Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9SBFMDEGJ8Z3CF16KY7JY

The oaks marked the boundary the way headstones mark a grave — old, leaning, half-swallowed by moss, standing in a loose circle that Rory had to squint to see as a circle at all. She'd been told to look for them. *Between the third and fourth stone, where the bracken thins, at night, alone.* The note hadn't said why. Notes from unknown benefactors rarely did. She checked the pendant at her throat. Cold. Nothing. Richmond Park at midnight was not supposed to feel like this. She'd walked through it before, coming home from Silas' bar half-drunk on cheap wine, laughing with Eva under streetlamps that bled orange onto the wet paths. But the park had gates, and the gates had hours, and she'd climbed a fence to get in here, which already felt like the first mistake in a night that was shaping up to be full of them. The gap between the third and fourth stone was narrower than it should have been. She turned sideways to pass through, bracken scratching at her jeans, and when she came out the other side the sound of the road had gone. Not faded. Gone. As if someone had reached over and turned a dial to zero. She stopped walking. "Okay," she said, mostly to hear her own voice, to prove she still had one. The word came out smaller than she meant it to, and the grove — because that was what this was, she understood that now, some fold of space that didn't belong entirely to the park anymore — did not answer, but it also didn't quite let the word go. It seemed to sit in the air a moment too long, like a held breath. Wildflowers grew at her feet. Not the scrubby, half-dead things she'd have expected under November trees, but full-throated blooms, white and gold, glowing faintly of their own accord, as if they'd stored up sunlight from a summer that hadn't happened yet. She crouched to look at one and did not touch it. The pendant was warm now. Not hot — just warm, like a coal banked low — and she wrapped her fingers around it without deciding to. *This is where I'm meant to be,* she told herself. *This is fine.* She kept walking because standing still felt worse. The trees here were wrong in a way she couldn't name until she'd been walking for several minutes and realized: they didn't rustle. There was no wind that she could feel, and yet the leaves trembled sometimes, all at once, a shiver running through an entire tree like a shudder down a spine, and then stillness. She watched it happen to an oak on her left and told herself it was nothing. Told herself again when it happened to a tree ahead of her, one she hadn't reached yet, as though the grove were rehearsing its next move before she arrived to see it. A twig snapped somewhere behind her. She turned. Nothing — just the pale flowers, the black trunks, the too-bright dark. The kind of dark that wasn't really dark at all, more a deep dusk that never resolved into night or day. She'd read once that fae places didn't hold time the way the rest of the world did. An hour here might be a minute out there. Or it might be a week. She hadn't quite believed it until this moment, standing in a clearing where the moon — if that's what hung above the canopy, low and swollen and the wrong shade of silver — didn't seem to move at all. Another sound. Softer. Almost a footstep, if a footstep could be made by something with no weight to put behind it. "Hello?" Nothing answered, which was somehow worse than if something had. She kept the pendant in her fist and made herself walk on, because turning back meant admitting she was afraid, and admitting she was afraid meant she might actually become afraid, properly afraid, the kind that stopped her legs from working. Better to keep moving. Better to treat this like a job, like a delivery — get in, get whatever this was, get out, back to the noise and the exhaust fumes and Yu-Fei shouting at her for being three minutes late with the Golden Empress order. The flowers thinned. The trees pulled back into a wider clearing, and in the center of it stood a single stone — not one of the boundary oaks, but a slab of pale rock, flat-topped, like an altar or a table, half-sunk into the earth as though it had been growing up out of the ground for a thousand years and had barely broken the surface. She approached it slowly. There was nothing on it. No object, no letter, no clue as to why she'd been sent here at all. Then the temperature dropped. It happened all at once, a cold that slid down the back of her neck and settled into her shoulders, and with it came a smell — green and wet and faintly like the inside of a flower left too long in a vase, sweet turning to rot. She became aware, in the specific and absolute way a body becomes aware of danger before the mind catches up, that she was being watched. Not from one direction. From all of them. She turned in a slow circle, and the trees at the clearing's edge seemed closer than they'd been a moment ago, though she hadn't seen any of them move, the way you never see a clock's hand crawl but know, somehow, that it has. Something rustled in the flowers to her left, low, a weight moving through them that left no shape behind. Something rustled to her right in answer, as though the two sounds were having a conversation and she was standing in the space between. The pendant burned. Actually burned now, a heat sharp enough to make her gasp and yank it away from her skin, and beneath her fingers it was pulsing — not steadily, but like something with a pulse of its own, quickening. *A Hel portal,* she thought, distantly, absurdly, the way you think of the name of a song you can't place. *It only does that near a Hel portal.* She had not been told that this was near anything of the sort. She had not been told much of anything. The flowers bent. Not from wind — there was still no wind — but as if something vast and low to the ground were moving through them in a wide arc around her, unhurried, patient, the kind of patient that only comes from something that has already decided how a thing will end and is simply enjoying the shape of the waiting. Rory did not run. Running felt like the thing it wanted. Instead she stood very still at the edge of the pale stone, pendant scalding her palm, and listened to the grass part in a slow, deliberate circle that was drawing, with each pass, a little tighter around her.