Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSJPJ5ACVS3FCSSWYWRZSVB

The standing stones caught the moonlight like teeth. Rory ducked between two of the ancient oaks, their bark gnarled into shapes that her eyes kept insisting were faces, and stepped into the Grove. The pendant lay cool against her sternum. No warmth, no pulse. Whatever the woman at the market had promised would be waiting for her here, it had nothing to do with a Hel portal. "Right," she breathed. "I'm here. Let's get this over with." The wildflowers nodded in a wind she couldn't feel. That was the first wrong thing. She'd noticed it before she'd named it — a stillness pressed against her skin, the air dead and close as a held breath, and yet the petals around her ankles swayed. Bluebells, foxglove, something pale that she didn't have a name for. They bent in unison, then righted themselves, then bent again, as though something walked among them that she could not see. Rory stood very still. "Hello?" Her voice didn't carry the way it should have. It fell from her mouth and dropped, swallowed by grass, gone before it reached the tree line. She tried again, louder, and the same thing happened. The clearing took the sound and kept it. She checked her phone. No signal, which she'd expected — Eva had warned her the Grove ate signals — but the time read 11:47, then she blinked and it read 11:47 still, and then the numbers weren't numbers at all but a smear of light she couldn't focus on. She shoved it back in her pocket. The moon sat directly overhead. It hadn't moved. She was fairly sure it hadn't moved since she'd arrived, though she couldn't have said how long that had been. A minute. An hour. The thought slid through her like cold water and she pushed it down. "I was told to come here," she announced, to the trees, to the flowers, to whatever bent the grass. "Someone left a message. So. I'm listening." Behind her, something laughed. She spun. Nothing. The oaks stood patient in their ring, and beyond them the dark was complete, no city glow, no orange smear of London on the horizon where London should have been. Just black, and the standing stones, and the silver grass. The laugh hadn't been cruel. That was the worst of it. It had been delighted — a child's laugh, high and bright and quickly bitten off, the sound of someone hiding who couldn't quite hold it in. "Hello?" she said again, and hated how her voice shook now. The flowers near the eastern stones bent flat. A line of them, pressed down as if by a footstep, and then the one beside it, and then the next, a trail moving away from her toward the trees. Something walking. Something with weight. She watched the grass flatten and rise, flatten and rise, and she could not see a single thing making it happen. Rory's hand found the pendant. Still cold. "That's not helpful," she whispered to it. "You're meant to be helpful." The trail of crushed flowers stopped. Then it turned. And began, with the same unhurried patience, to come back toward her. She stepped back. Her heel met something soft and she nearly fell — looked down — a fox, dead, curled neat as a sleeping cat in the flowers. No mark on it. Its eyes were open and dry. She hadn't trodden there a moment ago. She was certain she hadn't. The grass around it was undisturbed, no scuffle, no struggle, as though it had simply lain down in the perfect centre of the clearing and decided to stop. The flattening grass reached the fox. Paused. Then continued around it, giving it a wide and almost respectful berth, and resumed its path toward her feet. "Okay. Okay." She backed toward the stones she'd come through, eyes fixed on the moving grass. "I'm leaving. Whatever you are, I'm — I'm going home now, this was a mistake, I'm —" Her shoulder struck oak. She turned to slip between the stones and found the gap had closed. Not closed. The trees had not moved. But the dark between them, which had been a way out, was simply not a way out anymore — it was the same flat black as everywhere else, and when she put her hand toward it her fingers met cold, smooth bark where there had been open air. She pressed both palms against it. Solid. She pushed, and the wood gave back nothing, and from somewhere very close behind her the child laughed again. This time it didn't stop. It went on, that bright giggling sound, climbing, and other voices joined it — more children, a whole ring of them, circling, and under the laughter ran a wet clicking she felt in her back teeth more than heard. The flowers around her had all bent flat now, in every direction, a hundred invisible feet, and the moon overhead had begun, very slowly, to dim. "What do you want?" She had her back to the stone and her arms out and she could see nothing, nothing at all, only the silver grass going grey as the light died. "I didn't come here for this. Tell me what you want." The laughing cut out. The silence that replaced it had a texture. It pressed on her ears like depth, like the bottom of a lake, and into it a voice spoke — not from in front or behind but from inside the hush itself, close as her own pulse, a voice that knew the shape of her name before she'd given it. "Aurora." The pendant, against her chest, went suddenly and savagely hot. She gasped and clutched it through her shirt, the crimson light bleeding red between her fingers, and in that red glow she saw — for one half of one second, before the moon guttered out entirely — exactly how many of them stood in the ring of trees, watching her, smiling, and exactly how close the nearest one had come. Then the dark took the Grove, and she was not alone in it.