Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQJVK4GNA1H1QBHKSZWSEC

The air changed the moment they crossed between the standing stones. Rory felt it first as a pressure drop, like stepping into a cathedral, the world going quiet and vast around her. The oaks that marked the boundary of the grove weren't really oaks at all — not up close. Their bark had the grey-green pallor of old bone, and the whorls in their grain formed patterns too deliberate to be natural. Eyes, she realized. Dozens of carved eyes, lidded and watchful, spiraling up trunks that rose impossibly high before disappearing into a canopy that filtered light the color of late afternoon, though it had been nearly midnight when they'd entered Richmond Park. "Don't touch the trees," Nyx said from behind her, their voice that low rustle of wind through dead leaves. "They remember." "Remember what?" Rory asked, but Nyx had already drifted past her, their form rippling between solid and smoke as they moved through a shaft of golden light. Where the light struck them, their silhouette thinned to near-transparency, and Rory caught a flicker of something underneath — the ghost of a jaw, a cheekbone, features that might once have belonged to a man called Aldric. Then they were past it, and the shadow knitted itself whole again. "Everything," Nyx whispered. The wildflowers started a few steps beyond the boundary stones. Bluebells and foxglove and things Rory had no names for — blooms with petals like crushed velvet that shifted color when she turned her head, white to violet to a blue so deep it was almost black. They grew in impossible profusion, choking the spaces between roots, climbing the trunks, spilling across what might have been a path if she squinted hard enough. The scent hit her like a wall: honey, green sap, something metallic underneath that prickled the back of her throat. She pressed her hand against the Heartstone pendant through her jacket. It was cool against her sternum, dormant. No portals here — or at least not that kind. "Stay on the path," Nyx said. "What path?" "The one you're not seeing because you're looking too hard." Rory stopped. Breathed. Let her focus soften the way she'd been learning to do — not looking at the grove but through it, past the surface layer of impossible beauty to the architecture underneath. And there it was: a thread of intention laid into the ground, a subtle rightness to the spacing of certain stones, certain flowers. A way forward that felt like an invitation. She took it. They walked for what might have been five minutes or an hour. Time in the grove had a texture to it, thick and syrupy, pooling in certain hollows and rushing thin over rises in the terrain. Rory's phone had died the moment she'd crossed the boundary — the screen flashing once, then going black — and she'd stopped trying to track the passage of minutes by counting heartbeats because her heart seemed to be keeping its own counsel about rhythm. The clearing opened without warning. One moment the trees pressed close, branches lacing overhead like the ribcage of something enormous, and the next they simply weren't there, and Rory stood at the edge of a space that made her breath catch. It was a perfect circle, perhaps forty feet across. The grass was short and impossibly green, the kind of green that existed in paintings and nowhere else — or shouldn't have existed anywhere else. At its center stood a structure that wasn't quite a table and wasn't quite an altar: a flat slab of pale stone raised on legs that looked like they'd grown from the earth itself, root and mineral fused together. Moss traced patterns across its surface that Rory recognized, with a jolt, as writing. Not English. Not Welsh. Not any language she'd studied in three years of Pre-Law or picked up from the backs of menus at the Golden Empress. But she could almost read it, the meaning hovering at the edge of comprehension like a word on the tip of her tongue. "She's not here," Rory said. "The Seer is always here," Nyx replied. They stood at the tree line, refusing to enter the clearing. Their violet eyes — if eyes was the right word for those twin points of cold light — swept the perimeter with an intensity that might have been reverence or fear. Perhaps both. "This place is her. Or she is it. The distinction matters less than you'd think." "That's comforting." "It wasn't meant to be." Rory stepped into the clearing. The change was immediate. The ambient golden light brightened, concentrating, as though the grove were turning its attention on her specifically. The wildflowers at the clearing's edge leaned toward her — not bending in a breeze, because there was no breeze, but leaning the way sunflowers track the sun. She felt observed. Not threatened, not yet, but seen in a way that went deeper than sight. Seen the way an X-ray sees. She resisted the urge to cross her arms over her chest. The moss-writing on the stone slab began to glow. Faint at first, a bioluminescent green that could have been a trick of the light. Then brighter, the lines and whorls pulsing with slow rhythm, and Rory realized she was watching the stone breathe. Each pulse sent a vibration through the soles of her boots, up through her ankles, into the marrow of her bones. It wasn't unpleasant. It felt like being tuned, like something inside her was being brought into alignment with a frequency she'd never known existed. The Heartstone pendant flared to life against her chest. Not warm — that was its response to Hel portals, to the spaces between the mortal world and the infernal. This was something else. Cold. A ringing cold that spread from the pendant outward, climbing her collarbones, tracing the tendons of her neck. She gasped and pulled the pendant free from her jacket. The crimson gemstone blazed in her palm, thumbnail-sized and furious, throwing light that was somehow dark — a deep red that seemed to eat the gold around it. "Interesting," said