Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYRPDV6V2X0D0DEJS4YWXX

Richmond Park stretched beyond the terrace in shades of autumn grey, but the space behind the standing stones existed in perpetual, impossible spring. Aurora’s boots crunched against frost-killed grass one moment, then sank into loam that smelled of crushed lavender and lightning the next. She stopped at the boundary. Three stones towered before them, ancient oaks transmuted into granite and bone. They formed a rough archway that framed nothing—until Aurora tilted her head. Then she saw the shimmer, a distortion like heat rising from asphalt in July, except the November air bit her lungs with cold reality. "The Veil frays here," Nyx said. Their voice carried on the wind from three directions at once, a whisper that curled around Aurora’s skull. "I can taste the edges." Aurora’s fingers found the silver chain at her throat. The Heartstone Pendant beat against her sternum, a tiny, persistent drum. Warmth flooded her chest, spreading outward until her fingertips buzzed. "It’s reacting." Isolde stepped between the stones. No footprints marked the frost behind her, nothing disturbed the silver hair that fell to her waist like spilled moonlight. "Everything reacts to truth eventually. The question is whether you flinch." "I don’t flinch," Aurora said. "Then enter," Isolde replied, and vanished between the pillars. Nyx flickered, their violet eyes glowing brighter as they compressed from a six-foot silhouette into something denser, more human-shaped. "Solid form chafes here. The shadows want me loose." "Stay close," Aurora said. "Trying," Nyx whispered, and drifted forward. Aurora crossed the threshold. Sound died. Not silence—silence had texture, had weight. This was the absence of acoustic logic. Her own heartbeat thundered in her left ear, then her right, then somewhere behind her spine. She gasped, and the air tasted of honey fermented centuries past, sweet and alcoholic and tinged with copper. She stumbled. Gravity pulled wrong here, a diagonal tug that made her reach for the Fae-Forged Blade at her hip. The moonsilver met her palm with a cold shock, anchoring her to her own bones. The leaf-shaped dagger glowed faintly, luminescence rippling across its edge like water disturbed by a stone. "Don’t draw it yet," Isolde called from ahead. The Seer stood twenty meters distant, though she’d only taken three steps. "The grove interprets blades as questions. You may not like the answers." "Helpful," Aurora muttered. She forced her legs to move. The ground breathed. She felt it through her soles—an expansion and contraction like massive lungs working beneath the soil. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in colors that shifted when viewed directly. One blossom, star-shaped and deep crimson, turned ultraviolet when Aurora blinked. Another emitted a low hum, a B-flat that vibrated in her teeth. Nyx moved beside her, their form stuttering between solid and smoke. "Time pools here. Look at your watch." Aurora checked her phone. The screen displayed 3:47 PM, but the digits bled, liquid crystal dripping upward against gravity. She shoved the device into her pocket. "Right. No technology." "Technology works," Isolde said, her pale lavender eyes fixed on a point above the canopy where no sun hung. "It simply refuses to lie. The grove compels honesty. Even machines feel it." They walked deeper. The trees closed ranks behind them, not with hostility but with the inevitability of stages changing in a theater. Aurora reached out to touch a trunk. The bark moved under her fingertips, rippling like water, rough texture becoming smooth, becoming scaled, becoming bark again. She snatched her hand back. "Living wood," Nyx observed. Their shadow—normally a passive thing—stretched ahead of them, reaching toward the grove’s center while Nyx themselves lagged behind. "It remembers being saplings in the Fae Courts. It wants to go home." Aurora’s scar itched. The crescent mark on her left wrist, souvenir of a childhood fall from her father’s library ladder, burned with a sudden icy fire. She scratched at it, felt the raised flesh humming in resonance with the Heartstone at her throat. "You feel the binding," Isolde said. Not a question. "I feel like I’m standing in an electric current," Aurora said. Her hair stood on end, black strands lifting from her shoulders to drift in a wind that didn’t exist. "Is it always this... much?" "For the living? Yes." Isolde stepped over a root that hadn’t existed a second prior. "For the dead? Less. For Shades?" She glanced at Nyx. "It depends which century you listen to." Nyx laughed, a sound like dry reeds snapping. Their form split