Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9XM74PVX1ME8EJEZ1QM2M

The gate into Richmond Park sat locked at half past ten, so Aurora climbed the low fence near the Ham Gate entrance instead, boots sinking into wet grass gone black under the moon. The pendant sat warm against her collarbone, warmer than it had been in Camden, warmer than the tube ride out, and that warmth had pulled her here the way a fishhook pulls a lip. "This is stupid," she said, mostly to hear a voice that wasn't the wind. The deer didn't answer. A dozen of them stood scattered across the open heath, pale shapes against darker grass, heads down, unbothered by her passing. She kept to the tree line where the old oaks grew thick and twisted, their trunks wider than her outstretched arms, and somewhere past them the standing stones waited in Isolde's grove. She'd found the place twice before by day. Night was different. Night made the path narrower than it should've been, made the shadows between trunks deeper than trunks that size could cast. The pendant pulsed again, a small heartbeat against her sternum, and she followed it like a compass needle. Wildflowers bloomed along the last stretch before the stones, which made no sense in October, but she'd stopped questioning that months ago. Their colour looked wrong under moonlight, too saturated, purples gone nearly black, whites gone the blue of skimmed milk. She stepped between two standing stones and felt the air change — thicker, warmer, pressing against her ears the way altitude does on a plane. "Hello?" Her own voice came back flat, swallowed by the clearing before it could echo. That wasn't right either. Woods echoed. This place ate sound whole. She'd come because the note tucked under her flat door that morning had said *midnight, the grove, come alone*, unsigned, written in a hand she didn't recognise but trusted anyway, because trusting strange notes had become part of her life now, ever since the pendant landed round her neck from a benefactor she'd never met. She checked her phone. No signal, obviously. Eleven fifty-eight. Close enough. The clearing looked the same as always — ring of oaks, ring of stones inside that, wildflowers carpeting the space between like something out of a painting nobody sane would hang in their house. Except the flowers weren't moving. No breeze reached in here, never had, but tonight even the tall grass stood perfectly still, as if someone had pressed pause on everything except her. She sat on the flattest stone and waited. Five minutes in, she heard chewing. Small, wet, rhythmic, coming from somewhere behind the northern ring of trees. She told herself: deer, obviously, deer graze at night, deer are everywhere in this park. She turned to look anyway and saw nothing but trunks and the black gaps between them. The chewing stopped the moment she turned. "Funny," she said, to the empty grove, to whoever had written the note. "Very funny." Nothing answered that either, but the not-answering had a texture to it now, a held-breath quality, like a room full of people pretending they weren't listening. She stood and paced the inner ring, counting stones the way she'd counted them before — seven, always seven — except this time she counted eight and stopped dead in the middle of the ring with her pulse going harder than the walk here warranted. She counted again. Seven. She must've miscounted. A twig snapped somewhere to her left, sharp and clean, the kind of sound a foot makes stepping wrong on dry wood, except everything in this grove stayed green year-round, Isolde's little pocket of eternal spring, nothing here should snap dry. She spun toward the sound and caught — she was almost sure she caught — a shape withdrawing behind the widest oak, pale, tall, gone before her eyes could hold it. "Isolde?" The name came out smaller than she wanted. No fae stepped into view. No polite greeting, no riddling voice, none of the small courtesies she'd come to expect from the handful of Fae she'd actually met. Just the grove, breathing around her, wildflowers unmoved, and that eighth stone that wasn't there when she looked directly at it. The pendant went hot. Not warm — hot, hot enough that she pulled the chain away from her skin with two fingers and felt it burn faint red through the fabric of her shirt like a coal cooling in a grate. It had never done that. Warm meant a portal nearby. Hot meant — She didn't know what hot meant. Nobody had told her what hot meant, and the not-knowing sat worse in her stomach than any answer could have. Behind her, the chewing started again. Closer. She didn't turn round this time. She stood very still in the middle of the ring, seven stones, always seven, and listened to something graze in a place with no grass tall enough to graze, and felt — with a certainty that arrived all at once, fully formed, the way dread does when it finally stops pretending to be nerves — that she had walked into someone's kitchen rather than someone's parlour. That the note hadn't been an invitation to meet. That whoever wrote it in that careful, trusted hand had wanted her here for a different reason entirely, and that reason was standing, or crouching, or coiling, just past the edge of what her eyes could hold onto, patient in the way only something that had waited centuries could be patient. "I'm going to go now," she said, evenly, the way you'd tell a dog you weren't a threat. "I'm just going to walk back out the way I came." The chewing stopped. Every blade of unmoved grass in the clearing bent, all at once, all the same direction — toward her — as if something enormous had exhaled across the whole grove in a single breath, and the wildflowers that shouldn't bloom in October closed their petals like a held fist.