Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0YGTGA79PNCH90QSVK1BM

The oaks parted like sentinels stepping aside. Rory noticed it first — the silence. Not the ordinary quiet of Richmond Park at dusk, where dog walkers called out and cyclists hummed along gravel paths. This was a silence with weight, a held breath, as if the world had pressed its lips together and refused to exhale. "The stones," Nyx murmured, their voice a thread of sound that barely disturbed the air. "We're at the boundary." She looked down. Moss-covered monoliths jutted from the earth in a rough semicircle, weathered into shapes that could almost pass for natural rock formations. Almost. But the spacing was too deliberate, the curve too precise. These weren't boulders dragged here by glaciers. Something had placed them, long ago, with purpose. "Don't step between them yet." Nyx pooled into solidity beside her, their form coalescing from the dim spaces beneath the canopy. Violet light flickered in the hollows where eyes should be. "Once we cross, the rules change." "You keep saying that." Rory shifted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. The Heartstone pendant rested against her collarbone, warm — warmer than it should have been this far from any Hel portal. She pressed her palm over it through her jacket. "What rules, specifically?" "Time," Nyx said. "Direction. The assumption that walking back the way you came will bring you to where you started." "Lovely." "The Seer chose this place for a reason. The Grove exists in a fold. Not fully Earth, not fully Fae. Something in between." Rory studied the gap between the two tallest stones. The air there looked wrong — not shimmering exactly, but thick, as though she were peering through antique glass. She'd read about the Veil in the scraps of lore Nyx had shared over the past three weeks, but reading about a metaphysical barrier and standing close enough to feel it hum against her teeth were different animals entirely. She stepped through. The change hit her like plunging into cold water. Every nerve fired at once, a full-body static charge that prickled across her scalp and down her arms. The pendant flared hot against her skin, then settled. Behind her, or what she assumed was behind her, the park vanished. No gradual fade, no dreamlike dissolve. One moment the London skyline crouched beyond the trees. The next — gone. Rory exhaled. Her breath misted, though the air wasn't cold. It wasn't warm either. It was nothing. Temperatureless. "Still with me?" Nyx slipped through the boundary as easily as smoke through a keyhole, their shadow-form rippling once before solidifying. "Define 'with you.'" She turned in a slow circle. The Grove opened before them like the interior of a cathedral designed by something that had never seen a cathedral but understood the concept of reverence. Massive oaks towered overhead, but their bark was the pale gray-white of birch, and their leaves — she squinted — their leaves were silver. Not metaphorically. The canopy caught light from no visible source and threw it back in cool metallic flashes, a thousand tiny mirrors swaying in a breeze she couldn't feel. Beneath her boots, the ground was soft. Not muddy. Not mossy. Just yielding, as if the earth itself had decided to be generous. Wildflowers carpeted every surface that wasn't path or root — bluebells and foxglove and things she had no name for, blossoms with too many petals in colors that sat strangely in her vision. A deep, luminous teal. A red so saturated it looked wet. Something between gold and green that made her eyes water if she stared too long. "Don't fixate on any single flower," Nyx warned. "Some of them are curious. They'll hold your attention longer than you'd like." Rory tore her gaze away from a cluster of spiraling white blooms that had been — she was nearly certain — rotating slowly on their stems. "Noted." They moved deeper. The path, such as it was, wound between the pale oaks in a pattern that felt deliberate without being straight. Rory's sense of direction, usually reliable, began to protest. She'd turned left twice and right once, but her inner compass insisted she'd been walking in a straight line. The pendant pulsed once, a low throb of heat, then went quiet. "Nyx." "Mm." "The flowers are following me." She wasn't imagining it. On either side of the path, blossoms turned on their stems as she passed, the way sunflowers tracked the sun. Except there was no sun here. Just that ambient sourceless glow filtering through the silver canopy. "They're reading you," Nyx said. "Fae flora responds to intent. To emotion. Right now you're a stranger in their space. They're deciding what you are." "And if they decide wrong?" "Then we'll know quickly." Rory gripped the strap of her bag and kept walking. The air smelled green — not like a garden or a forest, but green the way a color might smell if colors had scent. It sat on the back of her tongue, sharp and alive. A sound reached her. Not birdsong, though something