AI They crossed the last bar of bracken and stepped into a light that did not behave like light. The air changed under their skin, cool as coin, not quite chill but edged with a depth that tugged at memory . Wildflowers crowded the path in colours that had no names and moved with a sound like distant bells when the breeze passed. The oak standing stones ringed the clearing like patient watchers; lichen carved runes into their faces that drank the light and kept it, as if it were a language.
"This isn't Richmond," Rory murmured. She dropped her bicycle helmet to the grass, fingers brushing the crescent scar on her left wrist as if the motion anchored her. The Heartstone at her throat hummed, a tiny pressure against her collarbone. The pendant warmed beneath her palm, its crimson pulse faint but present, as if answering an unspoken question .
Nyx slid forward, silhouette stretching and thinning until they was almost a strip of shade across the grass. Their violet eyes gleamed against the dark. "Stone remembers," they breathed, voice like a draft through paper, and the words bent the flowers toward them. A shadow peeled from the shadow of a stone and flicked Nyx's gauntlet like a fingertip. They smiled without teeth.
A figure stood between two oaks where the trunks leaned together to form a natural gateway, silver hair threading down her back. Isolde rested one palm on the bark and left no trace. The grove accepted her like a long-held breath. When she moved, the wildflowers did not bend but brightened, as if their colours were breathed in.
"You took your time," Isolde said in a tone that felt like calling a name at the edge of sleep. She spoke in riddles, but rhythm and gesture did the rest. "Time is greedy inside. Give it coin and it will eat you."
Aurora stepped through the leaning trees and caught her reflection where the light pooled: smaller, rawer, eyes bright blue and wide. Her watch face fogged the moment she tilted it. The hands spun, juddered, then stalled. Minutes outside would stretch into hours; hours might contract to a blink. Rory's mouth tightened.
"Keep the gadgets in your pockets," Isolde said. Her fingers moved over the leaves; they did not rustle. "Tell me everything that is true until it becomes false."
Rory laughed, a quick bark. "That's not helpful."
"Truth is a river," Isolde replied. Her feet found a path of daisies and the daisies kept their heads raised, following her. "It will show you the stones it passes."
Nyx drifted to Rory's side and a shadow pooled around her boots. They reached out a finger and did not touch the earth; the shadow curled between two blades of grass and returned to them with a taste like dust and copper. "This place remembers breath more than footfalls," Nyx breathed. "And it remembers the absence of footprints."
Rory looked at the ground where Isolde had stood and saw a hollow, a faint impression that teased the eye. No clear print. No mud clung to the soles. Their own shoes left a crisp mark by contrast, darker, real.
"Isolde?" Rory asked. Her voice steadied. "How deep does this pocket run?"
Isolde tilted her head. "Deep enough for bargains." She let the words hang and then looped a stray tendril of silver hair behind an ear. "Deep enough for the lost to get used to being found."
They walked. The canopy drew closed, not like a ceiling but like ink pooling on a page . Light thinned to slivers and then rewove itself into bands that hung in the air like ribbons. When Rory reached out, the ribbons trembled and left faint red prints on her fingertips that burned cool. Every breath tasted of iron and honeysuckle, contradictory and true.
A brook sang somewhere deeper in the grove, but the sound was wrong. It flowed uphill for an instant, then rushed back the other way, carrying with it the smell of citrus and hot bread. Rory cupped her hands to drink but the water slid through her fingers as if it had been painted on in motion. A fish the colour of dusk flashed beneath the surface and blinked like a remembered promise.
Nyx listened. They smiled and leaned toward a shadow that did not belong to any tree. The shadow sipped at their jaw and returned to the ground. "There are mirrors tucked between trunks," Nyx said. "They do not show faces. They show choices."
Isolde laughed softly . "They also tell the time of those choices. Watch yours."
Rory's hand went to the Fae-forged blade at her belt. The moonsilver was a sliver of night that held no reflection. Cold crawled through her palm the moment her fingers closed over the hilt, a sharp, clean ache that made her bones hum. The blade was always cold, always steady, and the metal tasted like winter against her tongue .
"Keep your hand on that," Isolde instructed. "It keeps a line through the quicksilver."
Rory kept the grip. The blade steadied the tremble she hadn't known she would have. Her heart kicked; the Heartstone answered with a small, synchronous pulse . The pendant's warmth didn't match the blade's cold. The mismatch felt like a promise and a warning at once.
They moved toward the grove's centre. Trees there bore fruit the size of moons and leaves thin as lace. The branches wove into arches and under each arch a scene held: a table set with dishes that steamed in colours—bisques that shimmered like galaxies, pies whose crusts were patterned with constellations. The scents braided together, absurdly appetising and faintly oppressive . Somewhere between the scent of sugar and roast, a voice called, low and patient.
