Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1G65F60N0TA9K66WA603PC

The standing stones came up out of the dark like teeth. Rory saw them before she understood what she was seeing — six oaks grown impossibly close, their trunks fused at the base, their crowns leaning inward as if straining to whisper to one another. The note Eva had pressed into her palm had said only this: *Richmond Park, the grove past the Pen Ponds, after moonrise. Come alone. Bring the pendant.* No signature. No explanation. Eva's handwriting, though — Rory would know those crooked Es anywhere. She'd come because she trusted Eva. She'd come because the Heartstone had begun pulsing against her sternum the moment she'd crossed the park's iron gate, a warmth that had nothing to do with the cold October night, and that frightened her more than anything Eva might have to say. Rory stopped at the threshold of the stones and listened. Richmond Park at night should not have been silent. There were deer here, hundreds of them; there were owls and foxes and the dull electric hum of the city pressing in from every side, eight million people breathing just beyond the treeline. London never truly went quiet. She had lived in it long enough to know its voice, the low grinding lullaby of buses and sirens and distant aeroplanes stitching the sky. Here, past the oaks, there was nothing. Not the wind. Not the rustle of the long grass she could see swaying — and that was the first wrong thing, because the grass was *moving*, bending in slow ripples as though a breeze passed through it, but no breeze touched her face, and no sound came with it. The grass bowed in absolute silence, like a film with the audio stripped away. The Heartstone gave another pulse. Stronger now. A live coal nestled in the hollow of her throat. "Eva?" Her voice fell out of her mouth and died at once, swallowed before it could carry. There was no echo, no return. The word simply ceased to exist. Rory pulled her jacket tighter and stepped between the stones. The temperature changed the way stepping into a cathedral changed it — a held breath, a sudden hush of stone-cooled air. But it wasn't cold. That was the thing she couldn't make sense of. It should have been October, should have been frost forming on her breath, and instead the air was soft and warm and smelled of summer: cut clover, honeysuckle, the green sweetness of meadows in June. Wildflowers crowded the clearing floor, white and gold and a violent shade of blue, blooming thick and lush and entirely out of season. They glowed faintly in the dark, or seemed to, a phosphor shimmer that made her dizzy when she looked too long. She did not like how the light here had no source. The moon hung somewhere above the leaning crowns of the oaks, but it cast no shadows. Her own feet stood in a clearing without a shadow to anchor them, and the absence of it made her stomach turn over slow and cold. *This is the grove*, she thought. *The one Eva called Isolde's.* She had thought it a story. A drunk-on-cheap-wine, three-in-the-morning kind of story, the kind Eva told when she missed home and the gin loosened the careful lock she kept on certain doors. A place between, Eva had said. An hour in there could be a minute out here. Or a year. Rory had laughed at the time. She wasn't laughing now. Something moved at the edge of her vision. She turned her head — too fast, the way you do when the animal part of you takes the wheel — and there was nothing. Only the swaying grass and the glowing flowers and the black gaps between the trees, which were darker than they had any right to be, darker than the night sky behind them, as if the spaces between the oaks were doorways into somewhere the dark was *manufactured*. "Hello?" she tried again. Useless. The grove ate the word. The pendant throbbed. Warmth bled out from it through the fabric of her shirt, spreading across her collarbones, and she found her hand had risen to press flat against it without her deciding to. Through her palm she could feel it pulse — once, twice, a heartbeat that was not her own and not quite in time with hers. The crimson stone glowed brighter than she had ever seen it, a sullen ember-light leaking between her fingers and staining the white flowers red. It pulses near a Hel portal. She did not know how she knew that. The knowing simply arrived, fully formed, the way a name surfaces from the back of the mind — as if someone had set the fact gently into her thoughts and stepped away. The certainty of it was worse than confusion would have been. Behind her, the grass whispered. Not swaying now. *Parting.* She heard it that time — the dry, deliberate sound of stalks bending aside in sequence, a line of them folding down in a path that led from the far stones toward the center of the clearing. Toward her. Something was crossing the grove, low and patient, and the silence that had swallowed her own voice did not extend to it. The grass made room with a sound like a long slow exhalation. Rory did not turn around. Every instinct she had — the same instincts that had once gotten her packed and out of Evan's flat in eleven minutes flat, the cool-headed core of her that her friends mistook for fearlessness — told her that turning around would be a mistake. That whatever moved behind her wanted her to look. That looking was a kind of invitation. She kept her eyes on the standing stones ahead, the way she'd come in, and she made herself breathe. The pendant burned. The parting grass stopped. Close. Close enough that she could feel a coolness at her back now, a pocket of true October cold opening behind her in all this false and cloying summer, breathing against the nape of her neck where her black hair lifted away from her skin. A voice spoke. It was very soft, and it was almost, almost Eva's. "You came," it said. "Good girl. Aurora. *Malphora.*" She had never told anyone that second name. She had never *heard* that second name. And the grove, at last, fell utterly still — waiting, like she was, to see what she would do.