Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNEYK4H177N4CDKXRXTEGYM

The air changed as they passed between the great oak standing stones. One moment, Rory was breathing the damp, petrol-tinged air of Richmond Park at dusk. The next, her lungs filled with the sweetness of decay and riotous, alien blooms. It was like stepping through a membrane, a subtle resistance giving way to a profound and sudden shift in reality. She stopped, her hand instinctively going to the Fae-forged dagger at her hip, its cold a reassuring anchor against her thigh. Nyx flowed to a halt beside her, their shadowy form seeming to drink the strange light. Their faintly glowing violet eyes scanned the grove. Isolde, who had guided them here, stood serene, her silver hair seeming to catch a light that came from nowhere and everywhere. “Welcome to the crossing place,” Isolde said, her voice a melody that hung in the air. “Mind your step. The path here remembers the tread of things far older than you.” The grove was nothing like the park outside. The sky above was a bruised, eternal twilight, a deep indigo shot through with veins of shimmering silver like a vast, celestial amethyst. No sun, no moon, no stars—just this constant, eerie gloaming. The ground underfoot was a carpet of moss so soft it felt like walking on a living thing, and it pulsed with a faint, rhythmic luminescence. Wildflowers, unlike any Rory had ever seen, bloomed in impossible profusion. Some had petals like spun glass that chimed softly as they brushed against each other in a breeze Rory couldn’t feel. Others were great, fleshy blossoms that throbbed with a deep, internal magenta light. “The light here…” Rory began, her own voice sounding small and blunt after Isolde’s. “It does not come from above,” Nyx whispered, the sound like dry leaves skittering over stone. “It comes from within. Everything here is awake. Everything is watching.” They moved deeper. The air hummed with a low, resonant frequency that vibrated in Rory’s teeth. A stream cut through the center of the grove, but its water ran thick and clear as liquid crystal, and where it flowed over rocks, it sang a complex, watery chord. Rory crouched, dipping her fingers in. It was neither warm nor cold, but it carried a charge that made the fine hairs on her arm stand on end. “Do not drink it,” Isolde warned, not unkindly. “It holds memories that are not your own. You would not enjoy the dreams.” Rory pulled her hand back, wiping it on her jeans. The unease that had been a flicker in her gut now fanned into a steady flame. This place was beautiful, but its beauty was predatory. It was too perfect, too conscious. She felt the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist tingle, a nervous habit she thought she’d long outgrown. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the shadows between the twisted, silver-barked trees deepen and stretch in ways that defied the consistent, sourceless light. Nyx seemed to find it comforting. They drifted toward a particularly deep pool of shadow beneath a tree whose branches drooped with heavy, golden fruit. Their form blurred at the edges, becoming less distinct, more a part of the ambient darkness. “This is a place of power for my kind,” they murmured, their voice gaining a strange resonance. “The barriers are… thinner. Softer. I could almost…” They reached a hand of solid shadow toward the dark, and the darkness seemed to reach back, coiling around their fingers like a affectionate pet. “Almost is a dangerous word here, child of nowhere,” Isolde said. Her lavender eyes were fixed on Nyx, her expression unreadable. “The paths that open for you may not be ones you wish to walk. You are a guest, not a native. Remember the difference.” Ahead, the grove opened into a wider clearing. At its center stood a ring of stones, smaller and darker than the oaks that had marked the entrance. They were slick with the same glowing moss, and carved with spiraling patterns that seemed to shift and writhe if Rory looked at them for too long. In the center of the ring, the air shimmered. It was a distortion, a flaw in the world, like heat haze off summer asphalt, but it crackled with silent energy. Rory’s Heartstone pendant, resting against her collarbone, gave a distinct, warm throb. “A rift,” she breathed, her scientific mind, trained for law, scrambling for a framework and finding none. “A tear.” “A thinning,” Isolde corrected. “A place where the Veil is worn to a thread. It is stable. For now. It is why this grove exists. It is a wellspring.” As they approached the stone circle, the humming in the air intensified. The wildflowers here were different—tall, slender stalks topped with blooms that looked like open, watching eyes, their irises shifting through a spectrum of colors. They turned, slowly, to follow the trio’s progress. Rory’s sense of wonder was now thoroughly braided with dread. Every step felt like an intrusion. The grove was not just a location; it was an entity, and they were bugs under its microscope. She saw things moving in the periphery—shapes that flitted between trees too quickly to be identified, a glint of something that might have been an eye, the rustle of something that was definitely not the chiming glass-flowers. She drew the Fae blade. The moonsilver glimmered in the twilight, and a wave of intense cold radiated from it, causing the nearest watching-eye flowers to snap shut with an audible *pop*. The unnatural silence that followed was more terrifying than the sounds. “You feel it,” Isolde observed, watching her. “The weight of ages. The gaze of the unseen. This is the truth of the world that lies beside your own. It is not all ballrooms and delicate politics in the Fae Courts, nor endless feasts in the amber halls of Dymas. This is the root and the bone of it. Wild. Old. Indifferent.” Nyx had drawn back from the shadows, their form coalescing into something more solid and defensive. The playful interaction with the darkness was gone, replaced by a wary stillness. The grove was no longer a curiosity; it was a revelation of scale, and their own smallness within it. Rory looked from the shimmering rift to the sentient flowers to the ancient, watching trees. The cool-headed logic she prided herself on was useless here. This required a different kind of thinking, a primal kind of listening. She wasn’t just a delivery girl from Cardiff or a refugee from a bad relationship. Standing in that impossible clearing, with a dagger of cold moonlight in her hand and a pulsing stone at her throat, she was something else entirely. She was a woman in a god’s garden, and she understood, with a clarity that was as frightening as it was absolute, that she was now part of its strange and terrible ecology. The exploration was over. They had been discovered.