Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H5EBNHS7HECDFPXDXG6P8C

The pendant was warm before Rory even reached the standing stones. That was wrong, for a start. The Heartstone only pulsed near Hel portals, and the Grove wasn't Hel — it was Fae, or so Eva had told her, back when Eva still told her anything at all. Rory checked the stone anyway, cupping it in her palm as she climbed the last stretch of the path through Richmond Park. In the dark the crimson gem glowed faintly, the way a coal glows after the fire is out, and against her skin it beat — slow, patient, like something asleep that had learned her heartbeat and was copying it. One hour inside could be days outside. That was the warning. She'd set her phone alarm for forty minutes and left the phone itself in her jacket's inner pocket, far from the pendant, because Yu-Fei had mentioned — in the offhand way she said things that turned out to be life-or-death — that the Fae Grove didn't like human timekeeping devices. Fine. Forty minutes. In and out, take the measure of the clearing, find whatever it was Silas had sent her to find, and be home before the milk turned. The stones rose out of the dark ahead of her like the ribs of something that had lain down here to die a very long time ago. Ancient oaks, actually, though at night and in this light no one could have told her they weren't stone. They were massive, silver-barked, their limbs bare and crooked, and between two of them hung a gap that was darker than the dark around it. The air through the gap smelled of green things. Growing things. It was November, and the wind off the park had a wire of ice in it, and here, at the threshold, it smelled like May. Rory stepped through. The change was immediate, the way stepping into a warm bath is immediate — a softness all along her skin, a hush. The wind stopped. Not died down. Stopped, as if someone had paused it mid-sentence. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in dense, knee-high drifts of white and violet, blooming with a brightness the darkness didn't account for. No moon overhead. No stars. The light came from nowhere and everywhere, sourceless and even, the light of an overcast day that had somehow misplaced the sky. "Right," she said aloud, because her voice, when there was nothing, was a comfort. "Forty minutes. Piece of cake." The clearing was maybe a hundred yards across, ringed by the great oaks. In the center stood a single tree, larger than the rest, its trunk gnarled into shapes her eyes kept trying to resolve into a face and kept almost succeeding. That was her marker; Silas had been clear about that much. Whatever she was looking for — a thread of Eva's, a trace of her passage — would be near the old tree. She started across the grass. Her footsteps made no sound. She noticed it halfway there, stopped, and stamped once. The flowers bent under her heel and sprang back and gave nothing. Not muffled. Absent. As if the Grove were politely declining to record her. "Fine," she said, quieter. "Creepy. Fine." Silas had said the Grove had been quiet for years. Sleeping, he'd said. But Eva had gone in three days ago and not come out, and the pendant had started burning hot enough to wake Rory at night, and eventually the choice had made itself. Near the great tree she knelt and parted the flowers with both hands. Soil, dark and rich. And there, snagged on a root half-buried — a thread of blue wool. Eva's jumper. Rory closed her fist around it and let herself breathe. The breath came back to her wrong. Too many echoes of it. As if, somewhere just past the edge of her hearing, someone else had exhaled at the same moment and slightly longer. She turned around. The clearing was empty. Of course it was empty. But the flowers — she was sure of this, sure the way you're sure of your own name — the flowers had been leaning away from the wind that didn't exist, all bent in one direction like a crowd facing a stage. Now they stood upright. Every one of them. Facing her. Don't be absurd. Flowers don't face anything. Wind, light. She stood, pocketing the thread, and made a slow rotation. Bent away from her in a wide ring, that was all, the way water bends around a stone. A draught she couldn't feel, she told herself, eddying. Physics. Boring, reliable physics. Then, from behind the tree line, a sound. A bird. Not a night bird — a blackbird, full daylight song, three bright rising notes. She waited for the pause that follows a song, the silence in which a bird listens. It didn't come. The blackbird sang again. The same three notes, same pitch, same length, precisely. Again. Same. Again. Same. A recording, a loop, something with the life ironed out of it, and it kept on with a persistence that stopped being beautiful after the sixth repetition and became, by the twelfth, a thing she wanted to kill. Her phone read 11:47. She'd been inside nine minutes. She walked toward the gap in the stones that she'd entered by, and the gap wasn't there. The oaks formed an unbroken ring. She walked the circle once, fast, breath loud in her ears — the only thing in the Grove still making honest sound — and every tree stood identical to its neighbours, silver and crooked and blank. At the place where she'd come in there was a tree like all the others. She put her hand against its bark and it was warm. Not stone-warm, not tree-warm. Skin-warm. And beneath her palm, faintly, something moved in a rhythm she recognised, because it had been beating against her sternum all night. The blackbird stopped. The silence it left behind had a texture to it, a held-breath quality, and in that silence Rory heard, very close behind her, the small wet click of a mouth opening. She didn't turn. Some animal part of her, older than reason, held her still, and the rest of her mind raced — forty minutes, in and out, the pendant, the thread in her pocket, the fact that the wrongness hadn't attacked her, hadn't breathed on her neck, had only clicked, only waited, the way something waits when it has all the time there is and yours is the currency being spent. "Eva?" she said. The answer came in Eva's voice, from a mouth she couldn't see, and it said, gently, in the exact cadence of the friend she'd crossed a country for: "Forty minutes, Rory. You didn't listen." Behind her, all around her, the wildflowers began, very softly, to sing.