Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE91M1RZTPYE3PFVFJGPVBQ

The oaks marking the boundary stood exactly where Eva's directions said they would, two black shapes against a sky that hadn't earned its darkness honestly—too deep, too starless, like something had been poured over the park rather than night simply falling. Rory checked her phone. No signal, which she'd expected. She checked the time before the screen died entirely, which she hadn't. 11:47. She slipped between the standing stones anyway. The pendant had been warm against her collarbone for the last half mile of the walk in, and now, stepping through, it went hot enough that she pressed her palm flat over her coat to keep it from searing skin. The heat ebbed the moment she crossed the threshold, settling into a low pulse, like something breathing against her chest. The grove opened around her the way water opens around a stone dropped into it—not gradually, but all at once, a completeness that made the mind stutter. Wildflowers she couldn't name in the dark grew thick between the roots, and she could smell them, cloying and sweet, though nothing should have bloomed at all, not in October, not at midnight. "Isolde," she said, because Eva had told her to say the name aloud, that names were doors in this place. "I need to talk to you." Nothing answered. That was fine. Eva had warned her the fae kept their own clocks. Rory found a flat stone near the center of the clearing and sat, drawing her knees up, and made herself wait. The wrongness didn't arrive as a single moment. It accumulated. First it was the quiet—too complete, the kind of silence that has weight, that presses on the eardrums until you become aware of your own pulse as an intrusion. Richmond Park, even at night, had sounds: traffic bleeding in from the road, the shuffle of deer in the bracken, wind combing through leaves. Here there was none of that. The wildflowers didn't sway. She watched them for a long moment to be sure, and they held themselves perfectly, unnaturally still, as though someone had told them to. Then the sound started. Not loud. A soft, wet rhythm, somewhere behind her and to the left, like a footstep pressed slowly into damp earth and lifted again. She turned. The trees at the grove's edge stood exactly as before, black trunks, blacker gaps between them. Nothing. She faced forward again and told herself it was an animal. Something small. A hedgehog, a fox. This was still, technically, a park. The sound came again, closer, and this time it didn't stop after one step. It came in a slow, unhurried procession—step, pause, step—circling her at a distance she couldn't quite judge, because the dark out here didn't work the way dark should. It didn't fade with distance. It simply ended, in a hard line past which her eyes refused to resolve anything at all, and the steps seemed to originate from just beyond that line, moving. "Isolde?" Her own voice sounded thin. Wrong for the space it was in, swallowed too quickly, as though the clearing had decided how much of her it would allow to exist here. The pendant pulsed hot again, once, sharp as a struck match, and went cold. She stood. Sitting had felt, suddenly, like the wrong posture for wherever this was going. At the grove's far edge, something moved. Not a shape, exactly. More an absence that traveled—a patch of the dark between two oaks that seemed, for half a second, to bulge toward her before retreating, the way a held breath moves a curtain. She fixed her eyes on the spot and made herself not blink, and nothing moved again, and she began to doubt she'd seen anything at all, which was somehow worse than certainty. The wildflowers near her feet had wilted. She hadn't noticed it happen. A moment ago they'd been full, straining upward, and now they lay flat and blackened at the edges as if a frost had passed through only that patch of ground, sparing everything else. She backed toward the standing stones without deciding to. Some older, quieter part of her brain had simply taken the wheel, and she let it, because the part of her that reasoned things out had started producing sentences like *that isn't a deer* and *nothing walks like that* and she didn't want to finish the thoughts attached to them. The soft wet footsteps had multiplied. Two sets now. Maybe three. Converging, unhurried, from different points around the circle, as though whatever owned them had all the time in creation and had simply decided this was worth doing slowly. "I only wanted to talk," she said, to the dark, to Isolde, to whatever was listening that was not Isolde at all. Her voice cracked on the last word. A shape detached itself from the treeline—not stepping out so much as *arriving*, fully formed, where a moment before there had been only bark and shadow. It was too tall. That was the first thing her mind fixed on, some primal accounting system flagging the wrongness of proportion before it could process anything else: too tall, limbs too long for the torso they hung from, and it did not so much stand as *lean*, perpetually, into a fall it never completed. It did not have a face she could describe afterward. She would try, lying awake in her flat above Silas' bar for weeks after, and every time the memory would slide away from her like wet stone, leaving only the impression of something that had looked at her too long, with too many places to look from. The pendant blazed white-hot against her sternum, and this time she didn't just feel the heat—she heard something, a thin, high whine like a wire drawn tight, and beneath it, wrong and close, a voice that might have been Isolde's saying *run, girl, run now, do not look back at the grove* — Rory ran. She did not remember crossing the boundary. She remembered only the standing stones passing on either side of her like the jaws of something closing a half-second too slow, and the ordinary cold of an ordinary October night closing over her like water, and far off, through the trees, the sound of London traffic, mundane and immense and utterly, blessedly indifferent to what she had almost left behind in that clearing. She didn't stop running until she reached the road.