Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6PCC7RY0QMG4CCT2Y2Y

Aurora Carter stepped through a break in the brush, boots crunching damp leaves—then no sound at all. Silence siphoned away her footsteps. She glanced back, half expecting her trainers to be smeared with dew and mud, but the ground already forgot she existed. Eva’s anxious voice faded behind her, snuffed like a candle. Ahead, pale morning fog haloed ancient trees; the air felt thin, electric, sharp with some scent she couldn't name. It was colder here, too. Shivering, Aurora zipped her jacket until the collar chafed her chin. Each breath tingled in her lungs. “Which way, Rory?” Eva whispered, a tremor in her voice that betrayed uncertainty she’d never admit aloud. Aurora let herself look—really look. Oaks, impossibly old, twisted up from the moss, their roots forming archways and knotted tunnels as if they’d grown with purpose. No graffiti, no cans or bottles left by thoughtless parkgoers. Wildflowers chimed with impossible color between the roots: violet, blue, shock-white. Overhead, branches wove a living canopy so dense only stray blades of sunlight speared through to the emerald gloom beneath. “I—just… listen.” Aurora closed her eyes. The Grove had a susurrus—wind, but not just wind. Somewhere behind, the city’s distant traffic should have muttered at the edge of hearing, but it was gone, replaced by the high, musical whir of summer insects despite the spring chill, and then another note, softer, like someone laughing underwater. Nyx moved beside her—a tall silhouette, strangely at home among the shadows. Their form blurred at the edges, less a body than a shifting suggestion. In the mortal world, Nyx’s presence made drapes twitch and lamplight stutter; here, darkness nestled around them like a second skin. Their violet eyes flickered. “The boundary’s thin here,” Nyx whispered, their words scarcely a ripple upon the thick, timeless air. Aurora touched the Heartstone Pendant at her throat. A faint pulsing warmth—a heartbeat—met her fingertips, syncing with the slow rhythm of her own. The little gem seemed brighter in the Grove’s gloaming, opaque crimson, casting a trickle of light onto her collar. She half-hoped it would stop, as if she might pass for an ordinary girl out for a woodland stroll, but the pendant’s warning heat only sharpened. “Are you sure the Seer means to help us?” Eva asked, her voice almost lost in the breathing hush. She pressed close, sun-browned hands balled in the sleeves of her grey jumper, fingers unsteady. Her eyes darted from blossom to trunk to shifting shadow. “She’ll help if it amuses her,” Nyx replied. Their mouthless face—if it was a face—expressed nothing, but the wind in their voice curled with hidden laughter. “Or if she thinks it will trouble the Courts.” Eva wrinkled her nose. “That’s… comforting.” Aurora let her gaze travel the boundary of the Grove. At the margins, a ring of oak standing stones reared up, each weathered into faces by centuries of wind and rain. Sunlight carved one side gold, the rest steeped in violet shadow. She squinted, heart pounding. Where she stared, a stone seemed to tilt minutely, as if regarding her in return. She reached out, and her hand slid through a veil of raised temperature—summer heat pooled in the ring’s center, warm and viscous. A spider’s thread brushed her wrist. She flinched. But no spider, only a trailing garland of bluebells, impossibly vibrant, stitching itself between her fingers before tumbling off and unfurling into moss below. Eva watched this with wary awe. “Magic, then?” Aurora hesitated. “Yes. Old magic." It wasn’t showy—no lightning, no chanted Latin. Just a sense that everything here, even the dirt beneath her feet, remembered. Nyx drifted nearer to the heart of the clearing, stirring the fog and sending wildflowers in their wake nodding as though in silent greeting. They moved without stepping, darkness sliding elegantly forward, and Aurora followed. Time began to slip. What felt like minutes stretched beautifully, painfully. The light thickened; a haze of gold bled through the branches, and the scent changed, deepening to crushed violet and crushed apple leaf. Aurora’s mouth watered unexpectedly, and Eva covered a sneeze, blinking away sudden tears. In a hollow, a pool shivered against a bank of moss so green it glowed. Water lilies drifted across its glassy