Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQGKN29X7RXF87P40J1DZ0

Aurora Carter found the first stone by nearly walking into it. One moment she was in Richmond Park with damp winter grass sucking at her trainers, a low grey sky pressing down, and the distant, bored cough of a stag somewhere beyond the trees. The next, the air in front of her thickened—as if the world had taken a slow breath and held it—and an oak standing stone rose out of the bracken like the spine of something ancient. It wasn’t tall, not compared to the trees. It was older than them, though. Its barkless surface had the texture of river-worn wood that had no business being dry, threaded with pale lines that might have been cracks or might have been writing. Rory stopped short. Her chest tightened, a reflexive check against panic. Behind her, the park still existed: a smear of trunks and a ribbon of path. Ahead, between two stones, the light shifted to a clearer green, the kind of green that belonged on children’s book covers, not in December. Nyx lingered at her shoulder. In solid form they were a tall silhouette, the shape of a person poured from night. Their eyes were a faint violet glow suspended in shadow, their edges soft, as if the air didn’t quite agree where they ended. “You feel it,” Nyx murmured. Their voice never came from a precise point; it slid along the back of Rory’s neck like a draft under a door. “I feel… something,” Rory said. She kept her tone flat on purpose. Cool-headed, she reminded herself, like it mattered to anyone but her. The small crescent scar on her left wrist prickled under the cuff of her jacket. Old injuries always chose the worst moments to remember themselves. The Heartstone pendant, tucked beneath her jumper on a silver chain, gave a faint, warm pulse against her sternum. Not a burn. More like the gentle insistence of a heartbeat that wasn’t hers. “That’s new,” she said, and lifted her hand to the chain. Nyx tilted their head. “The crimson stone wakes near boundaries.” “Boundaries,” Rory echoed, staring at the gap between the stones. She could have stepped around it, chosen to keep walking the normal park path and go home to her flat above Silas’ bar, to the smell of spilled beer and the familiar rattle of pipes. But she’d already come this far. She’d already followed the whispers—Nyx’s and her own. A pale shimmer lay between the stones like heat-haze above tarmac, faint and stubborn. If she stared directly at it, it disappeared. If she let her eyes relax, it returned, making the air look slightly wrong, as if the world had been copied and the copy didn’t line up. “The Veil,” she said, quieter. Nyx’s glow brightened a fraction. “Thin here. Fae-touched.” Rory’s fingers closed around the pendant through her jumper. The gem was no bigger than her thumbnail, and yet it felt like it had weight in more ways than one. She’d woken one morning to find it on her bedside table, no note, no explanation. Unknown benefactor. Unknown agenda. She exhaled once, sharp. “Right. Let’s see what all the fuss is about.” She stepped between the stones. Cold slid over her skin, not like wind, but like being looked at by something vast and patient. For a split second, the hairs on her arms lifted and her stomach lurched—an elevator drop, a sudden sense that gravity had changed its mind. Then the air loosened. The grey of the park softened, peeled back, and colour surged in. Wildflowers crowded the ground in reckless abundance: bluebells, foxglove, things she didn’t have names for with petals like thin glass. They bloomed through leaf litter and moss as if seasons were suggestions. The scent hit her next—honeyed and bright, with an undernote like crushed green stems that made her mouth water and her tongue feel too big for her teeth. The light wasn’t sunlight exactly. It came from everywhere, a diffuse glow that made shadows shallow and soft, like the world had decided to be kind. Nyx passed through the threshold behind her without disturbing a single petal. Their shadow-self darkened the air for a moment and then settled, their form sharpening as if the grove welcomed them. Rory turned back. The standing stones remained, but beyond them the park looked… distant. Not physically farther away, but as though it belonged to someone else’s memory. The path bent in a way she didn’t recall, and the trees had rearranged themselves. A crow sat on a branch that hadn’t been there a moment ago, watching her with an unnervingly steady gaze. “Time does that,” came a voice, soft as silk and twice as unsettling. A woman stood among the flowers as if she’d grown there. Silver hair fell to her waist in a smooth sheet, catching the ambient light like spun moon. Her eyes were pale lavender, too calm, too knowing. She wore a simple dress the colour of fog, and it moved as if it was underwater. Isolde Varga. She looked at Rory without blinking, the way some people watched the sea—aware it could drown them but fascinated anyway. Rory’s throat tightened. She forced herself to speak first. “You’re Isolde.” Isolde’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You have the right name in the wrong mouth.” “That’s… comforting,” Rory said dryly. Nyx inclined their head a