Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GFJ7EJCC9FRCNK5CANZNY

Rory hated Richmond Park at night. She hated it more now that she'd slipped the railings on Eva's insistence, pendant warm against her sternum, a penlight jammed between her teeth because her phone had died somewhere between Roehampton Gate and the long, hushed slope of bracken that led here. "You'll know it when you see it," Eva had said. "Two oaks like tall door frames. Just — don't step between them unless you have to." She had to. That was the whole point. Isolde had asked for her, and one did not keep the Fae waiting, not even when they smiled. The oaks rose out of the dark like black teeth. Rory stood a long moment at the boundary, listening. London's hum, the one you stopped hearing until it was gone, wasn't there. No planes. No low thresh of traffic from the A3. The quiet pressed against her ears until they rang. She stepped through. The air changed at once. Warmer. Sweet, the way a fridge is sweet when something in it has turned. Wildflowers crowded her shins — foxgloves and cornflowers and a starburst of something white she didn't know the name of, all of them blooming in November. The moon above the grove sat fat and unmoving, a little too yellow, a little too close, and she couldn't see a single cloud cross it though the trees at the edge of the clearing were shivering like there was a wind she couldn't feel. "Isolde?" Her voice came out too small. She cleared her throat. "Isolde, it's Rory. You sent for me." Nothing answered. The grove ought to have been full of Isolde's attendants, or at least those glimmery little lights that drifted between the stalks like ideas you couldn't quite catch. Tonight the grass was empty and the stones stood alone. She took another step in. The flowers whispered against her jeans. Somewhere behind her, on the far side of the oaks, a branch cracked — that sharp, deliberate crack of weight settling onto wood. She turned. The penlight's thin beam found nothing but the standing stones and the black gap between them, the park beyond folded away into a soft velvet dark. "Hello?" The crack came again. Closer. Not from behind her now — from her right, deeper in the grove, where the tree line thickened and the moonlight didn't reach. The Heartstone pulsed. It was the faintest thing, a nudge of heat against her breastbone, as if someone on the other side of her skin had pressed a thumb there. She flattened her palm against the pendant. The silver chain was cold. The stone, through her shirt, was not. Hel portals, she thought, and the thought was so stupid and so bright she almost laughed. Here. In Isolde's grove. The laugh died in her throat. Something moved at the edge of her vision. Not a shape — a suggestion of one, tall and narrow, the way a coat on a rack becomes a person at three in the morning. When she turned her head it was only a sapling, leaves still, perfectly still, while the trees behind it kept that soundless shivering. She held the penlight on the sapling until her arm began to ache. It did not move. She almost convinced herself. Then the flowers at the far side of the grove bowed down in a long, slow line, as though something heavy had walked through them, and rose up again behind — nothing. No one. Only the wildflowers, trembling their way back upright. Rory's breath left her in a tight little huff. "Okay," she said, mostly to hear a human voice. "Okay, okay." She began to walk back toward the oaks. Not running. Running felt like an invitation, though she couldn't have said to what. She was three paces from the stones when she heard the humming. It came from behind her, low and tuneless, the way her mother used to hum while marking books at the kitchen table in Cardiff, only her mother had been able to hold a tune and this thing could not, or would not. The melody stumbled. Caught. Tried again. It was nearly a song Rory knew. The almost-ness of it was worse than a scream. She did not turn around. "Rory." Her own name, in her own voice, spoken just at the edge of the tree line. Perfect pitch. Perfect cadence. Her lungs locked. "Rory, wait." She walked faster. The oaks seemed further than they had been. She could see the gap between them, the ordinary dark of the park beyond, but the flowers kept crowding her ankles, tugging, and the grove — the grove was longer than it had any right to be. The stones retreated as she approached them. Not by much. Just enough that each step didn't quite close the distance it should. "Rory, don't leave me here." Her voice again. Cracking now, the way it had cracked in the hallway of the Cardiff flat the night she'd finally packed her bag while Evan slept. Whatever was behind her knew that voice. Had heard it somewhere. Had kept it. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to hurt. Rory broke into a run. The flowers snatched at her calves. Something laughed — not cruelly, almost fondly — and the laugh was close, oh god, close, a breath's-width behind her left ear. She did not look. She would not look. Her childhood scar prickled on her wrist as if the old cut remembered being new. She hit the gap between the oaks shoulder-first, the bark scraping her arm, and tumbled out onto wet bracken that smelled, blessedly, of ordinary rot. The roar of a plane rolled across the sky. A distant siren whined somewhere past Kingston. The world, with its filthy lovely noise, rushed back in. Rory lay in the leaf-mould and stared up at a sky that was a normal colour of black, and listened to her own ragged breath, and did not get up for a long time. Behind her, inside the grove, the humming had stopped. But the flowers, just inside the stones, were still bowing down in a long, slow line — toward the boundary — as if something were walking, patient and unhurried, to the place where she had stood.