Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR1PCQVB2ABD44C6HKESR6

The standing stones waited in a silence that felt premeditated. Three of them, ancient oaks petrified into grey sentinels, arranged in a triangle that hurt Rory’s eyes when she tried to trace their geometry. The park beyond—Richmond at midnight—had dissolved into a muffled abstraction of distant traffic and dew-slick grass. Here, at the boundary, the air tasted of ozone and honey. Rory touched the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, an old habit when the world tilted. The Heartstone Pendant hung heavy against her collarbone, its silver chain cold, but the crimson gem itself throbbed with a rhythm that matched her pulse. Not the staccato warning it gave near Hel portals. Something slower. Hungrier. "To cross," Isolde said, her voice like bells heard underwater, "one must accept that the step is both forward and forever." The Half-Fae moved without sound. Rory watched her, silver hair catching starlight that seemed to bend toward her rather than fall, pale lavender eyes fixed on the space between the stones. Isolde’s bare feet pressed the grass and left no impression—no break in the frost, no bend in the blade. She passed through the threshold, and for a moment, her form flickered as if seen through heat haze. Then she was gone. Nyx shifted. In the dimness, their form lost definition, becoming a silhouette of living smoke approximately six feet tall, violet eyes hanging in the void like misplaced stars. Their voice came as a whisper against Rory’s ear, intimate and sourceless. "The Veil wears thin here. Do not follow her shadow. Follow her absence." Then Nyx, too, slipped between the stones, incorporeal, a drift of darkness swallowed by greater dark. Rory’s hand found the hilt of the Fae-Forged Blade at her hip. The moonsilver was ice against her palm, even through the leather wrapping. She drew it. The leaf-shaped dagger began to glow immediately, not with the warm amber of Dymas, but with a cold, spectral luminescence that painted the standing stones in shades of bruised blue. The light revealed what her eyes had missed: the air between the oaks wasn’t empty. It shimmered, a distortion like heat rising from summer asphalt, the Barrier itself made visible. She stepped through. The transition had no threshold, no sensation of movement, yet the world reassembled around her with violent wrongness. The temperature plummeted. The London smell—exhaust, wet earth, cigarette smoke—evaporated, replaced by an aroma of crushed violets and petrichor that existed in memory more than air. Rory’s ears popped, then filled with a high, harmonic hum, as if the grove itself vibrated at a frequency just below hearing. She stood in a clearing that couldn’t fit inside Richmond Park. The canopy above was not sky but twilight solidified, a deep indigo vault where stars wheeled in lazy, wrong orbits. Beneath them, wildflowers rioted in impossible contradictions—snowdrops nodding beside foxgloves, black roses climbing the same stems as cherry blossoms. They carpeted the ground in a tapestry of color that shifted when she looked away, rearranging into new patterns. Isolde stood ten feet ahead, motionless, her waist-length silver hair drifting in a wind Rory couldn’t feel. "You notice time," Isolde said. It wasn’t a question. Rory checked her watch. The second hand spasmed, jerking backward three ticks, freezing, then racing forward to catch up to a future that hadn’t arrived. Her phone’s screen displayed 3:33 AM, then 11:11 PM, then a string of symbols that looked almost like Enochian script before settling on a blank grey. "How long have we been here?" Rory asked. Her voice sounded flat, absorbed by the strange acoustics. "Longer than a breath," Isolde replied, turning. Her lavender eyes reflected the glow of Rory’s blade. "Shorter than a promise. The grove exists where the Courts remember the Earth, but the Earth has forgotten the Courts. Here, duration is a matter of intention." Nyx materialized beside a tree trunk, solidifying from a patch of shadow. In the moonsilver light—which came from no visible moon—they appeared almost humanoid, six-foot-two of defined darkness, their features suggested rather than seen. Only the violet eyes held steady detail. They reached out, incorporeal fingers passing through the bark of an oak. The tree shuddered, leaves rattling like bones. "It knows we’re foreign," Nyx whispered. The wind carried their