Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFFCXSJ98P6ZBQSB9YA3WC

The air in the grove tasted of ozone and damp earth, a metallic tang that clung to the back of Rory’s throat. The Heartstone pendant lay heavy and warm against her sternum, a persistent pulse that seemed to sync with the faint, shimmering distortion that hung in the air before them like a heat haze. The Veil. It wasn’t a wall, not exactly. It was a suggestion of wrongness, a place where the light bent reluctantly and the sounds of Richmond Park—the distant traffic, the chatter of walkers—faded into a muffled silence. Nyx flowed beside her, their form a humanoid suggestion of darkness that drank the dappled forest light. “The boundary is thin here,” they whispered, the sound like dry leaves skittering over stone. “Older than the park. Older than the city.” Isolde stepped forward, her bare feet leaving no impression on the moss. Her silver hair seemed to catch light that wasn’t there. “A stitch in the tapestry has come loose,” she said, her lavender eyes fixed on the shimmer. “We are the needle. Or perhaps the thread. It is often difficult to tell.” Rory took a steadying breath, her fingers brushing the crescent scar on her wrist. Cool-headed, she reminded herself. Out-of-the-box. This box was just… otherworldly. “Right. In we go, then.” Crossing the threshold was less like walking through a door and more like pushing through a curtain of cold, static water. The pressure lasted only a heartbeat, but it left Rory’s skin tingling, her ears popping. Then the world resolved around them, and her breath caught. They stood in a clearing, but it was unlike any part of Richmond Park. The sky above was a deep, twilight purple, shot through with streaks of luminescent green like slow-moving auroras. The air was several degrees cooler, carrying a scent Rory couldn’t place—something between night-blooming jasmine and cold stone. Giant, bioluminescent mushrooms, some as tall as her waist, clustered in rings around the bases of trees whose bark was the colour of weathered silver. Their caps glowed with a soft, blue-white light, casting long, dancing shadows. “This is… not the bike path,” Rory murmured, her voice hushed in the profound quiet. Nyx solidified slightly, their faintly glowing violet eyes scanning the grove. “It is a pocket. A bubble pressed between your world and others. See the stones.” At the far end of the clearing stood a circle of towering oaks, but their trunks were too straight, too smooth, carved with spiralling symbols that seemed to shift when Rory looked at them directly. The standing stones. Wildflowers—impossible violets, blood-red poppies, and blossoms of pure gold—carpeted the ground, blooming with a vibrancy that defied any season. Isolde moved forward, her form almost gliding. “Time here is a lazy river. It meanders. An hour may be a minute in your London. Or a day. Do not trust the sun, for there is none.” As they moved deeper into the grove, the sense of wonder began to curdle with a thread of unease. The silence was too complete. There were no bird calls, no insect buzz. Only the soft sigh of wind through the silver leaves, a sound like distant whispering. Rory’s pendant gave a sudden, sharper throb of warmth, and she glanced down. The deep crimson gemstone pulsed with a slow, inner light, like a dying ember breathed upon. “It senses something,” Nyx observed, their shadowy head tilting. “A resonance. This place… it touches many threads of the tapestry.” Rory’s hand went to the hilt of the Fae-forged blade at her belt. The moonsilver was cold, a shock against her palm even through the leather wrap. The slender, leaf-shaped dagger seemed to drink the ambient glow, looking less like metal and more like a shard of captured moonlight. They discovered a small, perfectly circular pool at the center of the stone circle. Its surface was mirror-still, reflecting the alien sky, but the reflection was wrong. Instead of their three figures, the water showed fleeting, indistinct images: a grand hall with tables groaning under fantastical food, a sky of warm amber, a figure with a crown of writhing shadows. Dymas. The pendant burned against her skin. “A window,” Isolde said, kneeling by the pool. She did not touch the water. “Or a memory the grove has swallowed. Places of power drink impressions. This one tastes of indulgence. Of endless hunger.” A rustle came from beyond the circle of stones. Not the wind. Something deliberate. Rory spun, the Fae blade half-drawn. Nyx dissolved into a wisp of shadow, flowing soundlessly toward the sound. Between the silver trees, a shape moved. It was vaguely deer-like, but its hide was the mottled grey of the tree bark, and antlers of crystalline growth sprouted from its head, catching and fracturing the mushroom-light. It watched them with eyes that were solid, depthless obsidian. It did not feel threatening. It felt ancient, and profoundly indifferent. “A warden of the grove,” Isolde said, rising. “It minds the stitches. We are not torn cloth; we are merely… static. It will ignore us, unless we try to cut.” Nyx reformed beside Rory. “The unease you feel is not from it. It is from the place itself. We are insects walking across a painting. We are out of context.” Rory forced herself to sheathe the blade, her heart hammering against the warm Heartstone. The discovery of the pool, the alien flora, the silent guardian—it was a cascade of impossibilities. The lawyer’s mind in her, trained to categorize and dissect, scrabbled for purchase and found none. This was all precedent-setting case law from a court that didn’t exist. She walked to the edge of the flower carpet, where the glowing mushrooms gave way to a patch of what looked like black glass. Kneeling, she saw it wasn’t glass, but a perfectly smooth, obsidian-like stone. Embedded within it, like fossils, were shapes: a curled leaf, a perfect acorn, a tiny, delicate bird skull. They were not pressed into the surface; they were suspended within its depth, preserved in flawless detail. “Time meanders,” she repeated Isolde’s words, tracing the smooth, cold surface with a finger. “It doesn’t just flow differently. It… pools. It leaves things behind.” A soft chime echoed through the grove, a single, clear note that seemed to come from everywhere. The crystalline deer lifted its head. The light in the mushrooms dimmed for a moment, then swelled brighter. In the pool, the images of the amber sky and gluttonous feast shattered into ripples and vanished, leaving only the reflection of the twilight canopy. “The grove acknowledges our passage,” Isolde said. Her voice held a note of finality. “We have walked its memory. To stay longer is to risk becoming a memory ourselves. A static image in the stone.” The wonder was still there, a bright, aching knot in Rory’s chest. But it was now ringed with a cold, primal fear. This was not a place for humans. It was beautiful, and it was utterly, terminally alien. The warmth of the pendant was a tether, a reminder of a world with coffee shops and traffic and laws of physics that mostly made sense. Nyx gestured toward the shimmering Veil at the clearing’s edge, which from this side looked like a vertical pool of mercury, reflecting the grove’s inverted image. “Our exit remains. The tapestry awaits its needle.” Rory took one last look at the silver trees, the glowing fungi, the silent, crystal-antlered warden. She imprinted it on her mind—the colors, the silence, the scent of cold stone and magic. A discovery that solved nothing and complicated everything. With a final glance at the now-blank pool, she turned her back on the wonder and the unease, and followed the shadow and the seer toward the shimmering mercury door, stepping from the timeless river back into the swift, familiar current of a London afternoon, the pulse of the Heartstone fading to a watchful warmth against her skin.