Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ95615ZWF2FPCT056KF9H8

The Heartstone went warm the moment they crossed the boundary stones. Rory felt it through her jacket, through the thin cotton of her shirt — a pulse against her sternum like a second heartbeat finding its rhythm. She pressed two fingers to the pendant through the fabric and said nothing, watching the ancient oaks close behind them as though the grove had swallowed them whole. Richmond Park had been ordinary ten minutes ago. Dog walkers. A cyclist in luminous yellow. The grey November sky pressing down flat and indifferent over muddy ground. Then Isolde had stepped out of nowhere in particular, silver hair catching light that didn't seem to belong to any identifiable source, and said, follow me through, and now there was this. The air was different. Not warmer exactly, but more present — dense with the smell of turned earth and something floral that Rory couldn't name, something that reminded her distantly of her grandmother's garden in Wicklow without being that at all. Wildflowers pressed up from the moss in small impossible clusters, white and violet and a shade of gold that seemed slightly too saturated, too deliberate, like a painting's idea of a flower rather than the real thing. Rory crouched briefly, touched a petal. It was soft. It was real. It just wasn't quite right. "Don't linger at the edge," Isolde said, already several paces ahead. She left no marks in the moss. Her feet passed over it like a thought passes over water. "The threshold has a long memory and a short temper." Rory straightened and followed. Nyx moved alongside her, or rather slightly above the ground, which was something she still hadn't entirely made peace with. In the grove the shadow that comprised them seemed richer somehow, the violet glow of their eyes more pronounced against the diffuse, sourceless light of the clearing. They turned their head in slow increments as they moved, cataloguing. "There is old power here," they said, in that wind-carried whisper that raised the fine hairs on Rory's arms. "Older than the Fae who tends it." "Much older," Isolde agreed without turning. "I inherited this place. I did not make it." The clearing opened before them. Rory stopped walking. She'd been told — she'd told herself — to expect something strange. She'd stood in Nyx's shadow in a condemned building in Bermondsey while a Hel portal bled red light through the floorboards. She'd held the Fae blade at three in the morning while something with too many joints tried to shoulder its way through a ward. She knew strange. She had a working relationship with it. This was different. The grove opened into a space that should not have fit inside Richmond Park. It was vast in a way that the eye kept refusing to accept — a natural amphitheatre dropping gently from the tree line to a shallow basin where the ground shimmered with something that was not quite mist and not quite light. Standing stones rose from the basin's edge, not the stacked grey slabs Rory associated with the idea of standing stones, but single shafts of dark wood grown rather than placed, ancient oaks arrested in the act of reaching skyward, their upper branches long gone, bark worn smooth and black by centuries of — what? Weather? Touch? Time moving differently than it should? Between them, something hung suspended in the air. Rory thought at first it was a veil of cobweb, or ice, or — she moved closer before she'd made the decision to — a distortion. A shimmer. Familiar in the way the Heartstone's warmth was familiar, the way she sometimes felt it under thunderclouds, the sense of something vast and thin stretched across reality's surface. "The Veil," she said. Not a question. She'd felt it before. But she'd never seen it. "Here it is thin enough to be visible." Isolde had come to stand beside her without sound, without transition, simply present. Her pale lavender eyes reflected the shimmer. "Not a rift. Not a tear. Only a window. You see, but cannot pass. Not here. Not yet." "What's on the other side?" Rory asked. "Which side?" Rory glanced at her. Isolde's expression was mild, unhelpful, and entirely serene. Nyx stepped past both of them and approached the shimmer. The darkness that composed them rippled at the edges, drawn faintly outward like smoke toward heat. They raised one hand — a shape approximating a hand, fingers of living shadow — and held it inches from the distortion without touching. "Both," they said quietly. The word landed in the clearing with unusual weight. Rory thought of the Heartstone again, thought of Dymas and what she'd been told of it — amber skies over gardens planted for excess, grand tables set for souls under contract, a prince of singular appetite presiding over it all. She pressed her hand flat against the pendant through her jacket. The warmth was steady now. Consistent. It knew something she didn't. She wrapped her other hand around the handle of the Fae blade at her hip without drawing it. The moonsilver was always cold but here it was cold in a way that felt purposeful, attentive. The blade pointing south. Rory looked south across the basin and saw, for just a moment, a colour in the shimmer that hadn't been there a second ago. Amber. Warm and slow as late afternoon light. "It's pointing toward something," she said. "The pendant. There's a portal somewhere near." "Not near," Isolde said. "Merely adjacent. This place touches many things. That is why I was drawn here, three centuries past, and why I remain." She paused, and something that was almost — but carefully not quite — amusement moved across her face. "The Seer and the threshold. We have an understanding." "What kind of understanding?" "The useful kind." Rory exhaled through her nose. Behind her, somewhere in the moss, something moved. She turned fast, hand closing on the blade's handle fully now — and found nothing. Only wildflowers. Only the sourceless light. But the flowers nearest her feet were facing the wrong direction. Not toward the sky. Toward her. Nyx appeared at her shoulder without sound, because that was simply what they did. Their voice came low, meant only for her. "I have been in the spaces between for three hundred and eighty years," they said. "I have walked places where the walls of the world are paper. And this place," they paused, violet eyes sweeping the basin, "makes the hair on the back of my neck rise." Rory looked at the smooth shadow-curve where a neck would be. "You don't have a neck," she said. "Metaphorically," Nyx said, with the gravity of someone delivering an important report. "My metaphorical neck hair is deeply unsettled." She almost laughed. Almost. The sound caught somewhere in her chest and she let it dissolve, because the flowers were still watching, and the Heartstone was still warm, and somewhere beneath the perfumed air and the beautiful wrongness of this pocket between worlds, something was paying attention to them with the patience of something very old and very hungry. Isolde walked to the centre of the basin and turned to face them, silver hair unmoving despite a wind that Rory could feel against her cheeks. "Come," she said, and her voice carried the shape of a prophecy not yet spoken, the held breath before the thing that cannot be unsaid. "What you have come to learn, this place will not offer freely. It must be asked the right question." Her pale eyes moved to Rory specifically, with the weight of three hundred years behind them. "And you, child of Cardiff and consequence, have been asking the wrong one." The shimmer pulsed. The Heartstone blazed. Rory stepped forward into the basin and felt the world rearrange itself, quietly and without ceremony, around the decision.