"Careful with hunger," Isolde said. Her palms hovered above a platter and it shivered, steam rising in letters. "Want is a lever here."
Rory's mouth watered despite herself and she pulled back. Her fingers found the Heartstone and rubbed it as if the motion could ground the want. The pendant pulsed in reply, thrumming against the scab of her wrist where the old crescent scar lay like a tiny moon. The sound of the grove's feast dimmed, then swelled, as if instruments were tuning to them.
A row of hedges parted, revealing a courtyard where time seemed to have layered itself like lacquer. Statues crouched at the edges—creatures that could have been foxes and could have been women , each with eyes set to catch trespassers. Under one statue, a pool held a sky instead of water. Clouds drifted along its surface and at times she saw stars there that did not belong to any season.
"This place keeps your shadow ledger," Nyx said, voice softer . "It counts what you bring and what you leave behind."
Rory stared at her own reflection in the pool. It wavered wrongly: her hair longer, fingers knuckled with age, her wrist scar larger and glowing faintly. The image smiled before she could, then slipped away. Rory's breath snagged.
"Don't trust reflections that preen," Isolde murmured. She stepped closer and spread her hands. The pool did not ripple for her. "They mistake mercy for kindness."
A sound like laughter threaded through the treetops, not cruel but winter-bright . Shadows shivered and a flock of moths the size of palms circled and then vanished against a trunk. Nyx's outline tightened.
"Stay close," Nyx whispered. Their hand brushed Rory's sleeve and the touch felt like velvet and cold . "Leaf-work and root-voices play tricks on the mind. If you listen too long the grove may speak for you."
Isolde's lips curved. "It will speak anyway." She knelt and pressed her forehead to a root; the root thudded back against her skull as if it wanted to share a heartbeat. "You two are raw. The grove will want to dress you."
Rory's laugh came out thin. "Dress me in what?"
"In histories," Isolde replied, her voice shifting into verse . "In old feasts and old debts. In names you had not given yourself. You will walk away full or empty and you will not be the same weight as you were when you came in."
Nyx drifted into a shaft of shifting shadow and their eyes glowed violet like lanterns. "I liked being not the same once." Their smile cut the air. "But the price then was flaying."
Isolde's gaze sharpened. "You traded well," she said and then, softer, "or badly. It depends on who counts."
A path of mothlight unfurled. Rory followed. The grass cushioned each step and hummed beneath the soles of her shoes, a soft chord that echoed down her spine and left memories where there had been none. She reached for a low branch and the bark thrummed against her palm. The wood hummed back like a chorus. Under that vibration a flavour rose—chill iron, old paper, the taste of a promise you'd been turning over for years.
"Do you hear your father's voice?" Isolde asked.
Rory stopped. Her father had been a barrister, precise, full of polite argument and certain endings. The grove did not use words like 'policy' or 'order'; it used a slow, persuasive grammar that suggested outcomes. Rory felt her training at Cardiff recoil and then melt into the hum.
"He said no one leaves the table without paying," Rory answered, voice small . She had not said the words aloud yet; they had formed in her bones.
The Heartstone pulsed and she felt the motion like a thumb against her sternum. The pendant's glow deepened by a shade, red as old wine.
Isolde's silver hair streamed like a curtain between them. "Table or Grove," she recited, oblique. "Both ask for dishes."
Nyx danced along the edge of the shadow of a branch and then slipped underneath it, vanishing between leaf and light. They reappeared with a sliver of something clinging to a fragment of shadow—a scrap of a letter, ink faded but legible enough to sting. They handed it to Rory.
"Old debt," Nyx said. "Not yours, but close . The Grove likes to lay debts beside the unsuspecting."
Rory unfolded the scrap. A name was there, older than the paper wanted to be, and beneath it a line that matched in rhythm a lullaby her mother used to hum about hedgerows and weather. Rory's throat tightened.
"This feels like a trap," Rory said, more steady now. "We came here to see if there was truth about portals, about Hel tearing through—"
"Hel's threads smelled here last spring," Nyx interrupted. The whisper tugged at the leaves. "A warmth that did not belong to this world. The Heartstone will braid if you let it. It will sing when a portal is near."
Rory pressed the pendant. The pulse answered, faint and hungry. She felt the groove of fear crawl down her spine like cold water. The grove unfurled another layer—branches weaving into an arch that framed a patch of sky not unlike burnt ember. Through that arch the Veil showed a flicker , a shifting seam the faintest of distortions. Only those with eyes bent to edges could have seen it, and even then it might have been the grove's invention.
