Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR3YDVP0G52J87W6XPXR61

The standing stones did not belong in Richmond Park. Rory stood before them, her breath clouding in the November air, and felt the wrongness settle in her bones like sediment. Three oak trunks, ancient and petrified, formed a rough archway where no archway should exist—between the bracken and the dead brambles of late autumn. Her hand went instinctively to the pendant beneath her coat, the deep crimson stone pulsing warm against her sternum, thrumming in a rhythm that reminded her unsettlingly of a heartbeat. "Veil's thin here," Nyx said, their voice like silk dragged over stone, whisper-close despite standing three feet away. In the fading light, they were barely more than a silhouette of living shadow, violet eyes pinpricks of phosphorescence in the gloaming. "Can you see it?" Rory could not, not at first. Then the air inside the stone archway shimmered, a heat-haze distortion in the cold, and her stomach dropped as if she’d missed a step descending stairs. The scar on her left wrist—a crescent moon of pale tissue she'd earned at eight, climbing her father’s bookshelf—prickled with sudden sensation. "I see it," she said. They stepped through. The change was immediate and absolute. The damp chill of London November vanished, replaced by air that tasted of honey and ozone, thick enough to chew. Rory’s ears popped. She spun, looking back, but the archway now framed a vista of impossible color—trees with bark like burnished copper, leaves that shimmered silver-green, and flowers. Everywhere, flowers. Bluebells and foxgloves and pale moonpetals that had no right to bloom together, let alone in this profusion, their scent heady and cloying. Nyx solidified beside her, taking on weight and dimension until they looked almost human—six feet of smoke-grey skin and featureless elegance, their form holding steady as they surveyed the clearing. "Time moves," they observed, tilting their head. "Listen." Rory listened. No traffic hum. No airplane drone. Just the susurration of leaves that shouldn’t rustle in still air, and somewhere distant, water falling upward. Her phone, pulled from her jacket pocket, displayed 3:47 PM—the same time it had shown when she’d left the flat above Silas’ bar three hours ago. The screen flickered, the digits warping into elaborate spirals before going black. "Conventional physics," Rory muttered, slipping the dead device away. Her fingers brushed the Heartstone again. It was hotter now, almost uncomfortable, pulsing in time with her pulse. "Useless." They moved deeper. The ground beneath Rory’s boots—practical leather, scuffed from delivery routes for the Golden Empress—was spongy with moss that glowed faintly aquamarine when pressure was applied. She found herself walking carefully, placing her feet between the luminescent patches, her lawyer’s mind cataloging details even as wonder threatened to overwhelm her: the way the shadows fell upward toward a sky that wasn’t quite the right shade of twilight purple, the sound of bells without clappers, the absolute absence of birdcalls. Nyx drifted ahead, sometimes walking, sometimes sliding through the spaces between tree trunks as if the wood were merely suggestion. They paused beside a stream that flowed against gravity, water crawling back toward a source that seemed to be the canopy itself. "Fae-touched," Nyx whispered, extending a hand of compressed shadow into the upward flow. The water passed through their fingers without wetting, leaving ripples of violet light in its wake. "Aldric knew places like this. Before." Rory didn’t ask how before. She knew Nyx’s history—trapped between realms since 1643, human once, sorcerer always. Instead, she focused on the path, or what passed for one. The wildflowers grew denser here, impossibly tall, their petals translucent enough to show the veins like stained glass. When she brushed against a stalk of something lavender and bell-shaped, it chimed, a note pure as crystal that reverberated in her teeth. Unease prickled her spine. They had walked perhaps fifty meters from the stones, but the trees behind them seemed closer now than when they’d started, and the way forward curved in a geometry that hurt to follow. She touched the scar on her wrist—a grounding gesture, childhood to adulthood—and felt her pulse racing there, rapid and shallow. "We’re being watched," she said, keeping her voice low. "Observed," corrected a voice like wind through chimes. Rory spun. The woman stood between two hawthorns that hadn’t been there a moment before, silver hair spilling to her waist like liquid moonlight, eyes the color of dawn fog over the Severn. She wore no shoes, and where she walked—if she had walked—the moss remained undisturbed, no compression, no print. Half-Fae, then. Isolde. "You cross the boundary unguided, delivery girl and shadow-ghost," Isolde said, each word measured, precise, weighted with double meaning. "Seeking what the stones cannot give?" Rory’s hand fell to her side, near the empty space where a weapon should hang. She’d learned caution in Cardiff, learned it again fleeing Evan in London, and the instinct screamed now despite the beauty. "Seeking you, I think. Or you wouldn’t be here." Isolde’s smile was ancient and sad, the edge of something sharp. "I am here because here is where I am. You