Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY8QD78M943VGKVR87R378

They found the boundary behind a row of oaks that had been there longer than memory. The trees leaned inward as if gossiping. Light pooled between trunks in a way that made the world outside look thin and paper-soft. "That's the line," Nyx breathed, their voice a thread pulled taut. It slid along the bark and tasted of cold metal. Aurora's fingers tightened on the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone felt like a small heartbeat pressed against skin. It warmed, faint and curious. She stepped forward. Soil changed underfoot from compressed park earth to something sprung and generous, like sponge and velvet. The air thickened without choking; it settled over shoulders and into lungs with a sweetness that made the back of her teeth ache. "Did you feel that?" Aurora asked. Her voice took a steady edge. She had learned the island of her breath in other people's chaos; she kept it now. Nyx folded into a shadow notch between trunks and unfolded again. Darkness tracked their movement with a living grace, not quite obeying the light. "It remembered you," they said. "Or it remembered the metal around your throat. The Veil always leaned toward a beat." Aurora nudged the pendant with a thumb. The Heartstone pulsed a shade quicker, like a small animal alarmed under leaves. For a moment a faint red glow seeped through the edges of the stone. They crossed the last threshold and left dusk behind. Light inside the grove broke into impossible colour—pale lavender drifting where green should have been, threads of silver falling like mist. Wildflowers thrust from the ground in tight, brushed clumps, their faces turned toward nothing she recognised. The scent that came off them mixed with moss and citrus and a note that tasted like memory. "Everything looks wrong," Aurora said, the words bare of judgement. She set her jaw and let wonder press against the edge of her ribs. She had read about fae places; none of the words had prepared her for being under one. Nyx's outline sharpened to a taller, almost-human shape. A wind moved through them and left only a ripple. "Wrong and right at once," they murmured. "The Grove wore both." They walked into the ring of standing stones. The oaks gave way to a clearing that swallowed sound. The stones rose, shoulders broad with lichen that gleamed faintly as if the moon had been poured over them. Symbols crawled across rock faces in patterns that paused when she looked and resumed when her gaze slid away. The air hummed; it did not settle on the eardrum so much as vibrate the bone. "Watch the symbols," Nyx said. "They mark the currents. They are not for us, mostly. They keep things polite." Aurora reached out and let her fingertips ghost over a looped glyph. Her skin prickled. The Fae-Forged Blade at her hip dropped a colder line of chill up her wrist. The dagger had never been warm. It felt like holding midnight. The stone accepted her touch in silence. Tiny sparks—silver, impossible—skittered like minnows along the glyph's edges and sank into the soil. "Polite, my arse," Aurora muttered. Her voice was lower now. She glanced back the way they'd come. Outside, the park's skyline rested where it had always been—the distant silhouettes of roofs, the slouched prestige of an everyday world. Inside, a thin shimmer ran through space like breath on glass. Nyx watched her, the violet in their eyes faint but steady. "Politeness has teeth," they said. "Read the order and it will smile." A path opened between the stones; it didn't look carved so much as invited. Every step forward sank barely, as if the world cushioned their soles. Moss lifted like pillows against shoe leather; it was springy, alive. When Aurora passed her hand across it, she found the texture of old paper beneath—veins, fibres, an imprint of stories. "Time feels slow," Aurora observed, and checked the watch on her wrist out of habit. The face had recorded thirty minutes since she'd left Silas' flat, though the light that filtered through the oaks was a belief in no hour. Nyx moved ahead, more shadow than man, and the undergrowth turned to meet them. They said nothing for a handful of heartbeats and then spoke again, softer than the first time. "The Grove will watch you like an animal does. It will decide whether you are prey, guest, or coin." Giants of ivy climbed a low wall of bracken and then un-climbed themselves, slipping like a tide. Aurora's skin went cold at the sight. She told herself stories—practical things—about ancient roots and microclimates, and they steadied her enough to reach the center of the clearing. A pool lay there, flat and black as a mirror that knew sin. Its surface did not mirror the sky. When Aurora leaned closer she saw not clouds but a scat of lights, like stars standing wrong in the wrong place. The Heartstone's warmth grew insistent; it nudged against her pulse. "Portal?" Nyx guessed. They had learned to guess. They had lived in edges long enough to trust a gut that hung outside the body. Aurora crouched by the pool, breathing shallow. She expected sound. She expected fruit-laden branches to bend toward her, to offer, to bargain. Instead the pool whispered her name, not in syllables but in small recollections—a laugh she'd held, the tang of a cheap wine she loved before it made promises, the smell of Evan's aftershave and the way it had stuck to her coat collar. She jerked back as if something had scratched her ear and placed a hand against her wrist where the crescent scar made a pale map. The mark tingled. Nyx's shadowy fingers left smudges on the water and then vanished. They hovered above the surface and a ring of pale lights expanded inward, swallowing the reflection. The Heartstone stuttered and then pulsed once, bright, like a heartbeat on the surface. "You're a heavy thing between places," Nyx observed. "The Hemline of Hel might like that." Aurora's throat closed. She had not known the pendant came from Dymas, not until the stranger had slid it across a stall in a market she could no longer picture. It had felt like an anchor then, and now it thrummed as if it remembered a feast. Her mouth tasted of iron and honey. "Keep it close," Nyx said. "If the pool opens, don't—" They did not finish. A laugh braided through the trees, an invisible thing that ate corners of sentences as it passed. The sound made the leaves tilt, seeking. The wildflowers turned their faces toward a place that could not be seen. Aurora stood. She scraped a boot against loam to steady herself. The Fae-Forged Blade hummed once against her hip, a low note of agreement. It wanted to be out. It wanted to taste wards. She slid the dagger free. The moonsilver caught nothing from the grove; it drank light and kept it. When she raised it a thin frost blossomed along the edge, minute and precise. The blade