Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT040FRKYME2Q7E0ZYR86Q2

The standing stones appeared without warning. One moment Rory was pushing through a thicket of brambles, cursing under her breath as thorns snagged her jacket sleeve. The next, she stumbled into a clearing that had no business existing in the middle of Richmond Park. Seven oak pillars rose from the earth in a rough circle, each one carved with symbols that seemed to writhe at the edge of her vision. Ancient. That was the word that surfaced in her mind, unbidden. Not old. Ancient. The distinction felt important, though she couldn't say why. "Well." Nyx's voice drifted past her ear like smoke. "She wasn't lying about the entrance." The shade materialized beside her, their form coalescing from the shadows cast by the standing stones. In the dappled afternoon light, they looked almost solid — a tall silhouette of darkness given human shape, violet eyes gleaming with what might have been curiosity. "You sound surprised." Rory stepped closer to the nearest pillar, drawn by the carvings despite herself. Up close, they resolved into something almost recognizable. Leaves, perhaps. Or flames. Or neither. "Surprised implies expectation." Nyx tilted their head, that gesture they did when processing something new. "I expected nothing. The Fae are notoriously difficult about their borders." The Heartstone pendant pulsed against Rory's chest — not the sharp warning it gave near Hel portals, but something softer. A recognition. She pressed her palm against it through her shirt and felt warmth spread through her fingers. "This is it, then." She looked back at Nyx. "Isolde's grove." "One way to find out." The space between the standing stones shimmered. Not quite visible, more like heat rising from summer pavement, distorting the trees beyond into something fluid and uncertain. Rory had seen the Veil before — glimpsed it through windows at wrong angles, caught its shimmer in rain-slicked streets at midnight. But she'd never stood this close to a place where it wore thin. She stepped forward. The world tilted. For one nauseating second, Rory existed in two places at once. She could feel the packed earth of Richmond Park beneath her boots and something else — moss, cool and impossibly soft — pressing up through it like a memory. The air tasted of autumn leaves and honey and something sharp, metallic, like the aftermath of lightning. Then the sensation passed, and she was through. "Bloody hell," she breathed. The grove spread before her in defiance of every natural law she'd ever learned. The clearing should have been perhaps thirty feet across, contained by the standing stones. Instead, it stretched into impossible distance — a meadow of wildflowers that rolled toward a horizon that couldn't exist, beneath a sky that held both stars and daylight in the same breath. Violets carpeted the ground nearest her, their petals so deeply purple they were almost black. Beyond them, a riot of color — blues and golds and reds she had no names for — swaying in a breeze she couldn't feel. And rising from the meadow's heart, a single tree. Not an oak, though it shared something of an oak's shape. Its trunk twisted upward in a spiral, bark the color of old silver, branches spreading wide to catch light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Blossoms covered every limb, white and pink and palest gold, and they fell in a constant slow rain that never seemed to diminish the tree's crown. "Time moves strangely here." Nyx's voice came from her left, though she hadn't seen them cross through. "I can feel it. Stuttering." Rory tore her gaze from the tree. "Stuttering?" "Like a heartbeat that can't find its rhythm." The shade's form flickered, edges blurring before resolving sharp again. "We should be careful. An hour here might be minutes outside. Or days. The Fae don't experience time as mortals do." "And you?" Violet eyes found hers. "I stopped experiencing time properly three hundred years ago. This place feels almost familiar." Something in their voice made Rory look away. She'd learned, over the past months, to recognize when Nyx was remembering. The silences that stretched too long. The way their form grew less substantial, as if grief could make them fade. She didn't push. Instead, she started walking toward the tree. The flowers parted around her feet without being crushed, stems bending aside and springing back as if eager to make way. No — that wasn't quite right. They weren't bending. They were never there in the first place, reforming behind her in a new configuration. The path she walked existed only in the moment of her walking. "Do you hear that?" Rory stopped mid-stride. Music. No, not music — the suggestion of it. A melody that lived in the space between notes, felt more than heard. It seemed to emanate from the tree itself, from the slow spiral of falling blossoms, from the very light that touched this place. "I hear echoes." Nyx had caught up, moving through the meadow without disturbing a single flower. "Traces of something that was once sung here. The Fae leave marks on places they touch. This grove has been lived in for a long time." "How long?" "Longer than my mortal life. Longer than my existence as I am now." They paused, head tilted. "Long enough that the ground itself remembers." Rory's hand drifted to the pendant again. Still warm. Still pulsing with that gentle recognition. Whatever this place was, whatever power hummed through its impossible earth and alien sky, the Heartstone knew it. Or knew something like it. The tree drew closer with each step, though Rory could have sworn she wasn't covering any distance. Its trunk was wider than she'd realized — ten feet across, perhaps more, bark carved with the same writhing symbols as the standing stones. But here, in this light, they resolved into something almost readable. Stories. The carvings told stories. Births and deaths and everything between, spiraling up the trunk in an endless chronicle she could almost understand. She reached out— "I would advise against touching that." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, a woman's voice like wind through crystal chimes. Rory's hand froze an inch from the bark. "Most who read the Tree's memories find themselves lost in them." The voice grew closer, warmer, more solid. "Some for days. Some forever." She turned. Isolde Varga stood among the falling blossoms as if she'd always been there, silver hair catching light that seemed to bend toward her. She was smaller than Rory had expected — barely five foot five, with features too delicate to be entirely human. Her eyes were the pale lavender of the horizon, and when she smiled, it was the smile of someone who had seen centuries of mortals stumble into her grove with the same wide-eyed wonder. "Aurora Carter." Isolde's gaze moved to Nyx, something flickering in its depths. "And Aldric. Or what remains of him." Nyx went still. Absolutely, completely still, in a way that made them look more like a statue than a living thing. "That name," they said quietly, "hasn't been spoken to me in a very long time." "Names have power. Surely you remember that much." Isolde began to walk, leaving no footprints in the moss, no trace of her passage through the flowers. "You sought me out. Both of you. I saw you coming before you knew you would. The question, then, is why you came at all." Rory found her voice. "We need answers." "Answers." Isolde laughed, soft and sad and impossibly old. "Everyone needs answers. The trouble is that answers rarely come in the shapes we expect. You came asking about the tears in the Veil. About why they're spreading. About what hunts you through the shadows of London." "You know what's hunting me?" "I know many things." The Seer stopped before the tree, pressing one palm against its bark without hesitation. The carvings pulsed with light where she touched them. "I know that you carry a stone forged in Dymas, given by hands you've never seen. I know that your friend exists in the spaces between dying and dead, and that something in Hel wants him back. I know that the Veil is weakening — not in the way it weakens each winter, but truly weakening. Thinning. Coming apart at seams that have held for millennia." She turned back to face them, and her eyes had changed. No longer pale lavender but something deeper, shot through with gold and darkness in equal measure. "What I do not know is whether you can stop it."