AI The first thing Rory noticed was the silence .
Richmond Park never stayed quiet. Even at night there were foxes, drunk students, planes groaning overhead. Out here, beyond the fence, beyond the last smear of sodium orange from the road, all that noise had drained away.
Her breath misted in front of her face. Frost crusted the dead bracken. The Heartstone pendant under her jumper throbbed a lazy warmth against her chest, out of step with the chill .
Nyx waited where the path dissolved into darkness, a man-shaped absence leaning against an oak. Their eyes glowed a soft violet, the only colour on that side of the trees.
Rory hitched the strap of her rucksack higher.
"You sure this is the right night?"
The shadow's head tilted.
"Midwinter. The Veil thins. Your stone woke. If not tonight, then when?"
They didn't move their mouth. The words brushed her ears like a draught in an old house.
She rubbed her left wrist, thumb passing over the crescent scar.
"Fair point."
They turned and flowed ahead, more shadow than outline. Rory followed. Leaves crackled under her boots. Branches knitted overhead until they cut off the sky. The park behind her shrank, its city-glow smudging to a faint halo between trunks.
The oak standing stones rose out of the dark so fast she almost crashed into one.
She stopped with her hand pressed to rough bark. The "stones" looked like trees at first glance, but no roots broke the soil around them. Seven ancient trunks grew in a perfect ring, each worn smooth as if fingers had passed over them for centuries. The air inside the circle held a faint shimmer, like heat over tarmac.
Rory's skin prickled. Her pendant grew warmer.
Nyx drifted up beside her and reached toward the invisible barrier. Their hand met resistance an inch from the air. The shadow of their fingers bent around something that wasn't there.
"It resists me."
A small, sharp smile tugged at Rory's mouth.
"Good thing Isolde gave me a shortcut then."
She slipped the Fae-forged blade from the inside of her jacket. The moonsilver metal caught what little light there was and turned it pale and cold. The hilt bit into her palm with a cold that wasn't weather.
She lifted the blade into the ring, toward the place where Nyx's hand had pressed. The shimmering thickened, took on a faint colour, as if she looked at a sheet of river water turned on end. Runes she didn't recognise smouldered across its surface, lines looping in and out of each other like living vines.
"Do not cut too wide."
Nyx's voice came low, close to her ear.
"Opening is entering. But it is also invitation."
"Comforting."
She braced her feet, heart thudding, and drew the dagger across the air.
The Veil didn't part so much as yield. The knife moved with almost no resistance. Light bled out of the cut, a clean white that washed the world of its streetlamp orange memories. The air pressed at her ears. Her pendant flared hot against her skin, then steadied.
The gap hung there, edges fraying in lazy tendrils of radiance. Beyond, nothing waited. No trees, no sky, just a darkness with texture, like velvet in a tunnel.
Nyx stepped aside, their form thinner at the edges, voice drier.
"After you, little mortal."
"You're the one who got stuck between realms."
She took a breath so deep it stung and stepped through.
Cold swept over her without temperature, a subtraction rather than a presence. For a blink her stomach lurched , as if she dropped three floors in a lift. The ground under her feet turned strange—no crunch of leaves, no give of soil.
Then it was over.
The light here pulsed from everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn't bright, more a steady glow without a source, as if the air glowed on its own. Her eyes adjusted and the space around her came into shape.
She stood in a forest that had never known a council-planted sapling.
The trees didn't rise straight. They twisted in slow spirals, trunks wide and smooth, bark the colour of old bone. Their branches wove together in arches that met high overhead, forming a ceiling of interlocking limbs and translucent leaves. Those leaves shone from within, a faint green luminescence that breathed with a rhythm she almost matched unconsciously.
Her boots rested on something that looked like black glass . It held her weight, but faint shapes wandered under it, moving just out of focus, like fish beneath ice.
Rory crouched and touched two fingers to the surface. The glass felt like stone but pulsed, once, with a sluggish heartbeat.
"Right. Not unsettling at all."
She straightened. Her breath no longer misted. The air here tasted full, like breathing in after chopping herbs in a tiny kitchen: layers of scent, sharp and floral and earthy all tangled together. Wildflowers she couldn't name opened between the glass-like roots, petals shifting shade as she looked at them, blues bending to purples, then reds.
Nyx emerged from the split behind her and sealed it with a brush of their hand. The cut knit itself together, light curling, then sinking back into the shimmer. The way they'd come vanished. Only the circle of bonelike trunks remained, framing nothing but more of this forest.
Rory's chest tightened.
"You do that on purpose?"
"Safer. Exits draw attention."
"From what?"
Nyx's violet gaze hunted along the upper branches.
"From watchers who are not us."
Comforting again.
She gripped the Fae blade, then slid it back into her jacket. The weight reassured. The cold soaked through the fabric to her ribs.
They moved deeper.
Every step felt both too loud and swallowed. The glass underfoot never cracked but gave a faint tonal thrum, the pitch rising and falling with her stride. It set her teeth on edge. Somewhere far off, water trickled. Or something that wanted to sound like water.
Rory licked her lips.
"So. Where exactly is here?"
Nyx drifted at her side, their shadow stretching longer than their body, as if the light misjudged their shape.
"A path between. Fae carved it when the world was young and soft. They walked from Court to Court without touching your soil."
"Like a bypass for immortals."
"You build motorways." A faint humour coloured their voice. "They pressed forests into tunnels."
She reached out to brush the nearest trunk.
The bark felt warm. Fine patterns had grown across it, not carved: spirals and loops and sharp-edged symbols that wriggled if she focused too long. Images lay buried in them—crowns, knotwork, wings—and something with far too many teeth.
