Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR9EPV5NHN681GWT62XP0Y

The standing stones appeared between one heartbeat and the next. Rory stopped so suddenly that Nyx flowed around her like water parting against a rock, their shadowy form rippling with what might have been amusement. One moment the path through Richmond Park had been ordinary—autumn leaves, distant dog walkers, a jogger's fluorescent jacket disappearing around a bend—and then the oaks simply weren't oaks anymore. They were something older, their bark silver-grey and carved with spiraling symbols that seemed to shift when she tried to focus on them directly. "We're here," Nyx whispered, their voice carrying that strange quality of wind through empty rooms. "The boundary." The stones—seven of them, arranged in an irregular circle—rose from the earth like broken teeth. They shouldn't have been possible. Rory had walked through Richmond Park a dozen times since moving to London, had mapped delivery routes that skirted its edges, and she would have remembered standing stones the size of small cars. The Heartstone pendant against her chest pulsed once, warmly, as if in greeting. "Through the gap," Nyx said. "The widest one. Don't touch the stones themselves." Rory's hand drifted unconsciously to the Fae-forged blade at her hip, the moonsilver cold even through the leather of its sheath. Isolde's gift. She still wasn't sure why the seer had given it to her—the half-Fae had spoken only in riddles, as always, something about threads and cutting and choices that bleed—but the weight of it was reassuring now. She stepped between the stones. The world inverted. That was the only way her mind could process it—a sensation of being turned inside out and right-side up simultaneously, of falling in every direction at once while standing perfectly still. The autumn chill of the park vanished, replaced by air that tasted of honey and green growing things and something else, something that fizzed against her tongue like champagne. When her vision cleared, Rory forgot how to breathe. The grove spread before her in impossible geometry. The clearing was perhaps fifty feet across, carpeted in wildflowers that shouldn't have been blooming—couldn't have been blooming, not in late October—yet there they were: foxglove and bluebells, wild roses and flowers she had no names for, their petals colors that existed somewhere between violet and silver and a shade of blue that made her eyes water to look at directly. The flowers swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel, moving in patterns that suggested communication rather than wind. Above, the sky was wrong. Not wrong in a threatening way, but wrong in the way that dreams are wrong—too saturated, too deep, the blue of it stretching upward into a purple that graduated into something her mind kept sliding off of, refusing to categorize. There was no sun, yet light suffused everything, sourceless and golden, casting no shadows except for the one that Nyx had become. "The Fae Grove," Nyx breathed, and even their whisper-wind voice held something like reverence. "I haven't been here in... a very long time." Rory took a step forward, and the grass beneath her feet chimed like tiny bells. She froze. "It does that," Nyx said. "The grove responds to intention. Walk with wonder, and it welcomes you. Walk with malice..." They didn't finish the sentence. They didn't need to. Rory tried to walk with wonder. It wasn't difficult—every step revealed something new, some detail that pulled at her attention and refused to let go. A stream wound through the far edge of the clearing, its water running uphill in defiance of physics, silver fish darting through it that might have been fish or might have been something else entirely, their scales catching light that didn't exist. Trees ringed the grove's edges, but they weren't the oaks she'd passed through—these were pale-barked and twisted, their branches heavy with fruit that glowed faintly from within, casting soft illumination like paper lanterns. She reached toward one of the fruits automatically, and Nyx's shadow-hand caught her wrist. "Don't." The single word carried centuries of warning. "Nothing here is free. Everything given must be returned, and the Fae have long memories for debts." Rory pulled her hand back, tucking it against her chest where the Heartstone pulsed its slow warmth. "You said you'd been here before. When?" Nyx's form rippled, their violet eyes dimming for a moment. "When I was someone else. Before the ritual. Before..." They gestured at their shadowy body, the movement conveying what words couldn't. Before they were Aldric, Rory thought. Before they became trapped between. The deeper they walked, the stranger the grove became. The wildflowers gave way to mushrooms—massive things, some taller than Rory, their caps patterns of bioluminescent spirals that pulsed in rhythms she could almost understand, almost recognize as language. Somewhere in the distance, something sang—not music, exactly, but close enough that her heart ached to hear it, a melody that seemed to know her name. "Time moves differently here," Nyx warned. "An hour, a minute, a day—you won't know until we leave. The Seer does that deliberately. It keeps visitors... manageable." Rory touched the crescent scar on her left wrist, a habit she'd developed when she was nervous. The childhood accident that had left it seemed very far away now, a memory from another life—the life where she was just Rory Carter, delivery girl, Pre-Law dropout, refugee from a bad relationship and a city that held too many painful memories. That Rory wouldn't have believed in standing stones or living shadows or groves that existed between worlds. That Rory hadn't carried a Fae blade or worn a pendant from Dymas. "There." Nyx pointed with a tendril of shadow. "The Seer's dwelling." Rory had expected something grand—a palace of crystal, perhaps, or a tower of living wood. What she found was a cottage. Small, round-roofed, covered in flowering vines that bloomed in colors she still couldn't name. Smoke rose from a crooked chimney, sweet-smelling and spiraling in patterns that suggested symbols, sigils, words in languages older than human speech. The door was painted blue. Ordinary, almost painfully mundane blue, the color of forget-me-nots or summer skies or her mother's favorite teacup back in Cardiff. The normalcy of it was more unsettling than everything else combined. "She knows we're here," Nyx said. "She knew before we decided to come. That's what being a Seer means." "Then why hasn't she—" The door opened. Isolde Varga stood in the threshold, and Rory understood immediately why they called her the Seer. Her pale lavender eyes held depths that shouldn't have fit in a human-shaped face—depths that contained futures and pasts and possibilities branching in infinite directions. Her silver hair fell to her waist, unbound, catching that sourceless light and reflecting it in ways that made it seem alive, moving with its own current. She was small—shorter than Rory, delicate-boned, ageless in the way of something that had simply stopped keeping track—and she left no footprints as she stepped forward, her bare feet passing over the chiming grass without a single note. "Aurora Carter," Isolde said, and her voice was music and honey and something sharp beneath, like a knife wrapped in silk. "You carry the Heartstone. You carry my gift. You carry questions that have no answers and answers that have no questions." She smiled, and her teeth were just slightly too white, too perfect. "Come inside. The kettle has been waiting for three hundred years to boil for this moment." Rory looked at Nyx. Nyx's violet eyes flickered once—encouragement or warning, she couldn't tell. "I need to know about the Veil," Rory said. "About why it's weakening. About what's coming through." Isolde tilted her head, bird-like. "You need to know many things. Need is a river, Aurora Carter. It flows where it will, regardless of want." She turned, moving back into the cottage's shadows. "Come. Or don't. The future arrives either way, and it arrives hungry." Rory's hand found the cold hilt of the Fae blade, grounding herself in its reality. Then she stepped across the threshold, into the impossible warmth of the Seer's home, and the door closed behind her without being touched, sealing out the grove's eternal twilight and all the questions she'd thought she'd wanted answered.