Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VCFQ3BWJSYGTPQE7SRTWA

The map on Aurora's phone had stopped working three minutes after they'd entered Richmond Park. She held it up anyway, tilting the screen in the dark as if a better angle might coax the signal back. The GPS circle spun and spun. Around her, the park stretched like a held breath — still, moonlit, the old oaks throwing long shadows across the frosted grass. January had stripped everything back to bone: bare branches, pale sky, the kind of cold that got under your collar before you'd noticed it. "You're relying on technology." Nyx's voice came from somewhere to her left, or possibly behind her. With them it was always difficult to say. "In a place like this." "I rely on what I have." Aurora pocketed the phone. "Then we go by feel." She didn't like that answer, but she didn't have a better one. Isolde's grove wasn't on any map. She'd been told that much by a man in a pub in Kew who'd had violet eyes and known her name before she'd offered it. The grove was in Richmond Park, he'd said, somewhere past the Isabella Plantation. Follow the stones. She'd spent two weeks telling herself she wasn't going to do that. Now here she was. The Isabella Plantation sat dark and locked behind its iron fence. She moved along the perimeter until the fence ended, then cut into the trees beyond it, away from the lamp-lit paths. The grass here was longer, unmanaged. Her boots soaked through at the ankles. Nyx moved alongside her — or moved was perhaps too generous a word. They flowed. Their silhouette kept pace without making any sound at all, a smear of darkness against the moonlit dark, the faintly glowing violet of their eyes the only consistent thing about them. "I can feel something ahead," Nyx said. "Something." "A seam. Like a place where two pieces of cloth don't quite meet." Aurora slowed. She could feel it too, though she couldn't have named it. A change in pressure, almost — the way the air before a storm thickens and pulls. She pressed her fingers to her sternum and felt the Heartstone pendant warm through her coat. Not the urgent pulse it gave near a Hel portal. Something gentler. Curious, almost. The first standing stone appeared between two oaks. She'd expected carved monoliths, something ancient and dramatic. These were nothing like that. The stone was pale grey and rough-edged, barely taller than her hip, so thoroughly overgrown with lichen it looked more like something the earth had pushed up than something placed. Then she saw the next one, and the next — eight of them in a loose, uneven ring, each canted at a different angle as though the ground had shifted beneath them over centuries. The oaks around them were enormous, their trunks wider than she could wrap her arms around, their bark deeply furrowed and dark. "Old," Nyx said quietly. "Very old." The pendant's warmth spread across her chest. Aurora stepped between two of the stones. The cold didn't go away exactly, but it changed quality. It became less hostile — the cold of a cellar rather than a street. The lichen on the stones nearest her was vivid green despite the frost, and when she crouched to look, tiny white flowers threaded through it, open and blooming as though it were May. She straightened. "Right." The grove opened up beyond the standing stones in a way that made no geographic sense. Richmond Park didn't have clearings like this — the space was too large, too perfectly round, the tree line too complete. The grass was ankle-deep and soft, silvered by moonlight, spotted with flowers that had no business existing in January. Bluebells and foxgloves and something she couldn't name with petals the colour of cream, trembling slightly despite there being no wind. Nyx had stopped at the boundary. "I'm going to ask you not to pull me back if it goes badly." Their eyes cut toward her. "I don't take well to that from mortals." "I wasn't planning on it." "Good." They stepped through. The moment they crossed, their form solidified slightly — became more present somehow, their edges sharper against the diffused light of the clearing. They looked down at their own hands with something resembling surprise, flexing fingers that trailed wisps of shadow. "Interesting," they said, mostly to themselves. Aurora moved further in. The grass bent around her boots without noise. The flowers closest to her path turned fractionally, the way sunflowers tracked light, except there was no light to track. When she stopped, they stopped. When she moved, they moved again. A sound reached her — low and continuous, like water over smooth stone, except there was no water, no stream anywhere visible. It came from the air itself, or from the space between sounds. She stood still and listened. "Aurora Carter." The voice arrived from the centre of the grove. The woman standing there hadn't been there a moment ago. Isolde Varga was exactly what the man in the pub had failed to adequately describe — silver hair that reached her waist, pale lavender eyes that caught the moonlight and gave it back different, a face entirely without age in the way that had nothing to do with youth and everything to do with time not having touched her the same way it touched other things. She wore a long coat the colour of birch bark and held nothing in her hands. Her feet, Aurora noticed, left no impression in the grass at all. "Seer." Aurora kept her voice level. "You smell of the deep realms." Isolde's gaze drifted past her to Nyx. Something moved in those lavender eyes. "And you bring a between-thing. A relic of a man who reached too far." Nyx's jaw tightened. "I have other names." "All shadows do." Isolde turned back to Aurora without hurry. "You have walked a long road to find a door. Most who find this door have already decided what they hope is behind it. Have you decided?" "I have questions." "Everyone has questions." She tilted her head, and the silver hair shifted like water. "The wolf who walks to the river has questions about its thirst. That does not mean the river will quench it." Her eyes dropped to where the pendant sat beneath Aurora's coat, hidden from view — and yet Isolde looked at it with the particular focus of someone watching something move. "You carry a key to a place you have not yet understood. You stand at a threshold you have not yet seen." The pale eyes came up. "And you brought shadow to walk in a place where shadow has weight." Aurora felt the pendant warm again against her skin. At the far edge of the clearing, something shifted in the tree line — a slow, vast movement, like something enormous turning its attention.