Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPY4Q2T92S3MC6YFP68WN4

The oak stones didn't look like much from the outside. Three of them, grey and lichen-crusted, leaning together at the top of a rise where the bracken grew waist-high. Rory had walked past this part of Richmond Park a hundred times on a hundred deliveries and never once looked twice. "That's it?" She pushed a bramble aside with the toe of her boot. "That's the boundary of a Fae grove? Looks like something a council worker forgot to mow around." "Wards work best when they're boring." Nyx flowed along beside her, more suggestion than shape in the late afternoon light, their edges fraying wherever the sun caught them. "Nobody investigates boring." "Right. And we just walk through." "You walk through. I'll be a step behind you." "Comforting." The pendant at her throat had gone quiet an hour ago — no warmth, no pulse — and Rory found she missed it. She'd got used to the crimson stone thrumming against her sternum like a second heartbeat, telling her the world was still stitched together the way she expected. Now it hung dead and cold, and the silence of it made her fingers itch. Silas came up the slope behind them, breathing hard, one hand braced on his knee. He'd insisted on coming and Rory suspected he was regretting it around the fifteen-minute mark. "If time moves funny in there," he said, "who's minding the bar?" "Nobody. Which is why we're not staying for tea." Rory stepped between the stones. The world folded. There was no other word for it. One moment the wind had been cold and wet off the Thames and there'd been a plane grinding somewhere overhead, and the next the air went thick and sweet as syrup and the sound simply stopped — not silence, but the absence of the sounds she'd been carrying. In their place came something else. A low ringing, like a wet finger on the rim of a glass, coming from everywhere at once. She stood in a clearing that had no business existing. The grass was so green it hurt to look at, and it moved without wind, bending in slow waves as though something enormous breathed beneath it. Wildflowers everywhere — bluebells and foxglove and poppies and a dozen things she had no name for, all blooming at once, all of them out of season, some of them out of any season she'd ever heard of. A flower the size of a dinner plate turned its face toward her as she passed. Not toward the light. Toward her. "Rory." Silas' voice came out flat and strange, like he was speaking into a pillow. "Rory, the trees." She looked up. The oaks ringing the clearing went up and up and kept going, trunks broader than a bus, bark carved into channels deep enough to hide in, and the canopy above them didn't end in sky. It ended in more canopy, layer over layer, receding into a green gloom that suggested no ceiling at all. Motes drifted through the shafts of light. Rory watched one land on her sleeve. It sat there, glowing soft gold, and then unfolded four legs and walked off her cuff into the air. "Don't touch anything," Nyx said. They'd gone solid — properly solid, a tall figure of matte black with violet eyes like coals through a grate. In the grove's strange light they cast a shadow, and the shadow moved a half-second late. "Don't eat anything. Don't accept anything. Don't thank anyone." "Don't thank anyone?" "Gratitude is a debt here. Debts are collected." Silas made a small noise. "I'd like to go home now." "You'd like to have gone home twenty minutes ago." Rory started walking. The grass parted for her, which she chose not to think about. "Come on." They moved deeper, and deeper turned out to be a strange direction in this place. The clearing had looked round and small from the stones — thirty paces across, she'd have guessed. She counted a hundred and forty before the far treeline got any nearer. When she glanced back, the standing stones were still right there, thirty paces behind, and Silas had gone the colour of old paper. "Rory." "I saw." "Rory, the stones—" "I *saw*, Silas." The ringing changed pitch. Not louder. Deeper, dropping into her chest, and with it came a smell: cut grass and old stone and something underneath, faintly metallic, like a coin held too long in a fist. Rory pressed her palm flat against her sternum where the pendant sat and felt nothing at all. Water somewhere. She followed it. The stream, when they found it, ran uphill. Rory crouched at the bank and watched it for a long moment — clear as glass, flowing steadily up the slope toward the trees, small silver fish holding themselves still against the current with their noses pointed downhill. The stones on the bed were smooth and white and, when she looked closer, carved. Faces. Hundreds of them, each no bigger than her thumbnail, worn to soft suggestions of eyes and open mouths. "Nyx." She kept her voice level. "What am I looking at?" Nyx crouched beside her. The violet eyes tracked the water upward. "Offerings. Or debtors. The line between the two is thin in the Courts." "They're faces." "They were." Nyx reached out — didn't touch, held their hand an inch above the surface — and the water bulged upward toward the shadow of their palm like a cat pushing into a stroke. "This grove is a pocket. A scrap of the Fae Realm caught in Earth's hem when the Veil was drawn. Everything in it remembers being somewhere else." "That's not an answer." "No." Rory stood. Her knees had gone stiff, and when she looked down the knees of her jeans were damp with dew that hadn't been there when she crouched. She rubbed the crescent scar on her wrist without deciding to. The trees on the far bank grew closer together, trunks braided, and between them the light did something she didn't like: it hung in the air in visible sheets, pale and shimmering, warping when she moved her head. She'd seen that shimmer once before, on the night the thing came through the wall of Silas' cellar. The Veil, thin as breath. "It's tearing," she said. "It's *thin*." Nyx rose to their full height. "There's a difference, and the difference is who's standing on either side." Something laughed. It came from up in the canopy, high and delighted and entirely without warmth, and it was followed by a rustle that travelled the length of the treeline — branch to branch to branch, a hundred metres of movement, and nothing visible making it. Silas grabbed Rory's arm. She let him. "Hello," she called out. "*Don't*," Nyx hissed. Too late. The rustling stopped. The ringing stopped. Every flower in the clearing turned toward her at once, a soft mass shifting like a crowd in a stadium, and in the sudden stillness Rory heard, quite clearly, the sound of bare feet in grass — coming from behind, where there was nothing but a hundred and forty paces of open ground and three grey stones that hadn't moved. The pendant at her throat gave one hard pulse of heat and went cold again. "Right," Rory said quietly, and drew the moonsilver blade from inside her jacket. It came out glowing, faint and blue, though there was no moon anywhere she could see. "Everybody stay behind me."