Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WPZCQMHYWVXSWCTXN02PS

The pendant burned. Not painfully — not quite — but with that same low, insistent warmth Rory had learned to distrust over the past two weeks, the kind that had twice led her to the edges of things she hadn't been ready to see. She pressed two fingers against her sternum through her jacket, feeling the pulse of it through the fabric, and glanced sideways at Nyx. The Shade moved like smoke given manners — contained, deliberate, keeping pace at her left shoulder in what she'd come to recognise as a chosen proximity. Not crowding her. Not drifting. A choice. "It's been doing that since the roundabout," she said. "I know." Their voice slid into the cold air without making fog, without disturbing the dead leaves rasping across the path. "The grove responds to Fae-touched objects even from a distance. The pendant is reacting to what's ahead." Rory looked ahead. Richmond Park in November was all iron skies and bare oaks, the kind of landscape that felt like a held breath — like the land was waiting for permission to go grey all the way down. Dog-walkers had thinned out near the southern treeline. The light was already softening toward that particular bronze of late autumn afternoons, and the grass here was longer, uncut, beginning to show the slight shagginess of a place groundskeeping had quietly decided to leave alone. Then she saw the stones. They weren't dramatic about it. That was the first surprise. She'd expected standing stones to announce themselves — Stonehenge grandeur, towering and obvious — but these were six ancient oaks, older than anything else in the park by the look of their gnarled bark, arranged in a rough circle that might have been mistaken for chance if you weren't looking. Their trunks were so broad that three people linking hands couldn't have embraced them. Their roots had buckled the earth into ridges and trenches, and where the bark had split over centuries, the splits had been filled with something dark and resinous that caught the last of the amber light like old lacquer. Rory stopped at the edge of the circle. The air was different here. Not warmer — warmer would have been explicable. It was something else. A pressure, or the absence of one, like the moment a plane adjusts altitude and your ears pop and the world becomes slightly more itself. "You feel that?" she asked. "I feel it constantly," Nyx said, which didn't really answer her question, but she let it go. She stepped through the gap between two root ridges, and the world changed. It didn't lurch. It didn't flash. It simply was different the moment she was inside the circle, the way a room is different the moment you close the door behind you, and the difference had always been there waiting for you to notice. The wildflowers were the first thing. Rory looked down and found her boot inches from a cluster of something pale and star-shaped that had no business existing in November. She crouched, bringing her face close to the ground without touching it — old instinct, the kind her father had drilled into her on walks as a child, you look before you touch — and the flowers were perfect. Unblemished. The kind of unblemished that doesn't happen in nature, that implied something other than nature was responsible. There were others, scattered through the longer grass: something blue and bell-shaped, something deep violet that seemed to shift toward her as she looked at it. She stood up quickly. The sky above the grove was the same iron-and-amber November sky. The trees beyond the standing oaks were the same bare-branched park trees. But within the circle, the air smelled of green things and something else — older, sweeter, with a faint mineral edge like rain on hot stone, though no rain had fallen and the stone beneath the soil was far below. The light was different too: softer, more even, as though the shadows had been smoothed out by a considerate hand. Nyx had entered behind her and stood very still. That in itself alarmed her. The Shade was never still the way humans were still — their form always shifted in small ways, the edges of them breathing in and out of solidity. But now Nyx stood with the deliberateness of something old and careful, their faintly glowing violet eyes scanning the grove with an expression she couldn't read on a face made of shadow. "What is it?" she said, low. "I can't slip here." A pause, measured. "Between the shadows. The space that usually exists — the between-places — it's occupied." "Occupied by what?" "By this." They gestured, a spare movement, at everything around them. "The grove takes up all of it. There is no between while we're inside." Rory pressed her fingers to the pendant again. Still warm. Steady and warm, like a held coal. She moved deeper. The grove was larger inside than by rights it should have been. She tracked thirty paces from the standing oaks before the light shifted a second time — deepened, somehow, though the sun hadn't moved — and then she heard it. Sound, or the edge of sound: something between music and weather, a low harmonic drone that she felt more in her back teeth than heard in her ears, rising and falling on a rhythm she couldn't quite predict. Not threatening. Not welcoming. Indifferent, the way mountains were indifferent, and all the more unsettling for it. The clearing opened ahead of her. It wasn't a large space — a rough oval, perhaps twenty feet at its widest, carpeted in moss so deeply green it seemed luminous. At the centre stood a single stone, low and flat, its surface covered in markings that might have been carved or might have grown. Sitting on the far edge of it, looking at Rory as though she'd been waiting since before Rory was born, was Isolde. She was exactly as the whispered accounts had described her, which somehow made her more unsettling, not less. Silver hair reaching her waist, loose, catching the grove's soft light. Pale lavender eyes that held too much of something — not malice, nothing