fraction. “Seer.” Isolde’s attention flicked to them, then away, as if looking directly at Nyx was like looking into a mirror at night. “Shadow that remembers being skin,” she said, voice lilting. “Your edges fray in places the world forgot to sew.” Nyx went very still. The violet glow in their eyes pulsed once, like a bruise being pressed. Rory didn’t like the way Isolde spoke. Not because she didn’t understand it—she did, mostly—but because it made her feel like she was walking on a floor that might become water at any moment. “I came because I need answers,” Rory said. She didn’t mention Evan, or the way London still felt like a borrowed coat. She didn’t mention the pendant arriving like a threat wrapped as a gift. She didn’t mention the nights when Nyx’s presence in her flat made the shadows too deep and her dreams too bright. Isolde glanced down at Rory’s chest, at the place the Heartstone rested. “You have a door-key you didn’t ask for.” The pendant warmed again, in agreement. Rory swallowed. “And you have—what—doorways?” “I have a grove,” Isolde corrected. “A pocket where the Veil forgets to be strict.” She turned, and as she walked, Rory noticed what Nyx had told her before: no footprints. The flowers didn’t bend. The moss didn’t compress. Isolde moved like a thought, leaving nothing behind. “Come,” Isolde said. “You can stand at the edge all day and still not be inside.” Rory hesitated. The sensible part of her brain—the part that had tried to make a barrister out of Brendan Carter’s daughter—ran through risks like a checklist. Unknown magic. Unstable time. Riddling oracle. Shadow being. She almost laughed. Instead she reached into her coat and wrapped her fingers around the handle of the dagger tucked there. Moonsilver. Leaf-shaped. Isolde’s gift, given with a look that had felt like pity. The blade was always cold, even through leather. That cold steadied Rory now, an anchor in a place too lush to be trusted. She followed. The grove deepened as they moved, not by distance but by layers. The flowers changed first: petals became sharper, colours more saturated, as if someone had turned up the contrast. Then the trees grew stranger—trunks braided together, bark patterned with spirals that made Rory’s eyes slide off them. Branches arched overhead, knitting into a canopy that wasn’t quite leaves, not quite lace, filtering the omnipresent light into shifting patterns. Sound changed too. The park’s distant city hush faded until Rory realised she couldn’t hear traffic at all. No airplanes. No human noise. In its place: a constant low music, like the hum of a glass rim being played far away. Occasionally it broke into brighter notes—birdsong, maybe, except Rory couldn’t spot any birds, and the notes threaded through her ribs like fingers. She felt watched. Not in the paranoid way she’d felt in Cardiff after she left Evan, glancing over her shoulder at every footstep. This was broader. Impersonal. Like being observed by a landscape. Nyx drifted closer. In the grove’s light, their shadow seemed to drink in the brightness and hold it, becoming deeper, more defined. “This place remembers older rules,” they whispered. Rory kept her gaze ahead. “I’m not sure I like any rules older than me.” Isolde glanced back, hair rippling without wind. “Then don’t be ruled. Be sharp.” Rory almost asked what that meant, but the grove answered first. They came upon water. It wasn’t a pond. It was a narrow ribbon that cut through the clearing like a blade, perfectly straight, too straight to be natural. The surface reflected the canopy above, but the reflection lagged, moving a heartbeat slower than the world. When Rory leaned closer, she saw something else beneath it—faint shapes drifting far down, like pale fish or fragments of light. Her pendant warmed, a deeper pulse that made her breath catch. The heat spread across her skin as if the gem had pressed closer. Isolde stood at the water’s edge and looked down as if she was reading a book. “Here is where Earth forgets its name.” Nyx’s voice dropped even lower. “A seam.” Rory crouched, careful not to touch the water. The air above it tasted metallic, like coins on the tongue. “What happens if you cross?” Isolde’s eyes flicked to Rory’s face. “Sometimes you arrive. Sometimes you become a story someone else tells wrong.” “That’s not an answer.” “It is,” Isolde said gently, and somehow that made it worse. Rory straightened. Her heart thudded, out of proportion with her stillness. She forced her shoulders loose. “We’re not crossing blind.” “Good,” Nyx said. “Blindness is expensive.” Rory shot them a look. “That’s a comforting phrase.” Nyx’s glowing eyes held hers. “It is a true one.” Isolde moved along the water without disturbing the grass. “The grove is a mouth,” she said. “It tastes what you bring in. It keeps what it likes. It spits out what it cannot chew.” Rory stared at the straight waterline. She could feel the Veil here like a pressure in her ears, as if she were underwater. The shimmering distortion she’d seen between the stones now threaded the air in fine strands, visible in the corner of her eye. If she focused, it vanished. If she relaxed, it returned, mapping invisible borders. The pendant pulsed again, warmer. It