Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ91539A926W1BMQCMTWHST

The pendant burned. Not painfully — not yet — but with a low, insistent heat that had started the moment Rory stepped between the standing oaks and hadn't stopped since. She pressed two fingers against her sternum where the Heartstone rested beneath her jacket and felt it pulse like a second heartbeat, quicker than her own. "It's doing the thing again," she said. "I know." Nyx drifted alongside her, their silhouette half-swallowed by the long afternoon shadows cast by trees that had no business being this old, this tall, or this close together in what was technically a public park in southwest London. Their violet eyes moved constantly, cataloguing, watchful. "It began when we crossed the boundary stones. It will worsen the further we go." "Comforting." "I did not intend it to be." Rory dropped her hand from her chest and kept walking. The grove had changed since she'd visited Isolde three weeks ago. Or perhaps the grove was always changing and it only looked different depending on when you arrived, or how, or what you carried with you. The wildflowers were still there — she could see hawthorn blossoms and something small and purple that she had no name for threading through the grass — but the light had shifted. It came from no particular direction. It simply existed, amber and sourceless, warming the air without quite reaching the skin. She recognized that light. She'd seen it twice before in her life, both times through a closing portal. "This is Dymasian light," she said. Nyx paused. The shadows around them deepened fractionally as their attention sharpened. "Yes." "Isolde's grove doesn't connect to Dymas." "It did not." A beat. "Veils shift. Particularly near the solstice." Rory looked up. Through the canopy — oaks old enough that their branches had grown into one another overhead, forming a vault of tangled wood — she could see no sky. Only that amber warmth pressing down like a held breath. Somewhere deeper in the grove, something was humming. Not melodically. More like the resonance of a plucked string left to vibrate long after the hand has moved away. Isolde stood at the center of the clearing as though she had been standing there since before the trees grew. Her silver hair was loose and moved in a wind that didn't exist. Her pale lavender eyes tracked Rory first, then Nyx, then dropped briefly to the pendant with an expression that might have been satisfaction. "You came sooner than the last thread suggested," she said. "The grove pulled you." "The grove didn't tell me it had redecorated," Rory said. Isolde's mouth curved. "Decoration implies intent. The boundary does not intend. It breathes." She turned and walked — leaving no impression in the soft earth beneath her feet, not even a bent stem — toward the far edge of the clearing where the trees grew most densely. "Come. There is a door you have not yet seen." Rory glanced at Nyx. Nyx had no face, precisely, but somehow managed to convey that they did not like this. She followed anyway. The trees at the clearing's edge stood so close together that the gaps between them were barely wide enough for a person. Rory turned sideways and pressed through, bark rough against her jacket, and emerged into something that wasn't quite a second clearing. More like a corridor. The oaks continued on either side, but the ground had changed — the soft grass giving way to stone, flat and fitted, worn smooth by age or traffic or something she didn't want to think about too hard. Moss filled the joints between them. The amber light was stronger here, and the warmth that had been absent on her skin was now present, pressing in from all sides like standing too close to a hearth. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to make her gasp. "Easy," Nyx said, close behind her. Their voice, always that carried whisper, had gone very quiet. "Breathe." She breathed. The pulse steadied into its quick, relentless rhythm. "What is this place?" she asked. Isolde had moved ahead without appearing to hurry, yet she was already twenty feet down the stone corridor. "A seam," she called back, the word falling cleanly through the warm air. "Where Veil and Grove grew thin together, and something else pressed through. Not a door made by hands." She glanced back over her shoulder, lavender eyes bright. "A door made by hunger." The word settled wrong in Rory's stomach. She looked down at the stones beneath her feet. They were carved, she realized. Not decorated — not patterned — but covered in script so dense and fine that at first she'd mistaken it for wear. The characters were nothing she recognized. They coiled over one another, and as the amber light shifted — it did shift, she was certain now, moving like light on water — some of them seemed to deepen. To recede into the stone rather than sit atop it. "Don't touch the floor directly," Nyx said. Their form had gone more solid than usual, shadow condensed, definition sharpened. Something about them had changed when they'd entered the corridor. Less like wind, more like iron. "The inscriptions are bindings. Old ones. Touching them without understanding them is inadvisable." "I wasn't going to touch them." "You were considering it." She hadn't been. Or she had, a little. She stepped more carefully after that. The corridor opened without warning. Rory stopped walking. Ahead of her, the stone path continued down a gradual slope into a space so large that the amber light couldn't fully illuminate it. The ceiling was lost somewhere above them, vaulted and dark. Below — because the path dropped away sharply in a series of wide, shallow terraces — she could see gardens. Not wild like the grove. Cultivated. Ordered. Rows of trees she had no name for, heavy with fruit in impossible colors, deep violet and gold and something almost black that caught the light like a wet coal. Between the rows, lower beds of herbs and blossoms spread in geometric patterns. Water moved through the space in channels cut precisely into the stone, and the sound of it, barely audible from here, was the clearest thing she'd heard since entering the grove — a cool, clean trickle against everything else's warmth. The smell reached her then. Rich and layered, sweet and savory both, with something underneath that her brain translated as abundance, as surfeit, as the feeling of having eaten until full and then being told there is more. She felt her mouth water and felt, immediately afterward, a cold spike of alarm. "Don't eat anything," Nyx said. Their voice held no inflection, but the firmness in it was absolute. "I know." She did know. She'd been told. Still, the knowledge sat uneasily against the wanting, which was immediate and irrational and embarrassingly strong. Isolde stood at the edge of the first terrace, looking out over the gardens with an expression that managed to be simultaneously reverent and deeply, profoundly sad. "The Dymasian seam opened four nights ago," she said. "On the solstice's early edge, while the Veil still trembled." She did not look at them. Her silver hair drifted. "The grove has been absorbing it since. Tasting it." "That's not good," Rory said. "The grove is old. It has tasted worse." Isolde finally turned, and for the first time in Rory's limited experience with her, she looked directly at the Heartstone — not at Rory, at the pendant — with something unguarded in her face. "But you did not come for a lesson in Veil geography." "No." Rory pulled the pendant out from under her jacket. In this light, the deep crimson of the stone had gone darker, almost black at its core, and the warmth she'd been feeling through the fabric was now a visible thing — a slow, deep pulse of light with each heartbeat. "I came because someone sent me this from Dymas. From inside. And I need to know why." Isolde's lavender eyes moved from the pendant to Rory's face. "You need to know who," she corrected gently. Rory held the Seer's gaze. Behind her, Nyx's shadows spread slowly across the stone, quiet as breath. "Same thing," Rory said. "No." Isolde looked back out over the impossible gardens, the ancient cultivated rows, the fruit that had no name. "It is not. Not in Dymas." Her voice, always precise, had gone soft. "In a realm built on wanting more, the who is always the answer. The why is only ever the bait." The pendant pulsed again, warm against Rory's palm, and somewhere below them in the borrowed gardens, something moved between the trees.