Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXPKNJTDJTW2WA5MV063D5

The air changed before the light did. One step they walked through Richmond Park's damp November chill, dead leaves crunching underfoot, breath fogging in pale clouds. The next, the cold vanished. Not gradually — it simply stopped existing, replaced by a stillness so complete that Rory's ears rang with the absence of London's hum. She paused between two oaks whose trunks had grown together in a twisted arch. The bark wasn't bark anymore. It had the grain and texture of stone, ancient and grey-green with lichen, and from somewhere beyond it came a scent like honey and crushed thyme and something else underneath, something mineral and old. "Don't stop in the threshold." Nyx's voice reached her the way it always did — not quite from behind, not quite from beside, more like it rose from the ground beneath her feet. She stepped through. The grove opened like a held breath released. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in colors that belonged to no season Rory recognized. Deep violet crocuses tangled with summer poppies. Snowdrops pushed through beds of lavender that shouldn't have been blooming. The grass between them was the vivid impossible green of a place that had never known frost, and it bent without sound beneath her boots. "Jesus," she whispered. Behind her, Nyx slipped through the stone arch like ink poured through a crack. Their form solidified as they crossed — shoulders, the suggestion of a jaw, those violet points of light where eyes belonged. They surveyed the grove the way a cat surveys an unfamiliar room: utterly still, absorbing everything. "The standing stones," they said. "Count them." Rory looked. Arranged in a rough circle at the clearing's edge, half-hidden by the riot of flowers, stood columns of the same petrified oak. She counted. Seven. Eight. She squinted at what might have been a ninth, mostly swallowed by ivy. "Nine? Maybe eight and a half." "There were seven when this place was made." Nyx drifted forward, their shadow-form rippling at the edges where the grove's strange ambient light touched them. "The grove is growing." "Growing into what?" Nyx didn't answer. They rarely did when the answer was something Rory wouldn't like. She pressed deeper. The pendant at her throat — the Heartstone, that thumbnail-sized crimson mystery — lay dormant against her collarbone, its usual faint warmth absent. Whatever this place was, it wasn't Hel. The pendant knew the difference. She touched it once, a reflex she'd developed over the past weeks, and let her hand fall. The clearing was larger than it should have been. From outside, the arch had seemed to open onto a space no bigger than a tennis court. But she'd been walking for what felt like two full minutes and the standing stones on the far side hadn't grown any closer. The light helped nothing — it came from everywhere and nowhere, warm and directionless, as though the sky itself were a lamp. She looked up. No sun. No clouds. Just a pale gold wash that faded to silver at the edges, like the inside of an oyster shell. "Time's wrong here," Rory said. She didn't know how she knew. Something in the way her pulse felt — too slow, or too fast, she couldn't tell which. Like her body's internal clock had been picked up and set down facing the wrong direction. "Time isn't wrong." Nyx's whisper carried a note of correction. "Time is honest here. It's honest everywhere else too. The two honesties simply disagree." "Helpful." A sound reached her — not birdsong, but close. A single sustained note, high and clear, like someone running a wet finger around the rim of a crystal glass. It came from ahead, where the wildflowers grew tallest and a silver birch stood alone in what might have been the grove's center. Rory reached for the Fae blade at her hip. The moonsilver dagger sat in a leather sheath Isolde had provided — old leather, soft as cloth, with no buckle or clasp. The blade simply stayed put until you needed it and then it was in your hand, cold as creek water. She didn't draw it. But her fingers rested on the hilt, and the metal's chill seeped through the leather and into her skin. "Something's here," she said. "Many things are here." Nyx had gone translucent, their edges bleeding into the ambient light. "Most of them are the grove itself." "And the rest?" The crystal note pulsed. Rory felt it in her molars, in the small bones of her wrists. The crescent scar on her left wrist tingled — phantom sensation, the kind that came before a storm or an argument or, apparently, before walking into the heart of a place that existed between worlds. She kept moving. The birch tree resolved as she approached. Its bark was white as bleached bone, and its leaves — she stopped walking. Its leaves were silver. Not metaphorically silver, not the pale green that poets called silver. Actual silver, thin as foil, catching the sourceless light and throwing it back in fragments that danced across the grass. Each leaf chimed faintly against its neighbors when a breeze that Rory couldn't feel moved through the canopy. That was the sound. Not a single note but thousands, layered so precisely they blurred into one. "Don't touch the tree." Rory pulled back a hand she didn't remember extending. "Why?" Nyx materialized beside her, more solid than she'd seen them in the grove so far. The violet glow of their eyes had