Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSJSE55MDXN9EH40TBGFZE6

The oak standing stones rose out of the bracken like the ribs of some long-dead leviathan, grey and lichen-furred, leaning toward one another as though sharing a secret. Rory stopped at their threshold, one hand still gripping the strap of her bag, and felt the hair on her arms lift. "This is it," she said. "It has to be." Beside her, Nyx had thinned into something barely there—a smudge of dusk against the late afternoon light, their violet eyes the only solid thing about them. *I can taste the seam,* they whispered, and the words seemed to arrive less in her ears than at the back of her skull. *The world is worn through here. Step carefully.* Behind the two of them, Eva hovered at the edge of the tree line, arms folded tight across her chest. She'd insisted on coming. Now she looked as though she regretted it. "It's just Richmond Park," she said, though her voice didn't believe itself. "I've had picnics here. There were deer." "There aren't any deer now," Rory said. She was right. The ordinary park noise had drained away without her noticing the exact moment it left—the distant hum of the South Circular, the joggers, the bark of someone's spaniel. The silence that replaced it wasn't empty. It pressed against the ears like deep water. Rory took a breath and stepped between the stones. The cold hit her first, a brief plunge as though she'd walked through a curtain of river-water, and then it was gone and she was standing in summer. The light changed. Where the park behind her had been the flat, bruised grey of an October evening, the air in front of her glowed gold, slanting honey-thick through trees she did not recognize—pale-barked, their leaves silver on the underside so that the whole canopy seemed to breathe and shimmer with each small wind. "Oh," she heard Eva say behind her, very quietly, as she crossed too. "*Oh.*" The grove opened before them, a clearing wider than it had any right to be given the modest ring of stones marking its edge. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in colours Rory had no proper names for—a blue that verged on violet, a red so deep it looked wet, little starbursts of white that turned to follow them as they moved, the way a sunflower tracks the sun. The air smelled of crushed mint and something older underneath it, something like rain on hot stone, like the inside of a cathedral. "Stay close," Rory murmured. "Don't touch anything. Don't eat anything." "Who's eating?" Eva said, but she said it through her teeth. They moved deeper. The grass made no sound beneath their feet, and when Rory glanced back she saw that her own boots had left no mark in it—the blades springing upright again the instant her weight lifted, as if she'd never passed at all. Nyx left no trace either, but then they never did. It was Eva's footprints that unsettled her most: there weren't any. Rory pressed two fingers to the Heartstone pendant at her throat. It lay quiet against her skin, neither warm nor cold. Whatever this place was, it was not Hel. That, at least, was a small mercy. A sound threaded through the trees ahead—water, she realized, the silver run of a stream somewhere close. They followed it. The trees thinned, and there it was: a brook winding through moss-cushioned banks, but the water ran the wrong way. Rory stood and watched it, frowning, until she understood. It was flowing *uphill*, climbing a gentle slope to vanish into a fold of rock, patient and impossible. "That's not—" Eva started. "No," Rory agreed. "It's not." *Time is loose in here,* Nyx said. They had drifted to the water's edge and crouched there, a darkness gathering itself briefly into the shape of a kneeling figure. They did not let their shadow-hand touch the surface. *The stream remembers a shape the land has since forgotten and keeps running it anyway. Do not trust the light to tell you the hour. We may have been here a breath. We may have been here a year.* Eva went pale. "A *year?*" "He's exaggerating," Rory said, though she wasn't certain, and Nyx did not correct her. They went on. The further they pushed into the grove the more the wrongness sweetened into wonder, until Rory caught herself smiling without deciding to. Lights had begun to wake among the flowers as the gold deepened toward evening—small soft motes that rose drifting from the petals, like dandelion seed lit from within, drifting up and up until they joined a slow constellation turning overhead. A bird sang somewhere, three rising notes, and a moment later something answered it that was not a bird, a low chiming run that ached behind the breastbone. "It's beautiful," Eva breathed, and the wariness had gone out of her, which was precisely what made Rory's stomach tighten. "Eva." She caught her friend's sleeve. "Eva, look at me." Eva turned. Her eyes were glassy, and a drifting mote of light had settled in her dark hair like a jewel, and she was smiling at nothing, at everything. "I think I'd like to stay," she said dreamily. "Just a little while. It's so warm here, Rory. Don't you feel it? Like nothing ever has to be difficult again." *That,* whispered Nyx, suddenly close, the cold of them sharpening the air, *is the grove talking. Not her. Wake her before it finishes the sentence.* Rory took Eva by both shoulders and shook her, hard. "Eva. Evan's not here. You're not in Cardiff. You're with me, and we came here to find the seer, and then we're leaving. Say it." For a horrible moment Eva's smile didn't move. Then she blinked, and her face crumpled, and the light fell out of her hair and guttered against the grass. "I—God. I'm sorry. I don't know what—it just felt—" "I know." Rory let go of her gently. "Don't listen to it. It promises easy things." Ahead, where the brook climbed into the rock, the silver birches grew close and tall, and beyond them the air thickened into a soft pearl-coloured haze. Within it, Rory could just make out a paleness moving—a figure with hair like poured moonlight, standing patient at the heart of the haze as though she had been waiting all along, and perhaps she had. The flowers nearest the figure had turned their faces toward her, every one. Rory drew a slow breath. The crescent scar on her wrist prickled, the old way it did before something happened. "She's seen us," she said softly. "Come on. And whatever she says—" she glanced at Eva, then at the shadow at her shoulder— "don't make any promises." She stepped into the haze.