Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X3225K0M50X5W1991HNMG

The wildflowers were wrong. Rory knew it the moment she ducked through the gap in the standing stones, the ancient oaks pressing close on either side like sentinels deciding whether to let her pass. She had been to the grove a dozen times now, enough to trust the familiar drop in temperature at the boundary, the way the air here smelled of loam and something older — green and mineral and faintly electric. She knew what to expect. She hadn't expected flowers. It was November. The last time she'd stood in this clearing the rowan trees had been stripped bare, the ground a mulch of brown. Now, in the thin wash of moonlight that filtered through the canopy, she could make out clusters of white blooms at her feet — wood anemones, she thought, though she wasn't certain — and further in, nodding heads of something pale yellow. Year-round, Isolde had said once. The grove keeps its own seasons. But there was something about the flowers tonight that made Rory's stomach pull taut. They were too bright. Too still. Not a single petal trembling, though she could feel a breeze against her cheek. She had come for the journal. That was the shape of it, the simple errand she had talked herself into at half-eleven while the London night pressed against the windows of her flat. Isolde had left the journal in the grove three days ago — or what had been three days outside; who knew what it had been inside — and Rory had promised to retrieve it before the weekend. She had her torch. She had the pendant around her neck. She had told herself that the grove was safe, that she'd walked it before. She hadn't walked it alone. At night. Without telling anyone where she was going. The thought arrived now, belatedly, with the mildly reproachful quality of something she should have considered an hour ago when she was still on the 371 bus and it wasn't too late to turn around. Rory clicked on her torch and started forward. The standing stones were behind her quickly. The clearing opened up — perhaps thirty feet across, ringed by oaks so old their branches had grown into each other overhead, knitting a roof of bare winter wood. Or what should have been bare winter wood. She tilted the torch upward and found leaves. Full, summer-dark leaves, heavy and motionless. As wrong as the flowers. She made herself keep walking. The journal was in a hollow at the base of the centremost oak, wrapped in oilskin. Isolde had been very specific. Go straight to it. Don't wander. The pendant shifted against her collarbone. It had been warm since she'd entered the park — warm enough that she'd noticed it through her coat when she crossed the car park on Broomfield Hill Road, warm enough now that she could feel it without pressing her hand to her chest. That meant a Hel portal nearby. She knew that. There was one at the grove's eastern edge, dormant and sealed, Isolde had assured her. Dormant. Sealed. She was walking east. Rory stopped and reoriented herself. She'd drifted without realising it, the torch pulling her toward a gap between two oaks where the moonlight seemed marginally brighter. She turned back toward the centre of the clearing. The centremost oak. Straight line. Something moved in her periphery. She spun the torch toward it — nothing. Just shadow resolving into the familiar shapes of trees, of hanging moss, of the pale flowers below. She held still and listened. The grove was usually quiet in a particular way, a held-breath quality, but this was different. Too quiet. No wind in branches that were full of leaves that should not have been there. No small animal movement. No owl. The silence had texture, had weight, and Rory found herself breathing shallowly as though sound itself might cost her something she couldn't afford to spend. She turned back toward the centremost oak and walked faster. The hollow was where Isolde had described it. She crouched down, felt the oilskin packet with her fingers, and tucked it into her bag without taking her eyes off the middle distance. Standing again, she thumbed her torch wider, sweeping it in a slow arc. That was when she heard it. Footsteps. Not behind her. Not to the side. Ahead — between her and the standing stones at the boundary. A slow, unhurried tread on soft ground, each footfall deliberate, like something that had all the time it needed. She counted four steps, and then silence again. Her mouth had gone dry. She tracked the torch toward the sound and found the flowers. Just the flowers, white and obscenely still, and the dark columns of oaks behind them. "Hello?" The word came out smaller than she intended. Nothing answered. Rory turned the torch off. It was tactics, she told herself. If something was watching her, the torch made her easy to locate and ruined her own sight. In the sudden dark her eyes scrambled to adjust. Shapes assembled themselves slowly from the moonlight — the clearing's rough oval, the roof of impossible leaves, the pale carpet of flowers. She could see the gap between the standing stones from here, forty feet away. She could see the boundary. There was a shape standing at it. It was tall. That was the first thing. Tall enough that she had mistaken it, in the torch light, for one of the oaks — but it was in the wrong place, in the space between trees, filling the gap that was her only exit. It wasn't moving. It was just standing there, and Rory couldn't make out its face, or its features, only the fact of its height and the way it seemed slightly too dark — a darkness that wasn't just shadow but something more absolute, more deliberate, as though light bent around it. She ran her thumb across the scar on her left wrist, the small crescent of raised skin she always found when she needed something to hold onto. The habit was so ingrained she wasn't aware she'd done it until the familiar texture steadied her pulse by half a beat. The pendant was burning now. Not painfully — not yet — but with an intensity that had moved from warmth through heat and was still climbing. The shape at the boundary didn't move. But it was watching her. She was absolutely certain of that in the way she was certain of very few things: it was watching, and it had been watching for some time, and it had let her come into the grove, and retrieve the journal, and turn off her torch, and it had let her do all of this because watching was precisely what it had come here to do. She took one slow step to the left, keeping the centremost oak at her back. The shape didn't turn to follow her, not that she could see — but she had the nauseating conviction that it didn't need to. That it was tracking her without bothering to look. Forty feet was not very far. She'd run a half-marathon in another life, before London, before all of this. She was wearing trainers. The ground was soft but not uneven. Rory breathed in once through her nose. The shape took one step forward into the clearing. She ran. She ran flat out, bag slamming against her hip, arms driving, and the flowers blurred white beneath her feet and the oak roots she'd always been careful to step around became obstacles she cleared without thinking, some animal override cutting out everything but speed and the gap in the stones and the dark strip of path beyond it. She heard nothing behind her — no footsteps, no breath, no sound of pursuit — and that was worse, somehow, than if she had. The silence stretched at her back like something reaching. She hit the boundary between the stones and kept running, out into the park, onto the frost-hard path, the moon full and cold and enormous overhead, the pendant searing against her collarbone like a brand. She ran all the way to the road before she stopped, hands on her knees, gulping cold air, the journal a hard rectangle through the canvas of her bag. She turned back. Through the bare winter oaks — bare, she registered, properly bare, stripped and skeletal as they should have been — she could just make out the pale mouth of the grove in the distance. Nothing stood at the boundary. Nothing moved. The pendant had gone cold. Rory straightened up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and stared at the grove for a long moment. The flowers inside were invisible now from this distance, but she knew they were there. She knew the leaves were there. She knew something had stood at that threshold and chosen — chosen — not to follow her out. She turned toward the car park and the road and the long bus ride back to Silas's bar, and she pulled her coat tight, and she did not run. But she did not look back either. Some calculations, she had learned, were better made in full light, with other people present, at a table that didn't have roots growing under it. She would tell Isolde in the morning. She would show her the journal, and she would describe the shape at the boundary, and she would ask, very calmly, what manner of thing kept summer in November. She pressed her fingers once against the pendant as she walked. It lay still and cool against her skin, saying nothing, offering nothing. That, too, felt like a kind of answer.