Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPVQ6THTEKQ53W53JVHVV5

The satnav gave up two miles back, so Rory went by the pendant. It sat warm against her sternum, a slow throb like something asleep, and every time she took a wrong turn along the bridle path the warmth thinned to nothing. She'd doubled back three times. Richmond Park after midnight was bigger than it had any right to be — the gates locked at dusk, the deer moved like rumours through the bracken, and the city glow hung above the treeline in a dirty orange band that never got closer no matter how long she walked. She'd come for answers. That was the whole of it. Silas had said the grove opened on the new moon and that Isolde would speak to her, and Rory had nodded and said fine, brilliant, and hadn't asked what happened if Isolde didn't feel like speaking. The standing stones came up on her without warning. That was the first wrong thing. She'd been watching the ground, picking her way over roots, and when she lifted her head they were simply there — five oak trunks, dead a thousand years by the look of them, grey and fissured and standing in a ring like a jaw with teeth missing. No approach. No thinning of the woods. Just there, three paces off, close enough to touch. Rory stopped. Her breath went out of her in a plume, and she watched it hang in the air, and then she watched it drift sideways. There was no wind. "Right," she said, and hated how small her voice sounded under all that sky. She stepped between two of the stones. The cold went. Not gradually — it dropped off her like a coat sliding from a chair, and the air on the other side was mild and thick and smelled of cut grass and something sweeter underneath, honeysuckle or rot, she couldn't decide which. Wildflowers came up to her knees. Foxglove, cornflower, campion, poppies, all of them wide open and nodding in a breeze she couldn't feel on her skin. The grass moved. She stood very still and watched a line of it bend and rise, bend and rise, tracing a slow curve towards the centre of the clearing, and she waited for the deer or the fox or the badger to show itself. Nothing did. The line reached the middle and stopped. "Isolde?" The word didn't carry. It came out of her mouth and fell dead about a foot in front of her face, and she felt the shape of it drop, the way you feel a step that isn't there. The pendant flared hot. Then cooled. Rory pressed her palm flat against her chest and counted, the way she used to count in Evan's flat with her back to the bathroom door. Four in. Hold. Four out. Her heart argued with her and lost. When she was steady she started walking, cutting a straight line for the centre of the grove, and she kept her chin level and didn't look at the flowers. Grass whispered against her jeans. Behind her, something else whispered against something else. She turned. Nothing. The clearing lay open and pale under a sky the colour of old milk — no stars, no moon, and she hadn't clocked that until now, hadn't registered that there was light here and nothing making it. The oak stones stood round the edge. She counted them. Five. She'd counted five coming in. She was almost certain she'd counted five coming in. Rory kept walking. The sound started when she was halfway across. Faint, so faint she thought it was her own blood in her ears — a high thin note, like a wet finger dragged round the rim of a glass, and it rose and fell with a rhythm she recognised before she could name it. Then she named it and wished she hadn't. Breathing. Something behind her was breathing, and it was doing it very carefully, the way a person breathes when they're pretending to be asleep. She didn't turn round. That was the whole trick, that was what Silas had told her — *never turn round twice for the same noise, love, once is curiosity, twice is an invitation* — and she walked with her hands loose at her sides and her jaw locked so hard it ached. The breathing kept pace. Twenty steps. Thirty. The centre of the grove had a flat stone in it, a slab about the size of a door, worn smooth and dished in the middle like a soap dish, and the flowers grew right up to its edge and stopped dead. Rory reached it and put her hand on it and the stone was warm as skin. The breathing stopped. She stood in the enormous silence and became aware, very slowly, of a shape at the left-hand edge of her vision. Tall. Thin. Standing among the flowers about fifteen feet out, perfectly still, and when she turned her head towards it there was only foxglove, six spikes of it in a clump, purple bells hanging heavy. She looked away. The shape came back. "I know you're there," she said. *I know you're there,* said the grove, in her voice, from behind her left shoulder. Rory's whole body went cold. She kept her hand on the stone because she needed to be holding something. "That's a party trick." Her voice cracked in the middle and she pushed through it. "Isolde. I've come to bargain. I've got a name and I've got a debt and I'm not leaving until—" *—until,* said the grove, closer now, and this time it wasn't quite her voice. It had the shape of her voice but the mouth was wrong, too many consonants for the space they had to live in, and she heard the wet click of a tongue that was too long. The flowers behind her bent. All of them, at once, in a wave, and she felt the displaced air move the hair on the back of her neck. She turned round. Grass. Flowers. Empty clearing. The five stones, still five, and between two of them the black slot of the gap she'd come through, and she thought about running for it and knew, with a certainty that arrived fully formed and reasonable, that she'd be caught before the third step. Not chased. *Caught.* Something in the grove wasn't a thing that had to travel. The pendant went hot again — properly hot, a coin fresh from a fire — and she gasped and hauled it out from under her jumper on its chain. The crimson stone was glowing hard enough to throw red across her knuckles and it was pulsing fast, fast, faster, no rhythm left to it at all. Above her, something exhaled. Not behind. Above. Six, seven feet up, directly over her head, a long soft breath that stirred her fringe and smelled of turned earth and iron, and Rory did not look up, would not look up, stood there with her fist closed round a burning stone and her eyes fixed on the smooth dished slab beneath her hand. The dish in the stone was the right shape for a head. "I've a name for you," she said. She got it out steady. She was proud of that, in some cold clerical corner of her mind that was already writing this down for later, if there was a later. "I've a name and I'll trade it. But you'll come out where I can see you first, because I don't deal with things that hide." Silence. Long enough for her to hear the grass settling. Then, very quietly, from every direction at once, the grove began to laugh in her mother's voice.