Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXXRBC4Q23SNDF4E4Z9P2S

The ancient oak standing stones loomed before them like weathered sentinels, their bark silvered with age. Aurora pushed through a veil of hanging willow branches, and the air shifted—not temperature exactly, but something deeper, as though reality itself bent around her skin. The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled. Behind her, Nyx moved between the shadows cast by dying afternoon light, their form flickering at the edges of perception. Isolde glided forward without disturbing a single blade of grass, her silver hair catching luminescence from no visible source. The boundary dissolved as they crossed it. The grove opened before them, and Aurora's breath caught. Nothing prepared you for this. No amount of warning from Isolde's cryptic premonitions could have readied her for the sheer wrongness of beauty. The sky burned amber-warm, though no sun hung in it—the light radiated from everywhere and nowhere at once. Wildflowers bloomed in impossible profusion, their petals shifting through colors that had no names. Blues that tasted sweet. Purples that hummed at frequencies just below hearing. "Christ," Aurora whispered. The flora didn't obey natural law. Flowering vines wound up impossibly thin silver birches that shouldn't have existed in Richmond Park. Mushrooms tall as a person thrust from the earth in clusters, their caps bioluminescent. Each step she took released a faint chime from the ground, as though the earth itself resonated beneath her boots. Nyx's form grew more distinct here, the violet of their eyes brightening to match the lavender wildflowers. "Time moves differently here," Isolde said. Not a warning. A fact stated as simply as observing the color of water. Her pale lavender eyes reflected the impossible light without blinking. "You may feel hours pass while minutes drift by elsewhere, or the inverse." Aurora checked her phone. No signal. The screen's date flickered once, then stabilized. She pocketed it. The three of them ventured deeper into the clearing. Aurora's fingers found the Fae-Forged blade at her hip—the moonsilver dagger Isolde had pressed into her hands outside the park. Cold against her palm, it thrummed with a pulse that matched her heartbeat. Reassuring and unsettling in equal measure. The ground beneath their feet transformed gradually. Soft grass gave way to a mosaic of stones—not arranged by human hands, but grown that way, as though ancient magic had convinced the earth to form a path. Veins of crystal ran through them, refracting the ambient light into fractured rainbows. Where Aurora stepped, those crystals brightened momentarily, as if acknowledging her presence. "You're drawn to the wild places," Isolde observed, watching her. "The magic recognizes kinship." "I'm not magic," Aurora said. "Not yet." The words should have felt threatening. Instead, they settled over Aurora like a coat she hadn't known she was wearing. She pushed the feeling aside and focused on her surroundings. A stream appeared without warning, cutting across their path. Its water moved wrong—flowing upward in places, spiraling in slow whirlpools that defied gravity. The liquid shimmered with an opalescent sheen, and Aurora could hear voices in it, fragmented whispers that almost formed words. "Don't drink from it," Nyx advised, their voice like wind through a graveyard. "The Fae have rules about hospitality and consumption. You'd be bound by debt." "How long have you known that?" Aurora asked. "Three hundred and eighty years, give or take a few decades. Time blurs when you're dead." She didn't ask for clarification. The history of Nyx was older than empires, older than nations. Sometimes ignorance felt safer than knowing. They circled the stream, and the landscape shifted again. The wildflowers parted to reveal a grove within the grove—massive ancient oaks, their trunks wider than a car, their roots rising above the ground like wooden arthritic fingers. Between these titans, the air shimmered with visible distortion. Not the shimmer of heat, but something else. Something that made Aurora's teeth ache when she looked directly at it. "A rift," Isolde said. "Small. Dormant. But it weakens as winter solstice approaches." Aurora's hand moved to the Heartstone pendant hanging beneath her shirt. She didn't remember reaching for it, but her fingers closed around the deep crimson gem. It pulsed with warmth—faint but unmistakable. In response, the shimmer between the ancient oaks flared briefly, violet and gold light crackling across its surface like electricity meeting water. "Interesting," Isolde murmured. "What is?" Aurora pulled her hand away from the pendant. The warmth faded. The rift settled back into its subtle distortion. "The artifact recognizes you." Isolde's silver hair stirred despite the absence of wind. "Whoever gifted it did so knowing you would need its properties. The question is whether they knew what you would become, or simply hoped." A sound drifted across the clearing—something between music and shattering glass. Aurora's head snapped toward it. In a distant pocket of the grove, half-obscured by hanging vines and luminescent flowers, something vast moved. Not threatening, not yet, but present. Aware. Her breath came faster. "What lives here?" she asked. "Guardians, perhaps. Remnants of older things. The Fae don't explain themselves to mortals." Isolde's lavender eyes followed Aurora's gaze. "Though they seem to be taking notice of you." Nyx drifted closer, their shadow form solidifying further. In this place, they looked less like a creature trapped between worlds and more like someone who belonged. "We should move. Standing still invites questions." They turned deeper into the grove, away from the rift, away from the distant movement. The wildflowers seemed to part as they walked, creating a path that hadn't existed moments before. The crystal-laced stones beneath their feet glowed brighter with each step, and Aurora realized they were marking a trail—recording her passage. Above, the amber sky deepened toward something like sunset, though she couldn't determine if time was actually passing or if the light simply shifted according to rules she didn't understand. The air grew thicker, more textured. She could taste it now—sweet like honey, metallic like blood, electric like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks. "How did you find this place?" Aurora asked Isolde. "I didn't find it." The Half-Fae seer moved between the ancient oaks with the grace of something returning home. "It found me. When the Fae Courts cast me out for sharing visions with your kind, I fled toward the weakest part of the Veil. This grove was waiting." They emerged into another clearing, smaller than the first. At its center stood a stone circle—not the standing stones that marked the boundary, but seven pillars of black rock streaked with silver, arranged in a perfect formation. The ground at their center shimmered with that same distortion, more pronounced here. Stronger. Aurora took a step toward it, and the Heartstone pendant burned hot against her chest.