Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1G3C1WCMF61ZS6T7EFXZ3C

The standing stones came out of the dark like teeth. Rory had expected something grander — an archway, maybe, or a curtain of light, the kind of thing that announced itself. Instead there were only the oaks, two of them, leaning toward each other across a gap in the bracken with their bark gnarled into shapes that almost looked like faces if she let her eyes drift. Richmond Park lay behind her, ordinary and damp, the distant orange smear of London glowing against the underside of the clouds. Ahead of her, past the stones, the world simply stopped making sense. "This is it," Nyx said. Their voice arrived the way it always did, less a sound than a suggestion of one, a whisper threaded through the cold air. In the gloom they were barely more than a deeper patch of night, a tall smear of shadow that shifted at the edges. Their violet eyes were the only fixed points. "Past the threshold, the rules loosen. Stay close to me." "That's reassuring," Rory muttered. The Heartstone hung cool against her sternum, dormant now — no portal here, then, whatever else there was. She wrapped her fingers around the dagger at her hip out of habit. The moonsilver was cold even through the leather wrap, the way it always was, but tonight it seemed colder, as though it recognized where they were going. Isolde's gift, coming home. She stepped between the stones. The change wasn't gradual. One foot fell on wet English grass and the next came down on something warmer, springier, and the sound of the city — that low constant hum she'd stopped hearing years ago — vanished as cleanly as if someone had closed a door. Rory's ears rang with the absence of it. She turned to look behind her and found the park gone. There were the oaks, yes, but beyond them was only more grove, more impossible green, folding away into a soft luminous distance that had no London in it at all. "Don't," Nyx said, materializing into something nearly solid at her shoulder. They had a shape now, six feet and more of him, the silhouette firming into the suggestion of a long coat, a narrow face. "Looking back, the first time. It can unsettle you. The way out isn't where you left it." "Brilliant." Her breath caught anyway, because she had turned forward again and the grove had stolen it. It was night here too, but a night that did not behave. There was no moon she could find, yet everything glowed with a gentle borrowed silver, as though the air itself held light the way water holds warmth. Wildflowers grew everywhere — and not in clusters, not in beds, but in drifts and rivers of them, foxglove beside snowdrop beside something with petals like spun glass that she had no name for, blossoms that had no business sharing a season blooming shoulder to shoulder. Spring and autumn and high summer all at once. The smell of them was thick and layered, honey and crushed green and something underneath, older, that made the back of her throat tighten. "It's beautiful," she said, and hated how small her voice sounded. "It's a snare." That was the third of them — Eva, hanging back near the stones with her arms crossed tight over her chest. Her friend's face had gone pale and set. "Beautiful things in places like this are usually snares. You taught me that, Rory." "I read it in a book. Same as you." But Eva wasn't wrong, and they both knew it, and the knowing sat between them as they began to walk. The grass gave under Rory's boots without a sound. She glanced down once and saw, in the silver glow, that she left prints — dark crushed shapes pressing into the dewed green. Nyx left nothing; shadows kept no weight. And ahead of them, picked out faint as breath on glass, ran a line of footprints already pressed into the grass, leading deeper in, the toes pointed away from the stones. Rory crouched and held her fingers above one without touching it. "Someone went this way," she said. "No." Nyx's eyeshine narrowed. "Look again." She looked. The prints were too few — three, four of them, then nothing, as if whoever made them had simply stopped existing in the middle of a stride. Or as if the grove had only bothered to remember part of their passage. "The Seer leaves no prints at all," Nyx said softly. "These belong to someone else. Or to no one. Time pools strangely here. You may be looking at footsteps that haven't been walked yet." Rory stood up rather faster than she meant to. They went on. The light shifted as they moved, never brightening, never dimming, but changing its angle in a way that made the shadows of the wildflowers wheel slowly around their stems like the hands of clocks all set to different hours. Once Rory heard music — pipes, high and aching, somewhere off to the left — and she turned toward it before Nyx's cold not-quite-hand closed around her wrist. "That isn't for you," they said. "Nothing you hear in here is for you unless it says your name. And even then." She pulled free, rubbing the spot where their touch had numbed her skin, right over the small crescent scar on her wrist. The music faded behind a stand of silver birch that she could have sworn hadn't been there a moment ago. Eva had gone quiet, walking close at Rory's shoulder, her breath shallow. "How long have we been in here?" "I don't know." Rory checked her phone. The screen was a smear of meaningless light, the numbers crawling, 11:04 dissolving into 11:04 dissolving into something that wasn't a time at all. She slid it back into her pocket. "I don't think it counts the same way." "An hour in here might be a minute out there," Nyx murmured. "Or your mother might be old before we leave. The grove decides. It's why so few come twice." The path — and it was a path now, the wildflowers thinning to either side of a corridor of moss so soft and deep it swallowed her ankles — bent around a great fallen oak, its trunk wider than a car, and beyond it the land opened into a clearing. Rory stopped breathing. A pool lay at its center, perfectly round, perfectly still, and the not-moon she had failed to find anywhere in the sky was reflected in it whole and bright, a coin of pale fire on black water. Around the pool the standing flowers stood taller than people, their blooms turned inward like a congregation. And the silence here had weight, the held-breath silence of a place that knew it was being looked at. The Fae blade at her hip had begun, faintly, to glow. "We're close," Rory whispered. The cold of the moonsilver was bleeding through her trouser leg now, an ache in the bone. "She's near." Nyx's violet eyes had fixed on the far side of the pool, where the moss gave way to deeper dark beneath a single colossal oak. "Yes," they said, and for the first time since she'd met them, the whisper held something that sounded almost like caution. "And she already knows we're here. She's known since before we did." Out across the still water, the reflected moon trembled once, as though something had passed in front of it — and there had been nothing in the sky to pass. Rory's hand found the dagger's grip. "Then let's not keep her waiting," she said, and stepped out onto the moss, into the light that wasn't moonlight, toward the dark beneath the oldest tree she had ever seen.