Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE92AETBH7RPX1BFPAZ58GJ

The Grove hadn't looked like this before. Rory ducked under the low branch of the nearest standing stone, the bark cold and slick under her palm, and stopped. The wildflowers that usually carpeted the clearing in impossible summer colour lay flat, pressed down like something heavy had rolled through. No wind stirred them. No wind stirred anything. "Isolde?" Her voice didn't carry the way it should. It went out maybe ten feet and just — stopped, swallowed by air that felt thicker than it had any right to be. She'd come because the pendant had gone warm against her collarbone an hour ago, the crimson stone pulsing like it had a pulse of its own, and warm meant a portal, and a portal near the Grove meant trouble worth walking into. That was the job now. That was what she did instead of sleeping. The warmth was gone. She checked, thumb finding the stone through her jumper. Cold as a river pebble. That should've been the moment she turned around. The oaks stood the way they always stood, ancient and split-barked, ringing the clearing like sentries who'd forgotten what they were guarding. Except three of them, she counted them twice, three of them stood where she didn't remember three of them standing. Or maybe she'd never counted before. Maybe you didn't count trees you trusted. She started counting them now. Nine. There'd always been nine, hadn't there? Ten. She stopped walking. Stood very still in the flattened flowers and looked at the tenth oak, squat and wrong-angled against the treeline, and told herself trees didn't move and grow overnight, not even here, not even in a place where an hour could swallow a week whole. Something exhaled. Not wind. She knew wind, the way it dragged through leaves and hissed low over grass. This was closer to breath, a long low sound that came from everywhere and nowhere, and it curled around her ankles like it had weight. "Right," she said, mostly to hear her own voice do something normal. "Right, okay." The moon hung directly overhead, too bright, the kind of bright that should've thrown shadows sharp as knives across the clearing. It didn't. Her own shadow lay soft-edged at her feet, smudged like someone had dragged a thumb through wet charcoal, and when she turned her head fast — just to catch it, just to see — the smudge didn't turn with her. It held a half-second too long before it caught up. She laughed, one short humourless bark of it, because that was insane, shadows didn't lag, and laughing was better than the alternative which was standing in the middle of a fae clearing believing her own eyes. The exhale came again. Closer. Rory turned in a slow circle, boots crushing dead flowers that had no business being dead in a place where flowers didn't die, and catalogued everything the way Eva had taught her to, the way you catalogued a room before you decided whether to run. Nine oaks. Ten oaks. The standing stones at the entrance, black basalt slick with a wet she couldn't source because it hadn't rained, hadn't rained in days. The grass rippling in a wind that didn't touch her hair. At the treeline, something the size of a person stood among the trunks. She was almost certain of that. Almost. The angle was bad, the light worse, and when she fixed her eyes directly on the spot there was nothing there but bark and shadow and the ordinary architecture of a forest at night. But the edges of her vision kept insisting, kept placing a shape there, tall and still and patient, and every time she flicked her eyes sideways to catch it straight-on it had already gone, already tucked itself back into the dark a half-step before she could look. "Isolde, if this is you taking the piss—" Nothing answered. The Grove didn't answer. It had never been silent before, not like this — always some hum of insect-song, some rustle of unseen wings, the low music of a place that lived. Now there was only her own breath, too loud in her ears, and beneath it, so faint she could've imagined it, something that sounded like breathing that wasn't hers keeping time with it. In. Out. In. Out. She matched it without meaning to, then made herself break the rhythm, made herself breathe wrong on purpose, short and sharp, and the other breathing — if it existed, if it wasn't just her pulse in her own ears — stumbled too. Caught itself. Fell back into time with her again a beat later. That decided it. She started walking back toward the standing stones at the entrance, not fast, nothing that could be called running, because Eva always said running told a thing you were prey and she'd rather die than confirm it, but her legs wanted to run badly enough that she felt it in her knees, a shaking that had nothing to do with cold. The flattened flowers ahead of her hadn't been flattened a moment ago. She was almost sure of that too. A fresh path of crushed stems led from where she stood toward the standing stones, toward the exit, laid out ahead of her like something had already walked the route she meant to take — walked it recently, walked it in the last few seconds, walked it going the same direction she was. Or coming from it. Rory stopped in the middle of the path that shouldn't exist and made herself look at the standing stones properly, made herself see the gap between them where the boundary sat, where Earth and the Fae realm bled into one another in a wound that never fully closed. The gap looked narrower than she remembered. Not by much. Just enough to notice. Just enough that a person walking through fast wouldn't quite fit without turning sideways. The exhale came a third time, right behind her ear, close enough that she felt it stir the fine hair at her neck, and this time there was no pretending it was wind or breath or the ordinary sound of a strange place at night. She didn't turn around. She walked, fast now, faster, past caring what running told anything, straight through the narrowing gap between the stones with her shoulder scraping cold wet basalt, out past the boundary into the ordinary dark of Richmond Park where the trees stood in their right numbers and the moon threw shadows the way shadows were meant to be thrown. Behind her, the Grove exhaled one last time, long and slow, like something settling back to sleep now that she'd left its bed undisturbed.