Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXPEEFSAN5SCJ41Y826HB7

The note had said midnight, and Rory hated that it had said midnight. She pressed through the gap between the standing stones, the ancient oaks rising like petrified sentinels on either side, their bark gone silver under a moon she could no longer quite see. Richmond Park had been ordinary enough on the walk in—the smell of wet grass, the distant grind of traffic past the gates, a fox barking somewhere off toward the ponds. Ordinary. Then she'd crossed the threshold between the stones, and the ordinary had simply stopped. The traffic. The fox. The wind. All of it. Rory stood still and listened to the silence, and it listened back. The Fae Grove unrolled before her, a clearing that had no business existing inside a London park. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere despite it being the dead of October—foxglove and cornflower, primrose pale as bone, every petal lit from within by a light that came from nowhere. There was no moon overhead. There was no sky overhead, exactly. There was a kind of luminous dark, a held-breath grey that made her think of the moment after a candle is snuffed, when the eye still insists it can see. "Hello?" she said. Her voice didn't carry. It dropped at her feet like a stone into deep water and was gone. She'd come because of the letter. *If you want to understand what you are, come to the grove at midnight. Come alone.* No signature. The same elegant, slanting hand that had once accompanied the pendant now warming against her sternum. She touched it through her shirt—the Heartstone, deep crimson, no bigger than her thumbnail. It pulsed against her skin, a faint heartbeat answering her own, a little quicker than she'd like. That was wrong, too. It only did that near a portal. Rory let her hand fall and made herself breathe slow. *Cool head. Think.* That was the thing she was good at, the thing that had gotten her out of Cardiff and out of worse than Cardiff. She catalogued the clearing the way she'd been taught to catalogue a witness statement—for the things that didn't fit. The flowers didn't move. There was no wind, so why should they—but they leaned. Subtly. Toward her, the way sunflowers track the sun. When she turned her head they were upright again, innocent, and the certainty that they'd been leaning curdled in her gut. The light didn't flicker. The shadows did. She caught the first one at the edge of her vision, low against the treeline—a shape that detached itself from the dark between two oaks and slid sideways, smooth as oil, and was gone before she could turn. She turned anyway. Nothing. Wildflowers. The pale gleam of standing stones. The grove looked at her with its lovely, blooming, empty face. "I'm here," she called, and hated how thin she sounded. "You wanted me here. So talk." Nothing answered. But the pendant flared—a hot little throb, almost a sting—and somewhere behind her, very softly, a child laughed. Rory's whole body went cold. She knew that laugh. It was Eva's, from when they were small, from the garden behind the Ellis house with the broken trampoline—a high, delighted, breathless giggle that Rory hadn't heard in twenty years because people don't laugh like that once they grow up. It came from directly behind her, close enough that she should have felt breath on her neck. She did not turn around. Some animal part of her, older than her cleverness, locked her spine rigid and screamed *do not look.* She stared straight ahead at the standing stones, at the way out, and counted her own heartbeats, and the laugh came again—closer now, intimate, just over her right shoulder. A wet, contented sound, the sound of something that has been waiting a long time and is pleased. "You're not Eva," Rory whispered. The laughing stopped. In the silence that followed she heard, for the first time, the breathing. Not hers. It was huge and slow and patient, and it surrounded her—it came from the trees, the flowers, the grey not-sky, as though the entire grove were one vast sleeping lung and she was a mote of dust caught at the back of its throat. In. Out. The flowers swayed with it. *Of course they leaned,* she thought wildly. *They breathe with it. They've always breathed with it.* She took a step toward the stones. The breathing quickened to match her. She took another. The grass beneath her boots was suddenly longer, wetter, coiling around her ankles, and the standing stones—which had been twenty feet away—were now thirty. Forty. The clearing was stretching, opening, the treeline peeling back like a pupil dilating in the dark, and the more she walked the farther the way out receded, and the pendant against her chest was burning now, burning like a coal, screaming *portal, portal, portal* as if she didn't already know that she had walked through a door that was never meant to open for her. Rory stopped. Forced herself to stop. *It feeds on the running. Don't run.* She made herself stand perfectly still in the long wet grass, in the breathing dark, and she did the only thing she could think to do—she did nothing. She refused to give it the chase. And slowly, sullenly, the grove settled. The grass loosened. The stones drifted back to their proper distance, twenty feet, no more. The breathing softened into something almost like sleep. But she was not alone now, and she knew it utterly, the way you know in the dark of your bedroom that someone is sitting on the end of your bed. Something stood among the flowers to her left, just past the turn of her head, tall and patient and not quite still. She could see the suggestion of it in the corner of her eye—pale, narrow, wrong in its proportions, a height that bent at the wrong place. It did not move when she held still. It waited for her to look. "I'm not going to look at you," Rory said softly. Her voice didn't drop this time. The grove had decided to let her be heard. "I came for answers. Give them to me, and I'll go." A long pause. The flowers leaned. Then, from the tall pale shape that she would not, would not turn to see, came a voice like wind through a keyhole—courteous, ancient, and delighted. "But you came alone, little Malphora," it said. "And no one ever leaves a grove the way they came."