Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT00WH3N5NCSK63PHC9QYTC

The oaks had warned them first. Not with words — Rory wasn't that far gone yet — but with silence. The birdsong that had followed them through Richmond Park cut out like someone had pulled a plug. One moment, magpies bickered in the canopy above. The next, nothing. Just the wet crunch of their footsteps on leaf mulch and the distant hum of something Rory couldn't name. "There." Nyx extended a hand of solid shadow toward a gap between two ancient oaks. Their violet eyes flared brighter. "The boundary." Rory squinted. Between the trees, the air shimmered like heat rising off summer tarmac, except it was November. The distortion wavered, vertical and strange, a curtain made of not-quite-glass. She could see through it — sort of — but the image on the other side refused to hold still. Green shifted to gold, then back. Branches appeared where none should be. "The standing stones should be ahead," she said, pulling up the collar of her jacket. The Heartstone Pendant resting against her sternum had gone warm, a small heartbeat of its own tapping at her ribs. Not urgent. Curious, almost. She pressed her palm against it through the fabric. "They are not ahead." Nyx rippled. The edges of their form dissolved for a moment, then reconstituted, sharper. More present. "They are here. You are standing on one." Rory looked down. The root she'd been bracing her boot against was no root at all. It was grey stone, weathered to the same dull green as the lichen around it, half-swallowed by earth and time. She stepped off it and saw more — rough-hewn slabs that might have been natural rock if they hadn't formed a perfect arc disappearing into the undergrowth on both sides. "Right." She swallowed. "So how do we—" Nyx walked forward and vanished. Not vanished in their usual way, the slow dissolve into whatever shadow was handy. They simply stepped through the shimmer and ceased to exist on this side of it. Rory stared at the space where they'd been. "Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant." She touched the pendant again. Warm. Steady. Not warning her off. She stepped through. The first thing was the smell. Green and alive and impossibly sweet, like someone had crushed a florist's entire stock and mixed it with honey and rain. It filled her lungs so completely that she coughed, overwhelmed, eyes watering. When she blinked them clear, the world had changed. The Fae Grove opened around her like the inside of a cathedral. Towering oaks — the same species as those on the other side, but wrong in scale — stretched upward until their canopy became a vaulted ceiling of interlocking branches and leaves that glowed with their own pale light. Between them, wildflowers carpeted every surface in defiance of season: bluebells alongside summer poppies alongside snowdrops, all blooming at once, all radiating gentle color in a space where the light had no obvious source. There was no sun visible through the canopy. No sky at all. Just a pearlescent luminescence that came from everywhere and nowhere, warm on her skin. The ground beneath her feet was soft moss, dense as memory foam. Her boots left no impression. "Took you long enough," Nyx whispered from somewhere to her left. They had flattened themselves against the trunk of the nearest oak, blending so thoroughly with the bark's shadow that only their eyes gave them away — two violet pinpoints. "You could've warned me it was a 'just walk through it' sort of deal." "Where would be the joy in that." It wasn't a question. Nyx peeled away from the tree and drifted forward, their form slightly translucent here, as if the Grove's light was doing something to the shadows they were made from. Thinning them. Rory followed, one hand instinctively dropping to the Fae-Forged Blade tucked against her hip beneath her jacket. Isolde had pressed it on her two days ago, the moonsilver cold even through its leather sheath, and the half-Fae's exact words had been: *The Grove knows its own steel. Carry it, and the thorns will not mistake you for prey.* Rory hadn't asked what thorns. She was beginning to think she should have. They moved deeper in. The oaks grew wider, their trunks splitting into shapes that looked almost deliberate — archways, windows, the suggestion of doorways leading somewhere else. Rory stopped at one and peered through. A second clearing lay beyond, smaller, its wildflowers entirely white. In its center stood a stone basin filled with water so still it looked like polished obsidian. "Don't drink it." Nyx's whisper crawled across the back of her neck. She jerked back. "Wasn't planning to." "Good. The last mortal who drank from a Fae spring spent forty years convinced he was a salmon. The Thames authorities were not pleased." She couldn't tell if they were joking. Their voice — that perpetual whisper, wind carried through old hallways — gave nothing away. They pressed on. The path, if it could be called that, wasn't marked in any obvious way, but Rory noticed that the flowers