Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV9XKA04Z4DPD09BTSSDWK

Rory pressed through the last of the bracken and stopped, because her breath wouldn't come. The grove waited exactly as Eva had described it — the ring of oaks hunched like old men around a clearing no bigger than a public pool, their bark scabbed with lichen that caught the moonlight in patches of dull pewter. Wildflowers grew knee-high between the standing stones. Foxgloves. Cornflowers. A scatter of tiny white things she didn't know the name of. In October, in Richmond Park, with frost already webbing the grass outside. All of them in bloom. She'd walked here for forty minutes along paths she'd mapped on her phone, and in those forty minutes she had heard herself think with perfect clarity: *something is wrong about where you're going, and you are going anyway.* Now she stood inside the ring of oaks and the wrongness was no longer ahead of her. It was around her. It had closed. The Heartstone was warm against her sternum. Not hot — not yet — but warmer than blood, with a slow pulse that didn't match her own. She touched it through her jumper, and the crimson caught the moon in its faint inner glow, winking like a coal that refused to go out. *Pulses when near a Hel portal*, Silas had said, in that careful voice he used when he was telling her something true he didn't want to be true. She had laughed. She wasn't laughing now. "Okay," Rory said aloud, because the silence had grown teeth. "Okay. You're here." Her voice went nowhere. That was the first thing. In an open clearing, in a park the size of a small country, a voice should carry at least a little — should find some bird to startle, some far-off traffic to mingle with. Her *okay* dropped at her feet like a stone into wet wool. The second thing: there was no traffic. No distant hum of the A307. No planes stacking for Heathrow. No dog barking three gardens over. London, the largest city she had ever known, had been switched off like a lamp at a wall. The third thing was the wind. The tops of the oaks were moving. She could see the branches shifting against the stars, the leaves turning their pale undersides to the moon, a long slow susurrus high up in the canopy. But the air on her face was perfectly still. Not a hair lifted from her cheek. The foxgloves at her knees stood as though painted. Rory took a breath and counted, the way her mother had taught her when the panic attacks began at sixteen. *Four in, seven hold, eight out.* The Heartstone pulsed against her chest on its own rhythm and wouldn't be counted with. She stepped into the clearing. She had come because Eva had said the grove would *tell her things*. Eva, who knew too much lately, who had started looking at her the way people look at hairline cracks in the ceiling. Eva, who had put a hand over Rory's pendant two nights ago and gone very still and said, *Rory, where did you really get this.* And Rory — who could not remember, who had woken one morning with it around her neck and an empty space in her head shaped like an evening she had no memory of spending — had come here because somewhere at the edge of her sleep a voice had been whispering the name Isolde. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She turned her head. Nothing. An oak, a standing stone leaning at its drunkard's angle, the dim suggestion of a deer track beyond. Bright blue eyes scanning, scanning. The grove looked back at her with a patience that felt almost amused. She made herself walk to the centre. The flowers brushed her shins and left no wetness on her jeans. That was the fourth thing, and she wished she had stopped counting. Dew at this hour, in this cold, should have soaked her through by now. The stems parted around her legs like hair. "Isolde," she said. Nothing answered. But somewhere behind her — behind and low, near the ground — something that was not wind moved through the grass. A long, deliberate rustle. It started at the tree line and travelled perhaps six feet towards her and stopped. Rory did not turn around. She had watched enough of the wrong kind of film to know that turning around was what it wanted. That was the trick of it, the old trick: you turn, and there is nothing, and the nothing has moved three feet closer each time. She kept her eyes on the oak directly ahead of her, a pale scar down its trunk where lightning had opened it a long time ago, and she breathed. The Heartstone was hot now. Properly hot. A small sullen sun against her skin. "I came because you called me," she said, and her voice sounded very young to her, the Cardiff in it thickening the way it did when she was frightened, when she had been a child and Brendan had been shouting at somebody on the telephone in the next room. "I came. So. So say what you wanted." Behind her, something breathed. It was not a human breath. It was too slow, and too even, and it came from roughly the height of her own throat, which meant whatever was drawing it was standing upright and close enough that she should have felt the air move and did not, because the air in this grove did not move at all. The pendant burned. She caught movement again, at the left edge of her sight — a long pale shape between two of the standing stones, the barest suggestion of a shoulder, of hair, of a face tilted as if listening. When she slid her eyes towards it, it was gone. A cornflower nodded once in the windless air where it had been, and was still. Somewhere above the oaks, very high, a bird cried out a single broken syllable, and the cry came out backwards — the tail of the sound arriving before its beginning. Rory felt it like a cold finger drawn up the inside of her spine. On her left wrist, the small crescent scar throbbed as though it were new again. "Malphora," said a voice at the back of her neck, warm as breath, and Rory, who had never heard that word before in her life, understood with a sudden terrible clarity that it was her name.