Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9Z5BRP5G2PSERJZMVKH3Y

The stones stood the way teeth stand in a jaw that's forgotten how to close. Rory counted seven of them from where she stood at the treeline, though she knew from the last time there were meant to be nine. She hadn't meant to come back to Richmond Park after dark, not after everything, not after the portal and the warmth of the pendant against her collarbone that never quite left her skin cold anymore. But the message had said midnight, and it had used Eva's turn of phrase, the one about *sorting your shite out*, and Rory had convinced herself that meant something. Now, standing at the boundary with the moon cut thin as a fingernail overhead, she wasn't sure of anything. "Isolde?" Her voice didn't echo. That was the first wrong thing — not that there was no reply, she hadn't expected one straight off, but that the word just stopped, swallowed whole by air that felt thicker than October should allow. She rubbed her thumb over the Heartstone pendant tucked beneath her jumper. Cool. No pulse. No warmth. Whatever waited here wasn't Hel-touched, then. Small comfort, that. She stepped between the stones. The wildflowers brushed her calves, and that was wrong too, because wildflowers didn't grow shoulder-high in November, and they definitely didn't grow black-petalled with veins like something had cracked open beneath the soil to feed them. She'd seen the grove blooming with poppies and foxgloves plenty of times. Never this. Never a garden of things that looked like flowers the way a photograph negative looks like a face. "Right," Rory said, to nobody, because sometimes you needed to hear your own voice to remember you still had one. "Sorting my shite." Something rustled off to her left. Not wind — there was no wind, the leaves above her hung dead still, a held breath in the shape of a canopy — but a rustle, low, close to the ground, the kind of sound a fox makes crossing dry brush. She turned. Nothing. Only more of the too-tall flowers, swaying now though the air hadn't moved. She kept walking. The grove had never felt large before. Isolde's clearing was meant to be small, intimate, a pocket of somewhere-else you could cross in under a minute if you knew the path. But Rory had been walking for what felt like ten now, and the standing stones behind her had vanished into a dark that pooled between the trees like something spilled. The second rustle came from her right. Closer. She didn't run. Running felt like an invitation, though she couldn't have said to what. Instead she stood very still, hand closing around the pendant, and listened to the specific quality of the silence that came after. It wasn't empty. Silence with nothing in it doesn't sit on your skin the way this did, doesn't make the fine hairs on your arms stand up like iron filings drawn to a magnet you can't see. "Whoever's there," Rory said, keeping her voice level through sheer bloody-minded effort, "you can come out. I've had a long week and I'm not in the mood for games." Nothing answered. But the flowers nearest her — the black-veined ones — turned. Not with the wind, because there still wasn't any. They turned the way sunflowers turn towards the sun, slow and total and entirely too aware, and every one of them faced her. She backed up a step. Her heel caught on a root, and she caught herself before she went down, and when she looked up the flowers had turned back to face whatever direction they'd been facing before. As if they'd never moved. As if she'd imagined the whole thing, except she hadn't, she knew the difference between a trick of moonlight and a hundred small black faces watching her. Somewhere off to her left, deeper in, something exhaled. It wasn't a big sound. That was the worst part. Not a roar, not a scream, nothing dramatic enough to justify the way her stomach dropped through the ground beneath her. Just an exhale, long and slow, the kind a person makes when they're settling into a chair after a hard day, except it came from somewhere at head height among trees that had no business holding anything at head height, and it did not stop for a very long time. Longer than lungs should allow. Rory's hand found the small knife she kept at her belt — more habit than protection, these days, though it had saved her more than once. She didn't draw it. Not yet. Drawing a blade felt like committing to something she wasn't ready to name. "Isolde," she tried again, quieter this time, less a demand than a hope. "If this is you taking the piss, I'm going to be properly narked." The dark between two trees ahead of her held its shape wrong. That was the only way she could describe it after, lying awake later trying to make sense of what she'd seen — not a shadow, not an absence of light, but a *shape*, tall and narrow and utterly still, the kind of still that living things can't manage because living things breathe, twitch, shift their weight. This didn't. It simply was, the way the stones were, the way the grove itself was, ancient and patient and paying her the particular attention of something that had all the time in whatever world this was and had decided to spend some of it on her. Her pendant stayed cold against her sternum. Whatever this was, it wasn't Hel's. That should have made her feel better. It didn't. The shape between the trees didn't move, and it didn't need to, because Rory had already decided she wasn't walking any further into this clearing tonight, message or no message, sorting her shite be damned. She began to back away, slow, deliberate, the way you're meant to move around a dog you don't trust, and the flowers around her feet turned again to watch her go, black petals angled like a hundred tiny satellite dishes tuned entirely to the sound of her breathing. Behind her, past the treeline, past the seven stones that should have been nine, something exhaled a second time. Closer now.