in its cadence reminded her of it. A high, repeating note, almost melodic, threading through the trees from somewhere ahead. It rose and fell without pattern, without rhythm, and Rory felt it in her ribs more than her ears. "Is that her?" "No. That's the Grove itself. It sings when someone enters. A kind of announcement." Nyx's form flickered at the edges, their silhouette less defined than usual, as if the Grove's ambient light made it harder for them to hold their shape. "She'll know we're here." The path widened. The oaks drew back, their roots arching above the ground in great silver-gray waves that formed natural archways. Rory ducked under one and stopped. A clearing. Perfectly round. The wildflowers here grew waist-high, a dense meadow of impossible color that swayed in unison, all leaning toward the center as if drawn by a magnet. And at the center — a pool. No larger than a dining table, its surface so still it reflected the silver canopy above with a fidelity that bordered on unsettling. The reflection was sharper than the reality. Clearer. Rory could count individual leaves in the water's surface that she couldn't distinguish overhead. She knelt at its edge. The water — if it was water — was perfectly transparent. She could see the bottom, smooth pale stone, and yet the reflection sat on its surface like paint on glass. Both things at once. Window and mirror. Her own face stared up at her. Blue eyes, black hair tucked behind her ears, the tired set of her jaw she'd been carrying since she left Cardiff. But the reflection's expression didn't quite match hers. It lagged by half a second. She frowned; the reflection frowned a beat later. She tilted her head; the reflection followed, sluggish, as if it were choosing to mirror her rather than compelled to. "Don't touch the water." Nyx's whisper carried a rare edge. Rory pulled her hand back. She hadn't realized she'd been reaching for it. Her fingers hovered an inch above the surface, and the reflection — her reflection — smiled. She hadn't smiled. She stood quickly. Her heart kicked against her ribs. "The pool is a border," Nyx said. "Fae realm on one side, what's left of Earth on ours. Things leak through. Reflections are just the beginning." "Right." Rory wiped her palms on her jeans. The pendant throbbed again, brief and insistent, like a second heartbeat reminding her it was there. She touched it through her jacket. "So where is she? Isolde." A sound behind them. Not a footstep — something lighter. The absence of a footstep. Rory turned. A woman stood at the edge of the clearing where no woman had been a moment before. Silver hair fell to her waist, catching the Grove's light and holding it. Pale lavender eyes regarded them with the calm, measured patience of someone who had been waiting for a very long time and had not found the wait especially inconvenient. She wore a dress the color of storm clouds, belted with something that looked like braided ivy, and her bare feet rested on the carpet of wildflowers without pressing a single stem flat. No impression. No disturbance. As if she weighed nothing at all, or as if the Grove itself chose to bear her up. "The Heartstone brought you." Not a question. Her voice carried the same quality as the Grove's singing — felt as much as heard, settling somewhere behind Rory's sternum. "And the Shadow, still wearing a shape that was never yours." Nyx said nothing. Their violet eyes dimmed slightly. "You're Isolde," Rory said. "I am what remains of her." The Seer's gaze dropped to Rory's chest, where the pendant hid beneath fabric. Something shifted in those lavender eyes — recognition, perhaps, or the echo of it. "You carry a gift from Dymas and you don't even know who gave it to you. That is either very brave or very unwise." "Hasn't been either yet. I'm still deciding." The barest twitch at the corner of Isolde's mouth. Not a smile. The suggestion that a smile had once been considered and declined. "Ask your question, Aurora Carter. But know this — in this Grove, every question answered is a thread pulled. And some tapestries unravel from a single thread." Rory reached into her jacket. Her fingers found the cold weight of the Fae blade — moonsilver, slender, the leaf-shaped dagger Isolde herself had sent through intermediaries two weeks ago. She drew it out and held it flat across both palms, an offering or a piece of evidence, she wasn't sure which. "You sent me this. You sent me the pendant before that, or someone did on your behalf. You've been arranging pieces around me since before I even knew the board existed." Rory met those ancient, lavender eyes. "My question isn't what's happening to the Veil. My question is why you chose me." The flowers leaned closer. The pool behind her rippled once, though nothing had touched it. In the silver canopy above, the sourceless light dimmed by a single, almost imperceptible degree. Isolde tilted her head, and the wildflowers tilted with her. "Now that," the Seer said, "is the first thread worth pulling."