Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRC0NH1Z2X2923Y1TT55GZ

Mist coiled through the gnarled undergrowth of Richmond Park, draping itself over hoof-scuffed loam and tangled roots. Aurora Carter stepped lightly, her trainers muffled by last autumn’s leaves, fingers curled tight around the cold chain at her neck. It pulsed seldom—once, softly—under her collarbone, as though the crimson stone heart noted their passage. Ahead strode Isolde Varga, half-gliding, half-floating. Every time Rory tried to listen for footfalls, she heard nothing but the distant hush of a breeze. Isolde’s gown slipped over flower-strewn grass without gathering the dew, her silver hair trailing luminescence that was moonlight even in midmorning haze. Nyx flowed behind them, a walking absence—tall as myth in a vague hunched posture under a cowl of living shadow. The shade flickered at their edges where sunlight intruded, violet eyes mere slashes in an indecipherable face. Rory heard their voice only when they wanted her to: otherwise, the only evidence of their passing was a shudder in the grass, a chilling hush in the under-canopy. “This way,” Isolde whispered, yet it shaped the air as if spoken directly into Rory’s ear. “The gate yields to few, but I have spoken kindly with the stones.” Rory eyed the ancient oak pillars, standing sentinel amid bluebells and foxgloves. The trunks twisted upwards, bark lined with swirling, unreadable script. Between them shimmered an air-thin membrane, like sunlit oil on puddled water. It blurred the world behind. The sound of distant barking dogs and traffic faded with every step. She hesitated—and the Heartstone’s glow deepened by a shade or two, warming against her skin in queasy, warning pulses. “Do we just—walk through?” She kept her voice low, though the hush here felt sacred, like a cathedral abandoned by everything but memory and scent. Isolde turned, pale lavender eyes sharp with a mirthless glint. “There is little use for hesitation in liminal places, Rory.” She lifted a hand, long fingers brushing the shimmer. “If you would find answers, enter.” Nyx flowed forward in silence, features composed of moonless midnight. The boundary stretched, thinned around them, then seemed to drag Rory’s shadow forward like a leash. She took a breath, bracing against the cold. When she stepped forward, the air changed—warm, damp, impossibly scented. She wobbled, vision strobing. One heartbeat she looked back on oaks and ordinary parkland, the next—the Grove unfolded around her, untouched by London, untouched by centuries. She blinked, slow. The light here was impossibly soft, richer than gold, green like chlorophyll filtering through young leaves. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing, but not in any common pattern: poppies and bluebells beside moonlotus, vetch tangled with blossoms she had no name for. Some glowed with gentle, internal radiance—violet or serum-blue—others hummed at the edge of hearing, petals trembling with fugitive music. She felt her lungs fill with air so sweet it was dizzying. Something behind her coat rustled, and when she looked down, seeds stuck to her hem bloomed instantly into star-patterned blooms before shriveling away. She touched one; it left a smear of luminous gold on her fingertips. “Is this—” She managed, voice thready. “The Fae Grove,” Isolde said, and in her tone, Rory heard something between pride and sorrow. Nyx manifested beside a ring of mushrooms nearly a yard wide, their silhouette far more defined than back in the mundane world. They raised a hand—long, inky fingers ending in glassy claws—and brushed the cap of one crimson toadstool. Tiny blue lights winked awake beneath the skin, tracing sigils that flickered for a second and went dark. Nyx’s voice rose, faint as the first threads of night. “The realms shift here. Both doors and mirrors, sometimes.” Their tone was like damp stone, yet not unfriendly. Rory moved forward, careful not to trample anything. Time seemed to stretch, loosen. She looked back—the standing stones were there, but shimmered with their own internal moonlight, and the world outside their circle was a watercolor painting, edges dissolving. Her heart hammered, not with fear, but a kind of grandeur. She ran her thumb along the Fae blade’s hilt, tucked cold beneath her jumper. Always cold, as if the steel wanted to drink the warmth from her skin. She wondered absently if it approved of this place. “Why is it so—” She searched for a word, gave up. “—so full-on?” Isolde knelt by a thicket of feverfew, hands moving in slow, deliberate patterns. “This clearing neither dreams nor awakens as mortals do. It remembers the world before borders and bargains.” She turned a blossom: firefly blue, bulbous and glittering with dew. “Time folds in such places. Be cautious what you wish for or what you linger on, lest you find your shadow too long or your memories too short.” Rory