Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1GCGEGZKVJ7F4XVGS2FGJN

The standing stones rose from the earth like rotten teeth, their surfaces furred with moss that glowed faintly green in the moonlight. Aurora counted them as she stepped through the gap between the two largest oaks. Seven. She had counted seven the last time, too, the night Eva had brought her here and whispered that Isolde's grove was real, that the wildflowers that bloomed in December were not a dream, that the air tasted of copper and honey and something older. That had been spring. This was November, and the meadow beyond the stones should have been dead. It was not dead. Rory stopped at the threshold, boot heel catching on a root that hadn't been there a moment ago. The meadow stretched before her in a wash of pale blue and violet, flowers she had no name for nodding in a wind she could not feel. Their stems were too white. Their petals caught the moonlight and held it, then released it in slow pulses, like the breathing of something vast and patient beneath the soil. She swallowed. Her hand went to the chain at her throat. The Heartstone Pendant hung against her collarbone, the small crimson gem cool and inert. She had worn it for three years now, ever since the stranger in the leather coat had pressed it into her palm outside the tube station and vanished into the crowd before she could ask why. It had never done anything. It was a pretty stone on a silver chain. She wore it because it was pretty, and because sometimes, late at night, when the silence in the flat above Silas' bar grew too thick, she liked to pretend it was a gift from someone who had loved her. Tonight, the gem was not cool. Rory drew it out from beneath her jumper. The crimson had deepened, darkened to something closer to old blood, and at its center, a faint light moved. Not a reflection. A pulse. Slow, then faster, then slow again, in a rhythm that did not match her own heartbeat. She held it in her palm and felt the warmth of it, felt the way the metal of the chain tried to tighten against the back of her neck. She should not have come. The thought arrived clean and unadorned, and she let it sit there for a moment, turning it over like a coin in her hand. Eva had texted at half past nine. *Richmond. Tonight. Don't ask, just come. Wear the pendant.* And because Eva had never once in fifteen years of friendship asked her to do something without reason, Rory had pulled on her boots and her jacket and walked the long way along the river, past the closed boathouses and the sleeping willows, to the place in the park where the path forked and the right-hand fork was not, strictly speaking, on any map. Eva was not here. Rory had known she would not be, somewhere beneath the decision to come. Eva's text had carried the cadence of someone being watched while they typed. Rory had not wanted to admit that to herself until now, standing in a meadow that should not exist in November, holding a stone that should not be warm. She stepped forward. The flowers parted around her ankles without bending, their stems straightening behind her as if they had never moved. The air tasted of copper and honey. Eva had been right about that, too. The pendant pulsed. Rory lifted her head. The grove was not large. She had walked its edges a dozen times in daylight and known it for a small, secret place, a clearing no bigger than a tennis court ringed by oaks so old their bark had split into vertical strips like weathered columns. Tonight the oaks seemed further away. The clearing had stretched, the way a room stretches in a dream, and the standing stones at her back had thinned to smudges of grey in the dark. She took another step. Then another. The flowers whispered against each other, a dry papery sound, and beneath it she heard something else. A sound like someone drawing a long breath through teeth. She stopped. Listened. The sound did not repeat. *Get it together, Carter.* She walked on. The centre of the grove was marked by a single oak older than the others, its trunk so wide she could not have circled it with her arms. Its roots humped the ground in pale arches, and between two of the largest she had sat with Eva that first night, sharing a flask of tea gone cold, listening to Eva explain that the Fae were not a myth, that they were a border, that the grove was a seam in the world and the flowers grew because something on the other side was bleeding into this one. Rory had laughed. Then she had not laughed. Now she stood before the oak and pressed her palm flat against its bark. The wood was warm. Living things in November are not warm in this way. She pulled her hand away and the bark held the ghost of her touch, a faint darkening that faded slowly. The pendant pulsed again, harder, and this time the warmth climbed her wrist, circled her forearm, settled in the hollow of her throat. She touched the gem with her thumb and felt it move beneath the skin of the setting, a tiny rotation, a tick of alignment. As if it were pointing. She followed its direction with her eyes. North, perhaps. Or east. Somewhere into the deeper dark beyond the great oak, where the meadow should have ended at the ring of standing stones and instead continued, the pale flowers thinning but not stopping, opening out into a space she did not recognise. She had never seen this part of the grove. She was certain of it. Something moved at the edge of her vision. Rory turned. The standing stones were where they should be, seven grey shapes against the darker trees. The flowers swayed in their slow, windless rhythm. The oak stood behind her, solid and enormous, its roots gripping the earth like knuckles. Nothing. She turned back. The meadow beyond the oak was empty. The pendant's warmth had climbed to her jaw. She took a step toward the unseen extension of the grove, then stopped. Listened. The papery whisper of the flowers had not changed, but beneath it now she could hear a new layer, something rhythmic and low, like a heartbeat transmitted through soil. It was not her heartbeat. The pendant was beating in her palm, and this sound was answering it from somewhere ahead, somewhere in the dark where the flowers grew sparse and the moonlight did not quite reach. The sound of a breath through teeth again. Closer this time. Just behind the oak's furthest root. Rory did not turn around. She stood very still and watched the dark ahead of her, and the dark watched her back, and somewhere in the space between the two, the heartbeat in the earth grew louder, and the pendant grew warmer, and the flowers at the edge of the clearing began, one by one, to close their petals.