felt as if it remembered old wars. "That's the kind of thing you'd hand me if you wanted me alive afterward," she said without irony. Nyx tilted their head, a shadow smile. "Then we will consider that a kindness." They moved in a circle around the pool, careful, because every careful step left a hollowness the Grove noticed. The standing stones hummed and answered each other with a language that was not sound. Wind carried on the surface of the water like an echo. Where the stone faces met the grass, tiny footprints blossomed and then were gone again—impressions that resisted being claimed by foot or shoe. "Who passed here?" Aurora asked. "Nobody left," Nyx answered. "Which is to say: everything here folds itself when you are not looking." She bent and ran a fingertip through one vanishing print. It felt like rubbing the belly of a sleeping animal and hearing it try to breathe out a secret. "Isolde?" Aurora's question hung there. The idea had lodged from the beginning of the plan. The grove was Isolde's grove; the seer had been exiled here. Somewhere, the map of Richmond Park pinched into an impossible pocket. A voice answered that wasn't meant to. The sound came from the periphery—wind and leaf and a paramour's confidence. "She keeps tea for her company," the voice said in a tone that smelled of citrus and woodsmoke. "And riddles for passing shapes." Aurora tasted the words and found they were riddles themselves; meaning shifted like light through glass. She moved toward the voice, heels sinking less with each step. "I didn't come for riddles," she said. Her voice was sharper now. It carried the kind of marshalling that had pulled her through courtrooms she had never wanted to stand in. "I came for answers. For help." Silence balanced on the edge of the leaves before it tilted into something like laughter and something like a sigh. The voice peeled down from a branch and settled into the space beside the pool. "You came for help. That is a shape, Aurora Carter. Names gather on a soft night." She started at the name. The Grove had no need to be polite. It had a way of calling people into their small selves. "Who are you?" Aurora asked. "I am not a question," the voice said. "I am a place between words. I am a woman who forgot the sound of her own steps when she walked. But you know me. You left a blade at my door. You will have tea." Nyx drifted toward the stones and their shadow traced the glyphs like a hand reading braille. "She wasn't alone when she arrived," Nyx murmured. "Isolde never had to speak. The trees remembered her first footsteps." A shape detached from the dappled light—no, not a shape but a pattern shading into someone. Silver hair fell like water across shoulders when the pattern resolved. Lavender eyes blinked as if recovering from a long sleep. Her presence did not make a noise, but it rearranged air. The standing stones bowed as if in recognition. Isolde stepped from behind a stone and left the clearing in a wind that did not rustle the leaves. She wore no shoes, and the grass that met her feet shimmered and made no indentation. "You came looking for me," she said. Her voice had the patient hush of someone reading an old book. Aurora closed her mouth and let the ache behind her ribs speak: "We need to know about the Veil. It thinned near the docks last month. And—" Isolde tilted her head. The leaf-shadow on the girl's wrist caught the late light and showed the scar like a pale comma. Her eyes softened in a way that made Aurora suspect she had never once believed herself soft. "The Veil held a hole," Isolde said. "Holes have appetites. They will stretch to fit whatever feeds them." "Did you send that pendant?" Aurora asked. The question came faster than she expected. The pendant pulsed as if it would answer on its own. Isolde's lips curved. "There are always gifts given in return for company," she answered. "You take warmth and you leave a cold blade. Or the other way around." Nyx murmured, almost to themselves, "Gifts from Dymas do not arrive without price. They remember feasts." A sound like a spoon against a bowl echoed from the pool. The surface broke in a slow ripple that was not movement but intention. The Heartstone pulsed bright and steady in response, like a lighthouse acknowledging another light. Aurora felt the pulse in the small of her chest. Her breath thinned as if the Grove had wrapped a finger around the knot in her stomach and tightened. She was aware of the long list of practicalities she had rehearsed on the walk over: keep the pendant close, never drink anything a fae gave, do not accept a seat until invited. They felt threadbare now, outstripped by the thickness of the place. "Are you coming?" Nyx asked. Aurora looked at the pool and then at the blade she held. The moonsilver was almost unbearable in the cold of her grip. "If we go closer," she said, "and the pendant warns us—" It pulsed, and the pulse spelled consent and warning both. The lights under the water rearranged, making a pattern that had the honest sharpness of a map. "Then we will step," Aurora said. Her voice was steady now. She had led worse things than fears into the dark. She had left worse people in the bright light of day. "Slowly." They crossed to the edge of the pool together. The air smelled of honey and rain, and beneath that, of iron and smoke. The Heartstone warmed, the blade chilled. Nyx's presence pooled and un-poolled like ink in water. Isolde watched without revealing whether what she saw interested her or bored her. She folded her hands behind her back and offered no counsel. Aurora put her fingers to the surface of the pool. The water did not wet her hand. It took her and held it and showed her a reflection that was not a reflection: a crowd at a table with goblets like open suns, a hand closing around a pendant the same size as hers, a distant bell that tolled without sound. The image did not insist it was true; it simply was. The Heartstone flared. Nyx's fingers never quite met the surface. They hovered above and let a shadow-finger touch, and when that happened the water didn't ripple so much as sing. "Now we know," Nyx said. "And now we choose." Aurora felt the choice like a ledger laid across her palm. The Grove made no promises. It offered glimpses and expected the bargain was clear. She would bend toward the light or step away. The pendant pressed warm against her throat. The blade tasted the air like cold salt. She did not answer in words at once. She held the image in the pool and let it burn away the neat plans she'd brought with her. The world shifted only by a fraction, but that was enough. The sky through the oaks looked like a photograph inside another photograph. Time folded, slow and decisive, around the three of them in the clearing. "Step by step," Aurora said. Her voice was small and bright, a rope in her mouth. "We go together."