Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G6DG9ZJ5QVKJFVR2CRD7X

The Tube had stopped running an hour ago, but Rory had walked the rest of the way from Richmond station with the pendant warming against her sternum like a second pulse. It wasn't supposed to do that here. The Grove was no Hel portal. Still, the Heartstone had hummed against her skin the whole walk up Queen's Road, and she'd taken that as invitation rather than warning. Stupid, probably. She'd had worse ideas. The park gates were locked, of course, but Eva had shown her the gap in the railings near Sheen Gate the week before, and Rory slipped through with the easy practice of someone who'd delivered curry to a hundred difficult addresses. Her torch she kept pointed at the ground. Deer moved in the dark here, big enough to put a dent in a car, and she had no interest in startling one. The path beyond the bracken thinned into what wasn't quite a path. She knew the way by the feel of it — a tug under the ribs, the same pull she'd felt the first time Isolde had brought her here. Tonight the pull was stronger. Tonight it wanted her. The oak stones rose out of the mist before she saw them. Four of them, black against a sky that had forgotten how to be black — too pale, too close, as though someone had stretched a grey sheet six feet above the treetops. Rory stopped at the boundary. "Isolde?" Her voice didn't carry. It went two feet from her mouth and dropped, like a stone into wool. She stepped through. The temperature changed on the inside of the stones, the way it did crossing a threshold into a warm house, except the Grove wasn't warm — it was merely different. Her breath no longer ghosted. The wildflowers were out, as they always were: foxglove and bluebell and something paler that she'd never learnt the name for. Moonlight lay across the clearing in a thick even wash, though she could see no moon. "Isolde, it's Rory. You asked me to come." Nothing answered. That in itself wasn't odd. Isolde kept her own hours, and the Grove bent time the way a lens bent light — Rory might have arrived early by days, or late by the same. She found the flat stone she always sat on and sat. The pendant pulsed once, firmly, against her breastbone. She curled her fingers around it. "All right. I'm listening." The wind moved. That was the first wrong thing. It shouldn't have moved, because there was no wind inside the stones. Isolde had explained it once — something about the air here being held, the way water was held in a bowl. But a breath of something passed over the back of Rory's neck, carrying a smell she couldn't place. Not quite iron. Not quite wet leaves. She turned. The treeline stood where it had always stood. Foxgloves nodded in a wind she still couldn't feel on her face. "Hello?" A fox, she thought. A badger. Something low and reasonable. She waited a full minute before she let herself look away. When she did, she caught the movement at the edge of her vision — a flicker, pale, between two of the farther trunks. By the time her eyes reached it, it was gone. "Isolde, if that's you, stop mucking about." A laugh. Small, bright, and not Isolde's. Rory stood up. The laugh had come from behind her, from the direction of the stone she'd just risen off. She turned and the clearing was empty. Foxgloves. Bluebells. The stone, blank and cold under the wrong moonlight. The pendant at her throat had gone from warm to hot — a small, insistent burn, as though someone were pressing the pad of a thumb against her sternum and leaning in. She tried to remember what Isolde had told her about the Grove after dark. You'll be safe inside the stones. Always inside. The phrasing came back to her now with an edge it hadn't had at the time. Safe from what, exactly? Isolde had smiled and changed the subject, and Rory, being Rory, had let her. Another flicker. Closer this time. Not between the trunks but under them, low to the ground, the shape of something that had stood up from a crouch and then decided, quickly, not to. "Right," Rory said, mostly to hear a human voice. "Right. I'm going." She started toward the stones. Her own footsteps made no sound. She stopped. Lifted a boot. Put it down deliberately on dry leaf-litter that should have crackled like a bonfire. Nothing. Just the soft, inoffensive give of something that had agreed to keep her secret. Behind her, very distinctly, a twig broke. She didn't turn. She knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence, that turning would be a mistake. That whatever stood behind her was waiting for her face, and that it had been waiting a long time, and that it would be patient about it if she wasn't careful. She walked. The stones looked further away than they had been. That was a trick of the eye, she told herself. Shock did that. Adrenaline did that. The Grove was small — twenty paces across, no more. She had walked into it in twenty paces. She would walk out in twenty. At thirty, she was still walking. The pendant was a coal against her skin now. Something was breathing — not behind her, that would have been simpler, but around her, the way a room breathes when you've been alone in it too long and suddenly realise you haven't been. "Isolde," she tried again. Her voice came out thinner. "Please." A voice answered, and it was almost Isolde's. The cadence was right. The warmth was right. Only the vowels sat wrong in the mouth, as though the speaker had learnt the word in a mirror. "Aurora. You came." It had come from in front of her now. From between her and the stones. She stopped walking. She kept her eyes on her boots, on the pale crescent of scar on her left wrist where her sleeve had ridden up, on anything that was hers and known and would not lie to her. The footsteps that approached her through the flowers made no sound at all.