Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ93993MNQKB2TFS13TFQYN

The pendant warmed against Rory's sternum a full minute before the grove came into view. She'd learned to pay attention to that. The Heartstone didn't announce itself loudly — no sudden heat, no dramatic pulse — just a slow, gathering warmth, like pressing a hand to a sun-warmed stone. She pressed two fingers to the outside of her jacket, feeling the faint throb through the leather, and said nothing. Nyx would already know. Nyx always already knew. They moved single-file along the deer trail, the November grass bleached pale on either side. Richmond Park stretched grey and wide behind them, the distant rumble of a jogger's playlist fading with each step. The oaks here were older than the surrounding woodland. Rory could see that much without supernatural sight. Their trunks had the swollen, arthritic look of trees that had been growing since people still died of tooth infections as a matter of course. Their roots had split the earth into ridges, and the path between them had narrowed to something that was more suggestion than trail. "This is the boundary," Nyx said from just behind her left shoulder. They didn't so much walk as exist at a different proximity — one moment a step behind, the next close enough that their absence of warmth was its own particular presence. Rory had stopped finding it unsettling sometime around week three. "How can you tell?" she asked. "The shadows here point the wrong way." She looked. They did. Long, leafless tree-shadows stretched north when the afternoon light was coming from the south, and the wrongness of it sat in her stomach like a swallowed stone. Isolde was already inside. The seer stood at the center of the clearing as though she had simply always been there, as though the grove had arranged itself around her and not the other way around. Her silver hair caught no particular light source but shone anyway, and her pale lavender eyes tracked their approach with the detached patience of someone watching clouds. "You came later than the vision showed," she said, which was either a greeting or a reproach and, with Isolde, could be both. "Traffic on the A316," Rory said. Isolde smiled. It was a strange smile, narrow and old. "Step through." The standing stones — and Rory used the term loosely, because they were oaks, impossibly old oaks, their trunks fused into archways by centuries of patient growth — framed the entrance in a way that made the space between them look thin. Like a gap between pages. Like something that, once stepped through, could not be entirely unstepped. She went first. The Heartstone flared. Not painfully. It was more like the difference between a room at comfortable temperature and stepping outside into warm summer air — an abrupt and total change that registered in the body before the mind caught up. The air on the other side of the stones was different. It was richer, somehow. Not thicker, not perfumed, just — more. As if every breath here was providing something that ordinary air was quietly withholding. The wildflowers were the next thing. November had no right to wildflowers. The ground outside the grove was dull and dormant, waiting for spring with that particular stoicism of English soil. But here, the grass was deeply, unreasonably green, and growing up through it in dense, jewel-colored clusters were flowers she couldn't name — some resembling primroses but with petals that caught the nonexistent light in the way gemstones did, some tall and violet-stemmed and moving gently despite no wind. The clearing was perhaps thirty feet across, and every inch of it was inhabited, growing, alive. Nyx materialized beside her. She heard the shift of them — that brief sound like a silk hem dragging across stone — and glanced over to find their silhouette sharper here, the faintly glowing violet of their eyes brighter against the ambient strangeness of the grove. They were looking at the trees. "They're watching," Nyx said. "The trees?" "The things inside the trees." A pause. "They're not hostile. Curious." Rory decided not to look too hard at the tree line. She moved toward the center, grass bending silently under her boots. There was no birdsong here, she noticed — not the absence of it, not silence, but something more specific. A held breath. As if the grove was listening to them the way they were listening to it. Near the center, she crouched. The pendant had stopped pulsing. It lay warm and still against her, the deep crimson of the heartstone oddly vivid when she drew it out and held it in her palm. The inner glow — usually so faint she second-guessed herself — was unmistakable here, a slow ember-beat that matched nothing so much as a pulse. "It's responding to this place," she said. "It responds to the boundary between realms," Isolde said, appearing at her shoulder with the complete absence of footsteps that Rory still had not fully made her peace with. "This grove shares its nature. It sits between. As you do." She tilted her head. "As all three of you do, for different reasons." "Was that a prophecy or an observation?" "Does it matter?" Rory tucked the pendant back. She stood and turned slowly, taking inventory. The grove felt bigger from the inside — not impossibly so, just more than it looked, like a room where the walls were slightly farther apart than they should be. The quality of time was strange here, too. She'd been warned about that. She couldn't tell if they'd been inside for three minutes or thirty, and the uncertainty sat in her chest alongside the residual warmth of the stone. She drew the Fae blade. It made sense to. The cold of it was immediate and familiar — moonsilver never warmed, not to body heat, not to friction, not to anything Rory had tried — and its faint luminescence seemed to deepen here, as if the blade recognized something in the air and was answering it. The leaf-shaped edge caught the sourceless light and scattered it in small bright fractions across the grass. "Will it do what I need it to do?" she asked. She was asking Isolde, but she was watching the light on the blade. Isolde was quiet long enough that Rory looked up. The seer's lavender eyes held that particular expression she sometimes wore — not evasion, exactly, but the careful architecture of a truth being arranged into a shape that would be honest without being complete. "What the blade is," Isolde said, "will be equal to what you are, when the time comes." "That's not an answer." "It is an answer." She paused. "Whether it is the answer you hoped for is a different question entirely." Nyx drifted to the far edge of the clearing, their form thinning briefly as they moved between two of the old oaks, and for a moment Rory lost them entirely against the shadowed bark. Then the violet of their eyes reappeared, lower than expected, as if they had crouched. "There's a marking here," they said. She crossed to them. The light between the trees was different — older-feeling, denser — and the bark of the nearest oak was etched with something she'd have taken for natural patterning at a distance. Up close, it was clearly deliberate. Not carved — grown, the lines as smooth and organic as the tree itself, as if whoever made them had simply asked the wood to remember a shape. She didn't recognize the symbol. Neither, apparently, did Nyx, which was notable enough to feel like information. "Isolde," she called. The seer moved to join them without any appearance of haste. She looked at the marking for a long moment, her silver hair falling forward over her shoulder, and when she raised her eyes again they were not opaque but not quite legible, either. "Old," she said. "Older than the Courts. Older than the name Fae." She touched the marking with two fingers, and the flowers nearest the tree's roots turned briefly, faintly luminescent, then stilled. "It means this grove has been here longer than anyone living can remember." She removed her hand. "Including me." The word settled over the clearing like the opening measure of something they hadn't agreed to hear. Rory looked at the marking, at the dark interior of the grove, at the pendant faintly warm against her chest and the blade cold in her hand. Around them the nameless flowers swayed in their windless air. The things inside the trees, whatever they were, continued their patient watching. She had a feeling they'd only found the edge of the thing, not the thing itself. She had a feeling the grove knew that too. "Right," she said quietly. "Where do we go from here?" Isolde looked at her with that narrow, ancient smile. "Deeper," she said.