Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRCZAC0C7F0BSP5W9HTT7Q

The air changed the moment they crossed the boundary stones. Rory felt it first in her lungs—a fullness, as though each breath carried more oxygen than London air had any right to offer. Then it hit her skin, a warmth that didn't belong to late November, rich and honeyed and faintly sweet, like walking into a kitchen where something magnificent had been baking for hours. She stopped two paces past the ancient oaks and stared. Richmond Park was gone. Not hidden behind them, not obscured by mist or magic—simply gone, as if the grey English afternoon had been a curtain someone had pulled aside. In its place stretched a clearing carpeted with wildflowers she couldn't name, their petals in colors that sat wrong against what she knew of botany: blues too vivid, purples that seemed to hum, whites that glowed faintly from within as though each flower held a trapped candle flame. The trees ringing the glade were oaks, or had been once, but their bark spiraled in patterns too deliberate for nature, carved or grown into knotwork that made her eyes ache if she followed the lines too long. "Don't stare at the trees," Isolde said from ahead, already several steps into the clearing. She moved across the flowers without bending a single stem. Rory looked down and saw that the Seer left no footprints in the soft earth, though Rory's own boots sank a quarter inch with each step. "The patterns weren't made for mortal eyes. They'll try to teach you things you're not ready to learn." "Cheery," Rory muttered. She pulled her jacket tighter, though she wasn't cold. The Heartstone pendant beneath her shirt pulsed gently against her sternum, a steady warmth like a second heartbeat. It had been doing that since they'd entered the park, growing more insistent the closer they'd gotten to the stones. Now it thrummed in a rhythm that didn't match her own pulse, syncopated, as if the pendant were listening to music she couldn't hear. A shadow peeled away from one of the oaks to her left, and she flinched before she recognized the shape. Nyx materialized into something approaching solidity—a tall silhouette with edges that drifted like smoke, their violet eyes the only points of color in an otherwise dark form. They tilted what passed for a head, taking in the grove. "This place remembers," Nyx whispered. Their voice carried the way it always did, arriving in Rory's ear as though spoken from inches away regardless of distance. "It remembers what it was before the Veil separated things." "Before the Boundary, the Courts and the mortal world were one garden," Isolde said. She didn't turn around. "This grove is a splinter of that garden. A seed that refused to die when the soil changed." Rory opened her mouth to ask what that meant in practical terms, then decided she didn't want to know yet. She was too busy looking. Beyond the initial ring of oaks, the glade opened into something wider than any clearing in Richmond Park had a right to be. The geometry was wrong—she could feel it in her bones, the way the space seemed to unfold as they walked, revealing more of itself with each step. A stream cut through the center, its water so clear it looked like liquid glass, and where it caught the light it threw prismatic reflections onto the undersides of leaves overhead. The sky—she looked up and her breath caught. The sky was a deep twilight blue despite the fact that it had been half-two in the afternoon when they'd entered the park. Stars burned there, but they were too large, too close, arranged in constellations she didn't recognize. One of them moved, drifting lazily across the firmament like a luminous fish in a dark ocean. "That's not a star," she said. "No," Isolde agreed. "It isn't." Rory waited for more. None came. She exhaled through her teeth and kept walking. The flowers changed as they moved deeper. Near the boundary they'd been small—crocuses and things that could almost pass for earthly wildflowers if you didn't look too hard. Here they grew larger, stranger. Blooms the size of dinner plates turned to follow their passage, petals shifting orientation like satellite dishes tracking a signal. One of them opened as Rory passed, releasing a puff of golden pollen that drifted upward and hung in the air, each mote glowing like an ember. She reached out without thinking. "Don't touch that." Nyx's shadow-hand closed around her wrist, and the contact shocked her—not painfully, but strangely, the way touching a television screen felt in the days of cathode rays, a buzzing static charge against her skin. Nyx released her immediately, their form rippling as though the contact had cost them something too. "The pollen?" Rory asked. "Fae things have prices," Nyx murmured. "Even the beautiful ones. Especially the beautiful ones." She pulled her hand back and tucked it into her pocket, fingers brushing the cold hilt of the Fae-forged blade Isolde had given her the week before. The moonsilver dagger was always cold, even when she kept it close to her body, and in this place its chill felt almost deliberate, a reminder. The blade was a thing of the Fae Courts, and it knew where it was. She could swear