Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0P4N104MSW7593PF25KKZ

The taxi had dropped them at the Petersham Gate of Richmond Park, and Aurora checked her phone again. No signal. That wasn't unusual in certain parts of London, but she'd had bars when they'd crossed Kingston Vale. Now the screen showed nothing but the time—3:47 PM—and even that seemed suspicious, the numbers frozen as though the device had given up. "You feel it?" Nyx asked, their voice carrying that strange quality like wind through an empty room. In the dying afternoon light, their form flickered between solid and shadow, the edges of their silhouette uncertain whether they wanted to exist fully or dissolve into the growing dusk. "Feel what?" "The thinning." Aurora didn't need to ask what they meant. She'd been feeling it for the past hundred meters—a pressure behind her eyes, a wrongness in the air like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks. The Heartstone Pendant against her chest pulsed warmth through her shirt, slow and steady like a heartbeat. They walked in silence after that, past the deer grazing in the amber grass, past the darkening tree line. The path wound deeper into the park, and Aurora became aware of small changes. The birds had stopped singing. The wind had died. Even her footsteps seemed to mute against the ground, as though the earth itself had grown softer, more secretive. The standing stones appeared without warning. One moment they were walking through ordinary parkland; the next, the oaks had thickened into a wall of ancient bark, and there they were—seven massive trees arranged in a rough circle, their trunks grown so close together they appeared fused. But they weren't quite trees anymore. The bark had taken on a greyish pallor, and where branches should have reached skyward, the wood twisted into shapes that suggested antlers, or fingers, or something else entirely. "Jesus," Aurora breathed. "The boundary," Nyx said, moving forward. Their shadow-form rippled as they approached the nearest stone, and for a moment Aurora thought she saw something like recognition pass through them—the way a traveler might greet an old friend. "We're meant to walk through the center." "Through the trees?" "Through the space between." Aurora hesitated. The pendant pulsed hotter against her skin. She thought about Evan, about the way he'd always told her she was too curious for her own good, about how she'd left him anyway. The scar on her wrist ached faintly, the old injury remembering itself. She stepped forward. The transition lasted less than a second but felt like drowning in reverse—a sudden absence of air followed by its overwhelming return. Aurora gasped, her lungs filling with something that wasn't quite oxygen, something sweeter and stranger, like honey and copper and the green smell of growing things. She stood in a clearing. The sky above was the color of a bruise, purple and amber and shot through with threads of silver that might have been stars or might have been something else entirely. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, casting no shadows, illuminating everything in an even glow that made the world feel staged, artificial, dreamlike. Wildflowers covered the ground—more varieties than Aurora could name, colors that didn't exist in nature crowding together in impossible profusion. She saw blue so deep it was almost black, red that seemed to pulse with inner light, petals that shifted between yellow and pink as she watched. The air smelled of nectar and rainfall and something underneath it all, a faint mineral tang like stone that had been warmed by long-dead suns. "This is..." She couldn't find the words. "The Grove," Nyx completed, their form stabilizing as they stepped fully into the space. For once, they looked almost solid, their humanoid shape more defined than Aurora had ever seen. "Isolde's realm." "I thought it was supposed to be hidden." "It is. To mortals." They gestured at the boundary—the ring of ancient oaks that now surrounded them, their trunks glowing faintly with the same silver light as the sky. "The Veil is thin here. The Fae blood in this place... it tears at the fabric of what should be." Aurora walked forward, her boots crunching on petals that crumbled like dried paint beneath her feet. The flowers grew thicker toward the center of the clearing, and she saw now that they weren't merely growing—they were moving, slowly, imperceptibly, turning their faces toward her as she passed like sunflowers tracking the sun. A sound reached her ears. Water. A stream or fountain, somewhere among the blossoms. She followed it, Nyx drifting at her shoulder, and found a pool fed by a spring that bubbled up from moss-covered rocks. The water was crystal clear, and at its bottom lay coins—hundreds of them, thousands, some ancient and encrusted with verdigris, others bright and new. Wishes, she thought. Offerings. "Don't drink from it," Nyx warned. "The Fae don't distinguish between giving and taking." "What do you mean?" "Any gift from them has a price. Even water." Aurora stepped back from the pool. The flowers around it had begun to close, their petals folding inward as the light in the sky dimmed slightly—the first change she'd seen since entering. Time. The codex had mentioned time moved differently here. "How long have we been here?" Nyx's glowing violet eyes fixed on her. "What makes you think we've been here long enough to matter?" She didn't answer. Instead, she looked deeper into the grove, where the flowers gave way to a structure she hadn't noticed before—something that might have been a temple or a ruin or simply a collection of stones piled in shapes that suggested meaning. The architecture was wrong, non-human, the angles and proportions at odds with anything built for people who walked upright. "We should find Isolde," she said. "Should we?" Nyx's voice carried amusement, or something close to it. "You came here seeking answers. But the Seer doesn't give answers. She gives visions. Riddles. Pieces of futures that may or may not belong to you." "I know." "And you're still going?" Aurora touched the pendant, feeling its warmth against her palm. She thought about the unknown benefactor who'd given it to her, about the weight of expectations she didn't fully understand, about the life she'd left behind in Cardiff and the new life she was building in London—one that involved deliveries and shadow-beings and trips to otherworldly groves hidden in public parks. "I didn't come all this way to turn back." They walked deeper, and the grove shifted around them—the flowers blooming and dying in spans that might have been seconds or hours, the light brightening and dimming in patterns that seemed almost rhythmic, almost intentional. Aurora felt the wrongness growing in her chest, the pressure of a place that didn't fully belong to her reality pressing against her like deep water. But beneath the wrongness, beneath the unease, something else stirred. Wonder. She'd felt it as a child, the first time she'd looked through a telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter. She'd felt it standing at the edge of a cliff in Snowdonia, looking down at the clouds and feeling truly small for the first time. The world was larger than she'd ever imagined, stranger and more terrible and more beautiful, and she was here, inside it, part of it now. The temple grew larger as they approached, and Aurora saw that it was neither temple nor ruin but something else—a living thing, perhaps, grown from the same silver-white stone as the standing stones at the boundary. It had no doors, no windows, only a single opening that gaped like a mouth in its surface. Light spilled from within, warm and golden, and within that light, a figure waited. Aurora took a breath. Then she stepped forward, into the unknown, toward the Seer who spoke in riddles and the visions that might save or destroy everything she'd come to love.