Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV7YX8J1F7Q2DZJ8QMM63A

Rory ducked under the lowest branch of the oak and stepped between the standing stones. The air changed. Not cooled, not warmed — changed, the way a room changes when someone stops speaking mid-sentence. She paused with one hand still braced against bark, half in Richmond Park and half somewhere else, listening to her own pulse find a new rhythm. "Isolde?" No answer. She'd expected none, not straight away. The Fae didn't come when called. They came when it suited them, and tonight, apparently, it didn't. She let the branch go and walked on. Torchlight swung across wildflowers that had no business blooming in November — foxglove, primrose, something pale and bell-shaped she didn't know the name of. The grove had its own weather. She'd been told that. She hadn't quite believed it until she'd watched her breath stop fogging the air between one step and the next. The Heartstone lay cool against her sternum. That was the first wrong thing. It should have pulsed here, at least a little — the grove sat on a seam between worlds, and the pendant had hummed every other time she'd crossed over. Tonight the crimson gem was inert. A chip of glass on a silver chain. She stopped in the middle of the clearing and turned a slow circle. "I only need five minutes of your time." Her voice travelled further than it should have. It kept going after she'd stopped speaking, thinning out into the treeline and not coming back. No echo. Just absence. Somewhere to her left, a twig snapped. Rory swung the torch. The beam caught nothing but the pale ribs of birch trunks and, beyond them, a deeper dark that the light didn't want to enter. She held the torch steady for a count of ten. Ten was sensible. Ten was the number at which you stopped staring and moved on, because staring only gave the dark time to look back. She moved on. The path — if it was a path; the grove liked to rearrange itself — curved toward the old stump Isolde used as a seat. Rory aimed for it, counting her steps the way she used to count stairs in Evan's flat when she was trying not to wake him. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-f— A sound behind her. Not a twig. A breath. Drawn in, held, let out, very close to the back of her neck. She spun. Empty clearing. Torch beam trembling because her hand was trembling, and once she noticed the tremble she couldn't stop it. The wildflowers bobbed gently in a wind she couldn't feel on her face. "Right," she told the emptiness. "Funny." The Fae had a sense of humour. She'd been warned about that too. If this was Isolde playing silly buggers, then fine. She'd wait. She'd sit on the stump and wait and not give anyone the satisfaction of a flinch. She made it three more steps before she saw the figure. Only at the edge of the torchlight — only for the fraction of a second it took to sweep the beam past — a shape that stood upright among the birches and wasn't a birch. Tall. Too tall. Narrow at the shoulders in a way that shoulders shouldn't narrow. She swept the beam back. Birches. Just birches, standing very still, the way birches stood. Rory's mouth had gone dry. She swallowed and it clicked. "Isolde, if that's you, I'm leaving." The grove held its breath with her. Then, from somewhere above her head — above, not ahead, not behind, above — a child laughed. A small, bright, delighted laugh, the kind a four-year-old made when you pretended to find them behind a curtain. Rory did not look up. She wasn't sure where the certainty came from. It arrived fully formed, the way certainties did in dreams: if she looked up, she would see something, and once she had seen it she could not unsee it, and the thing would know she had seen it, and then the game would change. She kept the torch low. She kept walking. The laugh came again, further off now, threading through the branches like a bird call. A second laugh joined it from the opposite direction, lower, older, not quite in tune with the first. Then a third, from directly behind her, so close that she felt the small warm stir of it against her hair. She broke into a walk that wanted badly to be a run. The stump was gone. Of course it was. The path she'd followed had closed behind her and the path ahead forked into two, then three, then a clutch of narrow silver corridors between trunks that all looked identical. The torch showed her each one in turn and each one swallowed the light the same way, which was to say — not at all, the beam simply stopped at a certain distance and refused to travel further, as though the darkness there had weight. Her hand went to the Heartstone. Cold. Dead cold. Colder than the air, which wasn't cold at all. Something moved at her nine o'clock. She did not turn her head. She watched it in her peripheral vision, the way you watched a wasp — the pale vertical of it drifting between two trunks, keeping pace with her, matching her stride. When she slowed, it slowed. When she stopped, it stopped, and she could feel it turn to face her fully, though she still hadn't looked. "I came to talk," she said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that, in a distant, administrative way, the part of her brain that filed things for later. "I came to talk to Isolde. Not to you." The thing at her nine o'clock tilted. She felt the tilt more than saw it. "Isolde isn't here tonight," it said. Its voice was her mother's. Rory's knees locked. Every muscle in her back went taut as wire. Jennifer Carter was in Cardiff, asleep in the box room of the house on Llanishen Street, and had not set foot in London in six years, and certainly, certainly, had never set foot inside the Fae Grove. "Rory, love," said the thing, in Jennifer's soft vowels, in Jennifer's particular way of landing on the r. "Put the torch down. You'll hurt your eyes." Rory did not put the torch down. She took one step backward, very slowly, and the wildflowers at her feet closed their petals in unison, like a hundred small mouths deciding, together, to stop smiling.