Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT01JSPC1XNF0MA3R1Q3QN2

The standing oaks rose like sentinels at the edge of Richmond Park, their trunks twisted in ways that made Rory's eyes water if she looked too long. Ancient symbols carved into bark that should have rotted away centuries ago still pulsed with a faint silver luminescence. The Heartstone pendant beneath her jacket thrummed against her sternum, not with the heat that warned of Hel portals, but with something else entirely—a coolness that spread through her chest like menthol on skin. "Here." Isolde's voice drifted from somewhere ahead, though Rory could've sworn the half-Fae woman had been beside her a moment ago. "Step between the third and fourth stones. Not through them. Between." Rory exchanged a glance with Nyx, whose violet eyes flickered in the dying afternoon light. The Shade had condensed themselves into something almost solid, though shadows still leaked from their edges like ink in water. "What happens if we step through instead of between?" "You'll find yourself walking in circles until I fetch you." Isolde materialized near the fourth oak, one pale hand resting against bark that seemed to lean toward her touch. "The grove does not welcome the uninvited." The air between the third and fourth oak shimmered like heat rising from summer pavement. Rory took a breath, stepped forward, and the world tilted sideways. Her foot came down on grass that shouldn't exist—too green, too vibrant, each blade catching light that fell at wrong angles. The sound of Richmond Park vanished. No distant traffic. No birdsong. Just a profound silence that made her ears ring until she realized it wasn't silence at all, but the absence of any sound she recognized. "Christ." "He has no dominion here." Isolde glided past, leaving no footprints in grass that sprang back from Rory's boots. "Welcome to what remains of my mother's court." The grove opened before them like a cathedral made of living things. Trees rose in spirals, their branches weaving overhead in geometric patterns that hurt to follow. Wildflowers bloomed in impossible clusters—blue roses growing beside summer poppies beside autumn chrysanthemums. The sky beyond the canopy glowed the color of pearls, neither day nor night but something caught perpetually between. Nyx flowed past Rory's shoulder, their form stretching upward as they examined the twisted branches. "The geometry is wrong. Nothing intersects properly." "It intersects perfectly." Isolde's silver hair swayed though no wind moved through the clearing. "You're simply accustomed to mortal limitations." A stream cut through the clearing's heart, its water running in two directions at once. Rory crouched beside it, watched the current split around smooth stones and flow both upstream and down simultaneously. Her reflection stared back at her, but the eyes were wrong—bright blue in her face, pale lavender in the water's surface. She jerked back. "The grove shows what could be, what was, what might yet come to pass." Isolde knelt beside her, and now the reflection showed them both, but Isolde's image aged and de-aged with each ripple, cycling through centuries. "Not always kind, but always true." "You said you needed our help." Nyx's whisper-voice carried oddly in the space, seeming to come from multiple directions. "That something had breached the grove's boundaries." Isolde rose in one fluid motion, gesturing them deeper into the clearing. As they walked, Rory felt time behave strangely—each step took both too long and not long enough, distance compressing and expanding according to rules she couldn't fathom. The Fae-forged blade at her hip had begun to glow, casting silver light across the grass. The clearing opened onto something that made Rory's breath catch. A circle of standing stones, each twice her height, arranged around a pool of water that reflected nothing. Not the pearl sky. Not the surrounding stones. Just an absolute blackness that seemed to drink in light. "There." Isolde stopped at the circle's edge, her lavender eyes fixed on the pool. "Three nights past, something touched the water. Something that does not belong in any realm." Rory moved closer, studying the stones. Unlike the oaks at the grove's entrance, these showed no carvings, no marks of any kind. Their surfaces were perfectly smooth, almost glass-like, and as she passed her hand near one, frost formed on her fingertips. "What kind of something?" "If I could name it, I would not need your assistance." Irritation crept into Isolde's melodic voice. "The grove shows me fragments. A shadow that is not shadow. A hunger that does not consume. A door opening in a place where no door should exist." Nyx circled the pool's perimeter, their form shifting between solid and incorporeal. "The Veil is intact here. I would sense if something had torn through from Hel." "Not Hel." Isolde's fingers twisted through a complex gesture, and the air above the pool shimmered. "Elsewhere." Images flickered into existence, translucent and fragmentary. Rory saw glimpses of impossible architectures—bridges that connected to nothing, staircases that descended into sky, towers that grew downward into earth. And moving through it all, something her mind refused to properly process. Her eyes slid off it, around it, found purchase on anything else. The Heartstone pendant flared cold enough to burn. Rory gasped, pressed her hand over it through her jacket. "You feel it." Isolde's statement held no question. "The artifact knows. Recognizes." "Recognizes what?" Rory's teeth chattered despite the grove's temperature, which remained perpetually spring-like. "What is that thing?" "A traveler. A refugee. A prisoner escaped." Isolde's words tumbled out in her typical riddling fashion. "It does not belong to Earth or Hel or the Courts. It comes from the spaces between spaces, the cracks where reality has worn thin." The images above the pool coalesced for one crystalline moment, and Rory glimpsed something that might have been a face if faces could exist in four dimensions. Then the vision shattered, and the pool returned to its depthless black. Nyx withdrew from the circle's edge, their violet eyes bright with something that might have been fear if fear could touch an ageless being. "We need to leave. Now." "Why?" Rory forced her hand away from the burning-cold pendant. "What did you see?" "The same thing I saw in 1643, right before I ceased being Aldric." Nyx's form flickered, threatened to dissipate entirely. "The thing that pulled me into the space between realms and left me as this. It's here. It's found another weak point." The grove's light shifted, the pearl sky darkening to gunmetal grey. Flowers wilted and rebloomed in rapid succession. The stream's dual current stuttered, stopped, flowed backward. Isolde raised both hands, spoke words in a language that predated human tongues. The standing stones began to hum, a resonance Rory felt in her bones rather than heard. "We cannot leave." The half-Fae's voice remained calm despite the chaos blooming around them. "The grove has sealed itself. Nothing enters, nothing departs, until we solve what has been presented." "You brought us into a trap?" Rory drew the Fae blade, its moonsilver surface blazing with cold light. "Not a trap. A test. A necessity." Isolde's silver hair rose around her face as power gathered in the clearing. "The grove protects itself. Something wishes entry. We must determine if it deserves passage—or oblivion." The pool's black surface began to ripple, though nothing touched it. And from somewhere beyond the standing stones, from somewhere that wasn't quite anywhere at all, Rory heard something that might have been breathing.