Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9RWB45PQTEGXNKQSGNMG9

The stones were exactly where Eva's text had said they'd be, four ancient oaks standing sentinel at the edge of Richmond Park where the paths gave out and the bracken grew wild and unclipped. Rory hadn't expected them to be so obviously *wrong* — too symmetrical for nature, too deliberate, like teeth set in a jaw that had forgotten how to close. She checked her phone. No signal, which wasn't strange in itself, but the battery had been at sixty percent when she left the flat above Silas' bar, and now it read four. She'd walked for what felt like ten minutes. The Heartstone Pendant sat warm against her collarbone, a small and stubborn heat that had started the moment she crossed between the second and third standing stone, as though she'd stepped through a doorway with a radiator behind it. She closed her fingers around it, and it pulsed once, gently, like something breathing. "Right," she said, to no one, because the sound of her own voice was better than the silence pressing in from all sides. "Isolde. You said midnight. You said the pendant would know the way." The grove didn't answer. Groves didn't, generally. But the wildflowers underfoot were blooming — actually blooming, dog violets and campion thick as a June morning despite the frost she'd walked through to get here, despite the black bones of the December trees beyond the stones. She crouched and touched a petal, half expecting it to be cold, waxen, false. It was warm. It was soft. It was very slightly wrong in a way she couldn't name, the way a word looks wrong when you stare at it too long. She stood, and that was when she noticed the quiet. Not silence — the grove was never silent, she'd learn that later, there was always some small percussion of insect or leaf. But the *quality* of the quiet had changed. A moment ago there had been the ordinary hush of a London night pushed back by traffic-hum and sirens somewhere beyond the park's edges. Now there was nothing beyond the clearing at all. As if the world past the standing stones had simply been switched off. She told herself this was the point. This was what Eva had promised — a pocket between worlds, time running strange, an hour here worth a day out there, or a day worth an hour, nobody seemed entirely sure which. She was here to find Isolde. She was here because the pendant had come from somewhere and someone owed her answers about who and why. She kept walking. The path — if it was a path, if the flattened grass constituted a path — curved deeper into the grove, and the trees here were not the trees of Richmond Park. They were older. Their bark had the look of skin stretched too tight over something that wanted to move. Rory had grown up on her mother's fireside stories, the kind with teeth in them, and some animal part of her brain kept flinching at each trunk as though it might turn its head to watch her pass. None of them did. She was almost disappointed. Then, behind her, a twig snapped. She spun. Nothing — the stones, the dark, the flowers nodding slightly though there was no wind she could feel on her face. She stood very still and counted her own heartbeat, the way she'd trained herself to do since Evan, since the flat in Cardiff where every creak of a floorboard had been a small emergency. *One. Two. Three.* Nothing came. "Isolde?" she tried. Her voice didn't echo. It should have — the clearing was wide, ringed with those old and listening trees — but the word went out of her mouth and simply stopped, as if the air here swallowed sound before it could travel. That frightened her more than the snapped twig had. She hadn't known that was a thing that could happen, sound just — ending. She walked on. The second time she heard movement, it wasn't behind her. It was ahead, off to the left, low in the undergrowth, a rustle with weight behind it, the sound of something dragging itself unhurriedly through wet grass. She stopped walking. The rustle stopped too — not abruptly, but with a kind of courtesy, as though whatever made it understood the rules of the game and had merely paused its turn. Rory did not run. She was proud of that later, though at the time it felt less like courage and more like her legs simply refusing the order. She stood with her hand around the pendant, which had gone from warm to hot, uncomfortably so, a coal pressed to her sternum, and she made herself breathe. "I'm looking for Isolde," she said, louder this time, to the dark in general. "I was told to come. I have the pendant. I'm not — I'm not here to cause trouble." Something in the branches above her shifted its weight from one bough to another. She heard the wood flex. She did not look up. Some old, wise, cowardly part of her insisted that if she didn't look up, whatever was in the tree could not be real, could not be looking back. The flowers around her feet had begun, very slowly, to turn their faces toward her, the way sunflowers turn toward light. There was no sun. There was barely any moon through the canopy. And yet the little white faces of the campion angled themselves, one by one, until she stood in a clearing of them all quietly, patiently, watching. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay, that's — that's new." The dragging sound came again, closer now, unhurried still, from the right this time, as if it had circled her without ever crossing her line of sight. The pendant burned. Somewhere far off — impossibly far, given how small the grove had seemed from outside the stones — something made a sound like laughter with all the joy filed out of it, thin and dry as paper tearing. Rory did not scream. She thought, quite clearly and with a strange detached calm, *this was a mistake*, and then she thought of the crescent scar on her wrist, pale and old, a reminder that she had survived worse ignorance than this, and she made herself take one step forward instead of back. The flowers bent toward her passing like a congregation bowing its head, and behind her, unseen, something exhaled.