Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1GSZJSEYK5EA8D58Z8CQ21

The standing stones rose from the heath like fingers of a buried hand, their surfaces carved with spirals that seemed to breathe in the failing light. Rory counted seven of them — no, eight — no, seven again as she blinked, her count slipping each time her eyes moved away from the stone she'd just fixed on. "Don't look at them directly," came the voice at her shoulder, soft as a draft through a cracked window. Nyx stood beside her, their violet-lit eyes fixed on the gap between the two largest oaks. "The stones test intent. If you mean to cross, you cross. If you waver, the Grove will not know what to do with you." "And if I mean to cross but I'm also terrified?" "Then you're human, and that is reason enough." Rory laughed, though it came out thin. The amber pendant at her throat pulsed with a heat she hadn't felt since she'd first slipped it from the anonymous parcel tucked behind the till at the Golden Empress. Yu-Fei had insisted she take it home. *For luck*, the old woman had said, in a tone that made clear it was not a request. The crimson stone had done nothing for three days, and now it burned against her collarbone like a coal drawn fresh from a hearth. Behind them, the city was already a memory. The hum of the Ring Road had dimmed to nothing, the distant clatter of the last Richmond Park gates had long since faded. They stood in a hush so complete that Rory could hear the blood moving in her own ears. Nyx stepped through the gap first. The shadow that formed their body bent like smoke passing through a doorway that was narrower than it should have been, and for a heartbeat they were nothing but a ripple in the air. "Keep moving," they called back, the whisper of their voice arriving a half-second late, as though the words had taken the long way round. "Do not stop on the threshold." Rory stepped forward. The air changed. That was the first thing — not what she saw, but what she felt against her skin. A pressure, gentle but undeniable, as though she had walked into the surface of a lake and the water had decided to let her through. The pendant flared hot enough that she hissed, her hand flying to it, and then the sensation passed and she was standing in another world. Wildflowers. They carpeted the ground in drifts that should not have been possible in late October — late October outside, anyway. In here the light was the colour of mid-July, golden and syrupy, slanting through a canopy of oaks so old their lowest branches had rooted into the earth and risen again as new trunks. The grove was a cathedral, and the air smelled of honey and rain and something greener than either, a greenness that had no name in any language Rory spoke. "It's..." She turned a slow circle. "It's not the same season." "Time is a courtesy in this place." Nyx had solidified beside her, though their edges still wavered like ink dropped in water. "The Grove was old when the Romans built their first road through yonder hill. It will be old when the last road falls to dust." A beetle the size of Rory's thumbnail crawled across the toe of her boot, its shell a luminous copper. She watched it move with the deliberate pace of something that had never known a predator. Beyond it, a sprawl of mushrooms grew in a perfect ring — not the pale, halfhearted rings of British woodland, but vivid purple caps edged in white, each one pulsing faintly with a light that matched the rhythm of the pendant at her throat. "What are those?" she asked. "Boundary markers. We are well inside. The Grove knows we are guests now, and not intruders." Nyx tilted their head, listening to something Rory could not hear. "We should not linger near them. The Fae that tend this place are curious about new faces." Rory took a step back from the mushrooms, and her heel found something that was not the soft give of moss. She looked down. A dagger lay nestled in a tangle of roots as though it had grown there, leaf-shaped and slender, its blade the colour of moonlight caught in ice. The metal — if it was metal — was cold even through her jeans where her ankle brushed it. She crouched slowly, heart beating high in her throat. "Isolde's," Nyx said. There was a weight to the word, a recognition. "She leaves it for those who will need it. Take it. Do not thank her aloud — the Fae do not love gratitude from strangers." The blade was freezing against Rory's palm, a cold that went deeper than temperature and settled somewhere near her ribs. The pendant's heat and the blade's chill warred at her sternum, two opposites holding her body as the ground of their disagreement. She slid the dagger into the back of her jeans, and stood. They moved deeper. The path — if it was a path — wound between the ancient oaks, and the wildflowers grew taller here, brushing her hips, their petals furred and trembling though there was no wind. A bird sang somewhere in the canopy, three notes repeated over and over in a pattern that almost resolved but never quite did. After the fifth repetition, Rory realised the pattern had changed without her noticing, and she could not have said when. A tree had fallen across their way. Its trunk was wider than she could have wrapped her arms around, and where it had torn from the earth, a hollow remained — a hollow that breathed, a slow expansion and contraction like the ribs of something sleeping. "Don't look in," Nyx murmured, and the urgency in their whisper was the first urgency Rory had heard from them. "Whatever it dreams, we are not part of it." She looked away. She had already seen. Inside the hollow, a small light had kindled at the sound of her attention, a light the colour of foxgloves, and it had almost, almost taken the shape of a face she almost recognised. They walked on. The canopy thickened. The golden light thinned to green-gold, then to green, then to something darker, until the only illumination came from the fungi clustered at the roots of the trees and the faint, trailing luminescence of a thread of something — pollen? spore? — that drifted across the path like a single bright thread of silk. "Here." Nyx stopped. Before them, a clearing opened in the wood, and in its centre stood a woman. Her hair fell to her waist in a fall of silver that caught no light because there was no light to catch. Her eyes were the pale lavender of wisteria, and where her feet met the ground, the grass did not bend. She smiled, though her mouth did not move, and her voice came from no place Rory could locate. "You have come at last. I had almost stopped expecting you." Rory opened her mouth. The blade at her back thrummed once against her spine, the pendant at her throat answered, and she understood, suddenly, that she had been expected before she had known she was coming, and the understanding sat in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. She bowed her head, the way one does in a place older than one's own manners, and waited.