Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRH6VB2YY537M2BP7R4P47

The oaks stood in a ring, seven of them, and every one had died standing up. Rory counted them twice because the number kept sliding. Bark like grey stone, trunks split down the middle as though something had walked out of each one and never bothered closing the door behind it. Between the trees, February had stopped. She could see it stop — frost on the grass to her side of the ring, and past it, three feet away, cowslips and bluebells and something with petals the colour of raw liver, all of it nodding in a wind that wasn't touching her hair. "Right," Eva said. "So we're not doing this." "We're doing this." "Rory." "She said the stones, she said dusk, she said bring no iron." Rory patted her jacket pockets, coming up with keys, and hesitated. "Are keys iron?" "Brass," Nyx murmured. They'd come out of the shadow under the nearest oak the way water comes out of a cloth, wringing themselves upright until the silhouette had shoulders. Violet light where eyes belonged. "Steel, likely. Leave them in the leaf litter. Nothing here wants your Vauxhall." "It's a Corsa." "Nothing here wants that either." Eva laughed — one short, ugly bark of a laugh, the kind that comes out of people right before they cry — and then Rory stepped between two of the oaks and the sound cut off like a phone dropping a call. The cold went. That was the first thing. Not warmth exactly, more the absence of any opinion about temperature, air that sat on the skin without weight. The second thing was the light. Above her the sky had gone the wrong colours in the wrong order: a low band of green over the treeline, then rose, then a deep drowned blue with no stars in it at all, and something moving through that blue very slowly, too large to be a bird and too silent to be a plane. The third thing was the grass. It leaned toward her feet. "Eva." Her own voice came back to her flat, no echo, as if the clearing had swallowed the edges of it. "Eva, come through, it's—" Eva came through with her arms crossed tight over her chest and stopped dead. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. "Yeah," Rory said. The grove ran maybe forty yards across, and Rory knew — the way you know the shape of your own bedroom in the dark — that it was bigger inside than the ring allowed. Wildflowers grew in drifts and spirals, and the spirals were deliberate; she could see the pattern of them from where she stood, the way you see a face in a crowd. Moss climbed the standing stones in letters. Not letters she could read. Letters all the same, with the confidence of letters, curling up the granite and stopping neatly at the top. "Don't step on the white ones," Nyx said behind her. Eva froze mid-stride, heel hovering. "Why." "Because they were something else recently." "That's not an answer, that's a—" Eva looked down. Under her boot, a cluster of small white blooms had turned their faces up. Each one had a dark centre, and each dark centre had a ring of paler dark around it, and Rory's stomach turned over as she recognised what she was looking at. Eva put her foot down somewhere else. Very carefully. They went in deeper. The ground rose, which it shouldn't have — Richmond Park was flat as a plate out here, Rory had cycled it a hundred times — and as they climbed, the noise started. Not birdsong. Something like birdsong that had learned the tune by ear and got the intervals slightly wrong, coming from three directions, answering itself. Water somewhere too. Rory turned her head to place it and the sound moved. "How long've we been in?" Eva asked. "Four minutes." "Feels longer." "It is longer," Nyx said. They walked without disturbing anything, and Rory noticed they'd gone solid — properly solid, boot-shaped depressions in the moss — which meant they wanted to be. That worried her more than the sky. "Outside, it might be Tuesday. It might be the same breath you took at the stones. Do not count. Counting is how people lose thirty years and a wife." "Cheerful." "Accurate." At the top of the rise the trees opened and Rory stopped so suddenly Eva walked into her back. A pool sat in a hollow, ten feet across, perfectly round. No stream fed it and none left it. The water was black and utterly still, and it held the sky — but not the sky above them. In the water it was noon. Hard blue, high white cloud, and a sun sitting fat and yellow at the top, and when Rory crouched at the edge her own face didn't appear in it at all. "Rory." "I see it." "Your face isn't—" "I said I see it." She sat back on her heels. Her hands had gone damp. At her throat the Heartstone hung cold as a coin, and she took a strange comfort in that; whatever this place was, it wasn't Hel, it had no door down. "Nyx. Is it safe to touch?" Nyx considered the pool for a long moment. "Safe. Rude." "Rude how?" "You would be putting your hand in someone's afternoon." Eva made a small sound and sat down hard on a stone. "I want to go home." "You don't." Rory said it gently, because it was true, and because she'd seen Eva's face in the last thirty seconds — the way she kept turning her head to catch the flowers moving, the way her hand had gone out to a hanging vine without her deciding it. Wonder looked a lot like nausea from the outside. Rory had learned that about herself in a stairwell in Cardiff, running from something with too many joints, laughing. Past the pool the wildflowers thinned into a colonnade of birch, white bark so bright it made the eye ache, and Rory walked it with one hand out, brushing trunks. Each one hummed faintly under her palm. Different notes. She went four trees along before she understood the notes made a phrase, and that the phrase came out backwards, and that she'd started walking to its rhythm without deciding to. She stopped. Lifted her hand off the bark. "There," Nyx said. At the end of the colonnade, half-buried, a doorframe. Just the frame — moonsilver-pale wood, or stone pretending to be wood, standing upright in the moss with grass grown thick through where a threshold should be. Nothing on the other side but more birches. And yet the air inside the frame was doing something: a slow shimmer, like heat off tarmac, and through it the birches on the far side stood in autumn, gold-leaved, dropping. Eva came up beside her. Neither of them spoke for a while. "That's the Veil, isn't it," Eva said at last. "That's what they mean. That's an actual—" "Not a rift." Nyx's whisper had gone thin. "A seam. Someone stitched here, once, and did it well. Do not step through it, either of you. Not tonight. Not on a whim." Rory looked at the gold leaves falling on the other side of nothing, and at the frost-free grass under her boots, and found she'd been holding her breath for so long her ribs hurt. "Isolde," she said, loud, to the trees. "We came. Where are you?" The humming birches went quiet, all at once, like a room turning to look.