Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ94GXF5RD6GEA25QAWVFQX

The standing stones exhaled. Rory didn't have a better word for it. As she stepped between the last two oaks — ancient things, their bark split and dark with age, their roots humped above the earth like the knuckles of a buried giant — the air pressure changed. A slow, deep exhalation seemed to move through the clearing, not wind exactly, more like the grove itself drawing breath and then releasing it, acknowledging them. She stopped walking. Nyx drifted in beside her, their shadow-form flickering at the edges where the afternoon light tried and failed to find purchase on them. On Rory's left, Isolde simply appeared, as she always did, having crossed the threshold without ceremony or sound. No footprints in the soft earth behind her. She stood with her hands folded at her waist and her waist-length silver hair unmoved by the breath that had stirred the long grass at Rory's ankles. "You've been here before," Rory said to her. It wasn't a question. "One does not visit one's own home," Isolde replied, and her pale lavender eyes moved slowly around the clearing. "One simply returns." Nyx made a sound — barely a sound, more the idea of one, a dry exhalation that passed for skepticism. "Comforting." Rory let her gaze travel. The grove was nothing like Richmond Park had been thirty seconds ago. She'd walked through the park a hundred times, knew the deer herds and the chestnut trees and the specific grey-brown misery of an English October afternoon. None of that was here. The clearing was maybe sixty feet across, perfectly circular, ringed by those standing oaks whose canopy had intertwined so densely overhead that the sky visible through the lattice of branches was the wrong colour — not the flat pewter of the sky outside, but something amber-pale and luminous, like light filtered through a jar of old honey. Wildflowers covered the ground in impossible abundance: white asphodel, blue forget-me-nots, something violet and waxy she had no name for that grew in clusters around the base of the stones and released, when the grass moved, a scent like rain on hot stone. There were no insects. No birdsong. No wind. "It's quiet," Rory said, and immediately felt foolish for saying it. "The creatures that live here learned long ago not to interrupt." Isolde moved forward without waiting for them, her white gown trailing soundlessly through the flowers that closed back around the fabric's passage as if they'd never been disturbed. Rory followed, and the Heartstone pendant warmed against her sternum. Not the urgent pulse it gave near Hel portals, nothing like that — this was gentler, almost curious, a low thrum like a cat purring against the flat of her hand. She pressed two fingers to it through her jacket, feeling the deep crimson gem's heat radiate into her palm. Something here agreed with it. She wasn't sure how she felt about that. Nyx moved differently in the grove than they did in the outside world. Out there, in the parks and alleys and the dark stairwell of her building above Silas' bar, they slid between shadows, flickered, barely occupied space. Here their silhouette was sharper. More present. Their faintly glowing violet eyes — the only consistent fixed point in their shifting form — moved steadily across the clearing with an expression that, if Rory had been forced to name it, she'd have called hunger. Not the bad kind. The kind that preceded learning. "The boundary is thinner here than I expected," they murmured. The whisper-on-wind quality of their voice was amplified in the stillness, carried cleanly in all directions. "I can feel the other side." "The Fae Realm," Rory said. "Both sides. Everything presses in." A pause. "It is not uncomfortable." Rory thought it sounded extremely uncomfortable but didn't say so. They had reached the centre of the clearing. Here, the flower-cover gave way to a patch of bare earth, packed hard and dark, and in that earth a shallow basin had been worn by centuries of something — rain, ritual, the slow patient pressure of intention. A trickle of water had collected in its lowest point, perfectly still, perfectly clear, and in it Rory could see the amber sky above reflected with uncanny precision. She crouched beside it. Her own face looked back at her — black hair, bright blue eyes, the thin crescent scar on her left wrist catching the light when she extended her hand toward the water's surface. She didn't touch it. "Good," Isolde said, from directly behind her, and Rory managed not to flinch. "What one sees in the basin and what is true are not always the same thing." "Is that a riddle or a warning?" "The difference," Isolde said serenely, "is only ever whether one acts upon it." Rory stood. She pulled the Fae-forged blade from the inner pocket of her jacket — a habit now, a reflex when she felt the particular quality of unease this place produced, not danger exactly, but the awareness that the normal rules had been quietly suspended. The moonsilver dagger was always cold. Here it was colder still, almost biting, and in the amber-tinged light filtering through the canopy it had taken on a faint luminescence, the leaf-shaped blade edged in something between silver and pale blue that pulsed in slow rhythm. Nyx turned their head toward it. "It recognises the place." "Everything here recognises everything," Isolde said. She had moved again — Rory caught her now at the grove's far edge, her hand resting lightly against one of the oaks, her cheek nearly touching the bark, her lips moving. Not speaking to Rory or Nyx. Something older. Rory closed her fingers around the dagger's hilt and breathed. The air tasted of green things and cold stone and that rain-on-heat scent of the violet flowers. Her heartbeat felt louder than it should. They were here because Isolde had summoned them, or the nearest thing to summoning a Half-Fae compelled by truth could manage: a message left at the flat's door, pressed into thick cream paper in handwriting that had no business being so neat. Come to the grove before the week turns. What is moving is nearly through. She hadn't said through what. Rory suspected she was about to find out. "Isolde." She kept her voice level, the way she'd learned to keep it when everything around her was giving her very good reasons to raise it. "What are we looking for?" The silver-haired woman turned from the oak. Her lavender eyes caught the light strangely, refracting it the way water did, and for a moment Rory had the dizzying sense that she was looking at something that only wore the shape of a woman as a courtesy. "You are not looking," Isolde said. "You are being seen." And somewhere beneath them, deep below the packed dark earth and the wildflowers and the still water in the basin, something shifted. A slow, ponderous movement, like a tide turning, like a very large thing rolling over in its sleep. The Heartstone burned.