Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV9P24PDDCWDEJ1GNJTWC6

Rory had told herself she wouldn't come back to the grove after dark. She had told herself a lot of things lately. That she would stop flinching at the sound of a door closing. That she would stop looking for Evan's face in crowds. That she wouldn't be the kind of person who stood at the edge of Richmond Park at half past ten at night with a torch she didn't want to switch on, because switching it on meant admitting she was afraid. The oaks rose ahead of her, older than the park around them, older probably than Richmond itself. Four of them, set in a rough square, their trunks gnarled into shapes the eye kept trying to resolve into faces. The standing stones, Isolde had called them, though they weren't stone at all. They only behaved like stones. Rory had learned not to argue about what things were called here. She stepped between them. The grass underfoot changed. It didn't look different — still the soft green of summer, still the wildflowers nodding in a breeze she could not feel on her skin — but the sound of the park dropped away as if someone had closed a heavy door behind her. No distant traffic. No wood pigeons muttering in their sleep. Only the hush of the grove, and the faint ringing in her ears that was not, she told herself, anything at all. She had come for the pendant. That was the reason. The Heartstone had begun to pulse an hour ago, warm enough against her sternum that she'd woken from a shallow doze on Silas' old sofa convinced she'd spilled tea down her front. A Hel portal, then, somewhere close. And the grove, Isolde said, was the only place on this side of the city where the veil was thin enough for Rory to see one opening before it was already open. So. Here she was. Seeing. She walked to the centre of the clearing and stopped. The wildflowers were out of season — foxgloves next to snowdrops, bluebells next to autumn crocuses, all of it wrong in the wrong quiet way things here tended to be wrong. She put her hand under her collar and lifted the pendant out. The crimson gem sat in her palm, warm. Not hot. Just warm, the way a living thing is warm. "All right," she said, quietly, to no one. "Show me, then." Nothing happened. She waited. The grove waited with her. After a minute she became aware that the wind had changed. Not risen — there had been no wind to rise. Changed. The flowers on her left were bending one way, and the flowers on her right another, as though two slow currents were moving past her and neither of them was air she could feel. Something rustled behind her. She did not turn. She had grown up with a father who cross-examined witnesses for a living, and one of the first things Brendan Carter had taught her, more by example than instruction, was that the moment you flinch is the moment you lose. So she kept her face towards the centre of the grove and listened, and the rustling came again, low and deliberate, the sound a large animal makes when it wants you to know it is there. There were no large animals in this grove. Isolde had been very clear about that. "Hello?" Rory said. Her voice sounded thin. The rustling stopped. She turned, slowly, and there was nothing behind her but the oaks and the flowers and, beyond the standing stones, the ordinary dark of Richmond Park. A jogger's dog, maybe. A fox. Except that sound had happened inside the grove, and things that were not invited did not come inside the grove. The Heartstone gave a small, definite throb against her palm. She looked down at it. The inner glow had deepened. The crimson was no longer the crimson of a ruby but of something slower — arterial, she thought, and wished immediately she hadn't. The warmth had climbed into something just shy of uncomfortable. At the edge of her vision, something moved. She didn't catch it directly. She caught the shape of its going: a tall, thin shifting between two of the oaks, a vertical darkness that resolved back into trunk and shadow the moment she turned her head. She stood very still. She counted to ten in Welsh, the way her mother had taught her when she was small and frightened of the dark. *Un, dau, tri.* The grove was silent again, so silent she could hear the blood in her ears. *Pedwar, pump.* Another movement, the other side. She did not turn this time. She let it be a shape in the corner of her sight and tried to hold it there, tried to make her eye stay where it wanted to slide off. It was taller than a person. It was standing just beyond the stones, where the grass gave way to park, and it was — she was almost sure of this — leaning forward, as if testing the air above the boundary. *Chwech. Saith.* The pendant pulsed harder. Her hand closed around it without asking her permission. Under her fingers the silver chain had grown cold, though the stone itself burned. "You're not supposed to be here," she said, and was surprised by how level her voice came out. "This is Isolde's grove. You know whose grove this is." The shape at the edge of her vision did not move. It did not need to. She could feel its attention now, the way you feel a stranger's stare across a tube carriage — that prickle on the back of the neck that is older than language. Something exhaled. Not a wind. A breath. Close. Close enough that she ought to have felt it stir the hair at her nape, except that whatever had drawn that breath was not, she understood very suddenly, on the outside of the stones at all. It was behind her. The Heartstone flared hot in her fist. The grove, which had been silent, became the particular kind of silent that is a held breath waiting to be let out. And Rory, who had told herself she would not flinch, found that she could not turn her head. She stood in the year-round flowers, in the wrong-quiet, and listened to something that should not exist breathe slowly and patiently at the back of her neck, and understood that she had not, after all, come here alone.