Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR774SY2NNKFW9G8QTR2CC

The standing stones rose from the earth like broken teeth, their surfaces worn smooth by centuries of rain and wind. Rory counted seven of them, arranged in a rough circle around a gap in the ancient oaks that shouldn't have been there. She'd walked through Richmond Park dozens of times since moving to London, had jogged past this exact stretch of woodland, and never once had she seen anything but unbroken forest. "You're certain this is safe?" she asked, though she already knew the answer. Nothing about the past three weeks had been safe. Nyx drifted beside her, their form more suggestion than substance in the afternoon light. When they spoke, their voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, a whisper that bypassed her ears entirely. "Safe is a mortal concept. The Grove exists. Whether it welcomes us remains to be seen." "Comforting." Rory touched the pendant at her throat—a reflex now, checking that the deep crimson stone still hung against her collarbone. The Heartstone pulsed with faint warmth, though they were nowhere near a Hel portal. At least, she hoped they weren't. The gap between the stones shimmered. Not visibly, not in any way she could have described to someone who hadn't spent the last month learning that the world contained far more than she'd ever imagined. But she felt it—a pressure against her skin, a vibration in the air itself. The Veil, thin as gossamer here, separating the mundane from something older. "Stay close to me," Nyx said. "Time moves strangely beyond the boundary. Minutes here might be hours inside. Or the reverse." "And if we get separated?" The shade's violet eyes flickered. "Then you'll need to find your own way out. The Grove answers to Fae rules, not mortal ones." Rory took a breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped between the stones. The world tilted. Not physically—her feet remained planted on solid ground—but something fundamental shifted in her perception. The grey November sky vanished, replaced by a canopy of leaves that blazed with impossible colors: gold and copper and deep burgundy, shot through with threads of silver that might have been spider silk or something else entirely. Sunlight filtered through the branches in shafts thick as honey, warming her face despite the chill that lingered in her bones. "Oh," she breathed. The clearing stretched before her, far larger than the gap between the oaks had suggested. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in drifts of blue and white and pale pink, their petals swaying in a breeze she couldn't feel. The air smelled of growing things—earth and sap and something sweeter, like fruit on the edge of rot. Beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. Nyx materialized beside her, their shadow-form somehow more solid here than it had been in the mortal world. "The Grove exists in the spaces between," they murmured. "Neither fully Earth nor fully Fae. A threshold place." "It's beautiful." Rory took a tentative step forward, half-expecting the ground to give way beneath her. It held. The grass was soft as velvet under her boots, and tiny white flowers bent around her footsteps before springing back upright, unmarked by her passage. She noticed, then, that Nyx left no footprints either. But that was different—Nyx rarely left marks on the physical world. Here, the Grove itself seemed to refuse any evidence of intrusion. "The Seer's dwelling lies deeper in." Nyx gestured toward a path that wound between the trees—silver birches with bark that gleamed like metal, their leaves chiming softly against each other like distant bells. "She'll know we've crossed the boundary. Whether she chooses to receive us..." "Is up to her. I know." Rory started down the path, hyperaware of every rustle and whisper around her. The forest watched. She could feel attention pressing against her from all directions, curious and calculating and utterly inhuman. The path curved, doubled back on itself, led them through a tunnel of woven branches that opened onto a stream so clear she could count individual pebbles on its bed three feet down. The water sang as it flowed—not a metaphor, not poetic fancy, but actual music, notes that rose and fell in patterns just complex enough to suggest meaning without ever resolving into words. "Don't drink from it," Nyx warned as Rory crouched at the water's edge. "And don't make any promises while we're here. The Grove remembers, and Fae bargains are binding." "Even for a shade?" Something that might have been a laugh rippled through Nyx's form. "I learned that lesson centuries ago, when I still had flesh to bargain with." Rory straightened, her hand drifting again to the Heartstone. Its warmth had faded since they'd entered the Grove, the crimson gem cool and dormant against her skin. Whatever power it responded to, this place didn't trigger it. They walked on. The forest shifted around them—or perhaps they shifted through the forest, following paths that rearranged themselves with each step. Rory caught glimpses of movement in her peripheral vision: a flash of iridescent wings, a pair of eyes too large and too bright to be human, a figure that might have been a woman or might have been a birch tree swaying in a wind that touched nothing else. She didn't look directly at any of them. Some