Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8XJ94ZZ597NY9HRWNAXK4

The standing stones marked the boundary the way tombstones marked a grave, and Rory had never liked the comparison, but it came to her anyway as she ducked between two of them into Richmond Park's dark. Isolde had asked her to come after moonrise. That should've been the first sign something was wrong — the Grove didn't usually bother with appointments. It simply was, whenever Rory needed it. But tonight the fae woman's message had come through a starling tapping at Rory's window, three sharp raps, gone before Rory got the sash up. *Alone. After moonrise. Come.* The Heartstone sat cold against her collarbone. That was the second sign. It always warmed near a Hel portal, and there wasn't meant to be one within miles of the Grove. The wildflowers didn't glow the way they usually did. She noticed that first, stepping past the oaks — the whole clearing usually lit itself with a soft phosphorescence, buttercups and foxglove throwing their own gentle light regardless of the hour outside. Tonight the flowers hung heavy and dark, closed up like fists. "Isolde?" Her voice didn't echo. It should have. The Grove had a way of throwing sound back at you, layered and strange, but tonight the word just died a foot from her mouth. She kept walking. Grass brushed her calves, wet though it hadn't rained. Off to her left, something rustled — too big for a rabbit, too quiet for a deer. She turned. Nothing but the black shapes of hawthorn, motionless. "I got your message," she said, louder this time. "Bit dramatic with the bird, don't you think?" No answer. The pendant pulsed, once, against her skin. She stopped walking. It pulsed again. Warmth spreading through the silver chain, faint but undeniable, the way it always did near Hel. She pressed her palm flat against it, as if she could smother the signal, and looked around at a clearing that had never once in two years given her reason to be afraid. The trees stood wrong. She couldn't say how at first — same oaks, same crooked branches she'd have picked out of a hundred like them — but the angles felt off, like a photograph slightly warped at the edges. She took a step toward the centre of the Grove, where Isolde usually waited on the flat grey stone, and the grass beneath her boot made a sound like it shouldn't — a wet, chewing sound, gone the instant she lifted her foot. "Isolde, this isn't funny." Something moved at the tree line. Not a full shape — just a suggestion of one, there and gone in the space between blinks, low to the ground and too long in the body. Rory's pulse kicked up. She told herself it was a fox. Foxes lived in Richmond Park. Foxes were low and long-bodied and moved like water when they wanted to. Foxes didn't usually stand still afterward, watching. She felt it before she saw it again — a weight to the air on her left, a held breath that wasn't hers. She turned fast enough to catch only darkness, the hawthorn swaying though there was no wind to move it. "Right," she said, to no one, to herself, to whatever was out there. "This was a mistake." The flat grey stone was empty when she reached it. No Isolde. No note, no flowers arranged in some fae signal Rory had learned to read over the months. Just the stone, cold under her palm when she touched it, colder than stone had any right to be in July. The pendant burned now. Properly burned, enough that she yanked the chain away from her skin and held it out at arm's length, staring at the crimson gem glowing like a coal against her fingers. That was when she heard the breathing. Not her own. Slow, wet, coming from everywhere and nowhere, the sound a large lung made dragging air through something narrow. She spun in a full circle, pendant still held out like a talisman, and the clearing spun with her — trees, dark flowers, the too-still air — all of it wrong, all of it watching. "Isolde, if this is some kind of test—" The breathing stopped. The silence that followed sat heavier than the sound had. Rory's own breath came too fast, too loud, embarrassingly loud, and she made herself slow it, made herself stand still the way her da used to tell her to stand still around dogs that might bite. *Don't run. Don't run, they smell it.* Something brushed her ankle. She looked down. Grass. Only grass, swaying though nothing else in the clearing moved. But she'd felt it, a definite pressure and release, like fingers testing whether she'd flinch. She flinched. A laugh came from the tree line then — not human, not quite, pitched too high and stretched too long, the kind of laugh a throat made when it had learned the sound from somewhere else and gotten the shape almost right. Rory's skin crawled up her arms and into her scalp. "Okay," she said, and her voice shook now, no use hiding it. "Okay, I'm leaving." She turned back toward the standing stones, back toward the boundary, and found the path gone. Not blocked — gone, hawthorn grown thick where there'd been open grass a minute before, the oaks at the entrance nowhere in sight. The clearing had closed around her like a hand around a moth. The pendant screamed heat against her palm. Somewhere close, too close, breath rasped in again, long and slow and full of teeth it hadn't yet decided to show her, and Rory Carter stood very still in the dark heart of a place that had never frightened her before, and understood, with the cold clarity of a woman who'd learned to read a room fast, that whatever waited for her in Isolde's grove tonight had not come from the fae realm at all.