Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXJVYSR3BMED4YD0K67EDF

The standing stones came first—gnarled oaks twisted into pillars, bark grey as old bone, leaning toward one another like conspirators. Aurora pressed her palm against the nearest one and felt it hum. "It's warm," she said. "Wood shouldn't be warm." Behind her, Nyx flickered at the edge of the treeline, their silhouette thinning where the afternoon light struck it. "Little in this place obeys what should and shouldn't be. Step through. The stones decide who passes." "And if they decide I shouldn't?" "Then you won't remember coming here at all." She glanced back. Eva hovered three paces behind, arms wrapped around herself, her trainers caked with Richmond mud. The ordinary world sat just over the rise—joggers, dog-walkers, the distant drone of the South Circular. None of it reached this far. Aurora drew a breath and walked between the oaks. The sound went out of the world. Not silence exactly, but a swallowing, as though someone had pressed thumbs against her eardrums. Then it returned all at once, doubled, tripled—birdsong she didn't recognise, a low chiming like wind through hollow glass, the wet rush of water somewhere ahead. She stood in the grove. "Bloody hell," Eva breathed, stumbling through after her. The clearing spread wide and impossible. Wildflowers grew in tangled riot—bluebells beside poppies beside blooms Aurora had no name for, petals the colour of bruised plums, others that glowed faintly from within like banked coals. They covered the ground in every direction, and not one of them belonged to the same season. Snowdrops nodded beside summer foxgloves. The air smelled of honey and cold stone and something underneath, green and ancient. "It's June out there," Aurora said. "And February. And every month at once in here." "How is that—" Eva crouched, reaching toward a flower that turned, slowly, to follow her hand. She snatched it back. "It moved." "They watch," Nyx said. They had solidified now, fully formed, six feet and more of living dark standing among the bright petals like a wound in the canvas. Their violet eyes drifted across the clearing. "Touch nothing you don't intend to keep. The Grove remembers what is taken from it." Aurora moved deeper. Beneath her boots the grass gave like moss, springing back without a print. She looked down and frowned. No track marked her passage. The flowers she'd brushed stood unbent. "Nyx. I'm not leaving footprints." "You're treading in a place between places. It hasn't decided you were ever here." The Shade said it without weight, the way another might mention rain. A brook cut through the centre of the clearing, water running over stones that shone too brightly to be ordinary pebbles. Aurora knelt at its edge. Beneath the surface, the bed glittered—not gold, not silver, but a thousand fractured colours shifting as the water passed over them. When she leaned closer, her own reflection stared back, and then it wasn't her. The face in the water was older, weary, a thin scar she didn't have running across its cheek. She jerked away. "What did you see?" Eva crouched beside her. "Nothing." Aurora wiped her hands on her jeans. The not-quite-her had unsettled something in her chest. "Don't look in the water." The chiming sound grew louder as they followed the brook. Aurora found its source—a stand of trees with leaves of thin silver, each one ringing softly against its neighbours when the breeze stirred them. The wind itself seemed to have moods. It would push warm and sweet, then turn, in the space of a breath, into a cold draught that smelled of frost and made the hairs on her arms stand. "This place is alive," she said. "Not like a forest. Like a thing that knows we're walking around inside it." "You're catching on quick." Nyx drifted ahead, their feet not quite meeting the ground. "Most mortals stand at the stones gaping for an hour before they understand they've already been measured." "Measured for what?" "Whether you're worth speaking to." Eva had stopped. She stood very still, staring at a tree to their left—an oak, broad and old, its trunk split by a hollow large enough to step into. Within the dark of it, something pale flickered. A face. Then gone. "Rory." Eva's voice had gone thin. "There's someone in the tree." Aurora turned. The hollow yawned empty, ringed by bark worn smooth as if hands had passed across it for centuries. But the unease coiled in her gut, the certain animal knowledge of being observed. "We're not alone here," she said. "You were never going to be." Nyx had gone half-transparent again, their form unsettled, drawn thin toward the deeper shadows beyond the silver trees. "She knows you've come. She's known since before you climbed the hill." The light changed. Aurora looked up and her breath caught. The sky above the grove was not the sky she'd left. The blue had deepened to something closer to dusk, though no sun had set, and threaded across it ran faint ribbons of colour—aurora-light, slow and rippling, green folding into violet folding into rose. Stars showed through it in the early afternoon, more than she had ever seen, arranged in patterns that pricked at the edge of memory and refused to resolve. "That's not our sky," Eva whispered. "Half of it isn't." Nyx's whisper came from everywhere and nowhere. "You stand with one foot in your world and one in hers. Look long enough and you'll forget which is which. Don't look long enough." Aurora pulled her gaze down with effort. The pendant at her throat sat cool and still—no warmth, no pulse. Whatever this place was, it was no door to Hel. It was older, stranger, harder to name. A path had opened ahead of them where she was certain none had been—a trail of flattened gold flowers leading between two leaning stones toward a hollow deeper in the grove, where the wildflower-light glowed brightest. "It wants us to follow," Aurora said. "It wants *you* to follow." Nyx flowed back to her side, solid once more, their violet eyes fixed on the path. "Your friend it merely tolerates. And I—" something almost like a smile moved through their voice, "—the Grove and I have an old quarrel. I'll come no further than the water." Aurora looked at the golden path, then at Eva's pale, frightened face, then back at the glow waiting at the end of it. "Then I suppose she's expecting me," she said, and stepped onto the trail.