Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2E9Y0HZ225AZW76D28BKN

Frost crunched under Rory's boots as she reached the ring of oaks. Five of them stood in the bracken, each broad as a delivery van and grey with lichen, their bark carved by wind into shapes that looked too much like faces. Richmond Park lay quiet behind her. A single deer watched from the mist, then turned and walked off. "Those aren't trees," she said. "No." Nyx's whisper slid out of the shadow the nearest oak threw across the grass. The shadow rose and thickened until a tall silhouette stood beside her, violet eyes burning where a face should have been. "They are older than the word for tree. Older than the Romans who cut this park's first road." "Great. Are they going to bite?" "Only the uninvited." "And are we invited?" Nyx's head tilted toward the gap between the two largest stones. The air there shivered like heat over tarmac. "The Veil is thin this week. The solstice loosens every knot. Whether she wants us is another matter." Rory pulled her scarf up and rolled her left wrist. The crescent scar itched, as it always did when the weather turned. She checked her phone. 14:07. One bar of signal. "Right. In and out." "Nothing enters and leaves the same way," Nyx whispered. "Helpful." She stepped between the stones. The cold vanished. It did not fade; it simply ceased, as though someone had shut a door on winter. Warm air pressed against her cheeks, thick with the smell of crushed mint and rain on hot stone. Her ears popped. Behind her, the ring of oaks had become a wall of trunks that looked no different from the ones ahead. She turned in a full circle. No gap. No park. "Nyx?" "Here." The shadow stepped through a moment later, solid at the edges and thin at the middle, like smoke shaped by a hand. "Do not look for the way back. It will show itself when it wishes." "I hate that sentence." She walked on because standing still felt worse. Wildflowers covered the ground, thousands of them, foxglove and cornflower and poppies red as a stop light, and other blooms she could not name. One had petals like folded glass. Another opened as she passed, releasing a cloud of gold pollen that hung in the air and drifted after her like a curious pet. It was December. It was, by her phone, still 14:07. She held the screen up. The numbers did not change. "My phone's frozen." "Your phone is behaving sensibly. Time here is a river that forgot which way to run. An hour beneath these boughs might be a minute at your restaurant. Or a week." "Yu-Fei will have my head if I miss a shift." She pocketed the phone. "You could have mentioned that before." "I did. You said, and I quote, 'yeah, yeah.'" Rory bit back a laugh. It came out as a breath. The path narrowed between hawthorns heavy with blossom and berries at once. Light fell in slanting bars, silver where it should have been gold, though she could find no moon. She trailed her fingers along a branch. The bark hummed, a deep note she felt in her back teeth. She snatched her hand away. "It's singing." "It is remembering." Nyx paused beside a trunk and laid a dark palm flat against it. Their fingers sank a little way into the wood, the way a hand sinks into cold water. "Somebody sang to these trees for a very long time. They kept the tune." "Creepy." "Beautiful. The two often share a house." The ground dipped. A stream ran across the path, clear enough to count the pebbles, and every pebble glowed a soft green from within. Rory crouched at the bank. Her reflection looked back at her, but a second behind her movements. When she lifted her hand, the woman in the water lifted hers after a breath, and smiled before Rory did. She stood fast. "Nope." "Do not drink from it." "I wasn't going to drink from it. I was going to leave the country." "Step on the flat stones. Not the wet ones." She chose each foothold as though crossing a minefield. On the far bank, she looked back. The reflection had gone still. It faced her, arms at its sides, and no longer moved at all. Rory kept walking. The Heartstone lay against her sternum, and she noticed its silence only now. In every place she had felt it, in the cellar of Silas' bar, in the alley behind the Golden Empress where the air had tasted of burnt sugar, it had pulsed with warmth. Now it hung on its silver chain, cool and dull, a red pebble. She closed her fist around it. "Nothing from the pendant," she said. "It doesn't like it here, or it doesn't know it." "This is not Hel. This place owes nothing to the Seven." Nyx's whisper dropped lower. "Whatever gave you that stone did not make it for these woods." "Meaning?" "Meaning you are carrying a stranger's key into a house with a different lock." She ignored the cold that crawled between her shoulder blades. The trees opened onto a slope of moss, and Rory stopped. Below them, a hollow stretched wide as a football pitch, ringed with standing stones of pale oak, each one taller than the ones at the entrance and etched with spirals that shifted when she looked at them from the corner of her eye. Between the stones, thin threads of light hung from nothing. They ran from branch to branch, from stone to stone, thousands of them, and they trembled with no wind. The threads chimed as they moved. It sounded like a thousand glasses touched together in another room. "What are they?" "Promises." Nyx drifted forward, and the threads bent away from their body, then leaned in again once they had passed. "Each one a bargain struck in this hollow. Kept, or waiting." "Waiting for what?" "For someone to break them." A thread brushed her cheek. It was warm, and it whispered, so faint she almost missed it, a name in a language she did not know. Her own name, maybe. Or the name of someone who had stood in this spot before her. She held her breath until it slid away. "Let's not touch anything," she said. "A wise policy." They descended. The moss swallowed the sound of their steps. Halfway down, Rory noticed that Nyx's steps made no sound at all, and that hers left no marks in the moss behind her either. Then she looked closer at the ground ahead. There were no prints there, not one. Whoever lived here walked without leaving a trace. "Nyx. Look." The shade crouched and passed a hand over the unbroken green. Their violet eyes narrowed to slivers. "She has been here recently." "How recently, if time's broken?" "Ask me again when it is mended." A breeze moved through the hollow. The threads sang together, rising into a chord that made the hair lift along Rory's arms. The nearest standing stone glowed from within, spiral by spiral, until the whole face burned lavender. Rory put her hand on the cold hilt of nothing, a habit from a dozen nights spent alone on Silas' stairs, and felt only her own empty belt. "I should have brought a knife," she muttered. "You should have brought a great many things." Nyx straightened. "Come. The centre is close."