voice, threw it against Rory’s other ear, then died. "The grove examines us." Rory moved deeper. The grass beneath her boots was too soft, yielding like memory foam, springing back with a delay that suggested the ground was considering whether to let her pass. She kept the blade raised. Its cold bit into her knuckles, a necessary anchor against the floating sensation in her chest. They passed beneath a canopy of trees with bark like tarnished silver. Here, the air grew thick, viscous. Breathing required effort, each inhalation tasting of copper and ancient magic. Rory’s pendant grew hotter, the crimson gem pulsing in arrhythmic spasms. She touched it through her shirt. The warmth bled into her skin, not burning, but claiming. "Your stone remembers," Isolde said, walking ahead. She moved between two massive ferns that parted for her like courtiers, their fronds brushing Rory’s shoulders with a touch that felt like static electricity. "It was born of Gluttony’s bounty, forged in Dymas where excess is law. Here, in the place of Enough, it dreams of appetite." "Is that dangerous?" Rory asked. She kept her eyes on Isolde’s feet, or rather, the lack of them—the Half-Fae left no depressions in the moss, no sign of passage. "Only if you hunger," Isolde said, and smiled. The expression was beautiful and unsettling, the smile of someone who could not lie but could choose which truths to illuminate. The clearing opened into a dell. At its center stood a pool of water that shouldn’t have been still. No ripples disturbed its surface despite the wind that now moved through the grove, carrying scents of cinnamon and cold iron. The water was mirror-black, and in it, Rory saw no reflection of the silver trees or the indigo sky. Instead, she saw a sky of warm amber, vast vineyards stretching under a swollen sun, and figures moving through the rows with too many joints in their limbs. Dymas. The heart of Gluttony, glimpsed through a pinhole. "The rift," Nyx said, solidifying at the pool’s edge. Their shadow stretched toward the water but stopped short, as if afraid to touch. "It bleeds both ways. The Veil is not a wall here, Carter. It is a wound." Rory approached. The Fae-Forged Blade blazed brighter, its moonsilver edge humming against the alien atmosphere. The cold intensified, frost forming on her knuckles where they gripped the hilt. Her breath plumed in the air, yet the flowers around the pool continued to bloom, petals unfolding in real-time, buds bursting into color with audible pops like distant firecrackers. Isolde stood at the water’s edge, her ethereal stillness a contrast to the frantic growth around her. "You sought a path," she said, addressing Rory but looking at the amber reflection. "You carry the key." She gestured to the pendant. "You carry the knife." A nod to the blade. "But do you carry the stomach for what lies beyond the reflection? The Helbound do not forgive trespass, and the Fae do not forget faces." Rory looked down at her left wrist. The crescent scar had paled to white against her skin, standing out like a mark of punctuation. She thought of Cardiff, of the flat above Silas’ bar, of delivery routes and ordinary dangers. Then she looked at the pool, where the amber sky of Dymas beckoned, and felt the Heartstone synchronize its pulse with something vast and sleeping that existed on the other side of the shimmer. "I don’t have a choice," Rory said. "Ah," Isolde said, her lavender eyes finally meeting Rory’s bright blue ones. "But that is the first lie you’ve told today. Choice is the only currency that spends true in all three realms." Nyx shifted, their form flickering between solid and shadow, a visual representation of uncertainty. "The Wardens will have felt this thinning," they whispered. "We are not unseen." "Then we move quickly," Rory said, tightening her grip on the cold blade. Isolde stepped onto the surface of the pool. Her foot touched the amber reflection, and the water held her, a surface tension of pure metaphysics. She did not sink. Instead, she stood atop the vision of Dymas, silver hair falling around her like a curtain, and extended her hand back toward Rory. "Wonder is the bait," Isolde said. "Unease is the hook. But discovery—" She smiled again, ageless and terrible. "Discovery is the swallowing. Come, child of Cardiff. Let us see if your out-of-the-box thinking can survive outside the box entirely." Rory took her hand. The grove held its breath. And the world changed.