AI The air changed the moment they crossed between the standing stones.
Rory felt it first in her lungs — a warmth that had no business existing in Richmond Park in late November. The cold drizzle that had soaked through her jacket simply stopped, as though someone had drawn a curtain across the sky. She took another step forward and the ground beneath her trainers went from wet gravel to soft earth carpeted in moss so green it looked painted.
"Keep moving," Isolde said from somewhere ahead, her silver hair catching light that had no visible source. "The threshold does not like the indecisive."
Rory moved. Behind her, the shadows thickened and then coalesced, and Nyx slipped through the gap between the last two oaken stones like smoke pouring through a keyhole. They reformed on the other side, their silhouette sharpening into something almost human, violet eyes casting faint light on the moss at their feet.
"Interesting," Nyx whispered, and even that single word carried a quality Rory had never heard from them before — something close to wonder. "This space is folded. We're standing in two places at once."
"Three, if you count where we were," Isolde corrected, not turning around. She left no footprints as she walked, and Rory watched the wildflowers behind her spring back upright as though the seer had never passed through them at all. Bluebells and foxglove and things Rory couldn't name — flowers that shouldn't have been blooming in any season, let alone all at the same time.
The grove opened before them like a held breath finally released. Ancient oaks rose in a loose ring, their canopies so dense and interwoven that they formed a living ceiling fifty feet above. Light filtered through the leaves in amber-gold columns, thick as honey, and where those columns struck the ground, the wildflowers grew tallest and strangest. Rory saw one blossom the color of a bruise slowly turning to track their movement, its petals unfurling like fingers.
"Don't touch that one," Isolde said.
Rory pulled her hand back. She hadn't realized she'd been reaching for it.
The pendant at her throat pulsed once — not the warm throb it gave near Hel portals, but something different. A single beat, like a heart restarting. The crimson stone caught the grove's strange light and threw it back in fractured red lines across the moss.
"The Heartstone knows this place," Nyx observe d, drifting closer. Their shadow-form rippled at the edges, as if the grove's ambient energy was pulling at them. "Or it knows what this place borders."
"Every thing borders every thing here," Isolde said. She stopped walking and turned to face them both, her pale lavender eyes settling on Rory with an expression that might have been pity or might have been amusement — with Isolde, it was impossible to tell. "The roots drink from three wells. Do you understand?"
"No," Rory said flatly.
A ghost of a smile. "Good. Understanding is a cage. Observation serves better."
"That's incredibly unhelpful."
"And yet it is not untrue."
Rory bit back her reply. She'd learned in the three weeks since meeting the seer that arguing with someone who literally could not lie but absolutely could mislead was an exercise in frustration. Instead she turned her attention back to the grove and made herself observe , as instructed.
The sounds were wrong. Not bad — wrong. Bird calls echoed from the canopy, but they were pitched a half-tone off from anything she'd heard in Richmond Park. The rustle of wind through leaves came in rhythmic waves, almost tidal, as though the grove were breathing . And underneath it all, so low she felt it more than heard it, a hum. Deep and resonant, rising from the earth itself, vibrating in her molars and the soles of her feet.
"Can you hear that?" she asked.
Nyx tilted their head. The gesture looked uncanny on a being without discernible features — just the silhouette of a person listening, backlit by violet eyes. "The harmonic. Yes. It's the Veil."
Rory stared at them. "The Veil makes a sound?"
"Every thing makes a sound. The Veil's is simply too low for most mortal ears to catch." They paused, and something like curiosity colored their whisper-voice. "You shouldn't be able to hear it."
"The stone hears," Isolde said, touching two fingers to her own sternum in a gesture that mirrored where the Heartstone hung against Rory's chest. "And the stone shares what it hears with the one who carries it. Come. There is more."
She led them deeper. The ring of oaks gave way to a kind of natural corridor, the trees pressing close on either side, their bark silvered with age and threaded with phosphorescent lichen that pulsed gently , lighting their path in soft blue-white. Rory ran her fingers along one trunk as she passed and felt warmth, actual warmth, as though sap ran hot beneath the bark. The tree shivered under her touch. She yanked her hand away.
"They're alive," she breathed. "I mean — obviously trees are alive, but these are—"
"Aware," Nyx finished. They had gone fully incorporeal, drifting alongside her like a dark stain on the air. "These oaks predate the current shape of the Veil. They remember a time when the barrier didn't exist."
"A seed remembers the forest it came from," Isolde added, which was either deeply profound or completely useless.
