Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W87WDN4ZNZ7Q04SW725T1

The afternoon had gone grey by the time they found the stones. Aurora had been through Richmond Park twice before — once on a delivery run that had taken her badly off-course, and once on a hollow Sunday when she'd needed open land around her and couldn't afford a train back to Cardiff. She knew the deer came closer to the paths in winter, watching with the glazed patience of things that had survived everything. She knew the ground turned to cold mud after rain. She did not know about the stones. "There," Nyx said. They were just ahead of her, or rather their shadow was — that long, lean darkness stretching across the leaf-litter at an angle that had nothing to do with the overcast sky. Nyx's solid form flickered at the edges, the way a candle flame does when someone opens a door elsewhere in the house. Aurora followed their pointing, and she saw them. Seven oaks, old enough that the word ancient felt insufficient. They stood in a rough circle at the edge of a treeline that the park's official paths didn't reach, their roots coiled out of the ground like the knuckles of buried fists. Each trunk was perhaps three times the width of a man's shoulders, their bark not brown but deep silver-black, as though they had been there long enough to absorb every night that had passed through them. Moss crept up each one in thick, deliberate bands. Between the trunks, where the late November light should have reached through bare branches, it didn't. "Isolde's grove," Aurora said, and the word grove felt suddenly inadequate. This was a boundary. She could feel it, the same way she'd learned over the last weeks to feel the Heartstone Pendant's moods — that faint warmth radiating against her sternum. Now it was doing something different. Not warmth. A pulling. Like being stood at the edge of something with a current. She pressed her fingers to her coat, felt the pendant shift against them, and pulled her hand away. "You don't have to touch it for it to communicate," Nyx said, without looking at her. "I know," she said. "It's annoying." She moved toward the stones. Her boots crunched over frost-stiffened grass, then dead leaves, then nothing — the ground between the path and the oaks was bare earth, but it made no sound beneath her feet. She noticed that and didn't say it aloud. The air changed two metres out. Not warmer — that came later — but different in pressure, as though she'd stepped into a room where several people had just stopped speaking. She felt the fine hairs along her forearms lift. "The Veil's thin here," Nyx said, coming alongside her. Their voice was its usual low susurrus, the sound of wind through a gap in a window frame. "You can see the edge of it if you have the sight for it. Faint. Like heat shimmer over tarmac." Aurora squinted between the trunks. She didn't quite have the sight — not properly, not yet — but she thought she understood what they meant. There was a shimmer, possibly. Or possibly her eyes were doing what eyes do when you stare at something long enough: inventing. She walked between two of the oaks. The cold left her at once. Not gradually, not with any warning, just — erased. The air inside the circle was the temperature of early May, soft and green-smelling, and she stood stupidly for a moment, blinking. "Keep moving," Nyx said, stepping through beside her. "Standing in thresholds is bad practice." She kept moving. The path that had not been visible from outside made itself apparent now: a gentle narrowing in the undergrowth, flower-lined, that curved away from the oaks and down a shallow slope. Flowers. Aurora stopped and crouched before she'd quite decided to, pressing two fingers to a cluster of pale blue crocuses pushing through the dark soil. She could feel them. They were real. They were cold-dewed and fresh and they had absolutely no business existing in late November. She looked up. The sky above the grove was not the flat aluminium of the London afternoon she'd just walked out of. It was the particular pale, lucent blue of an early-summer evening — the sky you get in June at seven o'clock, when the day hasn't quite given up yet. She could see distant smudges of pink cloud moving slowly at the margins. The light that came through it was gold. "Nyx." Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "I see it," they said. They had stopped a few feet ahead of her on the path, and where they stood their form was more solid than usual, more defined — as though the magic here was thick enough to give them better purchase on existing. Their faintly violet eyes moved across the clearing with something she might have called hunger, if that didn't seem too human a word for them. They walked on. The path deepened. The wildflowers thickened and diversified in a way that made Rory's school biology feel like a polite fiction — foxglove and snowdrop and something tall and white she had no name for, all growing alongside one another, all precisely in bloom, all exactly right. The trees that closed in overhead were not the same oaks as the boundary stones. These were older, if older was a word that stretched far enough. Their canopy sealed the sky into patches, those gold patches shifting as the branches moved in a wind she couldn't feel on her face. The sound they made wasn't quite the sound of leaves. It was slower. More deliberate. She found herself thinking of the Fae-forged blade tucked in the inner pocket of her jacket — the dagger Isolde's prophecy had sent her to find and which Isolde had then simply handed to her like a library book she'd been keeping for collection. It was moon-cold against her ribs, the way it always was, and for the first time she found that comforting rather than unsettling. "Time," she said. "Yes," Nyx agreed. She hadn't finished the question. She tried again. "How long do we have before—" "There's no clean answer to that here," they said. "An hour inside the grove might be ten minutes outside or three days. It shifts. Isolde herself doesn't always know." Aurora absorbed this. "So we might step out of those stones and find it's February." "Possibly." "Or it's still today and all my deliveries are still on the book." "Also possible." A pause. "The second outcome is significantly less likely." "Right." She exhaled slowly. "Good to know." The path bent once more, and the grove opened. She'd been expecting something — a hut, a cottage, a mossy altar, the set-dressing of someone who had lived for three hundred years and developed strong aesthetic opinions. What the clearing held was simpler and stranger than any of that. At its centre stood a single stone table, low and broad, the surface worn smooth. On it lay objects she couldn't categorise from this distance. Around it, the wildflowers gave way to green, and the green was the specific, saturated shade of a colour that shouldn't occur in nature on this side of anything. It was the kind of green that made the back of Aurora's throat ache. And at the far edge of the clearing, silver-haired and motionless, back turned, Isolde stood with her face raised to that impossible summer sky. She left no impression in the grass beneath her feet. Aurora took a breath and felt the Heartstone pulse once, hard, against her sternum — not warning, not hunger. More like recognition. She thought of her father's voice on old answer-phone messages, the specific quality of knowing that something about to happen was going to be important before you could name why. "She knows we're here," Nyx said quietly. "She knew we were coming before we did," Aurora said. Isolde turned. Her pale lavender eyes found Aurora's from across the clearing with the unhurried accuracy of someone who had spent three centuries watching things arrive that they'd already seen. Her expression was not quite a smile. It was what a smile becomes in a face that has witnessed enough to make the ordinary gesture feel too small. "The wound-one comes," she said. Her voice moved through the clearing air differently than voices should — evenly, without fade, as though the grove gathered it and carried it forward. "And the shadow who is not yet ready to be named." Nyx made a sound beside Aurora that was not quite offence and not quite amusement. "And only one of you," Isolde continued, tilting her head, "knows what they are looking for." Aurora stepped forward into the green, feeling the grass under her boots, the warm air on her face, the cold of the blade at her ribs and the warmth of the pendant and the old particular weight of standing at the beginning of something she hadn't chosen and couldn't leave. "That would be me," she said. Isolde smiled then, and this time it reached her eyes. "Would it?" she said.