Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQPGH2J92CGWCHCG06HT2P

The first thing Aurora noticed was how ordinary Richmond Park tried to be about it. The sky hung low and pewter-grey, the kind of London winter that dampened sound as much as it dampened the grass. Dog walkers moved like bundled silhouettes between bare-limbed oaks. Somewhere a child squealed and a man laughed too loudly. The whole world smelled of wet earth and cold stone. None of it mattered once the pendant warmed against her sternum. Aurora’s hand rose without thinking, fingers curling over the Heartstone through her jumper. The deep crimson gem was small—thumbnail-sized—but it carried its own weight, a subtle insistence. It pulsed faintly with warmth, not quite heat, like an animal tucked under your coat. Not a threat. Not a comfort. A signal. “Do you feel it?” she asked. Nyx drifted at her shoulder, more absence than presence at first—a darker patch of air where the light didn’t settle. When they chose to, they could look almost solid: a tall humanoid silhouette, edges soft as smoke. Their eyes, violet and faintly glowing, turned toward her with a patient stillness. “I feel the boundary,” Nyx whispered. Their voice didn’t hit her ears so much as it slid along the inside of her skull like wind under a door. “The Veil here is…thin, folded. Like fabric caught on a nail.” “Great,” Aurora murmured. “So we’re walking into a tear in reality. Again.” Nyx’s shadow-face tilted. If they’d had a mouth, she suspected they would have smiled. She kept moving, boots sinking into the sodden ground. She’d dressed for this—thick socks, a coat with a hood, gloves—practical, boring. She’d brought courage in the only way she knew how: by pretending she didn’t need it. The standing stones were not on any park map. They weren’t signposted. They weren’t even particularly grand in the way tourists expected ancient things to be. Just a half-circle of oak-dark monoliths tucked behind a bramble-choked rise, each stone slick with moss and streaked with lichen that looked unnaturally pale, almost silver. The air between them seemed clearer than the air around them, as if someone had wiped a finger through condensation on glass. Aurora slowed. Her breath came out in a thin cloud. It would have been easy—so easy—to decide she’d imagined the warmth of the pendant, the tug in her gut, the sense that the world was holding its breath. She could turn around. Go home. Deliver noodles for Yu-Fei later. Make tea in her flat above Silas’ bar. Put all this in a mental box marked Not Today. Instead, she stepped closer and watched the world change its mind about being ordinary. Nyx lifted a shadow-hand. “Do you see it?” Aurora squinted. At first there was nothing. Then, like a heat shimmer over tarmac, the air between the stones quivered. Faint. Almost polite. If she looked directly at it, it vanished. If she looked slightly aside, it became visible again—an edge, a suggestion of a seam. “The Veil,” she breathed, the word tasting like something borrowed from a book she’d never wanted to read. Nyx’s violet eyes brightened. “To me, it’s brighter. A net of light. Old knots.” Aurora swallowed. The Heartstone’s warmth increased, a gentle throb against her palm as if it approved of her standing at the threshold. She glanced back once. The park behind them looked unchanged: winter-bare trees, muddy paths, distant figures. Yet it already felt far away, as though she’d walked for hours rather than minutes. The sound of laughter seemed muffled, dulled by thickness in the air. “What if—” she started, then stopped. She hated asking questions that revealed fear. She forced the words out anyway. “What if we go in and can’t get back out?” Nyx leaned closer. Their silhouette sharpened, and the scent of cold smoke—impossible, but real—threaded through the damp air. “Then we find another way. There are always shadows. There are always seams.” That wasn’t reassurance. It was a promise of persistence, which was the closest thing Nyx ever gave. Aurora nodded once. “Right. Okay.” She stepped through. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the world turned inside out. It wasn’t a flash. It wasn’t a gust of wind. It was subtler and worse: a sensation like missing a stair, that stomach-drop of sudden wrongness, only it didn’t stop. Her ears popped. Her skin prickled as though the air itself had teeth. The smell of wet earth vanished and was replaced by something lush and sweet, like crushed leaves and honey and the sharp green of sap. Her boots hit ground that was not mud. It was springy, almost resilient, a carpet of moss and fine grass that gave beneath her weight and then lifted back as she shifted, as if the earth were breathing. Above, the trees were still oaks, but their branches held leaves—fresh, green, impossibly alive for December. Between them, wildflowers bloomed in riotous colour: bluebells, foxgloves, unfamiliar blossoms that looked like tiny lanterns lit from within. Aurora stopped short, her mouth parting. Her breath came out warm. Not steam. Just breath. The air here was mild, gentle on her cheeks. It carried the sound of water somewhere nearby, and something else under it: a faint chiming like glass touched by a fingernail. Nyx emerged behind her, their form deepening into solidity. The shadow they cast didn’t match the angle of the light. It stretched in a direction that made no sense, pointing toward the deeper grove like an arrow. Aurora looked back through the stones. On the other side was Richmond Park, cold and grey—except