Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQKE7370X1N9107Y1X9B9Q

The air in Richmond Park was crisp, carrying the familiar scent of damp earth and distant traffic. It was a normal Tuesday afternoon, but the three figures moving between the ancient oaks were anything but. Rory kept her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her leather jacket, her fingers brushing against the cool, smooth gemstone of the Heartstone pendant. It was inert. For once, the deep crimson stone wasn’t pulsing with a faint, warning warmth. A small mercy. Ahead of them, standing stones taller than any man marked a rough circle in a clearing. They were grey, lichen-spotted, and hummed with a low, sub-audible vibration that Rory felt more in her bones than her ears. Isolde drifted towards them, her silver hair a stark ribbon against the muted greens and browns of the park. She left no prints in the soft mud. Beside Rory, Nyx flowed, their shadow-form coalescing and dissipating with each step, a silent presence of deepest violet. “The threshold is thin here,” Isolde said, her voice like the chime of tiny bells. She didn’t look back. “The Veil is gossamer.” “What does that mean?” Rory asked, her voice a little too loud in the quiet. “It means we step through,” Nyx whispered, the words seeming to curl from the shadows around their feet. “And the world is no longer what it was.” Isolde paused before the largest of the standing stones, laying a hand on its weathered surface. The air around the stone began to shimmer, like heat haze rising from asphalt. It distorted the view of the trees on the other side, bending them into strange, elongated shapes. “Come, Aurora Carter,” Isolde said, her lavender eyes holding an unnerving, ageless calm. “Do not be afraid.” Rory wasn’t afraid. She was a Cardiff girl, daughter of a barrister; she dealt in facts and logic. But this… this was something else entirely. She took a breath, the cold air sharp in her lungs, and followed Isolde through the shimmering veil. The transition was not a step but a gasp. The world tilted. The smell of car exhaust and wet grass vanished, replaced by the impossible perfume of night-blooming jasmine and rich, loamy soil, as if the forest floor were made of pure decay and rebirth. The sound of the city, the distant wail of a siren, the caw of a crow—all of it was gone. In its place was a profound and resonant silence, a quiet so deep it felt like a pressure against her eardrums. The light had changed. The overcast grey of the London sky was replaced by a soft, perpetual twilight, as if the grove were trapped in the moment just after sunset or just before dawn. A gentle, sourceless luminescence emanated from the air itself, casting long, soft shadows from the silver-barked trees that now surrounded them. Rory’s boots sank into a carpet of springy moss, so green it seemed to vibrate with life. And everywhere, there were flowers. Wildflowers of every conceivable shape and hue carpeted the ground between the trees. Some glowed with a faint, phosphorescent light. Others had petals like spun glass or shimmering metal. She saw blossoms the colour of a bruise, and others that were a pure, blinding white. She knelt, her fingers reaching out to touch a flower with petals like deep blue velvet. It was real. Soft, cool, and impossibly delicate. A small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist stood out pale against her skin as she cupped the bloom. “A memory of what the world was,” Isolde said, her voice echoing slightly in the strange stillness. “And a promise of what it could be.” Rory stood up, brushing the moss from her jeans. Her eyes scanned their surroundings. The grove was larger than it had any right to be, stretching away into a twilight that refused to resolve into darkness. The trees were ancient, their bark swirling with patterns that looked almost like writing. Nyx drifted closer to one, their shadowy hand passing through the solid-looking trunk without resistance. “The air tastes of old magic,” they whispered, their voice a rustle of leaves. “It is… thick.” “It is pure,” Isolde corrected gently. Rory instinctively went to check her phone for the time, a habit born of a life lived by schedules and delivery notifications. She pulled it from her pocket. The screen was black. Dead. She frowned, pressing the power button. Nothing. That was odd; it had been fully charged an hour ago. She tried her watch, a simple analogue piece her father had given her. The second hand was frozen, twitching slightly, as if caught in a magnetic field. A knot of unease tightened in her stomach. “My watch stopped,” she said, her voice tight. Isolde offered a faint, knowing smile. “Time is a river, not a road, child of the mortal world. Here, it sometimes pools.” “Pools?” Rory repeated, the word feeling foreign on her tongue. “How long have we been here?” “Long enough,” was all the Seer would say. The unease was a cold trickle down her spine, a feeling more unsettling than any demonic chill. This place wasn't evil; the Heartstone pendant resting against her sternum was still cool. But it was fundamentally *wrong*, a place where the basic laws of her reality were merely suggestions. She rested her hand on the hilt of the Fae-forged blade at her hip. The moonsilver was always cold, a familiar, grounding sensation in the warm, alien air. It was her anchor, a gift from the very woman who was leading her deeper into this temporal anomaly. They began to walk again, deeper into the heart of the grove. Rory felt clumsy, her heavy boots crunching on fallen leaves that seemed to make no sound. Isolde moved with a liquid grace, her feet barely seeming to touch the ground. Nyx simply flowed, their form a shifting patch of darkness that drank the light around them. The further they went, the more wondrous and strange the environment became. They passed a stream where the water ran so clear it was invisible, the smooth stones at the bottom looking as if they floated in mid-air. Overhead, constellations Rory didn’t recognize began to glitter in the twilight sky, slowly wheeling in a silent, majestic dance. She saw a creature like a deer, but its antlers were made of twisting, living wood, and its eyes shone with the same gentle light as the flowers. It watched them for a moment with an ancient intelligence before dissolving into mist. Finally, they stepped into a vast, circular clearing at the grove’s centre. In its middle stood a tree of impossible scale. It was larger than any redwood Rory had ever seen, its trunk so wide it would have taken twenty people holding hands to encircle it. Its bark was not bark at all, but a polished, silvery metal that swirled with iridescent patterns. Its leaves were the shape of willow fronds, but they glowed with a soft, golden light, casting a warm, gentle pool around the massive base. At the foot of the tree, a pool of water lay perfectly still, its surface a flawless mirror reflecting the alien constellations above. Rory stopped, her breath catching in her throat. The unease, the fear, the logical part of her brain that screamed that this was all impossible—it all washed away, replaced by a profound, humbling awe. She was standing at the foot of something older than London, older than Britain, older perhaps than humanity itself. The silence was no longer oppressive; it was sacred. The strange light was no longer unsettling; it was beautiful. She stood there, a small, dark-haired woman from Cardiff, a delivery girl who talked to shadows, and felt utterly, completely insignificant. And for the first time since this madness had started, she also felt a flicker of peace. This was why she was here. This was what she was fighting for. The cold weight of the pendant against her skin and the sharp, icy touch of the Fae blade at her side were no longer just tools. They were promises.