brightened. "Because it will remember you. And what the tree remembers, the Fae Courts remember. And you are not ready to be remembered by them." The leaves shivered. A cascade of silver sound washed over them both, and for a moment Rory swore she heard a voice inside it — a woman's voice, not speaking words but shaping the edges of them, like someone forming letters in wet clay. She understood nothing. She understood that she was not meant to understand. Not yet. She took a step back. Then another. "Smart," Nyx said. "Terrified." "Same thing, sometimes." They circled the birch at a distance of ten paces. The wildflowers here were different — white blooms she had no name for, with petals that curled inward as she passed, as though shy or defensive. The grass beneath them was threaded with something that caught the light. She crouched. Thin filaments ran through the soil just below the surface, visible through the sparse turf. They pulsed with a faint blue-white luminescence, branching and reconnecting like capillaries. Like veins. The grove had a circulatory system. "It's alive," Rory said. "The whole place. Not just alive like plants are alive. Alive like — " "Like a body. Yes." Nyx hovered at her shoulder. "The Fae do not build their spaces. They grow them. This grove is Isolde's, and it is as much a part of her as her hands or her sight." Rory thought of Isolde — that silver waterfall of hair, those pale lavender eyes that looked at you and through you simultaneously, the way she walked without leaving footprints. She'd given Rory the blade and a set of directions to the grove and nothing else. No warnings. No guidance beyond find the birch, wait there. But Isolde couldn't lie. That was the Fae compulsion, burned into her blood. She could mislead, could dance around the truth until it was dizzy, but the words themselves always held. So when she'd said the grove is safe for you, she'd meant it. Whatever safe meant to a three-hundred-year-old exile who spoke in riddles. "Where is she?" Rory straightened. The luminous veins pulsed once, brighter, as though responding to the question. "Close." Nyx tilted their head — that strange birdlike gesture they made when listening to sounds beyond mortal range. "She's been here the entire time. Watching." "Watching from where?" Nyx extended one shadow-wrought arm toward the standing stones on the clearing's far edge. Rory looked. Between two of the petrified oaks, the air shimmered. Not heat-haze — something more deliberate, more architectural. A distortion with edges. It rippled like a curtain, and through its folds she caught fragments: a deeper green, a colder light, the impression of vast distance compressed into a sliver. The Veil. She was looking at the Veil. The Heartstone pendant flared — not warm, not the way it pulsed near Hel portals, but cold. A sharp bite of cold that spread from her collarbone down her sternum. She gasped and pressed her palm flat against it. "It shouldn't be doing that." Nyx had gone rigid, their form compressed to its densest state, almost fully human in silhouette. "The pendant responds to Hel. Not to the Fae Realms." "Well, someone should tell the pendant that." The cold deepened. Through the crimson stone she felt something — a pull, a tug, as though a thread attached to her ribs had been given a single sharp yank. It came from the shimmer between the stones. From whatever lay beyond. "Nyx." "I feel it." "What is it?" "Something that shouldn't be there." Their voice had lost its usual detachment. For the first time since Rory had known them — if known was the right word for a creature of living shadow who appeared uninvited and stayed out of what seemed like either boredom or obligation — Nyx sounded unsettled. "The Fae Realms and Hel do not overlap. They repel each other the way oil repels water. If the pendant is reacting to something beyond the Veil in a Fae-touched space — " "Then something from Hel is bleeding through." The silver birch erupted in sound. Every leaf chimed at once, a wall of crystal noise that hit Rory's chest like a physical blow. The white flowers snapped shut. The luminous veins in the soil blazed bright enough to cast shadows — her shadow, Nyx's shadow, and a third that belonged to nothing visible. Rory drew the Fae blade. It left the sheath with no resistance, no sound, just sudden weight in her hand and cold that numbed her fingers to the second knuckle. The moonsilver edge caught the grove's strange light and threw it back as something sharper, something that cut the air itself. In its glow she saw the third shadow move. It was shaped wrong. Too many angles, joints that bent in directions joints shouldn't. It slid across the grass toward the shimmering Veil point between the stones. "It's trying to get through," Rory breathed. Nyx was already moving — flowing across the clearing like spilled oil, shadow reaching for shadow. They intercepted the shape six feet from the stones, and for one frozen instant the grove went silent. No chiming. No pulse from the veins beneath the earth. Just Nyx, wrapped around something that thrashed and twisted in their grip, and the Veil shuddering between the standing stones like a struck drum. Then a voice — Isolde's voice, unmistakable, that tone like a bell rung underwater — cut through from everywhere at once. "Hold it. Do not let it reach the boundary." Rory tightened her grip on the blade and ran.