Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXNRZAZ40P2ZKRVJH5VJ29

The standing stones rose from the bracken like the ribs of some long-dead leviathan, ancient oaks petrified into grey columns, their bark gone hard and cold as iron. Rory stopped at the threshold between two of them, one boot in the mud of Richmond Park, the other hovering over grass that should not have been so green in November. "This is it?" she asked. Her breath fogged on the Park side. It didn't on the other. Beside her, Nyx was little more than a smudge of darkness against the failing light, a humanoid blot that the dusk seemed reluctant to define. Their voice came as it always did, soft as something brushing the inside of her ear. "This is a door. Whether it is the right one, that depends on what you're willing to leave behind on this side." "Cryptic. You and the seer should compare notes." "We have. She won." Rory snorted and stepped through. The cold vanished. That was the first thing — the bone-deep London damp peeled away from her like a wet coat, replaced by warmth that smelled of cut grass and something sweeter beneath it, honeysuckle and crushed thyme and a third scent she had no name for. The light changed too. Behind her, through the gap in the stones, the Park sat under a bruised winter sky, joggers and dog-walkers and the distant grumble of the South Circular. In front of her it was a long golden afternoon, the kind that came in late June and seemed in no hurry to end. She turned in a slow circle, and the hair on her arms lifted. Wildflowers grew in every direction, a riot of them — foxglove and cornflower, poppies the deep red of arterial blood, white stars she didn't recognise that turned their faces toward her as she passed, the way sunflowers track the sun. They opened and closed in a rhythm that wasn't quite breathing but came close enough to make her skin crawl. The grass underfoot was springy and warm, and when she looked behind her she saw the print her boots had pressed into it. Just hers. Beside them, where Isolde was said to walk, the seer would leave nothing at all. "Don't eat anything," Nyx said. They had taken a more solid shape here, six feet and more of edged shadow, their violet eyes the only colour in all that darkness. They were studying the flowers with what she might have called distaste, if a being made of absence could be said to have a face. "Don't drink anything. Don't take anything that's offered freely, and don't promise anything in return for anything else." "You've said that four times." "I'll say it forty more if it keeps you breathing." A pause. "Time runs strange here. We may have an hour. We may have a week. The Park won't have changed when we go back. Or it'll be spring. There's no telling." That landed harder than she wanted it to. Rory thought of the Golden Empress, of Yu-Fei's narrow patience, of the flat above Silas' bar where her toothbrush still sat in its cracked cup as though she meant to come back tonight and brush her teeth and go to bed like an ordinary woman. The thought felt suddenly thin, like a photograph of a life that belonged to someone else. She kept walking. The clearing went deeper than it had any right to. From the standing stones it had looked like a single field, a few hundred yards across, ringed by ordinary parkland trees. But the further in they went the more those edges dissolved, the ordinary oaks giving way to giants — trunks broad as houses, bark silvered and smooth, branches lacing overhead into a canopy that filtered the gold light into shifting coins on the ground. Somewhere water was running. Somewhere a bird was singing the same six notes over and over, perfectly, mechanically, a music box left to wind down. "Do you hear that?" she whispered. "Yes." "Is it real?" "Define real," Nyx said, and then, when she shot them a look: "It's a warning. The Fae sing to mark a boundary the way you'd hang a sign. We're being noticed." As if in answer the Heartstone pendant shifted against her sternum. Not the warmth it gave near a Hel portal — this was different, a faint vibration, like the artifact had cocked its head to listen. She pressed her palm flat over it through her shirt and felt it pulse once, twice, settling. The grove opened. She came out from under the great trees into a hollow ringed with hawthorn in full white flower, and her breath caught somewhere behind her ribs. A spring rose at the centre of it, welling up over pale stones into a pool so clear she could see the coins lying on the bottom — old coins, copper and silver and shapes of gold she didn't recognise, some of them so corroded they'd fused into the rock. Around the pool the air glittered. Not dust. Light, hanging suspended, motes of it drifting upward in defiance of every law she'd ever trusted to keep her feet on the ground. "Beautiful," she said, and meant it, and hated how small the word was. "Beautiful things here have teeth," Nyx murmured. They had gone very still. "Aurora. Look at the water. Don't lean over it." She didn't ask why. She'd learned that much. But she let her eyes drop, careful, and saw her own reflection looking back — and behind it, deeper, a second face that was hers and not hers, older, crowned, with eyes that held a knowledge her own had never carried. The reflection smiled before she did. She stepped back so fast she nearly fell. "What was that—" "A possibility." The voice was new. It came from the far side of the pool, where a moment before there had been only hawthorn, and now there was a woman, silver hair pouring past her waist, eyes the pale lavender of the sky just before true dark. She stood barefoot in the wildflowers and the flowers did not bend beneath her. "Or a memory. Or a lie I haven't told you yet. The water shows what it likes. It likes you, which is more than I can say for most who find their way to my door." Rory's hand had gone, without her deciding it should, to the cold weight of the moonsilver dagger at her hip — the blade this same woman would, in some tangle of past and future Rory hadn't yet learned to unknot, give her freely. Isolde watched the gesture and did not seem troubled by it. "You came seeking answers," she said. "How brave. How young." She tilted her head, and somewhere the unseen bird sang its six notes, and stopped. "Ask, then, daughter of the barrister. But understand — in this grove, I cannot lie to you." A faint smile. "I never said I'd make it easy."