Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9G5MGNCZ094G0CT2PQHFA

The oak stones marked the boundary the way tombstones marked a grave, and Rory had never noticed before how much they looked like teeth. She'd come because the pendant had gone warm against her collarbone somewhere around Kingston, warm enough that she'd pulled the car over and pressed her palm flat to her chest just to check she wasn't imagining it. Deep crimson, faint glow, the whole business humming like it had a pulse of its own. Nobody had ever told her what it meant when it did that. She'd just learned, over months, that it meant something, and that ignoring it had never once worked out well for her. Richmond Park at eleven at night wasn't supposed to be open. She'd left the car on a verge past the Ham Gate and walked in through a gap in the fence same as she always did, and the deer hadn't even lifted their heads at her, dark shapes lumped in the grass like sleeping boulders. That should have told her something. Deer startled. Deer always startled. The grove sat in its usual pocket between two stands of bracken, but the wildflowers were wrong. Not the flowers themselves — they still nodded pale and stupid in a breeze she couldn't feel on her own skin — but the colour of them, bleached out under a moon that hung too close and too yellow, like something ripening. "Isolde," she said, low, because you didn't shout in the grove. Shouting brought echoes, and echoes in the grove sometimes didn't stop. No answer. She hadn't really expected one on the first try. The standing stones let her through without complaint, the air changing pressure the way it did on an aeroplane, a small pop behind her ears. Inside, time did whatever it wanted, and she'd learned not to check her watch because the numbers never made sense afterward anyway. She went to the centre of the clearing where the grass grew shortest, where she and Isolde usually met, and she waited. The pendant kept its warmth. Didn't build, didn't fade. Steady, like something breathing evenly, keeping itself calm on purpose. A twig snapped off to her left. Rory turned fast, the old instinct from years of walking home alone in Cardiff at closing time. Nothing there. Just bracken, just the black gaps between fern fronds where a person could stand and not be seen if they wanted it that way. "Isolde, if that's you being cute, I've had a long day." The bracken didn't answer either. But something rustled again, further round now, like whatever it was had circled a few feet while she wasn't looking, and Rory's mouth went dry in that specific way it used to go dry outside Evan's flat, waiting to see which version of him would open the door. She made herself breathe. In through the nose. The grove played tricks. Everybody said so. Time slipped, light bent, and sound carried strange because the place wasn't fully anywhere, hovering between the park and somewhere else that had rules she'd never bothered learning properly. A twig snapping didn't mean a thing was crouched in the dark, sizing up her throat. Except the moon shifted. She only caught it out of the corner of her eye, a smear of paleness sliding across the top of the standing stones, and when she looked straight at it the moon sat exactly where a moon should sit, fat and yellow and unbothered. But she'd seen it move. She was sure she'd seen it move. "Right," she said, to nobody, to herself, mostly to hear a human voice that wasn't in her own head. "Right, okay." The wildflowers near her feet had stopped nodding. Every one of them, dead still, as if the breeze she couldn't feel had simply switched off, and in the new silence she heard breathing that wasn't hers. Not close. Not far, either. Somewhere at the level of a chest, low to the ground, slow and even and entirely unhurried, the kind of breathing that belonged to something with no reason to rush because it already knew how the next few minutes were going to go. Her hand found the pendant without her telling it to. Still warm. Still steady. That was meant to mean portal, meant to mean Hel-touched things nearby, and normally that was information she could use, a thing to point her toward or away from. Tonight it told her nothing useful at all except that whatever waited in the bracken had a foot, however small, in the wrong sort of door. "Isolde," she tried again, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. The bracken parted three feet to her right. Not violently — almost politely, the fronds bending aside the way a curtain gets drawn back by somebody who wants to be let in properly, not force their way through. Rory's whole body locked up waiting to see what stepped out. Nothing did. The gap sat there, dark and open and patient, fronds trembling faintly at the edges, and that absence was so much worse than a shape would have been. A shape she could run from, or reason with, or hit. An empty space that had made itself empty on purpose, that was choosing not to show her yet — she had no idea what to do with that at all. The breathing had stopped. Rory realised, in the new and total silence, that she couldn't remember the last time she'd heard an owl, or the distant road noise that always bled faintly into the grove from the A-road beyond the trees, or her own footsteps when she'd have sworn she just shifted her weight on the grass. The grove had gone quiet in the specific way a held breath is quiet, and she was standing in the middle of it with her hand pressed to a pendant that refused to tell her anything more than warm, still warm, always warm, while somewhere behind that black gap in the bracken something waited to see what she'd do next. She took one careful step back toward the standing stones, and behind her, close enough to raise the hair on her neck, something exhaled.