Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXK0KPS8RZXD0ZBBVSQE8A

The standing stones rose out of the bracken like the teeth of some long-buried beast, twisted oak grown gray and hard as iron, taller than any man. Rory stopped at the threshold between them, one hand pressed flat against the nearest trunk. The bark was warm. That was the first wrong thing. It was January in Richmond Park, the frost still crusting the grass behind them, and yet the wood beneath her palm held the warmth of a body. "This is it," she said. Her breath fogged in the cold air on the outside of the stones — and then didn't, as she leaned her head between them. Behind her, Eva's friend-of-a-friend, a wiry man named Tomas who'd claimed to know the way, hung back. "I'm not going in there." "You said you'd take us." "I said I'd bring you to it." He was already retreating, hands raised. "People go in and come out wrong. Or old. Or not at all. That's as far as I go." Rory looked at Nyx. The Shade had gone almost entirely incorporeal in the thin winter light, a smear of darkness clinging to the lee of a holly bush, but at her glance they solidified — drawing inward until the silhouette of shoulders and a head took shape, the violet glow of their eyes kindling like two struck matches. "He's not wrong," Nyx said, their voice the dry hiss of wind through reeds. "Time runs strange in there. We could lose an afternoon. We could lose a year." "Isolde said to come to her. So we go to her." Rory's fingers found the Heartstone where it lay against her sternum, cool now, dormant. No portal near. Small comfort. "Stay close. Both of you." She stepped between the stones. The cold vanished all at once, as though she'd walked through a curtain and out the other side into a summer she had no memory of. The change struck her in the lungs first — air thick and sweet and green, heavy with pollen and the heady rot of overripe fruit. She staggered a half-step, blinking. Behind her, the park was gone. Where the bare oaks and the gray afternoon should have been, there was only more of the grove: a wall of foliage so dense and so deeply colored it seemed lacquered, painted, unreal. "Nyx?" "Here." The Shade slid through the gap behind her, and for a moment they flickered, their edges fraying like smoke caught in a draft. They made a low sound that might have been pain. "This place doesn't like me. Too much light. Too much... living." They drew their form tighter, more solid than Rory had ever seen them, almost a man — six feet and more of dark, with the suggestion of a long coat hanging from those shadow shoulders. "I'll manage." The clearing breathed around them. That was the only word for it. Rory felt it in the soles of her feet through her boots — a slow, vast rhythm, an inhale and exhale that wasn't hers and wasn't Nyx's. The wildflowers carpeting the ground turned their faces toward them as they passed, not bending in any wind but *turning*, deliberate as cats, blooms of impossible blue and a red so deep it was nearly black. She brushed one with her knee and it chimed, a single clear bell-note that hung in the air far longer than sound had any right to. "Don't touch anything," Nyx murmured. "I noticed." The light had no source. She kept looking for the sun and finding only a high golden haze, the whole sky one diffuse glow that cast no shadows — and she realized, with a lurch in her stomach, that *she* cast no shadow either. Neither did the trees. The grass. Only Nyx trailed a faint smudge of dark beneath their feet, as if they carried their own night with them wherever they went. They walked. The clearing should have been small — Tomas had called it a clearing, after all — but the trees kept parting ahead of them, revealing new depths, new hollows. A stream crossed their path, water running silver and slow as honey, and when Rory crouched to look she saw her own face reflected back at her older, the skin around her eyes creased, silver threading the black of her hair. She jerked back. The next glimpse showed her a child, gap-toothed, the crescent scar on her wrist fresh and pink. She stood quickly and didn't look again. "It shows you what it wants you to fear," Nyx said quietly. "Or want. Keep moving." A sound began to thread through the green hush — music, maybe, or what music dreamed of being: a high, wandering melody with no instrument she could name behind it, rising and falling like a question never quite asked. It pulled at something beneath her ribs. She found her feet drifting toward it before she knew she'd turned, her hand lifting from her side. "Rory." Nyx's grip closed on her wrist — solid, shockingly so, cold as the Fae blade sheathed at her hip. The music guttered out like a snuffed flame. "Not that way. The Court left its hooks in this soil a long time ago. Walk the path that's shown to you and nothing else." She blinked the fog from her eyes. Her heart was going too fast. "How do you know all this?" The violet eyes regarded her. "I was a man once. A foolish one, who wanted things he had no business wanting, from places like this." A pause. "It cost me my body. I'd rather you keep yours." She didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer. She only nodded and let them lead her on. The trees thinned at last. Beyond them lay a true clearing — wide and round and ringed with hawthorn in full white bloom, petals drifting down through the still air to settle on the grass without ever seeming to land. At its center grew a single oak, vast and ancient, its branches woven overhead into a living vault. And beneath it, on a low seat of moss and root that the tree itself seemed to have grown for her, sat a woman with hair like spun silver pooling around her on the ground. She had been waiting. Rory understood that instantly — that the seer had been waiting not minutes but the precise length of their journey, that the grove had unspooled exactly as far as it needed to bring them here, no farther. Isolde Varga lifted her head, and her eyes were the pale lavender of the first crocus through snow. "You found the way," she said. Her voice was soft, amused, and underneath it ran something older than amusement. "Or it found you. The two are seldom different here." She tilted her head, and the silver hair slid like water. "You've brought the dark with you, child. And cold iron of the moon at your hip. Brave. Or foolish. Sit. We have less time than you think, and far more than you fear." Rory glanced once at Nyx, who had gone still and watchful at the edge of the hawthorn ring, refusing to cross it. Then she stepped forward into the falling petals, and not one of them touched her.