are here because the Veil flexes, and you carry"—her gaze dropped to Rory’s chest—"a stone that remembers Hell." The Heartstone flared, crimson light spilling through Rory’s cotton shirt. She pulled it free, the silver chain tangling in her fingers. The gem glowed with inner fire, responding to Isolde’s presence, or perhaps to the realm itself. "It pulses near portals," Rory said, watching Isolde’s reaction. "We’re not near Hel. This is Earth. Just... folded." "All realms touch," Isolde said, moving closer without traversing the space between, her lavender eyes fixing on Nyx. "Even shadows remember sunlight. Even exiles remember home." Nyx’s form flickered, instability Rory hadn’t seen since the first time they’d met in the alley behind Yu-Fei’s restaurant. "I remember," they whispered, and for a moment their voice carried the weight of centuries. Isolde reached out, her fingers long and pale, and from the air drew forth a blade. It materialized like frost forming on glass—slender, leaf-shaped, forged of moonsilver that drank the strange light and gave back only cold luminescence. She extended it toward Rory, hilt-first. "For the one who reads contracts but breaks chains," Isolde said. "A gift from the Courts I cannot return to. It cuts through promises as easily as flesh, through wards as easily as wind. Take it, Aurora Carter, born of the Carter line who once guarded such boundaries." Rory hesitated, then reached. The moment her fingers closed on the hilt, the cold struck her—a deep, biting chill that raced up her arm and settled in her chest, quieting the Heartstone’s frantic pulse. The blade was lighter than it looked, balanced like a thought, and faintly she could see her own reflection in the metal—eyes too wide, hair tangled from the wind that didn’t blow here. "It’s beautiful," she breathed. "It is necessary," Isolde corrected, stepping back, her feet leaving no impression in the moss. "Winter Solstice approaches. The Veil weakens. Princes of Hel hunger, and Dymas sends its scent of amber and excess to tempt the borderlands. You will need steel that bites magic, delivery girl, when the feasts begin." Nyx had solidified fully now, watching the exchange with violet eyes narrowed. "You speak in circles, Seer. Tell us plainly: what hunts here?" Isolde’s laugh was the sound of breaking ice. "Nothing hunts here, shadow. Everything waits. The grove exists between—the boundary, the barrier, the breath between heartbeats. You feel the unease. Time runs strange. Steps echo before they fall. This is the nature of pockets." As if to emphasize her words, a bird—if it was a bird—passed overhead with wings of woven light, casting no shadow. Rory watched it vanish into the copper-leaved canopy, her grip tightening on the Fae-forged blade. The cold of it anchored her, a point of certainty in the fluid unreality. They moved deeper still, following Isolde down paths that spiraled in on themselves, past flowers that opened and closed with the rhythm of Rory’s heartbeat, beneath branches that whispered secrets in languages she almost recognized from her mother’s old Welsh storybooks. The amber quality of the light—though this was not Dymas, not the realm of Gluttony—suffused everything with the sense of perpetual sunset, golden and heavy. Rory found herself walking between two worlds, her boots soundless on the emerald moss, the scar on her wrist burning faintly in sympathy with the magic that saturated the air. Nyx moved beside her, more solid than Rory had ever seen them, almost human in the way they placed their feet, the way they turned their head to catch every sound. At the heart of the grove, where the standing stones should have been but weren’t, they found an empty space. A circle of perfect grass, white as bone, surrounded by the wild chaos of the boundary realm. Isolde stopped at the edge, her silver hair stirring in a wind that touched nothing else. "Here," she said, "choices become fixed. The pendant you carry—it was given by one who walks Dymas’s vineyards. Remember that when the warmth becomes heat, when the pulse becomes demand." Rory looked down at the Heartstone. It had cooled to a steady thrum, synchronized with the blade’s cold beat in her other hand. Two artifacts, two temperatures, two realms pressing against her skin. "What do we do now?" Rory asked. Isolde smiled, and this time it reached her lavender eyes. "Now? You breathe. You remember that you are mortal, and that mortality is a blade sharper than moonsilver. You wait for the solstice, and you choose which hunger to feed." She stepped backward into the trees, and where she passed, the wildflowers closed their petals in reverence, leaving no trace of her passage—not a bent stem, not a footprint, only the lingering scent of winter roses and the faint hum of the blade in Rory’s grip, cold and true and waiting. Nyx shifted, becoming shadow and light beside her, their voice barely a whisper. "We are deep now. Deeper than London. Deeper than 1643." Rory looked at the white circle, then back at the path they’d walked—a path that now seemed to lead nowhere, everywhere, winding through the impossible orchard of the in-between. She adjusted her grip on the dagger, felt the scar on her wrist ache with old memory, and stepped forward, into the heart of the grove, where time held its breath and the Veil wore thin as silk.