Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQVQSA2J8A8JTQD3YMA6BE

The gate at Sheen Cross had been chained since ten, so Rory went over the wall, and her palm came away smelling of iron and moss. "Brilliant," she muttered, wiping it down her jeans. "Trespassing. Dad would be thrilled." Richmond Park at night wasn't dark so much as drained. The city glow sat on the horizon like a rind of dirty orange, and everything under it — the bracken, the flattened grass, the black humps of the oaks — held only shades of grey. She walked with her phone torch off. Yu-Fei had been very clear about that. *No light. Light makes you interesting.* The pendant lay against her sternum, cool. It had been cool since Putney. That was the whole point of the walk: Silas said the Heartstone went warm within a hundred yards of anything that opened, and Rory wanted to know whether the grove counted, because if the grove counted then the grove was a door, and if the grove was a door then she'd been sitting in it eating a sausage roll three weeks ago like an idiot. She found the standing stones by feel, the way she'd found them the first time. Two oaks, dead centuries back, the wood gone hard and grey-silver as bone, leaning toward each other over a gap barely wide enough for her shoulders. The bark had shapes cut into it that weren't letters and weren't pictures. Rory stopped in front of the gap. "Isolde?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "It's Carter. I'm coming in." Nobody answered. That was normal. She stepped through. The temperature changed on the second step. Not dramatically — three degrees, four, the difference between a hallway and a kitchen where somebody's been cooking. The air went sweet. Meadowsweet, cow parsley, and under it the green smell of stems snapped fresh, and that was the thing about the grove, that it did April in November and didn't apologise. The wildflowers stood knee-high all around the clearing, white and pale yellow, and every one of them was open. Rory frowned at that. Flowers shut at night. Every flower she'd ever seen shut at night, her mother had gone on about it in the garden at Llandaff, evening primrose being the exception and evening primrose was yellow but it wasn't *that*. These were open like it was noon. Cups tipped up at a sky that had no moon in it. "Right," she said. "Fine. Fae. Everything's fine." She pressed two fingers to the pendant. Cool. Cool as a coin. So not a door, then. Or not one that was open. She should have felt relieved and instead felt the back of her neck go tight, which was ridiculous, because she'd wanted a boring answer and she'd got one. She sat down on the flat stone at the centre — worn concave, like a step in an old church — and let herself breathe. The clearing was quiet. It took her a good minute to understand why that bothered her. Richmond Park at night was not quiet. It was deer coughing and foxes screaming and planes stacking up for Heathrow every ninety seconds, that low tearing sound she'd stopped hearing since she moved to London. She sat with her hands on her knees and counted, and no plane came. "Okay," she said, out loud, because out loud was better. "Time moves funny. Yu-Fei said. Maybe sound does too." Something moved in the flowers on her left. She turned her head. Nothing. Stems, upright, unbent. A rabbit would have left a wake in them. Anything with weight would have. Rory stayed still and let her eyes work. Left, the treeline. Ahead, the treeline. Right, the two grey oaks with the gap between them, and beyond the gap the ordinary park, the ordinary bracken, and it looked wrong through there, flattened somehow, like a photograph of the park rather than the park. Behind her she didn't look, because behind her was the treeline as well, and she'd decided about two seconds ago that she wasn't going to start doing that. The flowers rustled again. Further round. Four o'clock. "Hello," she said. Her voice went out and didn't come back. No echo, and there should have been something, a clearing that size, a wall of trees like that. She stood up. Slowly, hands loose, the way she'd learned to stand up in a room with Evan in it — no sudden movement, nothing that reads as fleeing, because fleeing invites the chase. "I'm going to head off," she told the clearing, conversational. "Lovely place. Ten out of ten. Not staying." Fifteen feet to the stones. She counted them as steps. On the fourth step, something laughed. It was so small she nearly convinced herself it was cloth. A breath through a smile, off to her right, at head height, and head height was the wrong height — the flowers came to her knees and the branches started twelve feet up, there was nothing at head height between her and the trees but air. Rory kept walking. Fifth step. Sixth. The pendant went warm. Not hot. Blood-warm, the way a mug goes when you've held it too long, and she felt it through her jumper and her hand came up and clamped over it without her deciding. "No," she said. "No, you were cold. You were cold two minutes ago—" The flowers on all sides of her closed. All at once, every one, a sound like a hundred small mouths shutting, and the clearing went dark in a way that made no sense because the flowers hadn't been the light, they *couldn't* have been the light, but the grey drained out of everything and left her standing in a black bowl with two grey oaks in it. Something was standing between the oaks. It was tall and it was thin and it was the shape of a person the way a coat on a door is the shape of a person. It didn't move. It filled the gap she needed to walk through, shoulder to shoulder with the stones, and she couldn't see a face and she was absolutely certain that it could see hers. Rory's mouth had gone dry as paper. "Isolde?" she said. The figure tilted its head. The tilt went further than a neck goes. "Ah," it said, and its voice was lovely, and it came from behind her. Rory did not turn around. Her whole body wanted to and she locked it, every joint, and she stood there with her hand over the pendant that was getting hotter against her palm, and she watched the thing in the gap not-move while the lovely voice went on somewhere near her left shoulder, close enough to fog the skin there. "You said your name at the door," it said. "You said, *it's Carter, I'm coming in.* Do you know what that is, little thing? That's an introduction." The flowers at her feet began, very quietly, to open again.