a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere. Rory spun. The clearing was empty. Nyx stood frozen at the tree line, their shadow-form gone rigid and still in a way she'd never seen before. "The stone knows you," the voice continued. It was female, or something adjacent to female — a voice like water over smooth stone, like the hum of a harp string after the note has ended. "But you do not yet know the stone. What a curious asymmetry." "Isolde," Rory said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. The air in front of the stone slab shimmered. Not like heat haze — like a curtain being drawn aside, a layer of reality peeling back to reveal what had been standing there all along. She was small, smaller than Rory expected. Silver hair to her waist, unbound, moving in currents that had nothing to do with wind. Her eyes were the color of the wildflowers that couldn't decide what they were — pale lavender that shifted toward grey, toward violet, toward something that might have been white. Her feet were bare on the grass, and Rory noticed with a crawling fascination that the blades didn't bend beneath them. No footprints. No indentation. She stood on the world without touching it. "You brought a shadow into my grove," Isolde said, and her gaze drifted past Rory to where Nyx stood at the boundary. "One who has been between and remained between. How appropriate. The threshold seeking the threshold." "We need your help," Rory said. "Need is a river," Isolde replied. Her lips curved — not quite a smile, more like the memory of one. "It flows in the direction it chooses. You may have followed it here, but that does not mean it leads where you think." Rory bit back the first three responses that came to mind. She'd been warned about this — about the way Fae and half-Fae communicated, the compulsion toward truth that made them artists of misdirection. Isolde couldn't lie. But she could build a maze of honest statements that led you in circles until you forgot what you'd come to ask. "The Veil," Rory said. "Something's wrong with it." Isolde's expression didn't change, but the grove did. The light dimmed by a fraction. The flowers at the edge of the clearing curled inward, petals folding like fists. Somewhere in the canopy above, a sound that might have been birdsong cut off mid-note. "Wrong is a word that assumes a right," Isolde said. "The Veil thins. The Veil thickens. This is its nature, as breathing is yours. What you call wrong, the Veil calls winter." "It's June," Rory said flatly. Something shifted behind Isolde's pale eyes. Not surprise — Rory doubted anything surprised a three-hundred-year-old seer — but something sharper. Acknowledgment, perhaps. The confirmation of something she'd already seen in whatever visions had gotten her exiled from the Fae Courts in the first place. "Yes," Isolde said softly. "It is." She reached beneath her hair — the movement fluid, practiced — and drew something from the folds of her garment. It caught the grove-light and threw it back cold and clean: a blade, leaf-shaped, slender as a finger, made of a metal that wasn't steel or silver but something between the two. Moonsilver, Rory's mind supplied, though she had no idea how she knew the word. The dagger was luminescent even in the golden light, and when Isolde held it out, Rory could feel the cold radiating from it like an open window in December. "You will need this," Isolde said. "The things that come through the thinning places are not stopped by mortal weapons." Rory stared at the blade. "I don't understand. Is this a gift or a payment?" "A gift freely given carries no debt," Isolde said, and Rory caught the careful precision of it — the Fae construction, airtight and deliberate. "I am giving you this because what I have seen requires that you carry it. Whether you choose to is your own river to follow." Rory took the blade. The cold was immediate and total, running up her fingers, past the small crescent scar on her left wrist, settling in her forearm like an ache. But beneath the cold was something else — a hum, a resonance, the blade recognizing the hand that held it or perhaps simply waking up after a long sleep. It weighed almost nothing. It felt like holding a thought. "Nyx," Rory called without turning. "Did you know about this? About the Veil thinning out of season?" Silence from the tree line. She looked back. Nyx's violet eyes were fixed on the Fae blade in her hand, and for the first time since she'd known them, the Shade looked afraid. "I suspected," Nyx whispered. "The shadows have been... restless. The spaces between are narrower than they should be. I can feel things pressing against the other side. Things that shouldn't be able to reach this far." "Things from Hel," Rory said. Nyx's form flickered. "Among others." Isolde turned away from them both, her bare feet making no mark on the perfect grass. She laid one hand on the stone slab, and the moss-writing flared and went dark, as though she'd turned a page. "The solstice approaches," she said, and for the first time her voice was stripped of its riddle-cadence, flat and bare and frightened. "And it will not strengthen what should be strengthened. Something has broken the pattern. The Veil will thin when it should hold, and what waits on the other side has been waiting a very long time." The grove exhaled. The canopy rustled with a sound like whispered warnings, and the wildflowers bloomed and died and bloomed again in the space of a single breath, a year's cycle compressed into seconds. Rory felt the wrongness of it in her teeth, in the cold blade in her hand, in the Heartstone that pulsed against her chest like a second heart beating out of time with her own. She looked at Nyx, shadow-bound and trembling at the threshold. She looked at Isolde, ageless and exile and terrified. She looked at the blade in her hand, cold as moonlight, sharp as a promise. "Then we'd better figure out how to fix it," Rory said, and stepped deeper into the grove.