Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXK5R6A1N04MPR22X9164T

The standing stones were not stones at all, not really. Aurora pressed her palm against the nearest one and felt bark beneath her fingers — ancient oak, petrified into something harder than granite, the grain still visible beneath centuries of lichen. The tree had died standing. Or perhaps it had never been alive in the way she understood living things. "Don't linger at the threshold." Nyx's voice slid past her like smoke through a keyhole. They hung at the edge of the clearing in a shape that was almost human, their violet eyes the only points of definition in a body that kept forgetting its own edges. "She's right to hesitate." Isolde stood between two of the standing oaks, her silver hair lifting in a breeze that touched nothing else — not the grass, not Aurora's jacket, not the wildflowers that grew in impossible profusion at the grove's edge. Snowdrops tangled with foxglove. Dog roses climbed over what looked like summer jasmine. Every season compressed into a single breath of color. Isolde's bare feet hovered a finger's width above the earth. She'd been doing that the entire walk through Richmond Park, and Aurora had stopped commenting on it somewhere around the second mile. "What happens if I linger?" "The boundary remembers you. Boundaries prefer to be crossed, not contemplated." Aurora pulled her hand away. Her fingertips tingled. She stepped through. The grove opened around her like a held breath finally released. The clearing was larger than it had any right to be — she could see the standing oaks at the perimeter, maybe fifty meters in every direction, but the space between them felt vast, as though distance had been folded in on itself and smoothed flat. The sky overhead was wrong. Not the heavy grey of the London afternoon they'd left behind. This sky held a luminous quality, pearl-white shading to pale gold at the horizon, and it cast no shadows. None. Aurora looked down at her feet and saw only grass. "Where's the sun?" "There isn't one." Isolde moved past her, leaving no impression in the ankle-high grass. "The grove borrows light. From when, from where — even I stopped asking." Nyx flowed through the boundary with considerably less ceremony, their shadow-form rippling as they crossed. They re-formed on the other side and stood very still, head tilted as though listening. "It's quiet here." "You expected noise?" "I expected echoes. Between-places always have echoes — fragments of the realms they border. This place..." Nyx turned slowly, scanning the tree line. "This place has been scrubbed clean." "Not clean." Isolde settled onto a low stone that Aurora could have sworn wasn't there a moment ago. "Curated." The grass moved underfoot. Not with wind — there was still no wind — but in slow, deliberate waves that radiated outward from Isolde's stone like ripples in water. The wildflowers tracked the movement, their petals turning to follow some invisible current. Aurora watched a cluster of bluebells near her boot rotate ninety degrees in perfect synchronization, pointing toward the center of the grove. She followed their direction. At the heart of the clearing stood a tree. Not petrified. Not dead. A hawthorn, massive and impossibly old, its trunk split into three main limbs that twisted upward and then curved back toward the earth like the ribs of an inverted cage. White blossoms covered every branch, so thick they looked like snow, and they glowed. Not reflected light. Generated light. Each flower pulsed with a rhythm Aurora felt more than saw — a slow, steady beat that pressed against her sternum. "Is it—" "Breathing? In its way." She took a step toward it. The pendant against her collarbone went warm. Not the gentle heat it gave off near Hel-touched places — this was different, an acknowledgment, as though the Heartstone recognized something in that ancient hawthorn and answered it. Aurora pressed her hand over the crimson gem through her shirt. It pulsed against her palm in time with the blossoms. "The tree is reacting to her." Nyx had gone fully solid, their form sharp-edged and defined in a way Aurora rarely saw. Their violet eyes hadn't left the hawthorn. "Isolde. You didn't mention the tree would react." "The tree does what the tree does. I don't speak for it." "You speak in circles around everything else." A flicker at the corner of Isolde's mouth. Not quite a smile. Aurora moved closer. The air thickened — not with humidity but with presence, as though the grove had become aware of her and was leaning in. Each step brought new details. The hawthorn's bark bore markings she'd initially mistaken for natural growth patterns. They weren't. Spirals and knots and something that might have been writing, if she could read a language written by wood growing over centuries. The symbols shifted when she looked at them directly, settling