Run: 2026-03-18-01KM08CWJNVRF30HXXG8ZFQCQK

Rory stepped through the standing stones and lost the city at once. One moment Richmond Park breathed around her with damp grass, distant traffic, and a jogger’s boots thudding somewhere behind the trees. The next, the air changed. It pressed cool and sweet against her face, carrying the smell of crushed leaves, rain on bark, and something older under it, something like roses left too long in a glass. She stopped with one boot still on the threshold stone. “Go on, then,” Isolde murmured from beside her. Rory glanced back. The seer stood with her silver hair loose around her shoulders, pale eyes fixed on the clearing beyond. No footprints marked the moss beneath her bare feet. Nyx hovered a pace behind, a dark shape made thinner by the light, their edges slipping and reforming where the trees cast shadows. Rory tightened her grip on the Fae-forged blade at her belt. The moonsilver felt like a winter stone through her shirt. Cold. Certain. “This is the place?” she asked. Isolde’s mouth curved in something that never quite became a smile. “A door that grew roots. A roof that learned the sky.” Nyx tilted their head, violet eyes faint in the shade of the oaks. “And if we keep walking, do we find the room beyond the door, or the teeth in the lock?” “The path answers only to feet,” Isolde said. Rory stepped fully inside. The grove took her. The first thing she noticed was the silence. Not absence. A held breath. Even the birds outside the stones seemed to have been cut off clean, as if some unseen hand had dropped a cloth over the world. Then the sounds came, one by one, thin and delicate: water trickling over stone, wings brushing leaves, a far-off chime that might have been wind through glass or bone. Wildflowers covered the ground in thick patches, white and blue and gold, blooming between roots that rose from the earth like knuckles. The trunks of the ancient oaks leaned inward, forming an arch over the clearing. Their bark shone with a faint silver sheen, and veins of light ran through it in slow pulses, as if sap carried moonlight instead of water. Rory swallowed. “The trees are glowing.” “They’ve not finished becoming,” Isolde said. “That makes it worse.” Nyx drifted past her shoulder and into a patch of shadow cast by one of the standing stones. Their form blurred there, edges softening until they looked almost like smoke held in a human shape. “A place between places,” they whispered. “It always felt crowded to me.” Rory gave them a look. “That’s meant to help?” “It was an observation.” She started forward. The ground gave beneath her boots, not muddy, not firm either, but springy as if she’d stepped onto woven moss over packed air. Every footfall sent a shiver through the flowers nearby. Tiny petals lifted, turned toward her, then settled again. Ahead, the grove widened. She saw more stones first, half-hidden in the trees, some standing upright and smooth as old teeth, others cracked and sunk sideways into the earth. Between them hung strands of pale vine threaded with lights that bobbed without flame. Not lanterns. Not quite fruit. They glowed like captured dusk, small and warm and alive. Rory took another step and heard a soft rustle above her. She looked up. A fox sat on one of the low branches, but its fur shimmered with silver and green, and its eyes held the same lavender sheen as Isolde’s. It watched her with a stillness that set the hairs on her arms upright. “You keep a pet?” Rory muttered. The fox blinked once, then vanished between one breath and the next, leaving only a ripple of leaves. Nyx’s whisper brushed close to her ear. “You saw it, then.” “Saw what?” “Good.” She shot them a flat look. “That’s not helpful either.” “It is if the grove wanted you to notice.” Rory exhaled through her nose and kept moving. The farther they went, the stranger the space became. The trees no longer stood in neat rows but curved into unexpected hollows and alcoves. A root thicker than a car crossed the path in front of her, and when she crouched to step over it, she saw carvings in the wood: spirals, hands, crowns, a hundred tiny faces with open mouths and no eyes. She reached out before she could stop herself. Isolde’s hand caught her wrist. Rory looked up fast, heart banging against her ribs. “What?” “Do not wake what sleeps in bark.” Rory pulled back. “You could’ve said that before I touched it.” “You would have touched it all the same.” There was no arguing with that, which made Rory more annoyed than if there had been. She straightened and moved on, keeping her hands close to her sides. The carved root fell behind them, and with it the faint sound of murmuring voices. Rory turned sharply. “What was that?” Nyx was already looking back. Their shape had gone still as a shadow under a locked door. “Not us.” The voices came again, low and overlapping, as if several people whispered in a room through a wall. Rory strained to catch words, but the sounds tangled and drifted apart the moment she listened. “Over there,” she whispered. Isolde followed her gaze toward a break in the trees. “Some things in the Grove repeat what they have heard.” “Hear from who?” The seer’s eyes glinted. “From those who begged. From those who lied. From those who were answered.” Rory didn’t like any of that one