Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G01CXMV3JCBK5TRN32ZCA

The standing stones rose out of the bracken like crooked teeth, older than the park itself, older than the city that had grown up around them. Rory counted seven as she approached, though she was certain she'd counted eight from the path. When she glanced back, there were nine. "Don't," Nyx murmured at her shoulder, their voice the dry rustle of leaves. "Counting them is how it starts. The grove likes games." "The grove likes games," Eva repeated under her breath. "Brilliant. Love that for us." She had her arms wrapped tight around herself, a windbreaker pulled up to her chin though the October air was only mild. Rory caught her friend's sleeve and squeezed. "Stay close. Both of you." Nyx was already drifting ahead, a tall silhouette in the thinning light, the edges of them blurring where dusk leaked into shadow. At the threshold between two oaks they paused, and Rory felt it before she saw it — a pressure against her sternum, as though the air there had thickened into water. The Heartstone lay quiet at her throat, cool and inert. Whatever waited beyond the stones, it was not of Hel. She stepped through. The sound came first. Or rather, the absence of it. The distant groan of London traffic, the sough of planes overhead, the small autumnal rustle of Richmond Park — all of it peeled away in a single breath, like a sheet drawn off a bed. In its place came a low, sweet humming, as though the earth itself were singing through its teeth. Then she saw. The clearing was perhaps thirty paces across and lit by nothing she could name. The sky overhead was the wrong color — not the bruised purple of English twilight but a slow, lilac shimmer, as if someone had poured dawn and dusk into the same glass and stirred. Wildflowers grew everywhere, impossible flowers: foxgloves blooming beside snowdrops beside poppies, all of them open at once, seasons braided together in defiance of the calendar. A small brook cut the meadow in two, and where its water fell over a lip of stone it made the sound of a woman laughing very quietly, very far away. Eva came through the gap and stopped dead, one hand flying to her mouth. "Oh," she said. "Oh, Rory." "Yeah," Rory managed. Her throat had gone tight. She was suddenly aware that her boots made no sound on the grass — not soft, muffled sound, but nothing at all, as though the ground itself refused to acknowledge her weight. Nyx had solidified. They did that sometimes, in places where the boundaries between things were gentler; their shadow-form pulled inward and knit, and now they stood as an almost-man in a long dark coat, their violet eyes the brightest thing in the clearing. They tilted their head, listening to something Rory couldn't hear. "The Veil is thin here," they said. "Very thin. Feel it?" Rory did, once she tried. A shimmer in the air above the brook, like heat rising off tarmac — except it was cold, and it moved against the breeze, and when she turned her head quickly she thought she caught, through the distortion, a different meadow entirely. One with two moons. "Don't look too long," Nyx warned. "Wasn't planning to." They moved deeper. Eva stuck close to Rory's elbow, her breath quick and shallow, and Rory felt a protective ache she hadn't known in years — the old Cardiff ache, the one that used to mean Eva was about to do something stupid on a dare. She caught Eva's hand and wove their fingers together. Eva's palm was damp. "How long have we been in?" Eva whispered. Rory checked her watch. The second hand was dragging itself forward in slow, reluctant jerks, pausing between each tick as though uncertain it wanted to continue. She watched it take three full seconds to cross from one number to the next, then skip back a notch, then forward again. "I have no idea," she said. The brook turned them east. Or what felt like east; the lilac sky offered no sun to orient by. Along the bank, mushrooms pushed up through the moss in a perfect, deliberate curve, white-capped and faintly luminous. Eva reached toward one and Nyx caught her wrist without looking. "No." "I wasn't going to—" "No." She drew her hand back as if burned. A deer stepped out of the tree line on the far side of the brook. It was the wrong shape. Too tall at the shoulder, too slender, and its antlers branched in spirals like script Rory couldn't read. It regarded them with eyes the color of old coins, unafraid, unhurried, and then it lowered its head to drink. The water ran gold around its muzzle. "Rory," Eva breathed. "Rory, Rory, Rory—" "I see it." "We shouldn't be here." "No," Rory agreed quietly. "We probably shouldn't." But she didn't turn back. Something had hooked her under the ribs — not the pendant, something older, something that felt suspiciously like her own curiosity with its teeth in her. She had stepped out of a Cardiff lecture theatre eight months ago and fallen, by increments, into a world that kept widening beneath her. Every time she thought she'd found its floor, another trapdoor opened. This grove was another trapdoor. She could feel the drop of it in her stomach. The humming grew louder as they followed the brook. It was coming from a great oak at the centre of the clearing — an oak so vast Rory could not have put her arms around a third of it, its bark silvered with lichen, its roots lifting out of the ground to form a kind of low stone hollow underneath. Candles burned among the roots, though there was no wind to threaten them and no wax pooled beneath. A thread of smoke rose from a clay bowl and did not disperse; it hung in the air in a slow, perfect spiral. Eva made a small, strangled noise. The shadow beneath the oak moved. It was not Nyx's kind of shadow. This was a shape resolving out of stillness — a woman seated cross-legged on the moss, silver hair spilling past her waist and into the roots. She had not been there a moment before. Rory would have sworn it. The woman raised her face, and her eyes were pale lavender and entirely without surprise. "You're late," Isolde Varga said, and smiled. "Or early. I never can tell the difference with mortals. Come in, come in — you're letting the quiet out." Rory's hand tightened around Eva's. Beside her, Nyx gave the smallest, driest laugh, as though to a joke only they understood. And the grove closed gently behind them, like a mouth.