so simple — too much time, too many things seen and not spoken. She was ageless in the way that old scars were ageless: evidence of duration rather than any single moment. She left no mark on the moss beneath her. "You came by the eastern gap," Isolde said. Her voice was a quiet, even thing, and managed to carry anyway. "The honest entrance. That tells me something." "Glad someone's getting information." Rory stopped at the edge of the moss, the crescent scar on her left wrist itching the way it always itched when she was tense and trying to hide it. "I was told you might speak to us." "Many things are told to many people." Isolde's gaze moved past her to Nyx, and something shifted in those lavender eyes — not surprise, never surprise, but a kind of recalibration. "And you have brought the between-things with you. How old are you, Shade?" "Old enough to know better than to answer that," Nyx said. The faintest suggestion of a smile crossed Isolde's face. "Good. Those who answer quickly are either lying or haven't counted. Sit." There was nowhere to sit on the edge of the mossy oval. Then there was: two flat stones, neither of which Rory had seen a moment before, positioned precisely where they'd need to be. She chose not to think about that. She sat. The grove breathed around them. The harmonic drone continued its unpredictable rhythm. One of the blue bell-shaped flowers near Rory's knee opened slightly further, releasing a scent like cold water and something almost citrine, and she found her lungs filling with it before she'd decided to breathe. "The pendant wants to go home," Isolde said then, with the air of someone continuing a conversation. "I imagine you've felt it pulling." Rory's hand went to her sternum. "It's been warm since we crossed into the park." "Warm is the wrong word. Awake." The Seer tilted her head. "Dymasian work, that stone. Hel-realm, the domain of excess. It remembers its origin the way all things remember — the way water remembers the sea, the way bone remembers the animal." She paused. A beat that felt curated. "It was not given to you by a friend." The moss exhaled cold beneath Rory's feet. She thought about the package on her doorstep — anonymous, wrapped in plain brown paper — and the way she'd told herself at the time that she'd look into it, she'd find out who left it, she'd be sensible. And then weeks had passed. "Will you tell me who sent it?" "I will tell you what I see," Isolde said, which was not the same thing, and all three of them in the clearing knew it. "The Veil thins." "It's weeks from the winter solstice." "It thins." Isolde repeated it with gentle, absolute certainty, the way someone corrects a small child who has misidentified a colour. "Something draws it thin ahead of its time, and what draws it is patient and very hungry. You have been handed a hook, Aurora Carter, by a hand belonging to the patient and the hungry." She looked down at the flat stone she sat upon. "The question of whether the hook sinks in — that remains open." Rory sat with that. Nyx was a darkness at her shoulder, utterly quiet. The grove pressed in, not with threat but with the weight of the attention of something very old. Wildflowers opened and closed at the edge of Rory's vision. The harmonic drone shifted half a note and settled again. "You also," Isolde said, standing in a single fluid movement that made the act of standing look newly invented, "need a better argument than bare hands." She moved toward them, and Rory tracked the ground beneath her feet automatically — the instinct of someone who'd learned in the last month to notice the ways magic left evidence. Nothing. No compression of moss, no slight darkening of dew. Isolde's feet described the path without taking part in it. She held out her hand when she reached Rory, and in her palm lay the dagger. Slender, leaf-shaped, the material of the blade catching the grove's soft light differently than steel would — too matte, too pale. Cold radiated from it in a way Rory could feel across three inches of air. In the gathered dimness of the clearing, under the smooth sky of the grove, the blade carried its own faint luminescence. "Moonsilver," Isolde said. "Fae-forged, carrying a court's worth of intent in the edge. It will cut what cannot otherwise be cut." A pause. "I give it freely. That matters. A freely given blade carries more weight than a purchased one." Rory took it. The cold hit her palm immediately, a clean, clarifying cold, and the crescent scar on her wrist ached and went quiet. She turned the blade once, watching the light move across it. "There's always a cost with Fae gifts," she said. She'd heard that enough times. Isolde regarded her with those ancient lavender eyes. "Freely given is not the same as without consequence. The blade will ask something of you, in time. They all do." She stepped back. "But that," she said, not unkindly, "is a problem for the you who has already left this grove." Behind Rory, Nyx made a sound that was almost — not quite, but almost — a breath. "We should go." Rory rose, the blade in her hand, the pendant pulsing its warm quiet pulse. She looked once more at the moss, the flowers, the flat stone now empty at the centre of the clearing. The harmonic drone had sunk below hearing but she could still feel it, lodged somewhere between her ribs. "Will I find you again?" she asked. "If I need—" "The grove finds those it will find," Isolde said, already receding, already seeming further than the distance explained. "It has found you once. That is more than most." The light in the grove softened another degree, and Rory understood without being told that it was time. She walked back through the wildflowers, Nyx at her side, the Fae blade cold in her grip and the world ahead of her narrowing from ancient to ordinary with every step toward the standing oaks. She crossed the root ridge. The pressure released. November closed back in. Behind her, if she'd turned, the wildflowers were already invisible. She didn't turn.