it was distorted, as if seen through thick ice. The dog walkers moved too slowly, their gestures elongated. A bird hung in the air mid-flight, wings outstretched, frozen for an impossible moment before it jerked forward in a sudden blur. Time, Aurora thought, with a cold little pinch of understanding. Time doesn’t behave here. Nyx’s whisper brushed her mind. “Inside, the hour is not always an hour.” “That’s comforting,” Aurora said, voice dry. It came out louder than she expected, the sound carrying too far through the trees, as though the grove held onto it and passed it along. She took a few cautious steps forward. The ground was soft, not slick, and her boots left shallow prints that faded as she watched, the grass rising back into place. The world healed itself from her presence. A dragonfly the size of her hand drifted past, wings catching light in iridescent sheets. Its body was a deep metallic green. It paused near her face, hovering with a precision that felt like judgment, then moved on without a sound. “Is that normal?” she asked. Nyx’s head turned, following it. “Normal is a word mortals use to anchor themselves.” “Okay, then. Is it going to bite me?” Nyx’s shoulders shifted in what might have been a shrug. “Perhaps not unless you deserve it.” Aurora exhaled through her nose. “Brilliant.” She kept walking. The grove opened and closed around them in slow, subtle ways. A path appeared where she expected one and vanished when she looked away. The light filtered down in shafts that seemed to sway like seaweed in water. Sometimes she caught movement at the edge of her vision—small pale shapes darting behind trunks—but when she turned her head there was only bark, moss, and flowers nodding as if they’d been touched. The chiming sound grew clearer. It wasn’t random. It had a pattern, a delicate repeating sequence that made her teeth ache with the urge to anticipate the next note. Aurora rubbed at the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, an old habit she hated. The skin there felt suddenly too tight. “Nyx,” she said quietly, “if this is a trap—” “It is a threshold,” Nyx corrected. “A place that collects those who seek it. And those who do not.” “That’s not better.” “No,” Nyx agreed, as if she’d made an excellent point. “But it is accurate.” They moved deeper. The air changed again—not temperature this time, but texture. It thickened, heavy with scent: lavender and crushed mint, something like ripe peaches. Aurora’s stomach, which had been tight with nerves, suddenly growled. She frowned. “That’s…odd.” Nyx’s violet eyes flicked to her chest. “The pendant.” Aurora looked down. The Heartstone had begun to glow faintly through her jumper, a deep red ember. Its warmth had sharpened into a persistent pulse, steady as a heartbeat. “It’s stronger,” she said. “Does that mean—” “A Hel portal may be near,” Nyx murmured. “Or something that echoes one.” Aurora’s skin cooled despite the mild air. Dymas. Gluttony. The only thing she knew about it was what little she’d pieced together and the way the pendant had felt the one time she’d passed too close to a place in London that had made the hairs on her arms stand up. She didn’t like the idea of Hell brushing up against…this. They crested a small rise, and the grove revealed its heart. A clearing opened like a held breath released. In its centre was a pool of water so still it looked solid, black as polished obsidian. Around it stood stones—older than the boundary stones, taller, pale and smooth as bone. They were set in a rough circle, and each one was carved with shallow lines that caught the light and seemed to shift when Aurora tried to focus on them. The chiming came from here. It emanated from the stones themselves, vibrating through the air in soft, precise notes. Aurora stepped closer to the pool’s edge, careful. The surface didn’t ripple when a breeze moved through the clearing. It reflected the trees overhead perfectly—except the sky in its reflection wasn’t grey or even blue. It was warm amber. Aurora’s breath caught. “That’s…that’s not—” “Dymas,” Nyx said, the word a whisper shaped like warning. Their silhouette darkened, edges bleeding outward as if the clearing’s light couldn’t quite hold them. The amber sky in the reflection flickered, and for an instant Aurora thought she saw shapes—distant terraces, rows of vines heavy with fruit, a flash of gold like sunlight on wine. Then the vision snapped back to leaves and branches. Her fingers tightened around the Heartstone. It throbbed hard now, almost hot, like it wanted to leap off its chain and dive into the pool. A sound behind her—soft, like silk brushing grass. Aurora spun, heart banging against the pendant’s heat. A woman stood at the edge of the clearing. She was about Aurora’s height, maybe an inch shorter, and she looked like a figure cut from moonlight—pale skin, silver hair falling to her waist in a straight, gleaming curtain. Her eyes were an unsettling pale lavender, irises too light to be entirely human. She wore a simple dress the colour of fog, and it hung on her as if gravity were optional. Aurora’s gaze dropped automatically to the ground. There were no footprints. Not in the moss. Not in the grass. Nothing. Nyx shifted beside Aurora, shadow drawing in tight, as if bracing. “Isolde Varga,” they whispered. The woman’s gaze settled on Aurora with a calm that felt like someone turning a page in a book they’d already read. “Aurora Carter,” she said, voice soft and clear. “Or Rory. Or Laila, if the winds are in a mischievous mood.” Aurora’s