Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSK43AVAER6JZZ1NX9X5R4M

The directions Eva had given her ended at the line of oaks, and Rory stood there for a long moment, deciding whether she truly meant to step past them. Richmond Park at this hour was a country of shadows. She'd left the car on a verge two miles back, where the road dwindled into a rutted track, and walked the rest by the light of her phone until the battery had dropped to a sullen red sliver and she'd switched it off to save what was left. Now there was only the moon, three-quarters full and high, laying a thin silver wash over the grass. The deer were somewhere out in the dark; she'd heard them earlier, the soft thud of hooves, a bark that carried strange and hollow across the open ground. She heard nothing of them now. The oaks rose ahead of her in a rough ring, eight or nine of them, far older than any tree she'd seen in the park by daylight. Their trunks were thick as cottage walls and split with age, and they stood too evenly spaced to be an accident of seeding. Standing stones, Eva had called them, though they were wood and not stone. Mark the boundary, she'd said, and wouldn't say of what. Rory came for answers. That was the reason she held on to, the one she repeated to herself as she crossed the last few yards of ordinary grass. Three weeks of half-glimpsed things and dreams that left her waking with her heart slamming, and the pendant — she pressed her palm flat against her sternum, where it hung beneath her jacket — the pendant that had started all of it. Eva swore the Grove held what she needed. So she stepped between two of the oaks. The change was immediate, and it was the silence that struck her first. Outside the ring, the night had its own quiet busyness: wind moving the high grass, the distant grumble of a city that never fully slept, the small clicks and rustles of living things. Inside, all of that fell away as cleanly as if she had walked into a sealed room. Her own footsteps went soft and muffled. The air was warmer here, and it carried the heavy sweetness of flowers — and that was wrong too, because it was late autumn, and yet the clearing before her was thick with blossom. Wildflowers crowded the grass in pale clusters, foxglove and cornflower and others she had no name for, all of them glowing faintly in the moonlight, all of them in full summer bloom. "Right," she said aloud, just to hear a voice. The word landed flat, swallowed before it could echo. "Right." She walked forward into the clearing. The flowers brushed her shins, releasing more of that cloying scent with every step, and she found she was holding her breath against it without quite knowing why. The pendant lay cool against her skin. She'd half hoped it would do something — warm, pulse, give her a sign that she'd come to the right place. It did nothing at all, and somehow that was worse. She was perhaps twenty paces in when she heard the laugh. It was light and bright and very brief, a child's laugh, coming from the trees on her left. Rory turned toward it. The oaks stood black and still. Nothing moved between them. "Hello?" Her own voice was unsteady now. "Eva? Is someone there?" No answer. She told herself it had been a fox — they could sound like that, like babies crying, like people, everyone knew that. She told herself this firmly and did not believe it, because the laugh had been a laugh, joyful and knowing, and a fox did not laugh as if it had seen something funny that you had not yet noticed. She kept walking. She didn't decide to; her feet simply carried her on, deeper toward the centre of the clearing where the grass thinned into a worn circle of bare earth. And as she went, she became aware that the quality of the dark had changed. The moon still hung above her, but its light seemed to be reaching her from further away now, dimmer, as though she were looking up through water. The flowers had lost their glow. The treeline, when she glanced back, looked further off than the distance she'd walked. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She snapped her head round and it was gone — but she'd seen it, a shape low and quick, pale, darting between two of the oaks. Her breath came short. She turned a slow circle, scanning the ring of trees, and now they were everywhere and nowhere, these movements: a flicker to her right, a stirring of grass to her left that the still air could not explain, the suggestion of a face that dissolved the moment her eyes found it. "Stop it," she whispered. "Whatever you are. Stop it." The laughter came again, and this time it was not one voice but several, soft and overlapping, rising up all around her in a delighted murmur that prickled the hairs along her arms. It was the sound of people very pleased that she had finally arrived. The sound of guests waiting for the party to begin. That was when the pendant moved. She felt it first as heat — a sudden bloom of warmth against her breastbone, sharp enough that she gasped and pressed her hand to it through her jacket. It was pulsing. She could feel the rhythm of it through the fabric, a steady throb like a second heartbeat, quickening. She dragged the chain out from her collar. The Heartstone hung from her fist, and its crimson stone was no longer faintly aglow but burning, an angry coal-red light that threw the shadows of her fingers across her face. Warmth when near a Hel portal. The words surfaced from somewhere — the note that had come with the thing, in handwriting she didn't recognise. She had read them and thought them nonsense. The murmuring stopped. In the absolute silence that followed, Rory understood, with a cold and total certainty that had nothing to do with reason, that she was being looked at. Not glimpsed at the edges of things, not teased — looked at, full and steady, by something directly ahead of her in the dark beyond the bare circle of earth. She did not want to raise her eyes. Every animal part of her urged her to keep them down, to be still, to be small. The pendant blazed in her hand, hot now, almost too hot to hold. She raised her eyes. The clearing stretched away from her, empty and silver and wrong, and at its far edge the air had begun, very slowly, to open.