wanted something. Or something wanted it. She slid her hand under her jumper and drew the Heartstone out. The gem hung from its chain, deep crimson with a faint inner glow that seemed to thicken in this place. It was beautiful in the way blood is beautiful—unavoidable, intimate, dangerous. The warmth intensified when she held it over the straight ribbon of water. Rory’s mouth went dry. “This is what it does near a Hel portal,” she said, more to herself than anyone. Isolde’s gaze sharpened. “You have eaten from the wrong table.” “I haven’t eaten anything,” Rory snapped, then softened her tone because snapping at Isolde felt like snapping at a cliff. “I didn’t choose this.” “No one chooses the first bite,” Isolde said. “They only choose whether to swallow.” Nyx leaned closer to the water. Their form blurred at the edges, as if the seam tugged at them. “Hel,” they whispered, and their voice carried something older—fear, maybe, or memory. Rory looked at them. “You’ve been there.” Nyx didn’t answer immediately. The grove’s humming seemed louder in the pause. Finally they said, “I have been between. Places like Hel pull on the in-between.” Rory’s fingers tightened around the chain. “And this pendant is from Dymas,” she said, the name tasting strange. Gluttony. Prince Belphegor. Words she’d heard once, dismissed as myth until a crimson stone began warming itself against her skin like an eager animal. Isolde’s eyes went distant, seeing something Rory couldn’t. “Amber sky,” she murmured. “Vines heavy with fruit that never rots. Tables that groan under food that still screams if you listen closely.” Rory’s stomach turned. “Do you want to see?” Isolde asked, and for the first time her tone sounded almost human—curious, not teasing. Rory stared at the straight water. She imagined a tear, a portal, a step through and the world rearranging itself into something warm and indulgent and lethal. She imagined herself coming back to London and finding years had passed in her absence, or minutes, or nothing at all. She imagined not coming back. She forced herself to breathe. In through her nose, out through her mouth, like she’d learned to do when Evan’s moods filled a room and she’d needed to become invisible inside her own body. Her hand drifted to the dagger in her coat. The moonsilver was cold, clean, real. “If there’s a door,” she said, “I want to know who’s holding the key. And why it ended up with me.” Isolde’s smile was small and sharp. “Because you run,” she said. “And the doors like runners.” “That’s—” Rory began, then stopped. Isolde couldn’t lie. That didn’t mean she couldn’t be cruel. Nyx shifted, their shadow deepening as if readying to leap. “The seam is listening.” Rory looked down at the Heartstone. Its glow had grown steady, no longer a pulse but a sustained warmth, as if it had found what it had been made for. The crimson gem reflected in the water, but the reflection didn’t match. In the water, the gem’s glow was darker, hungrier. It made the ribbon look like a cut that wanted to widen. Rory held the pendant a fraction lower. The air above the water shivered. The humming note changed, dipping into a lower register that Rory felt in her teeth. The surface of the ribbon rippled—its first imperfection—and for a heartbeat the reflection broke, replaced by something else. A flash of warm amber light, as if a sunset had been trapped behind glass. The suggestion of distant laughter, too loud, too many mouths. The scent of roasted meat threaded through the grove’s flowers, rich and nauseating. Rory jerked the pendant back instinctively. The vision snapped shut like an eye. Silence rushed in. Not complete silence—the grove still hummed—but the sense of being on the brink faded, leaving Rory with her heart hammering and her hand clenched around a chain that suddenly felt too thin to hold what it held. Nyx exhaled, a sound like wind through a crack. “It opened.” Rory stared at the water, at the straightness of it, at the way it had pretended to be harmless. “Just a peek,” she said, voice tight. “That was just a peek.” Isolde watched her with that calm lavender gaze. “The first taste,” she said softly, “is never enough.” Rory tucked the pendant back under her jumper, as if hiding it could mute its hunger. The warmth lingered against her skin anyway, a reminder. A promise. She met Isolde’s eyes. “I’m not here to be eaten by your grove or anyone else’s realm,” she said. “If we’re doing this, we do it on my terms.” Isolde’s expression didn’t change, but the air seemed to brighten around her, as if the grove approved of spine. “Then walk deeper,” she said. “And listen. The flowers will tell you what they remember. The stones will tell you what they regret. The shadows—” Her gaze flicked to Nyx. “—will tell you what they cannot forget.” Rory swallowed the unease that rose like bile. Wonder still lived in her chest too, stubborn and bright. The grove was impossible and beautiful, and it had just shown her a slice of another sky. She tightened her grip on the cold moonsilver dagger through her coat, squared her shoulders, and followed Isolde along the seam, deeper into the pocket where Earth’s rules thinned and the Veil shimmered like a lie trying to pass for truth.