parted where she walked, bending aside as though pushed by an invisible hand. When she glanced behind her, they'd already sprung back. No trail. No trace. As if the Grove swallowed every sign of intrusion the moment it was made. "Time," she said suddenly. "Isolde said time moves differently here. How differently?" Nyx paused. Their head — or the suggestion of one — tilted. "I cannot tell. I exist outside the normal flow. For you..." They trailed off. Their violet eyes dimmed, flared. "We should not linger. An hour here. That should be enough." "An hour by whose clock?" "Precisely the problem." Something rustled overhead. Rory looked up and saw movement in the canopy — a bird, she thought at first, but the shape was wrong. Too angular. It perched on a branch and watched them with eyes like amber coins, and she realized it was a moth. A moth the size of a hawk, with wings of deep emerald velvet and antennae that swayed like metronomes, tracking them. "That's..." "A guardian. One of many. Do not swat it." "I wasn't going to swat a moth the size of a terrier, Nyx." The moth's wings opened and closed. Once. Twice. Then it launched itself soundlessly into the luminescent non-sky and was gone. They reached a clearing larger than the rest. The oaks pulled back here, creating a space perhaps thirty meters across, ringed by standing stones that were nothing like the buried slabs at the boundary. These were tall, pale, and carved with symbols that shifted when Rory looked at them directly — holding still only in her peripheral vision. They formed a circle, and at the circle's center grew a single hawthorn tree, ancient and gnarled, its branches heavy with white blossoms that drifted to the ground like slow snow. Rory stopped walking. The Heartstone Pendant flared hot against her chest. Not painful. Insistent. "This is where she said to come," Rory murmured. She drew the pendant out by its silver chain and held it up. The crimson gemstone pulsed once, twice, three times, each beat brighter than the last, painting her fingers red. "It's reacting to something." Nyx had gone very still. More still than usual, which for a being of living shadow was a particular kind of unnerving. They stared at the hawthorn tree. "There is a tear here." "A tear." "In the Veil. Small. Barely a whisper of one. But the Heartstone knows." Their form flickered. "It was forged in Hel. In Dymas. It recognizes the taste of its own realm bleeding through." Rory turned the pendant in her fingers. The inner glow painted the hawthorn blossoms crimson as they fell. She thought of Dymas — the amber skies, the feasts, Prince Belphegor's sprawling vineyards. She'd never been there. Had only read about it in the Wardens' files that Nyx had stolen. But the pendant remembered. The pendant knew. "Isolde sent us here to find this," she said. "A rift point. In her own Grove." "The Seer exiled from the Courts, harboring a wound in the Barrier within her sanctuary." Nyx's whisper carried something new. Not fear exactly. Wariness. "Either she did not know it was here, which is unlikely for one who sees everything. Or she knew, and let it stay." Rory thought of Isolde's lavender eyes. The way she spoke — never lying, always circling. *The Grove holds what the Grove holds. What you seek is already seeking you.* She'd thought it was typical half-Fae nonsense. She was recalibrating. The blossoms kept falling around them, slow and weightless. The standing stones hummed — she could feel it in her molars, that deep resonance below hearing. The air near the hawthorn's trunk shimmered like the boundary had, but thinner. Threadbare. She could see through it, and what she glimpsed on the other side was a sky the color of warm amber and the distant green of what might have been vineyards stretching across rolling hills. Dymas. The pendant throbbed once in her hand, hard, like a second heart. "Don't touch the tear," Nyx said. "I'm not an idiot." "You walked through an unknown magical barrier sixty seconds after I did it, with zero preparation, because you assumed it was safe." "And it was safe." "This time." She exhaled. The Dymasian sky flickered and steadied on the other side of the rift, achingly beautiful, that amber light spilling through in a thin column that caught the falling hawthorn blossoms and turned them to gold. She lowered the pendant but didn't tuck it away. Its warmth hummed against her knuckles. "We need to tell the Wardens." "We need to think very carefully about what we tell the Wardens," Nyx countered. "A rift point in a half-Fae's hidden grove. They will burn this place to cinders to close it." "And if it widens on its own? The solstice is five weeks away." The silence that followed was longer than any Nyx had offered. The standing stones hummed their deep note. The moth — or another one — circled the hawthorn once before vanishing into the canopy. Rory stood in a place between worlds and felt the weight of what she'd found settle into her bones. The pendant pulsed against her fist, patient and relentless as a heartbeat counting down.