The corridor opened into a second clearing, smaller than the first, and Rory stopped dead.
A pool lay at the center, perfectly round, no more than ten feet across. Its surface was utterly still — not the stillness of calm water, but the stillness of glass, of something solid pretending to be liquid. It reflected nothing. Not the canopy above, not the light, not the three of them standing at its edge. Instead, the water — if it was water — was dark, the kind of dark that had depth to it, like looking down into a well with no bottom.
The Heartstone blazed.
Rory gasped and pressed her palm flat against the pendant. Heat radiated through the silver chain, almost burning, and the crimson glow was bright enough now to light her hand from within, turning her fingers translucent pink at the edges. She could see the shadows of her own bones.
"Easy," Nyx said, and there was an urgency in their whisper she hadn't heard before. They solidified beside her, one shadow-hand hovering near her shoulder without quite touching. "Don't step closer."
"What is it?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt. Cool-headed Rory. Crisis-mode Rory. The version of herself she'd built brick by brick in the years since Cardiff, since Evan, since all of it. She stared at the pool and forced herself to think instead of feel.
"A thin place," Isolde said. She had stopped several feet back from the pool's edge, and for the first time since Rory had known her, the seer looked uncertain. Her ageless face had gone very still, her lavender eyes fixed on the dark water with an intensity that bordered on fear. "The roots drink from three wells. This is one of them."
"One of the wells."
"A place where realms nearly touch. Earth, and what lies beneath it."
Beneath. Hel. Rory's hand went instinctively to the Fae blade at her belt — the leaf-shaped dagger Isolde had given her the week before. Its moonsilver hilt was cold, always cold, and the chill grounded her against the pendant's heat. She stood there with fire against her chest and ice under her fingers and watched the impossible pool.
Something moved in its depths.
Not a reflection — there were no reflections. Something below the surface. A shape, massive and slow, turning over in the dark like a whale in deep ocean. Rory caught the suggestion of a form, a curve of something that might have been a shoulder or a flank, and then it was gone , sinking back into the black.
"Tell me that was a fish," she said.
"I cannot," Isolde said simply. The compulsion that bound her tongue — the Fae inability to speak an untruth — had never felt more terrifying than in that quiet admission. She could not say it was a fish. Because it was not a fish.
"We should step back," Nyx said. Their form was flickering badly now, shadow bleeding at the edges, as though the thin place was pulling at the fabric of what they were. Rory remembered — Nyx existed between realms. A place where realms nearly touched would tug at them like a current.
"Nyx. Are you all right?"
"No," they admitted, and the honesty startled her more than anything in the grove had. Nyx never admitted weakness. "This place remembers what I was. I need distance."
Rory took their arm — or tried to . Her fingers passed through shadow and came away tingling, pins and needles racing to her elbow. She pulled back and settled for stepping between Nyx and the pool, blocking their line of sight to the dark water. The shadow being's violet eyes focused on her face, and slowly , their edges stopped flickering.
"Better?" she asked.
"Marginally."
She took that as a win.
They retreated to the first clearing, the three of them quiet with the weight of what they'd seen. The wildflowers nodded around them in an unfelt breeze. The hum of the Veil had grown louder in Rory's ears, or perhaps the Heartstone had simply tuned her hearing to it, because now she could pick out variations — places where the frequency dipped or swelled, a kind of sub-audible topography mapping the barrier between worlds.
"The solstice is in twenty-six days," Isolde said, settling herself on a moss-covered stone at the clearing's edge. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Rory with those ancient, unreadable eyes. "The Veil will thin further. That pool will open."
"Open to what?"
"To whom," Isolde corrected. "A door is only as dangerous as the one who walks through it."
"And who walks through this one?"
The seer said nothing. Her lips pressed together — not evasion, Rory realized, but genuine inability. She didn't know, or she couldn't say, and with Isolde those two things were sometimes the same.
Rory touched the pendant again. It had cooled to its usual faint warmth, the crimson glow dimmed to a soft inner pulse. Someone had given this to her. An unknown benefactor, Nyx had called them. Someone who wanted her to find this grove, this pool, this door. Someone who wanted her standing here with a Fae blade on her hip and a Heartstone from Dymas against her skin twenty-six days before the winter solstice.
She looked at the flowers tracking her with their bruise-colored petals. She listened to the breathing of ancient trees. She thought about the shape she'd seen turning in the dark.
"Right," Rory said quietly. "Then I suppose we'd better come back."