she felt it vibrating, a frequency too fine for sound, as though the metal were singing at a pitch only other Fae things could hear. They reached the stream, and Isolde stopped. She stood at its bank with her hands folded before her, silver hair hanging motionless despite a breeze that stirred everything else in the glade. Her pale lavender eyes were closed. "This is the heart," she said. "This is where the grove breathes." Rory crouched beside the water. Her reflection stared back at her—black hair, blue eyes, the sharp lines of a face that hadn't been sleeping well—but the reflection was wrong. It lagged behind her movements by a fraction of a second. When she tilted her head, the reflection tilted a beat later, as though it had to think about mimicking her. And its eyes were darker. She was sure of it. Her own eyes were bright blue, always had been, but the eyes in the water were the color of a deep ocean trench, almost black. "The water shows what you carry," Isolde said. "Not what you are. Don't confuse the two." "What does that mean?" "It means your burden is heavy, but it is not you." Isolde opened her eyes. "That is all it means. No more, no less, exactly what it is." Rory straightened, unsettled. She rolled the sleeve of her jacket down over the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist—an old reflex, nothing to do with the grove—and looked away from the stream. Nyx had drifted to the far edge of the clearing, where the oaks grew closer together and their canopy thickened into darkness. They stood at the threshold of that deeper shadow, and for a moment Rory couldn't tell where Nyx ended and the natural darkness began. Only those violet eyes marked them, two faint points of light floating at head height. "There's something deeper," they said, and their whisper carried a note Rory hadn't heard from them before. Awe, maybe. Or recognition. "Beyond these trees. I can feel it. A thinning." "The Veil," Rory said. "What's left of it here." Nyx turned back to face them, and their form solidified, edges sharpening as if they were pulling themselves together by force of will. "It's gossamer in this place. Tissue paper. I could push through it with a thought." "And what would be on the other side?" Rory asked. "That," Isolde said quietly, "depends on which direction you push." The pendant flared warm against Rory's chest, and she pressed her palm over it through her shirt. The pulse had quickened. She could feel it now like a compass needle swinging, pointing deeper into the grove, toward the darkness where Nyx stood, toward whatever lay behind the thinning Veil. "Hel," she said. It wasn't a question. Isolde's silence was the loudest confirmation Rory had ever heard. She walked toward the dark trees. Each step felt heavier, not because the ground resisted but because the air itself seemed to thicken, growing warmer, sweeter—that bakery smell again, but richer now, almost cloying. Cinnamon and roasted fruit and something underneath it all that was darker, earthier, the smell of wine left too long in the cask. The warmth reminded her of something she'd read in the old texts, the descriptions of Dymas, the realm of Gluttony, where grand feasts never ended and the sky burned a permanent amber. A place of excess. A place designed to make you want. She stopped three paces from the treeline. Through the gaps between the oaks she could see it—a shimmer in the air, barely there, like heat haze rising from summer asphalt. It rippled and shifted, and for half a second she thought she saw through it: a landscape of rolling vineyards beneath a sky the color of warm honey, vast and terrifying and beautiful. Then it was gone, and there was only the dark between the trees. "Did you see that?" she breathed. "I saw what the grove wished me to see," Nyx said beside her. She hadn't heard them move. "Which may not be the same." "I saw vineyards. An amber sky." Nyx's form flickered. "I saw a door. Standing open." They looked at each other—or rather, Rory looked at the violet points of light where Nyx's eyes burned, and Nyx looked back with whatever senses a being of living shadow used instead of sight. "Isolde," Rory said, not turning from the shimmer. "Why did you bring us here?" The Seer appeared at her other side. Close up, Isolde smelled of nothing at all—no perfume, no soap, no human scent of any kind. As if she existed only partly in the physical world. "Because you carry a key from Dymas around your neck," Isolde said, and her voice held none of its usual riddles. The words landed plain and heavy. "And because the Veil is weakening, and what comes through will not ask permission. And because the three of us, unlikely as we are, are standing in the only place in London where we might learn how to stop it." Rory looked down at her chest. The pendant's glow was visible now even through her shirt, a deep crimson light pulsing against the dark fabric. "Right," she said. She drew the Fae blade from her pocket. It caught the strange starlight and gleamed, cold and luminescent, and in its glow the shimmer between the trees solidified into something almost visible—a boundary, a threshold, a door. She could feel it waiting. "Then let's learn."