felt Nyx’s attention swivel to her, though the effect was disconcerting—like being noticed by the wind at midnight. “The Veil is thinner here,” Nyx said. “Step carelessly, and the world may not put you back together in quite the same order.” Despite herself, Rory grinned. “That’s encouraging.” She moved deeper, skirting the ring of mushrooms. As she walked, sounds swelled and slipped: the babble of a brook where no river flowed, the chitter of insects in impossible frequencies. Once she glimpsed a triple-winged moth alight on a water lily; it folded its wings and vanished, leaving a shimmer in the air. The chimes were everywhere—soft, windbrushed, carried in the branches. But the trees themselves moved subtly, always a degree closer than before, branches tangled overhead in an arched, knowing roof. The wildflowers reacted to her presence. They curled towards her shoes, trembling, as if tasting the possibility of crushing—before shying away at the last second. The air pressed gentle hands against her, coaxing but not demanding: an invitation, or a dare. At the center of the clearing rose a standing stone, taller than Rory, rough as unpolished bone and veined with thread-thin gold. Someone had knotted ribbons in a language she couldn’t parse; some decayed, some fresh as a lover’s promise. She reached out and felt a low pulse through the rock, rhythmic—like a distant heart. “These stones mark the bargain,” Isolde said, moving alongside her. “Here is where the Grove meets both Earth and Elsewhere. Here, oaths endure.” Rory felt compelled to bow her head. “What sort of bargain?” Isolde smiled, inscrutable. “Once, each dawn, the world was bartered in dew and silver. Some debts remain unpaid.” Behind them, the light flickered: Nyx had shifted, their form unwinding into something broader—shoulders fading, arms trailing into misty veils. Their presence drew cold from the air but did not unsettle the locusts and moths, who spiraled lazily in their own orbits. Rory’s fingers twined again around the pendant. The Heartstone’s warmth increased, rhythmic. For the first time, she sensed it not as an object but as an active thing—thrumming with a heartbeat that did not match her own. She caught Isolde watching her, eyes bright and uncanny. “Does it mean something?” Rory asked quietly. Isolde’s brows lifted. “Crimson is not the Grove’s color. That gem knows a hunger not found among green things.” Her gaze shifted—beyond, perhaps, to things Rory could not see. Rory wore the blade at her hip, cold and trustworthy, but she felt small before the scope of the place—like a trespasser before old gods. She listened, aware her own breath had picked up, pulse racing with slow awe. Nothing ordinary would find them here, she thought—nor would anything, once out, be quite so untouched. “Why did you bring us?” Rory asked, sensing the question hunching in her throat like a crow. Isolde rose, statuesque. “The answers you seek rot at the core of the world, hidden in bark and stone, in the spaces mortals never look. The Grove remembers.” She paused, head cocked. “And sometimes, it grants remembrance to the right sorrow.” Nyx drifted a half-step closer. The edge of their form brushed Rory’s arm: the sensation was not chill, but absence—a momentary silence in nerve endings, a gentle vanishing. “There is something beneath,” Nyx intoned, voice echoing the furthest well of the clearing. “A thread, or perhaps a gate. Do you wish to descend?” Rory looked at them, and then at Isolde. The Grove seemed to hold its breath. “Not alone,” she said, softly. This close, the standing stone gleamed with quiet hunger. The world narrowed—petals folding, branches bending. The blade at her hip whispered against cloth, as if sensing the threshold. Somewhere beyond, a root hummed. The earth shifted softly, aching with secrets long buried. Rory placed her hand upon the stone, cold grit against her palm, and closed her eyes. The air thickened, taking on the scent of crushed lilies and petrichor. As the stone pulsed against her skin and the Heartstone pressed heat into her chest, she felt the world tilt—a sensation of falling, but also of unsealing, unfolding. Beneath her hand, the rock grew warmer—a light blooming from its heart, gold mingling with the crimson at her own throat. The Veil here was whisper-thin; she could feel it, the press and urge of other places trickling through. Somewhere, water trickled—no, not water, but the memory of rain on forgotten soil. Isolde spoke, the words tangled in prophecy: “Step inward, seeker. Be wary of what roots remember, For the answers you draw may draw you also.” Rory opened her eyes. The Grove waited—endless, alive, and so terribly awake. And as the sun shifted, shadows spiraled and wreathed, Nyx’s shape coiling like a herald at the threshold of a new, half-imagined world. She drew breath, cold hand on stone and the Grove in her veins. The door, wherever it led, was open.