instinct warned her that to acknowledge them would be to invite attention she wasn't prepared to receive. The path opened without warning into a clearing ringed by standing stones—different from the ones at the boundary, older and more weathered, covered in spiraling carvings that seemed to move when she wasn't looking at them directly. At the center of the clearing stood a cottage that couldn't possibly exist. Its walls were woven from living branches, leaves and flowers growing directly from the structure itself. The roof was a thatch of golden straw that caught the strange light and threw it back in rainbows. Smoke curled from a chimney that appeared to be a hollowed oak trunk, and the smell of it—woodsmoke and herbs and something achingly familiar that Rory couldn't quite name—made her chest tight with unexpected longing. "She's expecting us," Nyx said quietly. The cottage door opened. Isolde Varga stood in the threshold, and Rory understood immediately why the codex entries she'd read had described her as ethereal. The half-Fae woman seemed to exist at a slight angle to reality, her silver hair flowing around her shoulders like water despite the absence of wind. Her eyes were pale lavender, beautiful and unsettling, fixed on Rory with an intensity that made her want to take a step back. "The carter's daughter comes at last." Isolde's voice was music too, but sharper than the stream's song, with edges that suggested it could cut if she chose to wield it that way. "And the shadow who was once a man. I wondered when you would find your way here." "You knew we were coming?" Rory asked. "I know many things." Isolde descended the cottage's single step, moving with a grace that left no impression on the grass beneath her feet. "Some I may speak. Others remain locked behind my teeth. Such is the burden of sight." She circled Rory slowly, studying her from angles that shouldn't have been possible given the laws of three-dimensional space. Her lavender gaze lingered on the Heartstone pendant, and something flickered across her ageless features—recognition, perhaps, or concern. "You carry a piece of Dymas against your heart," she said. "A realm of excess and indulgence, of feasts that never end and hunger that is never satisfied. An interesting gift for one who fled a different kind of consuming." Rory's hand closed protectively over the pendant. "You know about Evan?" "I know about many things." Isolde's smile was not quite kind. "The question you must ask yourself is not what I know, but what you are willing to pay to hear me speak it." "We were told you offer prophecies to those who seek you out." Nyx moved to stand beside Rory, their shadow-form drawing closer around them both. "We seek guidance. The Veil weakens, and forces move against—" "I know what moves." Isolde cut them off with a gesture, her silver hair rippling. "I have watched it in my dreams for three hundred years. The question is not whether darkness comes—darkness always comes. The question is what the carter's daughter intends to do when it arrives." She turned her attention back to Rory, those pale eyes seeing through her in a way that made her feel stripped bare. "You carry a blade I forged in another age, given to another seeker, passed down through hands I chose not to foresee. Does it still sing when the moon rises?" Rory reached into her jacket and withdrew the Fae-Forged Blade. The moonsilver dagger was cold against her palm, its leaf-shaped blade faintly luminescent even in the diffuse light of the Grove. "It hums sometimes. At night, when I can't sleep." "It remembers what it was made for." Isolde reached out and ran one finger along the flat of the blade, and the metal sang—a single pure note that hung in the air long after she'd pulled her hand away. "To cut through wards. To pierce demon flesh. To sever what should not be joined." Her eyes met Rory's. "Are you prepared to wield it for its intended purpose?" "I don't know what its intended purpose is." "Then that is your first lesson." Isolde stepped back, gesturing toward the cottage. "Come inside. I cannot lie to you—the compulsion of my mother's blood forbids it—but I can tell you what I see. And what I see is a convergence, a knot in the weave of fate, with you at its center." She paused at the door, looking back over her shoulder with an expression that might have been pity or might have been something older and stranger. "The carter's daughter who fled one monster only to find herself pursued by others. The pendant that pulses with Hel's warmth. The shadow bound to the mortal plane by chains of his own making." Her smile widened, showing teeth that were just slightly too sharp. "What interesting threads you bring to my Grove. I wonder what pattern we might weave together." She disappeared into the cottage, leaving the door open behind her. Rory looked at Nyx. The shade's violet eyes were unreadable, their form flickering at the edges like a candle flame in a draft. "We could still leave," Nyx said quietly. "The boundary would let us pass. We could find another way." "Is there another way?" Silence stretched between them, filled with the chiming of silver leaves and the distant singing of water. "No," Nyx admitted finally. "There isn't." Rory squared her shoulders, touched the Heartstone pendant one more time, and stepped through the cottage door into whatever prophecy waited beyond.