Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GTDTHHX8J4EHGR6PD0T1R4

The note had been waiting under her door when she got home from the Golden Empress, the paper smelling faintly of crushed stems. Moonrise. The stones. Come alone. Isolde's looping hand, unmistakable — though the letters shuddered, as if written on a moving train. Rory had gone anyway. Of course she had. The Heartstone had been running warm for three days, a slow coal-heat against her sternum instead of its usual flicker, and Isolde's invitations had never once shaken. Richmond Park's gates had been chained since dusk. She went over the wall off Petersham Road, trainers soaking through in the wet grass, and set off across the dark toward the oaks. The deer were waiting on the slope. A dozen of them. Does, a stag, standing in a loose crescent, every head aimed at the same point past her shoulder — toward the treeline, toward the stones. None of them moved. Not an ear, not a tail. The stag's breath didn't fog. Hers did. "Evening." Her mother had raised her polite, and saying something made them less like ornaments. She walked the length of the crescent, close enough to touch, and their eyes stayed fixed on the stones, each one holding a coin of moonlight. At the treeline she looked back. The slope stood empty. Six oaks shaped into standing stones — grown that way or carved, Isolde had never said which — heartwood grain running where ordinary stones would carry lichen. Rory passed between the second and third, and winter gave up all at once: warm air, the smell of honey and green sap, the grove. The flowers were closed. Every bloom in the clearing shut tight as a knuckle. She stood among them with her hands deep in her jacket pockets, because the flowers bloomed every month of the year — Isolde boasted of it, said the grove kept its own calendar — and tonight thousands of buds had sealed themselves, and every stem leaned the same direction. Not toward her. Away from her. Toward the dark gap between the far stones, like a crowd turned to watch a door. The pendant's heat climbed a notch. "Isolde?" The word went in and nothing came back. No echo. Her voice always came back soft off the far stones — Isolde called that the grove's manners. Rory checked her phone. 12:14. No signal, which was normal. Full battery. She started across the grass. Her footsteps came back, though. Each one landed, and then landed again — half a second late, same weight, same rhythm, hers and not hers. She stopped. One more step sounded, out past her silence. She swept her torch across the grass behind her. Closed flowers. Still stems. Nothing. "It's moonrise. You said moonrise. It's moonrise, I came alone like the note said, so if this is a game, you've had your laugh." The grove said nothing. Then, from everywhere and nowhere — from the soil, from the buds, from the black between the far stones — a single note rang out. Thin and high, a wet finger round the rim of a wineglass. It faded. It rang again. She timed the third note against her own pulse. Not her pulse. Slower. Patient as a metronome. The Heartstone pulsed in time with it. "Wonderful." She blew out a breath and walked the perimeter, quick and decisive — the way she'd learned to move through car parks at midnight, and through Evan's moods long before that. Keep moving. Count your exits. She counted the stones as she passed them. One. Two. Three. From beneath the turf, close to her feet, came three knocks. Slow. Muffled. The sound of someone shut in a cellar, knocking up through the floor. She dropped to a crouch and pressed her palm flat to the grass. Warm soil. Nothing more, only that far note ringing, ringing. "Isolde? If that's you, knock twice." The soil kept its silence. Between the fifth and sixth stones, something stood. Tall. Thin as a stem. She felt the watching the way you feel sun through glass, and she let her eyes slide past it, casual, an old trick — watch reflections, never the thing itself — and when she forced herself to look back there was nothing there but heartwood grain and dark. Her torch beam was full of drifting motes. Except nothing drifted in that air. The grass never stirred, her breath never stirred it, and the motes hung where they hung, pale seeds of light. She switched the torch off. The motes stayed. Faint. Suspended in the black between the stones without her light to hold them. "Okay." She kept her voice level for her own benefit. "You're not Isolde. Isolde would've laughed by now." Isolde always laughed. Centuries on this earth and she giggled at pigeons. If this were one of her games, she'd have appeared by now, smelling of meadowsweet and insufferable with her own cleverness. A whisper answered from her left. Close. Close enough to stir the hair at her ear. "Rory." Her own voice. Exactly her own voice, with the Cardiff planed off it. Saying her name the way she said it when she talked herself down from panic — reasonable, gentle. "You're not real." Even to her own ears that came out wrong; you don't get to vote on what's real. She'd learned that much in the year after Evan. Name what's in the room. "Something is in the room." She said it out loud, steady. "It's wearing my voice. The room is a grove. The exits are six oaks. The time is—" She looked at her phone. 3:47. She had been inside eleven minutes. The battery read four per cent, though it had been full at the stones, and as she watched, the clock stepped backwards. 3:46. 3:45. Patient as the note. The chain at the back of her neck had gone hot as a hand. "Right. Party's over." She turned for the gap between the second and third stones — home, London, Silas' lock-ins, daylight, ordinary noise. "Isolde, I'm sorry. I'll come back with—" with what, with Silas and a crowbar? — "I'll come back." The flowers turned with her. All of them. Thousands of sealed buds on thousands of stems swivelled with a sound like silk pulled through a ring, and they weren't facing her. They had never faced her. They faced the space at her back the way a crowd faces a stage, and Rory understood, with a certainty that dropped through her like a swallowed stone, that everything in this grove had been watching something behind her since the moment she arrived. The footsteps began. Hers. Same trainers, same rhythm — late by half a second, then a quarter, then by nothing at all, so close the two sounds braided into one. She stopped. The footsteps took one more step. The pendant flared hot enough to sting, a coal on her collarbone, and the whisper returned at her ear, warm air against her skin, her own voice stripped and sweet. "You came alone." Rory turned.