throat tightened. She hadn’t introduced herself. “Isolde,” Aurora managed. She forced herself not to step back. “We— I came because—” “Because the world is cracking at its quiet places,” Isolde said, and her tone held no drama, only the simple statement of a fact. “And because you have been given a stone that remembers hunger.” Aurora’s hand closed protectively over the Heartstone. “You know what this is.” Isolde’s lips curved, not quite a smile. “Knowing is such a sharp word. I see. I taste. I listen to what the roots whisper when no one is watching.” Nyx’s violet eyes narrowed. “You called her here.” “I do not call,” Isolde said, and there was something careful in the way she spoke, as though each word had to be chosen with tweezers. “I open a door and some choose to walk through.” Aurora held her gaze. “And what am I supposed to find?” Isolde turned her head slightly, silver hair sliding like water over her shoulder. Her eyes flicked toward the pool, toward the amber sky trapped in its surface. “A mirror that is also a mouth,” she said. “A taste of Dymas on English soil. A seam pulled too tight.” Aurora’s stomach twisted. “So it’s a portal.” Isolde’s gaze returned to her. “It is a place where the Veil forgets its own strength. The Wardens would stitch it shut if they knew. Others would pry it open until it screamed.” Aurora didn’t like how easily Isolde spoke about screaming fabric in the universe. She didn’t like how the Heartstone seemed to respond to the mention of prying, its pulse quickening as if excited. “What do you want from me?” Aurora asked. Isolde stepped closer, and despite the lack of footprints, Aurora could sense her movement like a change in pressure. The air around the seer smelled faintly of rain on hot stone. Her lavender eyes lowered to Aurora’s wrist, to the faint scar, then lifted again as if she’d noted it for later. “I want nothing,” Isolde said. “Wanting is a mortal sickness. But you have a habit of stepping into places that were not made for you, and surviving anyway.” Nyx made a sound like a soft exhale through a crack. “She does.” Isolde’s hand moved, and something glinted in her palm. A dagger, slender and leaf-shaped, its metal pale as moonlight. It looked too fine to be practical, too elegant to be anything but ceremonial—until Aurora saw the edge, how it caught the light without reflecting it, as if it drank brightness rather than bounced it away. Even from a foot away, she felt its cold. Not winter cold. Deeper. The kind that lived in stone and starlight. Aurora’s eyes widened despite herself. “That’s—” “A blade forged where promises are currency,” Isolde said, holding it out. “Moonsilver. It will cut what hands cannot. Wards, bindings, the thin lies between worlds.” Aurora hesitated. She’d held knives before—kitchen knives, delivery box-cutters, blunt instruments of daily life. This was something else. This felt like a decision. Nyx’s whisper threaded through her thoughts. “Take it.” Aurora met Isolde’s gaze again. “Why give it to me?” Isolde’s expression softened by a fraction, and that tiny change made Aurora’s skin prickle more than any threat. “Because you will stand before a door that wants to be a mouth,” Isolde said, “and you will need teeth of your own.” Aurora reached out. The dagger’s hilt was simple, wrapped in dark leather. The moment her fingers closed around it, cold seeped into her skin—not painful, but startling, like plunging her hand into a mountain stream. The blade hummed, a faint vibration she felt in her bones more than heard. In the clearing, the chiming stones seemed to respond, their notes shifting into a new sequence. Aurora swallowed. “Okay,” she said, voice quieter now. “Okay. We’re really doing this.” Isolde’s gaze moved to Nyx. “And you,” she murmured, as if addressing a storm cloud that had wandered indoors. “Still half in the spaces between.” Nyx’s silhouette sharpened. “Still.” Isolde looked back at Aurora. “Do not drink from the mirror,” she said. “Do not answer if something beneath the water speaks with your mother’s voice. And if time offers you a bargain—” Aurora frowned. “Time can do that?” Isolde’s smile returned, thin as a blade edge. “Everything offers bargains here.” Aurora tightened her grip on the moonsilver dagger, the cold anchoring her in a way warmth never could. The Heartstone pulsed against her chest, eager and insistent, answering the amber reflection with a hunger of its own. She stepped nearer to the pool, careful not to let her curiosity pull her off balance. The surface remained still, but the amber sky within it seemed to brighten, as if something on the other side had noticed her. Nyx moved closer, their shadow stretching across the water. For a moment the shadow didn’t lie on the surface—it sank, as if the pool could swallow darkness as easily as light. Aurora’s throat went dry. Wonder and dread tangled inside her until she couldn’t tell them apart. She glanced at Isolde. “If this is a seam,” she said, “can it be stitched?” Isolde’s lavender eyes glittered, reflecting nothing of the clearing around them. “Yes,” she said. “But every stitch leaves a scar.” Aurora looked down at her own wrist, the faint crescent from childhood, and then back at the pool that wore another realm’s sky like a secret. She thought of doors that became mouths. Of hunger that remembered her. She took a slow breath, tasting mint and honey and the sharp green of sap. Then she stepped deeper into the clearing, toward the place where Earth forgot itself, and listened as the stones sang her closer.