surface, their petals unnaturally white, trailing roots into nothing at all—reflected sky where there should have been mud. For a moment, Aurora caught her own reflection. Then another face bloomed beside hers—delicate, ageless, crowned with hair like woven silver mist. Isolde Varga stood in the shallows, hem of her midnight-grey gown forever dry. Her feet, bare, made no dent in the moss. Her eyes, pale as lavender at dawn, fixed on Aurora with a kindly, maddening blankness. “You have come as the moon bleeds low.” The Seer’s voice foamed up from someplace old as the stones, gentle but sharp-edged. “And you bring a shadow, and a broken heart.” Aurora swallowed. The pendant at her collar pulsed faster, answering Isolde’s scrutiny. “We need answers.” The Seer tilted her head, like a bird presented with an offering. “Questions are seeds. Some bloom only in darkness, some smother the root.” Her silver hair pooled down her back, the ends impossible to follow, knitted with wild fennel and violet thistle. “Will you help us?” Eva said, voice unsteady but clear. “We’re looking for…" She faltered, not knowing what to call it. Safety? A way out? The Grove offered no easy names. Isolde knelt, fistfuls of moonlit hair tumbling forward. She plucked a lily from the pond and let it hover, petal edges pulsing with inward light. “Three must enter; one must bear the weight,” Isolde intoned, her words slipping out in coils and riddles. “To seek safe harbor, you must answer what you fear. But the Grove takes—always takes something. Ask, if you wish, but pay the price in memory or dream.” Nyx stepped forward, unphased. “We accept,” they breathed. Their shadow lengthened, falling across the pool’s mirrored skin. The lilies bobbed as in a hidden breeze. Shadows twisted up the ancient trunks; the standing stones drew closer, and Aurora felt the Grove’s attention like a thousand moth wings tickling at her scalp. Then, from the moss behind them, a shape rose—a door of tangled oak roots, arching just tall enough for a person to duck through. The air beyond shimmered with color: gold, green, the impossible blue of untrodden sky. It looked nothing like London, or even the real world at all. Instead, eternity unfurled in the curl of vine and the yawning dark between branches. Aurora’s heart hammered. Her left wrist ached, that little crescent scar prickling as if remembering old pain. “What if we get lost?” Isolde smiled, enigmatic and, somehow, sad. “Lost is only lost if you forget the way back.” Aurora drew the Fae-Forged Blade from her bag. The moonsilver metal caught the Grove’s diffuse glow, suddenly sharp, blue-cold in her palm. She remembered the day Isolde pressed it into her hands: a gift, a burden, a promise never really explained. Tonight, it almost hummed between her fingers. She met Eva’s eyes—wide, hopeful, frightened still. “Come on," Aurora managed, voice steadier than she felt. “We’ve come this far.” One by one, they moved through the root-door. The Grove shivered, closing behind, wildflowers sewing the gaps. Nyx died into shadow, slipping ahead, their violet gaze promising—something, Aurora was never sure what. Inside, the world bent impossibly. Branches arched overhead, tangled into cathedral spires hung with blue fruits and glowing orbs of drifting dew. Here and there the flowers sang, faintly, voices like strands of harp-silk echoing in the rarest wind. Every color felt a note too saturated, uncanny, beautiful to the point of pain. The ground was cool and soft, never quite solid, and Aurora’s footfalls made no sound. Her heartstone burned warmer, the Fae blade cold as the last hour of night, and, somewhere ahead, deeper in the grove, something called—wordless, insistent, the promise of answers or the peril of forgetting why they’d come. Each step carried wonder—startled blackbirds vanishing midflight only to reappear as clouds of twinkling dust, Eva brushing an arm against a thicket to find her sleeve veined in silver lichen that curled in reaction to her breath. Yet each step also sharpened unease: time, slippery as soap between her fingers; familiar landmarks winking out like lost thoughts; the sense of thousands of eyes, gentle and patient and weighing assent, waiting for what Aurora would surrender. Still, Aurora pressed forward, friends at her heels and the wild, waking Grove folding around them, bright and fearsome, and very, very alive.