Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GBCNECTGED20PYYZFVK0P

The frost came off the Richmond earth in thin grey plumes, and Rory's breath rose to meet it. Somewhere past the tree line a stag coughed, low and rasping, and she flinched before she could tell herself not to. "It's only deer," Eva whispered beside her, fingers tight on Rory's sleeve. Eva had bundled herself into three coats and still looked cold; her breath fogged her glasses. "You said it's only deer." "It's only deer," Rory repeated, because saying a thing twice made it steadier. Nyx did not breathe. That was the part that kept unsettling her — they walked a pace ahead, boots making no sound at all on the rimed grass, their tall silhouette cut out of the predawn blue like a missing piece of the world. Where the weak torchlight caught them, it found nothing to catch on, only violet eyes that glowed faintly under the hood. "Close," Nyx said, and their voice arrived the way their voices always did, a whisper laid directly against the inside of her ear. "The standing stones are just past the hawthorn." "I don't see any stones." "You will when you're meant to." Rory adjusted the strap of her satchel. Inside it the Heartstone pendant lay cold and quiet against her notebook — no portals here, then. Good. Her other hand drifted to the slim shape sheathed at her belt, and she drew her fingers back from the cold before she'd meant to. Even through the leather, the Fae blade bit. It always did. She'd taken to thinking of it as an animal, an unkind one, that tolerated her grip. The hawthorn came up on them too soon. One moment it was twenty yards off, a black snarl against the sky; the next they were under it, and Rory realized with a kind of slow, sickening lurch that she did not remember walking the distance between. "Nyx—" "I know. Don't name it. Keep walking." Past the hawthorn, the stones. There were nine of them, maybe more — it was hard to count, because Rory's eyes kept slipping off, the way they slipped off a word she'd read three times without understanding. Oak, not stone. Oak that had gone to stone, or stone that had always dreamed it was oak. The bark was grey and grooved and sharp with old lichen, and yet each one tapered like a tree, and at the top of each a tangle of petrified branches reached into the dark like fingers opening. Ice sleeved every twig. The ice did not melt where the torchlight touched it. Eva stopped breathing. Rory could hear her not breathing. "The boundary," Nyx murmured. "Step between the two nearest. Don't touch them." "And if I touch them?" Nyx turned their head a fraction. The violet glow slid across her face. "Don't." Rory went first, because going first was the kind of thing she'd decided she was going to keep doing. The air between the stones felt thicker, warmer, as though she'd pushed her face into laundry fresh off a line. Her ears popped. The cold on the far side of her body lagged behind, and for a heartbeat she was halved — one Rory still in December, one Rory already somewhere else — and then the rest of her caught up and she stumbled out onto soft grass. Green grass. She stared at it. Her boots had stepped from hoarfrost to summer in the length of a stride. The grass was full of tiny white stars of stitchwort, and bluebells, and something with a petal like a tongue of flame that she did not know the name of, and she could smell all of them at once — honey and pepper and that warm, dusty smell of a meadow at the end of a long afternoon. Eva came through behind her and made a small noise like a sob. "Oh," Eva said. "Oh, Rory." "I know." "It smells like my grandmother's garden." "It smells like a hundred things." Nyx emerged last, and the grove took them oddly; their shadow-form gathered itself more fully here, edges firming, as though the place insisted on a shape. They looked, Rory thought, almost like a man. Almost. The clearing was wider than the hawthorn had suggested. In its center a low spring bubbled up between pale roots, and the water made a sound that was not quite water — a note, sustained, a held chord in a language Rory's chest understood before her mind could. Above them the sky was — she tilted her head back — the sky was wrong. The sky was the same pre-dawn blue she had left, but behind it, faintly, she could see stars arranged in patterns that did not belong to any January she had lived through. They drifted very slowly, like leaves on deep water. "Don't stare at the sky," Nyx said softly. "It stares back." She lowered her gaze. Eva had knelt by the spring and was reaching a hand toward it. Rory caught her wrist — gently, gently — and Eva looked up, blinking as though waking. "Sorry," Eva whispered. "Sorry, I — I wasn't going to — " "You were." "I wasn't." "Eva. You were." Eva sat back on her heels and pressed her palms against her thighs, hard, the way she did when she was trying not to cry. "How long have we been in here?" Rory glanced at her wristwatch. The second hand was moving, but slowly — an unhurried sweep, as though the seconds had decided to be minutes, or as though the minutes were having a long conversation. The small crescent scar on the inside of her left wrist tingled, a pulse she hadn't felt since she was a child. "I don't know." "Long enough," Nyx said, "to be noticed." Rory looked up. Across the spring, where a moment ago there had been only wildflowers and the lean shape of an ash, a figure was standing. She had not walked there. Rory was certain of that — the grass in front of her was uncreased, unmarked, the stitchwort undisturbed. No prints. No bent stems. The woman was simply there now, as though she had always been there and Rory had only just chosen to see her. Silver hair poured over one shoulder to her waist. Her eyes were the pale, washed color of lavender steeped too long. She tilted her head at them the way a heron tilts its head at a fish. "Three," said Isolde Varga, in a voice like water over smooth stone. "A girl with a blade she hasn't earned, a shadow wearing a man's memory, and a friend who is only a friend. Welcome, little travelers. Mind the spring. It remembers what you forget, and sometimes it's thirsty." Rory's hand was on the hilt of the Fae blade before she knew she had moved. The cold of it ran up her arm like a warning. Isolde smiled. "Good," she said. "That's the first right answer. Come closer. We have less time than you think, and more than you'd like."