Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEAEG0BKA1TM31QVMVQXWHY

Rory found the standing stones by accident, or so she told herself, though the pendant had been warm against her collarbone for the last mile of the walk, and warmth like that didn't happen by accident. Richmond Park at midnight looked nothing like it did at noon. The deer were gone, or hidden, and the paths she'd walked a hundred times during daylight deliveries had rearranged themselves into something unfamiliar. She'd come looking for Isolde, because the fae woman owed her answers about the pendant and had a habit of only appearing when Rory least expected it. Standing here now, boots sinking into grass that seemed too soft, too deliberate, she wondered if expecting it was the whole problem. The oaks marking the grove's edge stood taller than she remembered. Their bark had a sheen to it, wet-looking, though no rain had fallen in a week. She stepped between two of them and felt the air change — thicker, warmer, carrying a green smell like crushed stems that didn't belong to any month she recognised. "Isolde?" Her voice didn't echo. It just stopped, swallowed by the clearing, and that alone made the hair on her arms rise. Wildflowers spread out ahead of her, pale in the moonlight, nodding though there was no wind to move them. She walked further in. The pendant pulsed once against her chest, a small heartbeat of heat, then went quiet. "Funny time for you to go shy," she said, tapping it through her shirt. Nothing answered. She hadn't expected it to, not really, but the silence that followed felt different from ordinary silence. Ordinary silence had texture — the hush of wind through branches, the far-off drone of traffic outside the park's edges. This had none of that. It was as if the clearing had drawn a breath and hadn't yet let it go. A twig snapped somewhere to her left. Rory turned fast, scanning the treeline. Nothing there but shadow stacked on shadow, the kind that shifted if she looked at it too long, resolving into branches and then unresolving again the moment she blinked. She told herself it was a fox. Parks had foxes. Foxes snapped twigs. She kept walking, following the curve of pale flowers deeper toward the centre where Isolde usually waited, perched on some root or stone looking entirely too pleased with herself. Tonight the centre held nothing. Just grass, flattened in a rough circle, as though something had been sitting there recently and had only just stood up to leave. "Not funny," Rory said, mostly to hear her own voice again. The flattened grass didn't answer either, obviously, but the flowers along its edge tilted toward her as she passed, a slow uniform lean like sunflowers tracking a sun that wasn't there. She stopped walking. The flowers stopped tilting. She started walking again. They tilted again. Rory's mouth went dry. She kept her eyes on them and took three more steps, deliberately slow, watching the movement track her like something patient, something that had all the time in the world and knew exactly how to spend it. "Right," she muttered. "Noted." Behind her, the grass rustled — not wind-rustle, but the specific weighted sound of something moving through it on purpose. She spun around. Empty. The wildflowers there stood perfectly still, which somehow felt worse than if they'd been tilting too. The pendant flared hot against her skin, sudden enough that she gasped and pressed a hand flat over her shirt. Not a Hel portal, then — Isolde had told her once, off-hand, that the stone reacted differently to different things, that heat alone didn't always mean danger. Rory hadn't asked what else it meant. Standing here now, she wished she had. A low sound drifted from somewhere beyond the tree line, not quite a voice, not quite anything she could name. It rose and fell like breathing stretched too long, and it seemed to come from every direction and none, the way sound behaved underwater. She held still and listened, heart thudding hard enough that she felt it in her ears. "Isolde, if this is your idea of a joke—" The sound stopped mid-syllable, as if cut with scissors. The quiet that followed pressed on her eardrums. She became aware, in a slow crawling way, that she couldn't hear her own footsteps from a moment ago, couldn't hear anything from the world outside the grove — no distant cars, no aircraft, no city hum that always threaded through London nights no matter how far into the park you walked. The grove had sealed itself. Time moved differently in here; Isolde had told her that too, offhand, like it was nothing. An hour outside might be minutes in here. Or days. Something moved at the very edge of her vision, low to the ground, quick. She turned her head and caught only the tail end of stillness, grass settling back into place where nothing should have disturbed it. "I can see you," she said, though she couldn't, not really, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted. No answer. The flowers near her feet had gone still again, but she counted three separate patches now, spaced apart in a rough triangle around where she stood, all of them slightly flattened, slightly wrong, like something was circling and hadn't yet decided to close the distance. Rory backed toward the standing stones, slow, refusing to run because running felt like an invitation. Every few steps she glanced behind her, and every few steps the darkness between the oaks seemed to have rearranged itself slightly, closer than before, though she never caught it in the act of moving. The pendant burned steady now, insistent, a small coal against her sternum, and she gripped it through the fabric like it might anchor her to the world she'd walked in from. "Isolde," she said, no longer bothering to hide the shake in it. "Whatever this is — I'd like to leave now." The grove didn't answer in words. But the flattened patches of grass around her shifted, all three at once, drawing the triangle tighter, and somewhere behind the nearest oak, low and patient, something exhaled.