momentarily, two Nyxes walking side by side, then snapped back into one. "I hear 1643. The year I stopped being Aldric. The grove plays it on repeat like a favorite record." They entered a cathedral of trees. The canopy opened into a vault of amber sky—not the warm amber of Dymas, Aurora knew from description, but a shifting kaleidoscope of rose and gold that cast no shadows. Instead, the light pooled in the air itself, viscous and golden, filling the space between tree trunks like honey poured into water. Aurora moved forward, blade drawn now despite Isolde’s warning. The moonsilver carved through the thickened light, leaving trails of darkness that lingered too long. Her breath came hard. Each inhalation brought scents that triggered memories not her own—strawberries in winter, the salt of an ocean she’d never crossed, the particular ozone smell of her mother’s perfume from a bottle broken twenty years ago. "Memory pollen," Isolde said. She stood atop a rise of moss that glowed faintly blue, still leaving no depression in the vegetation. "The grove harvests moments. Yours, mine, the little deaths of insects. It composts them into beauty." "That’s not creepy at all," Aurora said. She climbed the rise, her boots sinking into the bioluminescent moss. Each step released puffs of silver spores that danced around her knees, whispering in voices too small to understand. At the summit, the grove revealed its heart. A circle of stones—smaller than the standing stones at the entrance, but older, worn smooth as river rock—enclosed a pool of absolute stillness. The water reflected nothing of the amber sky above. Instead, it showed stars. Hundreds of them, clustered in constellations that hurt to look at directly, burning with cold fire. Nyx reached the pool’s edge first. They knelt, shadow-form darkening the grass to charcoal. "I see the summoning circle. The one that broke me." Aurora looked. The water showed Nyx’s past: a stone cellar, candles, a younger face with human eyes screaming as shadows poured into his mouth. She looked away, throat tight. Isolde touched her shoulder. The Seer’s fingers held no warmth. "Look again. It shows truth, not merely history." Aurora forced her gaze back. Now the water showed Nyx as they were now—violet eyes, shifting form, ancient and ageless—and beside that image, a thread of silver light. A path. A possibility. "The future?" Aurora asked. "One of them," Isolde said. "The grove exists at the intersection of was, is, and might be. We stand in the grammarian’s nightmare. Past tense, present danger, future perfect." The Heartstone flared against Aurora’s chest, crimson light spilling through her fingers as she clutched it. The warmth became heat, became burning. She gasped, dropping to her knees at the pool’s edge. "Rory!" Nyx’s voice sharpened, losing its whisper-quality, becoming almost human in alarm. "The pendant," Aurora managed. "It’s... opening." The gem pulsed in time with the strange stars in the pool. The water rippled, not from wind but from resonance. The standing stones at the grove’s edge—distant now, impossibly far—began to hum in a chord that made Aurora’s bones ache. Isolde’s expression shifted, the first emotion Aurora had seen on the Fae woman’s face. Concern. Or calculation. With Isolde, the two looked identical. "We’ve been noticed," Isolde said. "By what?" Aurora stood, blade raised. The Fae-Forged Blade screamed in her hand, a silent vibration that traveled up her arm. The moonsilver glowed white-hot, cutting not just air but the very fabric of the grove’s reality. Nyx spun, their form expanding, becoming vast and terrible, a cloak of living night. "Something older than the exile. Something that was here before the Fae Courts cast you out, Seer." The amber sky darkened to bruised purple. The wildflowers closed their petals with sounds like shutters slamming. The moss beneath Aurora’s feet grew cold, freezing through her boots, gripping her ankles with tendrils of frost. Isolde spoke a word in a language that had no consonants. It hung in the air, visible as a spiral of silver smoke. "Run," she said. "Or stay. Both choices lead through the grove. Neither leads back." Aurora looked at the path ahead, past the pool, where the trees grew thicker and the light fell in beams that solidified into crystal pillars. She looked back at the entrance, now obscured by a wall of mist that hadn’t existed moments before. The scar on her wrist burned. The Heartstone burned. The blade sang. "Forward," Aurora said. Isolde smiled, showing teeth that seemed sharper now. "As you choose." They moved deeper into the alien dark, following the song of the blade, leaving the pool of stars to reflect only the empty sky.