Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1H85QQRNRNJMZP559NNEJM

The directions Eva scrawled on the back of a receipt had ended at the iron gates of Richmond Park, and from there Rory walked on memory and stubbornness. The path narrowed past the last lamp, mud sucking at her boots, until even the city's orange smear behind the trees gave up and let the dark settle proper. She'd come for answers. That was the deal she made with herself crossing the park. Eva had spoken of a grove, a place where the woman called Isolde might explain the pendant that hummed against Rory's sternum, and Rory had laughed at the time. She wasn't laughing now. The standing stones rose out of nothing. One moment there were only birches, pale and ordinary. The next, two oaks loomed ahead, thicker than any tree had a right to be, their trunks grey and fissured like old bone. They leaned toward each other at the top, almost touching, and between them lay a clearing lit by no moon she could find. "Hello?" Her voice went out and didn't come back. No echo. The word simply stopped, swallowed, as if the air past the stones were thicker than the air behind her. She stepped through. Wildflowers brushed her shins. Foxgloves, she thought, and bluebells, and others she had no name for, all of them open and bright in the middle of the night, in the middle of a London winter. Their colours shouldn't have been visible at all. There was a glow to the grove, low and even, coming from everywhere and nowhere, the way a memory of light persists behind closed eyes. The pendant warmed. Not the gentle pulse she'd grown used to. This was a steady heat, a coal pressed flat to her skin, and she dragged the crimson stone out from under her collar to look at it. Its inner glow had deepened to the colour of a banked fire. She watched it throb once, twice, in time with something that wasn't her heart. "Right," she breathed. "I'm here. So where's Isolde?" Nothing answered. But the silence shifted. She felt it before she understood it — the quality of the quiet had changed, the way a room changes when someone enters it behind you. The flowers had stopped moving. There was no wind, she realised. There had never been wind. So why had they been swaying when she came through the stones? Rory turned a slow circle. The oaks stood at her back where she'd left them, the dark beyond them complete. The clearing stretched further than it should have, the treeline soft and uncertain at its edges, dissolving into a grey blur that hurt to look at directly. A sound came from that blur. A small wet click, like a tongue against the roof of a mouth. "Eva said you'd talk to me," she called, louder now, hating the tremor that crept into it. "I've got the pendant. That's why I came. That's the only reason I came." The click answered her. Closer. She kept her eyes on the spot where she thought it had come from, and that was the mistake, because the movement happened at the other side of her vision — a shape low to the ground, long-limbed, sliding from behind one foxglove stalk to behind another. When she snapped her head round there was only the flower, trembling, settling. Her breath fogged. The temperature had dropped. The flowers, impossibly, still bloomed. "I can see you," she lied. The grove seemed to consider this. Somewhere off in the grey, the clicking multiplied — not one source now but several, scattered around the clearing's rim, an idle conversation in a language built from small dry noises. She held the pendant in her fist. The heat of it was almost pain. A hand's worth of time passed, or an hour. She had no way to measure it. Eva's warning surfaced through the rising static of her fear: *time runs sideways in there, Rory, an hour can be a heartbeat or a week, don't trust the dark, don't follow anything that asks you to.* Nothing had asked her to follow. Not yet. The light flickered. For half a second the grove went truly black, and in that black she saw them — not with her eyes but with whatever sense lives below the eyes, the one that knows when a stair is missing in the dark. Tall now. Standing where the low shapes had crouched. A ring of them just past the flowers, patient, swaying with the absent wind, their heads tilted at angles necks don't make. Then the glow returned and the ring was empty grass. Rory took a step back toward the stones. The oaks were further than she'd left them. She was certain of it. The clearing had stretched while she wasn't looking, the way the corridor of a nightmare lengthens with every stride. "Okay," she whispered, to herself, to steady the thing rattling in her chest. "Okay. Walk. Just walk." She walked. The flowers parted. The pendant burned. Behind her — and this was the worst of it, this was the thing that scraped at the base of her skull — behind her, the soft sound of footsteps in grass kept perfect time with her own. When she stopped, they stopped. A half-beat late, every time, as though whatever made them had to remember how walking was done. She stopped. The footsteps stopped, late. "Isolde?" Her voice cracked on it. "If that's you, I'd really like you to say something." The click came from directly behind her left shoulder. Inches away. Warm and wet and patient. She didn't turn. Some animal sense locked her spine straight and told her that turning was an invitation, that the thing was waiting, polite as a guest, for her to face it and make it welcome. The pendant flared so hot she gasped, and in its crimson light she saw her own breath hanging, and past her breath, cast huge across the swaying flowers, a shadow that was not her shape at all — too long in the arms, too thin in the neck, crowned with something that branched like antlers, or like fingers, splayed and reaching toward the smaller dark blot that was her. The footsteps behind her shifted their weight. And from the centre of the grove, where there had been nothing a moment ago, a woman's voice spoke, low and amused and very, very old. "You're early, little flame. They haven't finished deciding whether to keep you."