Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8XK5TXJAH1YRB2BP41NKF

The oaks marking the boundary of the Grove had always seemed to Rory like sentinels standing at ease—old, patient, faintly amused by whatever nonsense the mortal world got up to beyond their reach. Tonight they looked like something else. Tonight they looked like they were listening. She hadn't wanted to come back. That was the truth of it, however much she'd dressed the decision up in practicality on the walk over from the bus stop, the pendant's cord damp against her collarbone from the effort of not touching it every ten seconds. Isolde had told her, weeks ago, in that offhand way the fae had of delivering information like a woman flicking crumbs off a tablecloth: *if the stone warms without a portal near, come back to where you found it. Something will need saying.* Rory had thought, at the time, that this was fae theater, the kind of cryptic nonsense immortals dealt in because plain speech bored them. Then last night the Heartstone had gone warm against her sternum while she lay in bed with no portal for miles, and she'd lain there at three in the morning feeling it pulse like something breathing, and she had not slept again. So: Richmond Park, gates locked behind her, no lawful reason to be here after dark and every reason to leave. She'd climbed the fence the way she'd learned to climb fences as a girl in Cardiff, quick and low, and she'd walked the long way in under a moon that kept vanishing behind cloud cover thick as wet wool. She told herself the quiet was just quiet. Parks were quiet at night. That was the whole design of them. But the quiet here had a texture to it. It wasn't the absence of sound so much as sound *withheld*, the way a person holds their breath so you won't hear them in the dark. The standing stones came up out of the black grass sooner than she remembered, pale as teeth, and beyond them the air did the thing it always did—thickened, folded, let her through into a place that technically wasn't anywhere at all. The wildflowers were still blooming, defiantly out of season, white and violet in the moonlight, and for one held breath everything looked exactly as it had the first time Isolde brought her here: lovely, and faintly, dangerously wrong, the way all beautiful things in the Fae Grove were wrong if you looked long enough. "Isolde?" Her voice sounded smaller than she meant it to. It didn't echo. There was nowhere for an echo to live. Nothing answered. She told herself that was fine. Fae came and went on their own clocks; an hour here could be ten minutes there or ten days, and Isolde had never been what you'd call punctual. Rory picked her way further in, past the ring of blackthorn that marked the grove's true center, and stopped. The flowers here had stems, and the stems were bent. Not broken—bent, all of them, all bowing in the same direction, as though something enormous had passed through and pressed them flat with a palm the size of a rooftop. She crouched and touched one. It sprang back upright at her touch, slow, unhurried, like it had all the time in the world to right itself and no particular interest in doing so. Behind her, something exhaled. She spun. Nothing—just the dark line of trees at the grove's edge, needle-black against a sky the color of a bruise. But the pendant had gone warm. Not portal-warm, that steady building heat she'd felt before. This was different: three short pulses, then nothing, like a code she didn't have the key to. "That's not funny," she said, to no one, because saying it out loud felt marginally better than the silence that came after. She made herself keep walking. The grove was small—she knew its dimensions, more or less, from the last three visits—but tonight the walk to its far edge seemed to take longer than it should have, the standing stones at the entrance no closer no matter how many steps she counted. She stopped counting. That felt like giving something the satisfaction of being noticed. The flowers were bending again. This time she watched it happen—not all at once, but in a slow ripple moving toward her, stem after stem dipping in sequence like a wave rolling shoreward, and there was nothing on the ground to cause it. No wind. The air hung still enough that her hair hadn't moved once since she'd stepped through the stones. She backed up. The ripple stopped three feet from her boots, as if considering, and then went still. *It's a fae thing,* she told herself. *Isolde's world. Not everything here follows earth rules, that's the whole point of the place.* But she'd been here three times before and nothing had ever moved on its own, and the part of her brain that had spent four years pretending law school didn't bore her to tears—the part that noticed patterns, that had gotten her out of worse rooms than this one—was telling her, very calmly, that whatever this was, it was new, and new was not good. She turned to leave and found the standing stones weren't where they had been. They were there—she could see the pale shapes of them, off through the trees at what felt like the wrong angle entirely, as if the whole grove had rotated a few degrees while her back was turned and hadn't bothered rotating back. Her pulse ticked up. She started toward them anyway, because there was nothing else to do, and the grass under her boots made a sound it hadn't made on the way in: a faint, wet give, like walking on something that had only recently stopped breathing. Somewhere behind her, low, almost fond, something said her name. Not Rory. Not Aurora. The other one. The name she hadn't used since London, the name that belonged to a version of herself she'd folded up and put away in a drawer she didn't open anymore. *Laila.* She didn't stop walking. She didn't look back. But her hand closed around the pendant, and it was burning now, burning bright enough that she could feel the shape of the gem imprint itself into her palm, and the stones ahead of her seemed to shiver in the dark like something underwater, and she thought, with a clarity that frightened her more than the voice had: *whatever this is, it already knows who I used to be. And it wants me to remember.*