into legibility for half a second before sliding back into abstraction. "I can almost read it." "Almost is the operative word. The tree speaks the old tongue — Fae root language, unspoken since the courts divided." Isolde's voice came from closer than expected. She'd moved without Aurora noticing, standing now at her shoulder, those pale lavender eyes fixed on the bark. "My mother could read it. I catch fragments. Like hearing a song through a wall." Aurora reached for the trunk. The bark was warm and faintly damp, the way living wood felt after rain, though no rain had fallen here. Beneath her fingers, the carved spirals seemed to press upward, rising to meet her touch. The Heartstone pendant flared hot — not painful, but insistent. Something inside the tree responded. A vibration traveled up through the roots, through the ground, through the soles of her boots. It climbed her skeleton and settled behind her teeth. She jerked her hand back. "It tried to show me something." "What did you see?" "I didn't — it wasn't seeing. It was more like..." She flexed her fingers. They felt strange, oversaturated, as though her nerve endings had been dipped in something electric. "More like remembering something that never happened to me. A room. Underground. Long table. People — no. Not people." Nyx materialized at her other shoulder, solid and watchful. "Demons?" "I don't know. They had the shape of people, but the proportions were off. Too many joints in their fingers. The light in the room was amber, like late afternoon, but it was coming from everywhere at once." Isolde's expression changed. The perpetual half-amusement drained from her face, replaced by something Aurora had never seen there before — unease, sharp and genuine, breaking through the oracle's careful composure. "Amber light. A long table." "You know it." "I know of it. The feasting halls of Dymas. The tree should not be showing you Dymas." She turned to the hawthorn, and for the first time since Aurora had met her, Isolde addressed something other than a person. She spoke three words in a language that sounded like wind through crystal, and the hawthorn's blossoms dimmed, their pulsing slowing to a crawl. The grove went dim with them. That borrowed light guttered. Aurora could see the standing oaks at the perimeter more clearly now, their petrified forms stark against the pearl-and-gold sky, and between two of them — between the third and fourth oak on the eastern edge — something that had not been there when they entered. A shimmer. Faint, almost invisible, like heat distortion rising from summer tarmac. But this was vertical, a narrow ribbon of disturbed air hanging in the space between the oaks. It wavered. Steadied. Wavered again. "Nyx." "I see it." They had already lost their solid form, spreading into a low, dark current that flowed toward the distortion. Halfway there, they stopped. Drew back. Re-formed with an abruptness that suggested retreat rather than choice. "That's a rift point." "Inside the grove?" Aurora looked at Isolde. "How is that possible? You said this place was between realms, that the boundary—" "The boundary is intact. The grove exists in the fold. Nothing should be able to tear through here — the Veil is not thin in this place, it is layered, doubled back on itself." Isolde's bare feet had touched the ground. Aurora noticed because she could see the grass bending under them for the first time. "Something is pushing through from the other side." The shimmer pulsed. It matched the rhythm of the Heartstone exactly. Aurora pulled the pendant free from her shirt and held it in her open palm. The crimson gem threw light against her fingers, brighter than she'd ever seen it, casting her hand in deep red. The warmth had become heat, not quite burning, sitting right on the edge. The gem's inner glow surged with each pulse of the rift. "It's connected." "The pendant was forged in Dymas," Nyx said. "If the rift leads there—" "It does." Isolde cut them off. Her lavender eyes tracked the shimmer with the focus of someone watching a wound open. "The tree was not showing you a memory. It was showing you a destination. Something on the other side of that rift is calling the Heartstone home." The Fae blade at Aurora's hip — the leaf-shaped dagger Isolde had pressed into her hands two weeks ago, always cold, always faintly luminescent in any light that touched it — went colder. She felt it through the leather of its sheath, a sharp frost that bit into her thigh. The moonsilver was reacting too, but differently. Not reaching toward the rift. Pulling away from it. She stood between two objects that wanted opposite things, and the rift pulsed, and the hawthorn's blossoms dimmed further, and somewhere in the spaces between the standing oaks, the Veil was tearing open like wet paper. "We need to decide," Aurora said, "whether we're closing that or walking through it."