bit. They pushed through a curtain of hanging ivy and came to a pool. She stopped so hard Nyx nearly passed through her shoulder. The water sat in a circular basin of black stone. It did not reflect the sky. It held another place entirely. Rory saw a hall beyond the surface, vast and amber-lit, with tables laid in rows under chandeliers that dripped fire. Figures moved through the hall in long robes and masks, carrying trays piled high with fruit and meat and jeweled glass. The image rippled, and for a breath she saw something else underneath it: a red-lit corridor, iron rails, a door marked with signs she couldn’t read. Her Heartstone Pendant gave one faint pulse of warmth against her chest. Rory froze and put a hand over it. Nyx drifted nearer the pool without quite touching the edge. Their reflection did not appear in the water. Only a column of darkness where their face should have been. “What do you see?” Rory asked. “Waiting rooms,” they murmured. Isolde knelt beside the stone basin. The pool’s light made her silver hair seem brighter, almost white-blue. She leaned over the water, and Rory saw no reflection there either, only petals drifting across a surface that remained perfectly still. “The place remembers hunger,” Isolde said. Rory looked at her. “That’s not the sort of thing a place should do.” “Places keep their own hungers.” Another pulse warmed at Rory’s throat. Fainter this time, but enough to draw her attention down to the pendant. It had gone from a dull ember to a deep, living red. Her fingers closed around it. “It’s reacting.” Nyx turned, their shape sharpening for a moment. “To what?” Rory looked at the pool. “I don’t know. But it’s close.” The air around the basin shifted. Not wind. A pressure change, like the whole grove inhaled. The lights hanging in the vines over their heads dimmed, then brightened once, as if a cloud had crossed a hidden sun. The water trembled. A shape moved beneath it. Rory stepped back. “Tell me that’s fish.” “It isn’t fish,” Nyx whispered. Something rose slowly from the pool, not breaking the surface so much as unfolding out of it. At first she thought it was a hand. Then a branch. Then a whole arm made of dark, wet wood and threaded with pale veins. Fingers opened, long and jointed, each tipped with a translucent claw. Rory drew the Fae blade in one clean motion. The moonsilver caught the grove’s glow and flashed pale against the darker colours around them. Isolde rose without hurry. “Do not cut it yet,” she said. Rory kept the blade raised. “That’s a generous warning after it came out of the water.” The thing beneath the surface lifted higher. It had no face she could make sense of, only a mask of bark and root, split down the middle by a seam of light. Beneath it, something pale shone and shifted like moonlit bone. Then it spoke. Not with a mouth. The sound came from the pool itself, rippling out through the stone basin and into the air around them. “Who enters my keeping?” Rory tightened her jaw. “We’re not here to steal anything.” The creature tilted its head. Water slid from its shoulders in silver sheets. “All who enter take something with them. Breath. Memory. Time.” Nyx’s voice hissed across the clearing like smoke through grass. “That sounded unpleasantly final.” The thing in the pool angled one claw toward Rory’s chest. The pendant burned hot. She sucked in a breath and clasped it hard enough to bite her skin. “This belonged to me before I came here.” The basin shivered. “No.” Rory looked up. “No?” “The red heart is marked by the feast.” The creature’s voice came layered with other voices beneath it, male, female, child, old. “It opened the way.” Isolde’s expression changed a fraction. “Show us your source.” The pool’s surface darkened. The image in it shifted from the grand hall to a corridor lined with hanging vines heavy with fruit. Beyond them, for one brief flicker, Rory saw a gate of black iron, half-buried in living roots, with a crack of amber light seeping through the seam. Dymas. The word landed in her mind without sound, yet she knew it the way she knew her own name. The pendant throbbed once in answer. Rory stared at the image and felt the back of her neck prickle. “That place isn’t here.” “Neither are you, if the wrong door opens,” Nyx murmured. The creature’s claw lowered toward the water. “The feast spreads. The hunger follows the heart. Return what was sent, or the path will learn your shape.” Rory’s fingers tightened around the Fae blade’s hilt until the leather creaked. “You sent this to me?” “No.” Isolde spoke from beside her, voice calm as still water. “Then who did?” The thing in the pool did not answer. Instead, the flowers at the basin’s edge bent inward, every bloom turning toward Rory’s chest as if they smelled the pendant. The warmth flared once more, sharper now, and she felt it through the chain, through her shirt, through skin and bone, right down to the old scar on her left wrist that had gone pale and tight. Rory took a slow step back. The basin’s surface rippled, and the corridor vanished. For one breath, the water held only darkness. Then something beneath it moved again, larger this time, a shadow with antlers or branches or both, rising just under the skin of the pool. Rory lifted the blade. “Right,” she muttered. “We’re done looking.”