Run: 2026-09-23-01M36S8XETAP182MP5BCVXF6WX

The oak standing stones caught Rory's torchlight like bone. She ducked between two of them, backpack snagging on bark, and stepped into the Fae Grove. Wildflowers covered the clearing in a carpet that didn't belong to any season — foxglove and cornflower and something with petals the colour of a bruise, all of them open, all of them facing her. "Right," she said. Her voice came out thin. "Here." She'd come for the pendant. Three nights it had sat on her windowsill above Silas' bar, pulsing that soft red heat against the glass, and every pulse had pulled the same direction — south-west, toward Richmond. Toward the grove where Isolde held court and time folded like wet paper. Rory needed answers about the stone, about who had slipped it into her delivery bag between the chow mein and the egg-fried rice, and Isolde traded in answers. That was the arrangement. Midnight, the grove, and Rory would come alone. She checked her phone. 23:58. No signal, which she'd expected. What she hadn't expected was the battery — full when she'd left the tube station at Putney, now showing nineteen percent and dropping in chunks. The grove held its breath around her. She found the flat stone near the centre that Isolde used as a table and set her torch on it, beam pointing at the canopy. Waiting felt worse than walking, so she paced the boundary inside the stones. Twenty-two pches across. Twenty-three. Twenty-two again. The flowers under her boots never crunched. They bent and rose behind her like water closing over a stone. "You said midnight," she told the dark between the oaks. "It's midnight." Somewhere past the stones, a bird called — two notes, then a third that dragged flat, like a cassette tape warping. Rory stopped pacing. Richmond Park had its share of birds. None of them sounded like a machine breaking. She held still and counted her breaths and told herself it was a corvid, corvids did strange things with sound, corvids could — The call came again. Closer. The second note shorter, the third note flatter, and underneath it a wet click she felt in her back teeth. She picked up the torch. Swept the beam along the standing stones. Between two of the outer oaks, something stood at the height of a man's chest and did not have a face, only a suggestion of one, a smudge where features might pool. When the light touched it, the shape resolved into hanging moss and the gap behind a trunk. Moss that hung in a curtain the exact width of her shoulders. "Don't," she whispered, and didn't know who she meant. The pendant warmed against her sternum. Not its usual faint sunlit trickle — a slow throb, patient as a second heartbeat. It only did that near a Hel portal. She pressed her fingers to the stone through her jacket and found it hot enough to sting. "Okay," she breathed. "Okay." She'd wanted answers. She hadn't wanted a portal. Time did things here. She checked her phone again: 00:01. Except the clock now read 3:41 and the battery had dropped to four percent, and the screen's glow had gone the colour of weak tea before the display died in her palm. The torch flickered. Not a battery flicker. A slow dim and swell, dim and swell, as if the beam breathed. The wildflowers in the light's reach had turned. She could swear it. Foxgloves and cornflowers and those bruise-coloured petals, all tilted now toward the outer dark instead of toward her, every stem bent at the same angle like a crowd leaning to watch something arrive. Something arrived. Sound first. A dragging weight through leaf-litter, unhurried, circling the stones at a distance of maybe thirty paces. Then a second weight to her left, keeping pace with the first, and the rhythm between them matched — drag, pause, drag, pause — the way two people walk when they carry something heavy between them. Rory turned in a slow circle, torch held at her collarbone. The beams caught trunks, ferns, the pale backs of the standing stones. Each time the light swung past the northern gap between two oaks, the moss curtain hung a little lower. "I'm expected," she said to the grove. Her voice steadied on the words and she leaned into that. "Isolde knows me. I've got business here. Whatever you are, I'm expected and I'm expected back." The dragging stopped. Both of them. Both whatever-they-were. Stopped on the same footfall. Then a sound came from the moss curtain. Not the bird-call. Something shaped like her own voice, worn thin and stretched, catching on a sound in the middle of her own name. "Rrrr-" It got the first syllable and buckled on the rest. Rory's hand went to the pendant. The gem burned and she held it anyway, thumb across the crimson face, and the warmth answered her palm in pulses she could count. Four beats. Stop. Four beats. Stop. The same rhythm as the dragging had been. The torch died. She thumbed the switch. Nothing. She thumbed it again and the beam burst back at half strength, and in that stutter the clearing looked wrong — the flat stone where she'd left her bag stood ten paces further from the stones than she remembered, or she stood further from the flat stone, and the wildflowers had closed their petals and turned pale stems toward the ground like fingers curling. "You said midnight." She said it to the empty air where Isolde should have been. "You said come alone. I came alone. That was the deal." Under her boots, the flowers breathed out. The scent hit like a room that hadn't been opened in years — sweet things gone over, sugar gone to vinegar, the ghost of something green underneath it. The dragging resumed. Closer. She could hear individual leaves now, the papery complaint of them under weight, and the thing on her left had drifted inside the ring of stones. She knew this the way she knew a room had changed around her — no sound of it crossing the boundary, just the acoustic difference, the way a voice sounds smaller in a full room. Something touched the wildflowers at the far edge of the torch beam and the blooms there folded flat, one by one, in a line travelling toward her. Rory stepped back until her shoulders met oak. "Isolde." She put the name out like a wall. "Isolde, this is your ground. You said midnight. Say something." The moss curtain between the northern oaks parted. Not by wind. It parted the way a curtain parts when a hand draws it aside, and what stood in the gap had the height of a man and the proportions of something assembled from a description of a man by someone working from memory. It did not move toward her. It simply occupied the gap where the light ended. Her pendant throbbed once and went cold. Rory held the stone and found it dead weight against her chest, the warmth gone out of it like a coal in water, and behind her the bark of the oak pressed shapes into her shoulders that felt less like ridges and more like letters. From the far side of the clearing, from the dark past the southern stones, something exhaled. Long, slow, satisfied. Then it said her name in her mother's voice, clear as a telephone call, and got every syllable right.