Run: 2026-09-24-01M39W86QWJ59GB47ED0TQVHE4

The Gate at Robin Hood Gate closed behind her at half past eleven, and Rory counted her steps into Richmond Park the way she counted money in her palm — one for each reason to turn back. The pendant hung against her sternum, warm as a coin fresh from a dryer. It had been warm since she crossed the Thames. Warm meant close. Dymas had told her that much before he stopped answering his phone: the Heartstone pulses near a Hel portal, and portals don't open in daylight, and daylight was four hours gone. "Right," she said to the dark. Her breath hung in front of her and dissolved. "Right, okay." The path underfoot was chalk-pale, easy to follow even without the torch on her phone. Oak trees leaned over it from both sides, so old their bark had gone smooth and silver, like the flanks of sleeping animals. She walked. Somewhere ahead, wind moved through branches that she couldn't feel on her own skin. The standing stones appeared without ceremony. One moment the path curved through oaks; the next, six monoliths rose in a rough ring ahead of her, taller than doorways, their surfaces furred with moss that glowed faintly green where her torchbeam touched it. Beyond them, wildflowers — real ones, cosmos and cornflower and things she had no names for — bloomed in a clearing that should have been brown and dormant in November. The pendant throbbed. Once, twice, then settled into a rhythm that matched nothing in her chest. "Isolde?" Her voice came out flatter than she intended. "It's Rory. Carter. We need to talk about Dymas." The grove said nothing, which was the first wrong thing, because the grove had never been silent before. Daytime visits came wrapped in birdsong, in the drone of insects, in a hum she'd assumed was the wind finding gaps in the stones. Tonight the hum was gone. Tonight the silence had texture, like wet wool pressed against both ears. She stepped between the stones. The air changed temperature in the space of a single stride — not colder, exactly, but thinner, as though she'd walked from a heated room into one where the heat had been used up years ago. The wildflowers turned with her. Not in the wind. There was no wind. They turned the way faces turn to follow someone crossing a room. Don't be ridiculous. Flowers track the sun. It's a thing flowers do. The sun was not out. She kept walking, because the pendant kept pulsing, and because turning around felt like losing an argument she couldn't afford to lose. The clearing was deeper than it had been in daylight — she remembered that much. In daylight, Isolde's oak had stood at the far edge, a single massive trunk with a door-shaped hollow. Now the clearing stretched on, and the trees at its border had grown taller, or the ground had grown deeper, or the hour inside the stones had stretched like warm toffee. Her phone read 11:47. It had read 11:47 when she passed the second stone. She checked it three more times. 11:47. 11:47. The battery had not dropped. "Okay." She stopped in the centre of the clearing and spoke to the dark over the flowers. "Time works differently here. Fine. Noted. Isolde, if this is you being funny, it's not funny. Dymas is missing. His flat looked like something had eaten its way out of it, and the Heartstone led me here, so either you know where he is or you know what took him, and either way I need—" A sound stopped her. Behind the far trees. A wet, rhythmic sound, soft as a spoon in batter. Turn, turn, turn. "Hello?" The sound stopped. She stood with her fists at her sides and counted to thirty. The silence that answered was worse than the sound, because the silence had weight now, and direction, and patience. She turned in a slow circle with the torch up. The beam crossed oak trunks, fern banks, the pale teeth of the standing stones far behind her. Nothing moved. Nothing had to move. The feeling had already arrived and settled on her shoulders like a coat: the absolute, animal certainty of being watched by something that had been watching for longer than she'd been walking. The crescent scar on her wrist ached. It always ached in the cold, but this was a different ache — deeper, rhythmic, in time with the pendant. "Isolde." She made her voice hard. "I know you can hear me. The grove hears everything, you told me that yourself. So hear this: I'm not leaving without an answer." Turn, turn, turn. The sound again — closer, or from a different direction, she couldn't tell which. The dark out here didn't carry sound the way normal dark did. It bent it. She raised the torch and swept it left, and in the half-second before the beam caught the treeline, she saw it at the edge of her vision: a shape standing between two oaks where no shape had been. Tall. Wrong-shouldered. Still in the specific way of things that are only pretending to be still. The beam reached the spot. Two oaks. Empty ground. Ferns. Her breath came out in a white flag. "There's nothing there," she said, to herself, to the grove, to whatever was counting her words. "There's nothing—" The wildflowers nearest her had closed. Every petal in a three-metre ring had folded inward, tight as fists, and the ring was widening. She watched it spread — flower after flower shutting its face against the night, a slow wave of refusal moving outward from her feet. They're closing because it's cold. Her pendant flared. Not a pulse — a burn, crimson light leaking through the neck of her jacket, throwing her shadow long and doubled across the flowers. Two shadows. One hers. One standing behind her left shoulder, where nothing stood. She didn't turn around. Every nerve she owned screamed at her not to turn around, and for once she listened to them, because Isolde had told her once, laughing, wine-drunk, on the flat roof above Silas's bar: Never turn to look at it, Rory. The looking is how it gets your address. The wet sound started again. Directly behind her now. Turn, turn, turn — and underneath it, low and layered, something breathing through too many openings. "Isolde," Rory said, and her voice held, barely, a wire pulled to snapping. "I'm in your grove. Under your stones. Get out here and tell me what the hell is standing behind me." The breathing stopped. In the silence that followed, from everywhere and nowhere, from inside the stones and under the flowers and in the hollow of her own skull, a voice answered. It was not Isolde's voice. It was not one voice at all. "She's been asleep a long time, Laila. You woke the grove coming in. Now it knows your name is a lie."