Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY8GWAWHWBP9XQJ67KNE5B

The standing stones rose from the earth like broken teeth, their surfaces worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. Aurora pressed her palm against the nearest one, expecting cold granite. Instead, warmth pulsed beneath her fingers, rhythmic as a heartbeat. "You feel it." Nyx's voice drifted from somewhere behind her left shoulder, though when she turned, the Shade had already dissolved into the lengthening shadows of the oak canopy. "The boundary remembers what it once was." "Which was what, exactly?" Aurora withdrew her hand, rubbing her fingertips together. The sensation lingered, a phantom warmth that seemed to seep into her bones. Nyx reformed at the edge of her vision, their form rippling like smoke caught in a draft. "A door. Before the Veil hardened. Before the Courts closed themselves to mortal eyes." The Heartstone pendant against her chest had begun its familiar pulse the moment they'd crossed into Richmond Park, but now it thrummed with an urgency that made her breath catch. Deep crimson light leaked between the buttons of her jacket, painting the grass at her feet in shades of old blood. "Rory." Isolde's voice carried no more weight than wind through leaves, yet it stopped Aurora mid-step. The Half-Fae stood at the center of the stone circle, her silver hair lifting in a breeze that touched nothing else. Those pale lavender eyes had gone distant, focused on something beyond the physical world. "The grove opens for those who approach with honest hearts. You must want to see — truly want it — or the path will not reveal itself." "I want to find answers." The words came out harder than Aurora intended. Three weeks of cryptic messages, of shadows that whispered her name, of dreams soaked in amber light and the taste of wine she'd never drunk. "I want to know why I'm seeing things that shouldn't exist." Isolde's lips curved into something that might have been a smile. "Want is a door. Need is what walks through it." The air between the stones shimmered. Aurora blinked, and the world shifted. Where there had been evening shadow and the distant sounds of London traffic, now there was light — soft, golden, filtering through a canopy so dense it might have been woven rather than grown. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in impossible colors: blues that belonged to tropical seas, reds that pulsed like embers, whites so pure they seemed to glow from within. The air tasted of honey and green growing things and something else, something older, like the first breath of spring after an endless winter. "Jesus Christ," Aurora breathed. "He has no power here." Isolde moved past her, leaving no mark in the flowers that should have crushed beneath her bare feet. "Nor any of the younger gods. This place existed before names. Before prayers. Before the first humans looked at the stars and wondered." Nyx hung back at the boundary, their violet eyes brighter than Aurora had ever seen them. The Shade's form flickered between solid and smoke, as though the grove couldn't quite decide what to make of them. "I cannot—" The whisper fractured. "This place knows what I was. What I lost." Aurora turned back. "Nyx?" "Go." The word carried an edge of something raw, something human. "I will watch the threshold. Nothing will follow you in." She wanted to argue. Three weeks of tentative alliance, of learning to read the patterns in Nyx's shadows, of discovering that the being who'd first appeared in her bedroom mirror was more lost soul than monster. But Isolde's hand closed around her wrist — cool, impossibly smooth, like touching polished stone — and pulled her forward. "Time moves as it wishes here," the Seer murmured. "We have hours or we have moments. The grove will decide." They walked deeper. The trees grew taller as they went, their trunks twisting into shapes that suggested faces, reaching hands, bodies frozen mid-dance. Aurora caught herself staring at one that looked almost exactly like a woman mid-laugh, her wooden arms thrown wide, mushrooms blooming where her eyes should be. "Don't look too long." Isolde's voice carried a warning. "Some of them can still see. Some of them remember being seen." Aurora jerked her gaze away. "What happened to them?" "They stayed too long. Drank too deep. The grove gives freely, but it takes what it is owed." The path — if it could be called a path — wound between root and stone and sudden drops that seemed to plunge into nothing but shadow. Twice, Aurora thought she heard music: pipes and drums and something like singing, though the words slipped away before she could grasp them. Once, she caught the flash of movement in the corner of her eye, quick and small and definitely not human. When she turned, nothing remained but the rustle of leaves. "The small folk," Isolde said, not breaking stride. "Curious but shy. They haven't seen a mortal in seventeen of their seasons. You are... a novelty." "How long is that in our time?" "I do not know. I stopped counting years before your grandmother's grandmother drew her first breath." The grove opened without warning into a clearing. Aurora stumbled to a halt, her breath catching. A pool lay at the center, perfectly circular, its surface so still it might have been black glass. Moonlight filtered down through a gap in the canopy — impossible moonlight, since it had been late afternoon when they'd entered — painting everything in shades of silver and shadow. At the pool's edge grew a single tree, different from the others. Its bark was pale as bone, its leaves silver-white, and from its branches hung fruit that pulsed with the same faint inner glow as the pendant around Aurora's neck. "The Heart-Tree." Isolde's voice had dropped to barely a whisper. "I did not think it would show itself. Not to a mortal. Not to one unmarked by the Courts." Aurora touched the pendant through her jacket. The warmth had intensified, spreading through her chest, down her arms, into her fingertips. "The pendant. It came from here?" "From one of its children, perhaps. Heartstones grow in the places where the realms touch. Dymas. The Deep Courts. The spaces between." Isolde's pale eyes fixed on Aurora with an intensity that made her skin prickle. "Who gave it to you?" "I don't know. It was in my mailbox. No note, no return address. Just a velvet bag and—" She pulled the pendant free, letting it rest against her palm. The crimson light pulsed in time with her heartbeat. "I put it on and I started seeing things. The shimmer at the edges of crowds. The shadows that move wrong. Nyx." "The stone chose you." "Stones don't choose people." Isolde's laugh was the sound of wind chimes in a storm. "Your world is a story you tell yourselves to sleep at night. You build towers of logic and reason and you call them truth. But truth is older than logic. Truth is this: you were chosen, Aurora Carter. The Heartstone called to something in your blood. Something that should not be there." The words settled into Aurora's chest like ice. "What does that mean?" "I cannot say what I do not know for certain." The Half-Fae's compulsion against lies pressed against her words, shaping them into careful evasion. "But I can tell you this: you are not the first mortal to find yourself caught between realms. The Veil weakens. Cracks spread. Things slip through that should remain bound." "Things like Nyx." "Things far worse than Nyx." Isolde moved toward the pool, her reflection failing to appear in its black surface. "The Shade was human once. Whatever haunts your dreams — whatever sent you that stone — I do not think it carries such gentle memories." Aurora followed, her footsteps silent on the moss. This close, she could see that the pool wasn't still at all. Something moved in its depths, slow and vast and impossible to distinguish. She thought of whales in deep water, of things that lived their entire lives in darkness. "What's in there?" "Memory. Possibility. The echoes of every choice ever made and every choice yet to come." Isolde knelt at the pool's edge, her silver hair spilling forward to brush the surface. "The Fae call it the Well of Seeing. It shows what you need to see. Not what you want." "And if I look?" "Then you will know." The Seer's lavender eyes lifted to meet Aurora's. "But knowing has a price. Everything in this place does." Aurora thought of the past three weeks. The sleepless nights. The visions that came without warning — streets that flickered between London and somewhere else, faces that wore two expressions at once, voices whispering in languages she shouldn't understand but somehow did. She thought of Nyx, who had appeared in her mirror and told her she was running out of time. She thought of the Heartstone, pulsing against her chest like a second heart, calling her toward something she couldn't name. She knelt beside Isolde and looked into the darkness.