Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQWPTA66N5HXR8VDEQNT2K

Frost crunched under Rory's boots until, quite suddenly, it didn't. She stopped with one foot lifted, absurdly, like a woman testing bathwater. Behind her, Richmond Park lay grey and hard in the December dark, the grass silvered, the bracken snapped brittle by three nights of hard freeze. Ahead of her — three paces ahead, no more — the ground was soft. Green. She could smell it. Cut grass and warm earth and something sweeter beneath, like the inside of a florist's van. "Don't," said Nyx. Their voice came from her left shoulder, though there was nothing at her left shoulder but a smear of deeper black against the black of the trees. It always sounded like that: a whisper caught in a doorway, words arriving a half-beat before she registered anyone had spoken. "Don't what?" "Don't put your foot down until you've looked at the stones." Rory looked. She'd taken them for trees at first, and in fairness they had been trees once — eight oaks, or the memory of eight oaks, standing in a rough ring some thirty feet across. Bark had gone to stone. The grain was still visible in it, the knots and the whorls, the scarred lip where a branch had been torn away a few hundred years ago, all of it grey and cold and dense as gravestones. Two of them had leaned together at the top to make an arch, and beyond the arch the air did something she couldn't quite hold in her eye. It shimmered. Not like heat off tarmac. Like the surface of water seen from below. "Oh," said Eva, arriving at a jog and out of breath, her scarf half unwound. "Oh, that's not right." "That's the Veil," Rory said. She wasn't sure how she knew. The pendant told her, maybe — the Heartstone lay against her sternum under three layers of jumper and coat and it had begun to pulse, slow and steady and warm, a second heartbeat keeping time slightly out of step with her own. Not a portal, then. Something adjacent to one. A thin place. "It's a door," Nyx said. "Doors have manners. Say something." "To the trees?" "To whatever's listening." Rory felt ridiculous. She said, "We're here because we were invited," and it came out steadier than she expected, and the shimmer between the two leaning oaks parted like a curtain drawn back by a hand she couldn't see. Warm air rolled out over them. Warm — in December, with the solstice four days off and the pipes in her flat groaning every night above Silas' bar. It smelled of hawthorn blossom and wet moss and honey. Eva made a small, wounded noise. "Rory." "I know." "It's *May* in there." They went through single file, because it felt wrong to go through abreast, and Rory led because she'd have hated herself if she hadn't. Crossing took no time and it took a long time. She was aware of the stone on either side of her, of a chill that lifted off it like the breath of a cellar, and then of a sensation in her ears like a plane descending — pressure, and a low tone she felt in her teeth rather than heard — and then grass. Long grass, wet to the knee, seed-heads brushing her thighs. She looked up and forgot how to be afraid for a moment. There was no sky. There was a *ceiling* of sky, that was the only way she could put it later, hung low and close overhead, a deep bruised blue that held stars in the wrong places. She knew the winter constellations; her father had taught her Orion off the Cardiff seafront when she was six. Orion wasn't there. Nothing was there that she recognised, only a scatter of white lights and, off to what she decided to call the east, three moons — no, one moon and two things that were not moons, that had edges too clean, that turned slowly like coins falling through oil. The clearing spread out ahead in a shallow bowl. Wildflowers everywhere, hip-high: foxgloves, cornflowers, poppies, and things she had no name for that grew in spirals and gave off a pale mint-coloured light from inside their bells. Snowdrops grew beside them. That was somehow the worst of it. Snowdrops and poppies and blackberries in fruit and apple blossom, all at once, all in the same square yard of earth, every season of the year crowded into one clearing like guests who'd been given the wrong date. "It doesn't know what month it is," Eva whispered. "I don't think it has months," said Rory. They went deeper. The grass gave way in places to bare, packed paths that didn't seem to go anywhere in particular, and Rory noticed after a while that the paths had been made by feet — many feet, over a long time — and that hers and Eva's left prints in the damp, and Nyx left nothing because Nyx was currently a person-shaped absence gliding along the ground, and there was a third set of prints nowhere at all. She stopped and turned around and checked. Two sets. Just theirs. But someone had made these paths. Sounds came at her in layers. Water first: a stream somewhere to the right, chuckling over stone, though when they went to look there was only a dry channel of white pebbles and the sound continued anyway, unbothered. Then birds. Not birdsong exactly — sequences, five notes repeated with tiny variations, like something practising. Then, faint and far off and utterly unmistakable, laughter. A woman's, or a child's. It came from beyond a stand of silver birches whose leaves were turning, and hadn't finished turning, and would be turning forever. "How long have we been in here?" Eva asked. Rory checked her phone. 5:47 p.m. She had looked at it at the stones and it had said 5:47 p.m. The seconds weren't moving. "Don't," she said, before Eva could look over her shoulder. "Really. Don't." "Time's shallow here," Nyx said. "It pools. An hour can be a minute going out, or a fortnight. I knew a man who spent one song in a place like this and came home to his own grandson's funeral." "You could have mentioned that on the drive." "Would you have turned around?" Rory didn't answer, because she was looking at the tree in the centre of the bowl. It was an oak, and it was vast, and it was in blossom, which oaks did not do — great creamy panicles of flower hanging from black branches, dropping petals in a slow constant snow that never seemed to accumulate. Its roots had grown up out of the ground and back down again in loops big enough to walk through. Threads hung from the lower boughs: hundreds of them, thousands, ribbons and bootlaces and strips of cloth, some rotted to nothing, some bright as if tied that morning. Rings had been pushed onto twigs. A child's shoe. A wedding photograph, curling. Someone's driving licence, laminate cracked, the face bleached blank by weather. Payments, Rory thought. Or thanks. She reached out towards a ribbon and the Heartstone gave one hard pulse against her breastbone, sharp enough to make her flinch, and she pulled her hand back. "Wise," said a voice. Rory turned. There was a woman standing where no woman had been standing, in the flattened grass ten feet away, silver hair to her waist and eyes the colour of the inside of a shell. She was barefoot. The grass beneath her was undisturbed, unbent, as though she weighed nothing at all — as though she stood a hair's breadth above it. "You brought a shadow and a doubter into my grove," Isolde said pleasantly, "and only one of the three of you thought to ask permission. That one may sit."