Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2AV07ZQHT2QZ9ACB0VQF3

Frost furred the bracken along the path, and Rory's breath hung in front of her face like a second, paler ghost. Ten minutes off the Queens Road track, the deer had vanished, the joggers with them, and the hum of the A308 had thinned to nothing. The stones stood ahead of her. Six of them ringed a dip in the ground. She had expected granite. These were oak, trunks as wide as her arm span, black with age and hard as iron, their bark carved with spirals that ran clockwise up one side and anticlockwise down the other. Moss grew on their north faces in a green so bright it looked wet. "Those weren't on the map," she said. "Nothing here is on the map." Nyx's voice slid along the back of her neck like a draught under a door. They stood a pace behind her, six foot two of darkness that the pale morning couldn't quite pin down. Where sunlight touched their shoulders, the edges frayed into smoke. "You're leaking," Rory said. "I'm listening." A violet glint moved in the hollow of their face. "The Veil lies thin here. Thinner than it should be, with the solstice still three days off. Do you see it?" She squinted between the two nearest stones. The air there rippled, the way tarmac shimmered in August, except the frost lay hard on the ground and the shimmer had a grain to it, like silk pulled tight over a frame. "Yeah," she said. "I see it." "Then you have the sight. Good. Walk through the gap. Don't touch the wood." "Any reason?" "Many. I'll tell you the shortest one when you're inside." Rory tucked her hands into her sleeves, felt the crescent scar on her left wrist against the cold of her cuff, and stepped between the stones. The world pulled like a stitch. Her ears popped. The cold went out of her lungs, and warmth wrapped her face, thick with honey and crushed grass and something green and sharp she couldn't name. She opened her eyes and stopped walking. Flowers covered everything. Foxgloves stood shoulder-high beside cornflowers, poppies, bluebells, and some small white blossom with a throat of gold that she had never seen in any garden. None of them belonged together. All of them bloomed. Bees droned through the air, fat and slow, and their bodies flashed copper when they turned. "It's December," she said. "Not here." Nyx came through the gap behind her. Their outline firmed, the smoke drawing in until they stood solid, dark as a cut-out from the sky. "The short reason. Touch the stones on the way in and the grove keeps a piece of you. A hand, usually. Sometimes a year." Rory looked back. The stones showed from this side as pale as birch, and beyond them, where the park should have lain, a sheet of silver mist hung with no trees in it. "Cheers for the warning at the *end* of the sentence." "You're welcome." She pulled out her phone. The screen glowed, then flickered, and the clock showed 10:42, then 10:39, then 10:47, the numbers stuttering like a bad connection. She pocketed it. "Right. So time's a mess." "Time here is a river with no banks. An hour might cost you a minute. It might cost you a week." Nyx drifted ahead, and the flowers bent away from them, the stalks leaning as though a wind blew from their body. "Stay close. Don't eat anything. Don't accept anything that's offered." "Don't eat, don't touch, don't take. Got it. Is there anything I *can* do?" "Breathe. Walk. Look." She looked. A path ran through the flowers, a strip of bare, dark soil no wider than a hand-cart. It curved toward the middle of the clearing, and it was smooth. She crouched. Her own boots had left deep, crumbling prints behind her, but ahead of her the soil lay unmarked, as if no one had ever walked there. She pressed her palm beside it. The earth felt warm, like a sleeping animal's flank. "Somebody uses this path," she said. "There's not a single print." "Someone does." Nyx's violet gaze rested on the smooth earth. "Someone who weighs nothing to the world." "That's not creepy at all." She followed the path. The flowers thickened, then thinned, and the ground began to rise into a low mound crowned by a tree. She heard the music before she reached it. It was thin and high, one note held so long her teeth began to ache, and beneath it a second note rose slowly to meet the first. "Is that you?" she asked. "No." "Is it the bees?" "No." The tree grew from the top of the mound: a white-barked thing, neither birch nor ash, with leaves that chimed against each other in the still air. That was the music. Every leaf was a sliver of glass, thin as a fingernail, and each one rang a different pitch as it swayed. They swayed without any wind. Rory reached up. Her fingers stopped an inch from the nearest leaf. "Careful," Nyx breathed. "I'm not taking it. Just—" She let her hand drop. Inside her jacket, against her sternum, something warmed. She pulled out the chain and let the Heartstone Pendant swing free. The crimson gem sat in her palm, its inner glow steady and dull, no brighter than a coal under ash. It didn't pulse. "That's good," she said. "Right? It only goes off near a portal to Hel. Nothing here's going to drag me downstairs." "Nothing here belongs to Hel." Nyx tilted their head. "Which is not the same as nothing here being dangerous." They walked down the far side of the mound. The air changed. The honey-sweetness soured toward something cooler, mineral, like rain on slate. The flowers gave way to a carpet of pale moss, and the light grew strange. It slanted in low and gold, though the sun at the stones had stood high and white. "Sun's in the wrong place," Rory said. "The sun isn't here at all." She glanced up. The sky had no sun. A wash of pearl light, as even as milk, spread from horizon to horizon, and she couldn't find a source. Her shadow fell in three directions at once, faint as pencil, one of them shorter than the others. Something shifted at the edge of her vision. She turned. Between two flowering hawthorns, a face looked out of the bark, or she thought so: a long, patient face with hollows for eyes. She stared. The bark was just bark. The hawthorn was just a tree. "Nyx." "I saw." "Was it looking at me?" "It was looking at both of us." Their voice dropped to the barest breath. "It will lose interest." "When?" "When we give it nothing to look at." Rory made her hands stay loose at her sides. Her right hand drifted, without her sending it, to the sheath at her belt. The Fae blade sat there, the leaf-shaped moonsilver cold through the leather, cold enough to numb her hip. She didn't draw it. She rested her thumb on the hilt and kept walking. The hawthorns fell behind. The moss ended at the lip of a pool, and she stopped at its edge. The water lay black and perfectly still. No reflection of sky, no reflection of her. Only, far down, a scatter of tiny lights turning slowly, like a galaxy seen through a keyhole. A ring of small flat stones circled the pool, each inscribed with a single symbol. She knew none of them, yet her eyes slid over them and felt they should mean something, the way a half-remembered word sits on the tongue. "Do you know these?" she asked. Nyx knelt beside the nearest stone. Their long fingers hovered over the marks and did not touch. "I knew them once," they whispered. "In another life. Another name." The violet in their eyes dimmed and steadied. "They were written in a hand I used to have." Rory crouched next to them. Down in the black water, one of the lights drifted upward, slow as a dropped coin in syrup, and grew a little brighter.