Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE96AN4FBDTYR8YC6J6H2RZ

Rory pushed through the last screen of bracken and the standing stones opened up in front of her like teeth around a mouth. She hadn't meant to come back here. She'd told herself a dozen times on the walk over that this was stupid, that the pendant warming against her collarbone didn't mean what she thought it meant, that Richmond Park at eleven at night was just a park, dark and cold and full of deer, nothing more. The Heartstone said otherwise. It had gone from a dull weight to something with a pulse of its own somewhere around the Isabella Plantation, and by the time she reached the oaks it throbbed against her sternum like a second heart trying to keep pace with hers. "Right," she said, mostly to hear her own voice. "In and out." The grove swallowed the sound. That was the first wrong thing. Not the silence — Richmond Park at night was full of silences, the kind that pressed on your ears until you heard your own blood moving. This was different. This ate the words before they finished leaving her mouth, so that "out" came out flat and clipped, missing its tail. She stepped between two of the stones anyway. Wildflowers she remembered from her last visit — poppies, foxglove, things that had no business blooming in October — stood pale and closed in the moonlight, heads bowed like they were listening for something. The air smelled wrong too, not the green wet smell of a London park but something sweeter, riper, the smell of fruit left a day too long on the sill. "Hello?" Nothing answered, which was almost worse than if something had. She'd come because the pendant had been pulling toward this place for two days straight, tugging at her like a hook set behind her breastbone, and because whoever had given her the thing clearly wanted her to understand what it did. A Hel portal, she'd guessed, though she had no idea what that meant beyond warmth and dread in equal measure. Isolde would know. Isolde always knew, sharp-eyed and unbothered, sipping something numaidenshaped in a leaf-cup. Except Isolde's usual spot beneath the great oak stood empty, the moss around its roots undisturbed, no telltale scorch of fae-fire, no half-drunk cup. "Isolde?" The grove had a way of answering questions with worse questions. A branch above her creaked though the night sat still as held breath. She glanced up. Nothing there but leaves, black against a sky gone the wrong shade of purple, too dark for October, too bright for true night. Rory made herself walk further in. The stone circle should have been dead ahead, forty paces past the first ring of birches. She'd walked it twice before. But the birches went on longer than they should have, white trunks multiplying at the edge of her vision, and when she checked over her shoulder the standing stones behind her had already vanished into a wall of them. Her stomach dropped. *Time moves differently here.* She'd known that. She hadn't thought about what it might mean for space. The pendant burned hotter against her skin, close to painful now, and she pulled it out from under her shirt to look at it. The crimson stone glowed steady, insistent, throwing red light up into the hollows of her face. Whatever it was reacting to, it was close. Something moved between the birches on her left. Not an animal's movement — too slow, too considered, the kind of shift a shadow makes when the light source itself has shifted rather than the shadow. She turned. Nothing there. Just white bark and black gaps and the wrongly-purple sky beyond the canopy. "This isn't funny," she said, and hated how thin her voice sounded swallowed up by all that green. She kept walking. The flowers here had started opening as she passed, she noticed — poppies unfurling one petal at a time though there was no wind, no sun, nothing to prompt it. She didn't stop to watch. Somewhere to her right a twig snapped, deliberate as a footstep, and she spun fast enough to feel her own pulse stutter, but there was only more grove, more silver trunks leaning in like listening men. *Come on, Rory. Cool-headed. Think.* She fixed her eyes on a gap in the trees ahead where the ground rose slightly, remembering — or thinking she remembered — that the standing stones sat on a low mound. She angled toward it. The second footstep came from directly behind her. She didn't turn this time. Some old animal wisdom told her that turning was what it wanted, whatever it was, that the movement of her head would give it the half-second it needed to close whatever distance it was keeping with such patience. Instead she quickened her pace, not quite running, breath tight in her throat, and the pendant blazed against her palm like a coal. The footsteps behind her matched her stride exactly. Not chasing. Following. Pacing her the way a shark paces a swimmer, content to let the swimmer tire first. The mound rose in front of her, bare of the standing stones she expected, just bare earth and a ring of mushrooms pale as knuckles poking up through the grass. Wrong place. Or wrong time. Or both. "Isolde, if this is some kind of test, I am not in the mood," she said, too loud, too fast. The grove answered with silence, and then, from somewhere behind the veil of white trunks, something that might have been laughter if laughter had never once heard itself before and was only guessing at the shape. Rory didn't wait to hear it again. She turned on her heel, orienting on the one direction the footsteps hadn't come from, and walked — fast, faster, not running, not yet, some scrap of pride insisting she hadn't earned the right to panic — back the way she'd come, praying to whoever might be listening in this stretched, sour, purple-lit dark that the stones would find her before whatever paced her did.