterfly lifted from Rory's sleeve and drifted towards the flat stone at the clearing's centre, where it landed on the water's surface and stayed there without sinking. Nyx drifted back to Rory's side. "I have existed across a great many thresholds." Their voice was quieter than usual, stripped of its typical detached register. "I have never been somewhere that felt so entirely itself." Rory looked up at the latticed canopy, at the amber light breaking apart in the interlocked branches overhead. A single leaf detached somewhere high above and spiralled down through the air in a long, unhurried arc. When it landed on the pale ground cover, that low harmonic resonance she'd felt in her chest shifted — not louder, but fuller, as though a note had been completed. She kept her voice low without deciding to. "What happens if we go deeper?" "The Grove has no centre," Isolde said. "Only layers. Each one older than the last." She turned from the flat stone and regarded Rory with those faint lavender eyes. "The question is not what you will find. The question is what you are willing to carry back." Rory's hand found the pendant through her jacket again. The slow pulse continued. Patient, steady, out of time with her heart. She took a step forward.