Isolde watched them with those pale lavender eyes that held centuries and seasons like beads. "The Veil thins at knots," she said. "Knots gather like rosaries. Knots draw the greedy."
Rory imagined a thread pulling through cloth and thought of Evan and the way promises had been thin where he had been loud. She tightened her grip on the blade. The metal tasted of sea and snow.
Nyx drifted to the seam and let their hand hover. Shadow seeped through their fingers like smoke and coalesced into a small, blackened bead that slid into Nyx's palm and cooled against their skin. "Not all crossings crave meat," Nyx whispered, and then louder, "Some only want an audience."
A sound rose, delicate and relentless, like someone peeling a single petal off a flower for the hundredth time. The grove listened with its roots. Isolde stepped forward and spoke in a riddle that blurred into the wind.
"A bell that rings but draws no iron.
A lantern that burns without a flame.
A child who eats, then remembers the hunger."
The words shifted and bent the small lights among the branches. Rory felt the hunger in her like a hollowness that had been waiting under the ribs for years, for validation, for safety, for the simplest clean answer. She had fled Evan for air; here, the air asked questions she had no clean answers for.
"Name it then," Isolde urged. "One name. Give it a shape and the grove will decide whether to keep it or return it."
Rory did not know which name to choose. Names had power here; names were currency. She drew a breath so sharp it hurt and let the syllables fall.
"Home," she said. The word tasted of rain and binders and the smell of lemon oil on old wood.
The grove answered by sending a gust of wind that smelled like her mother reading aloud in a kitchen. It lifted a loop of her hair and for a breath she stood in two places—on a carpet she knew, a child again with knee scraped and a woman now, twenty-five, carrying a pendant that thrummed. The effect washed over her and faded. The Heartstone kept beating.
Isolde nodded. "Home can be a harbour. It can be a harbour made of nettles." She snapped her fingers and the banquet vanished, leaving only the ghost of steam curling toward the sky like a memory. "You will be fed and you will be billed. Decide which you prefer."
Nyx's shadow brushed Rory's shoulder and in the contact she felt a memory that wasn't hers: Aldric, a man's hands spelling names into the margins of books, a ritual gone sideways, a light too bright in a circle, and then the slow settling into a shape like ash. Nyx had been someone once. They had traded a name for a place between worlds. The knowledge sat in Rory's chest like a lodged pebble.
"How much will it take?" Rory asked, aloud and not. Her voice did not shake.
"A feast is paid in stories and silence ," Isolde said. "And in returning what was borrowed. Some things cannot be settled with silver."
Rory thought of the Fae-forged blade, of Isolde's gift, and of a debt the pendant's warmth hinted at. She felt small under the canopy of riddles, but the cool metal at her hip gave a steady answer to an anxious question.
"Then we'll not eat," Rory said, flat and fast. "We will not take what is offered."
Isolde inclined her head, unreadable . "You may walk away empty. You may carry a sack full of stars. Paths prefer actors who make choices. Action dresses the moment."
Nyx drifted close and pressed a shadowed palm flush against the Heartstone. The pendant flared, not with warmth now but with a hush . The violet in Nyx's eyes pulsed and the grove listened, as if awaiting a performance .
Rory's breath stuttered. She had come for portals, for a way to stitch the Veil. Instead the grove counted and rung and asked for names. She tightened her hand on the blade and felt the moonmetal answer—clean, unyielding.
"Keep watch ," Nyx said. "Grove tricks you with beauty. Hel tricks you with hunger. The difference smells like old promises."
They kept moving. The clearing opened to a wider bowl where the trees leaned in like conspirators. Above them the sky had no single direction. Light pooled in rivulets on one side, while shadows climbed like ivy on the other. Time folded and unfolded as they walked. Nobody moved in the way people usually moved in a park; their steps wrote sentences in green.
Rory thought of returning to the flat above Silas' bar, of Yu-Fei's food orders and her taped lecture notes. She thought of a scar on her wrist and a pendant that pulsed and a blade that tasted like winter . The grove offered a thousand small wonders and a hundred small alarms and it had already begun to rearrange what she carried inside her. She had come to count portals and had found instead a ledger of the self.
Isolde watched them with those ageless eyes unreadable as tides. "You will learn why the Veil trembles here," she said, not quite a promise, not quite a command . "But first, you must make the grove stop calling your names."
Rory tightened her jaw and walked deeper, the metal cool and sure at her hip, the pendant at her throat beating in time with the step she chose to take. The wind gathered itself and the flowers trilled. The grove had not yet decided whether to keep them.