Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXWE42J7YBMYD0G44J1CNK

The standing stones rose from the earth like broken teeth, their surfaces weathered smooth by centuries of wind and rain. Aurora traced her fingers along the nearest one, feeling the grain of ancient oak beneath her palm. It should have rotted centuries ago, yet here it stood, solid as the day it was planted. "This is wrong," she murmured. Nyx drifted beside her, their form rippling like smoke caught in a draft. "Define wrong." "Oak doesn't petrify like this. It's not stone, it's not wood anymore. It's something else." She pulled her hand back, flexing her fingers. A faint tingling sensation lingered in her skin. "Something in between." "The boundary between realms often births such contradictions." Nyx's voice carried on a wind that touched nothing else in the clearing. "You stand at the threshold. What lies beyond follows different rules." The Heartstone pendant pulsed warm against Aurora's chest, though they were nowhere near a Hel portal. She pressed her palm against it through her jacket, feeling its steady rhythm like a second heartbeat. "Through here?" She nodded toward the gap between two of the larger stones, where the air seemed to shimmer faintly, a heat-haze distortion without heat. "If Isolde wished to remain hidden, we would not have found this place." Small comfort. Aurora squared her shoulders and stepped between the stones. The world shifted. Not violently — nothing so dramatic as falling or spinning or the stomach-lurching sensation of a portal. Instead, reality simply rearranged itself around her, like walking through a doorway only to find the room on the other side had been furnished by dreams. One moment she stood in Richmond Park on a grey November afternoon. The next, golden light filtered through a canopy of leaves that couldn't exist in any natural forest. "Bloody hell." The clearing stretched before her, far larger than should have been possible given the stone circle's modest diameter. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in impossible profusion — foxgloves and bluebells and roses all blooming together, heedless of season or sense. The air tasted sweet, tinged with something floral and something older, earthier. Ancient. Nyx materialized beside her, their shadowy form seeming almost diminished here, the edges less defined. "The Grove does not welcome shadows." Their whisper-voice carried a note of discomfort. "I will remain, but I cannot protect you as I might elsewhere." "Noted." Aurora drew the Fae blade from its sheath at her hip. The moonsilver dagger gleamed faintly despite the amber-gold light suffusing everything, its surface cold against her palm. A gift from their destination's resident, carried now as both weapon and offering. She hoped it would be taken as the latter. They moved deeper into the Grove. The trees here defied classification. Their bark shimmered with iridescent patterns, greens and golds and deep violets shifting as she passed, as though the trees themselves were watching. The branches overhead wove together in intricate latticework, filtering the light into dancing patterns across the flower-strewn ground. No birds sang. No insects hummed. The silence pressed against her ears like cotton wool, broken only by her own footsteps and the faint rustle of Nyx's passage through the undergrowth. "The stories say time moves differently here," Aurora said, keeping her voice low. It felt wrong to speak loudly in this place, like shouting in a cathedral. "An hour inside could be minutes outside. Or days." "The stories are incomplete. Time here moves as Isolde wills it. We will leave when she permits us to leave." Nyx paused beside a tree whose trunk had twisted into a spiral, growing around itself in a pattern that made Aurora's eyes ache if she looked too long. "Or when she tires of our company." "Cheerful thought." A stream appeared ahead, its waters running silver-clear over a bed of smooth stones. Aurora approached cautiously, remembering half-forgotten childhood warnings about drinking or eating in faerie places. The water sang as it flowed, actual melody emerging from the ripples and eddies, wordless but beautiful. She found herself swaying toward it before catching herself, digging her heels into the soft earth. "Don't listen," Nyx warned. "The Grove tests all who enter. It will offer what you desire most and take what you cannot afford to lose." "What do you hear?" Nyx's form flickered, violet eyes dimming briefly. "Silence. True silence. An end to the whispers that have followed me since I became... this." They solidified again, edges sharpening with visible effort. "I have learned not to trust such offerings." Aurora stepped over the stream in one long stride, refusing to look down at her reflection in its surface. The Heartstone pulsed again, more insistently now, and when she glanced down she could see its crimson glow through the fabric of her jacket. "We're being watched." "Since we entered." Nyx drifted ahead, scouting the path. "The Grove itself is her eyes. Every flower, every leaf, every blade of grass." "Comforting." The trees began to thin as they walked, the canopy opening to reveal a sky the colour of burnished copper. No sun hung there, no moon or stars — just that warm amber glow emanating from everywhere and nowhere. Aurora felt the wrongness of it in her bones, the fundamental alienness of a sky without a source of light. This was not Earth. This was something older, stranger, a pocket of reality folded into the spaces between. The clearing appeared suddenly, as though it had been waiting for them to notice it. One moment they walked through dense woodland, the next they stood at the edge of an open space carpeted in pale purple flowers that swayed in a breeze Aurora couldn't feel. At its centre stood a structure that couldn't decide if it was a cottage or a ruin — walls of woven branches and living vines, roof of overlapping leaves that should have rotted but instead gleamed like emerald tiles. Doorway shaped like an archway, hung with strings of crystals that chimed softly despite the absence of wind. A woman sat before it, her silver hair cascading to her waist, her pale lavender eyes fixed on Aurora with an intensity that made her want to look away. Isolde Varga left no footprints as she rose. "The blade suits you better than I expected." Her voice carried the weight of centuries, each word measured and precise. "Though you hold it like a woman preparing for war rather than one seeking wisdom." Aurora forced herself not to adjust her grip. "The two aren't mutually exclusive." "No." A smile flickered across Isolde's ageless features. "No, they rarely are." She gestured toward the cottage-ruin, and the crystal strings parted of their own accord. "You bring interesting company, Aurora Carter. A daughter of Cardiff walking with a shadow four centuries old. The Veil must thin indeed for such partnerships to form." "We need information." Aurora sheathed the blade, hoping the gesture would be read as trust rather than naivety. "About the rifts. About what's coming through them." "You need many things." Isolde's bare feet made no sound as she crossed the flower-carpeted ground. "You need answers to questions you haven't thought to ask. You need protection against enemies you don't yet know you have. You need to understand what that pretty stone around your neck truly is, and why it was given to you, and by whom." She paused an arm's length from Aurora, her lavender eyes seeming to look through flesh and bone to something beneath. "What you need and what you will receive — these are different rivers, child." "Then tell me what you can." "I cannot lie." Isolde's tone carried an edge, half-warning and half-complaint. "But I can speak in circles until the truth means nothing. I can omit. I can redirect. My mother's blood demands honesty; my father's blood taught me how worthless honesty can be." She turned away, walking toward her strange dwelling. "Come. Sit. Accept my hospitality, and I will tell you what I am permitted to tell." Aurora glanced at Nyx, whose violet eyes had narrowed with suspicion. But what choice did they have? They'd come too far to turn back now, and the Grove certainly wouldn't release them simply because they'd changed their minds. She followed Isolde inside.