Her pendant pulsed again, stronger this time. Heat spread from it through her chest, into her throat, as if it wanted her attention.
Rory dropped her hand from the tree and slipped the pendant out of her jumper.
The gemstone sat in its silver nest, no bigger than her thumbnail, deep crimson but lit from within, the way embers held their own glow. It beat against her fingers in a quickened rhythm.
Nyx leaned closer, their edges fuzzing.
"It tastes Hel."
Rory stared at them.
"How can a stone 'taste' anything?"
"You would not like my version of flavour."
They turned their head as if listening . Their whole form tightened.
"It pulls."
"Towards what?"
They lifted a hand and pointed—not ahead, as she'd expected, but to the right , where the trees grew thicker and their branches locked in a tight lattice, light trapped between them.
Her stomach did another small lurch .
"I thought we were visiting Isolde's end of things."
"The worlds bleed." The whisper of their voice threaded through the leaves. "Here the Fae dug too deep. On the far side, Hel reached back."
Rory looked at the tangled archway of branches.
The forest didn't want a path there. Limbs crossed and wove, bark fused in knuckles. No gap invited them.
Her fingers tightened around the pendant until the chain cut her skin. The stone flared, bright enough to colour her palm.
"Feels like this disagrees."
Nyx regarded the knotted growth.
"You can open what others locked."
"So Isolde claimed."
She drew the dagger again.
Up close, the branches dryly creaked. Thin tendrils curled out as if to test the air.
"Don't touch me," she muttered.
She raised the moonsilver blade. The metal sang when it neared the wood, an almost inaudible harmonic that hit behind her eyes. The glow from the leaves dimmed, as if the trees held their breath.
"Cut with respect."
"Planning to."
She slid the blade between two fused branches.
The wood parted like muscle. No sap flowed, only a faint release of white motes that scattered and vanished. The sound travelled down the length of the forest, a rippling crackle like a wave through dry reeds.
She swallowed and cut again, then again, tracing a narrow arch, only wide enough for one person.
When she stepped back, the doorway she'd drawn stood edged in raw grain. Beyond it, the air turned darker.
Her pendant almost burned.
Nyx drifted forward, their shoulders brushing either side of the gap without touching.
"If we cross, the path changes. It will not remember where we came from."
"We already lost our exit."
"This is different."
"Brilliant."
Her voice came out thinner than she wanted. She shoved the pendant back under her jumper, drew the rucksack strap tighter, and ducked through the arch.
The light shifted at once.
Behind her, the soft green luminescence of the leaf-forest. In front, a deeper amber wash, as if the entire space drank sunset and never let it go.
The ground lost its glass quality. Her boots sank a half-inch into something that felt like compacted petals, springy and faintly damp. The scent hit a second later—ripe fruit, heady and cloying, layered with rich spice and something meaty under it that curled her stomach .
Rory grimaced.
"If this is Fae, they have weird tastes."
Nyx emerged at her side. The light painted their outline in gold, but their centre stayed pure dark.
"This is not Fae."
The forest had changed. The trunks lay farther apart and took on colour: deep greens, purples, rust-reds. Vines wrapped them like jewellery, heavy with swollen fruit that glowed from within, each orb pulsing with a heartbeat that synced to the stone at her chest.
She moved closer to one.
It looked like a cross between a fig and a heart, glossy skin stretched thin over something that shifted beneath, veined with faint light. There were no leaves, only clusters of these organ-fruits hanging in bunches.
Her hand rose without her consent.
Nyx's voice cut across her movement.
"Do not taste."
"I'm not licking demon fruit."
"Good. Some mortals do not wait to be told."
She curled her fingers into a fist, forcing them down. The scent from the hanging heart-fruit thickened as if offended.
The further they went, the more the forest rearranged itself into intention.
What first looked like random roots grew into low benches. Clusters of fruit arched overhead in canopies above clearings, as if to drip sweetness down on guests who no longer came. The amber light intensified near these spaces. Shadows clung to the edges, thick and velvet -black, watching.
Rory stepped around a root the size of a python and nearly tripped over a goblet.
Her boot scraped gold.
She crouched.
Goblets lay scattered across the ground—some intact, some bent, some melted into the roots. Most looked like metal, but the longer she stared the less sure she felt. Their surfaces shifted between gold and bone, bronze and something that had once been living. A plate nearby still held a crust of something that might have been meat centuries ago. It preserved no rot, only shape, like fossils pressed into stone.
She reached out and brushed a finger across the plate's edge.
Flavour exploded across her tongue, rich gravy and charred fat, though nothing had touched her lips. Her throat worked in reflex.
"Okay. No."
She wiped her hand on her jeans, pulse racing .
"Gluttony remembers itself here."
Nyx glided ahead, their gaze never still. "Dymas bleeds through."
"Belphegor's lot."
"You learn the princes." A wisp of a chuckle. "Your education improves."
"Working in a restaurant, you pick up things."
She tried a smile. It felt thin.
They came to the first true structure .
The forest opened into a wide hollow ringed by trees whose trunks curled inward, sealing the space like fingers around a bowl. Roots wove up from the floor into a broad table that took up most of the chamber, its surface polished to a sheen. Dishes dotted it in place: platters, bowls, candelabras of bleached bone, all grown from the same seamless material.
The table sat empty. No food, no drink, only the echo of them.
Rory stepped up to it. Her reflection stared back at her from the polished surface, warped by faint ripples as if she looked into dark syrup. Her blue eyes looked too bright in this amber glow.
Lines etched the table. At first they seemed random, shallow grooves from past use. Then she caught the pattern.
Circles.
Three major ones, intersecting, carved with obsessive precision. Tiny marks lined their edges—symbols, runes, or maybe script from somewhere that had never invented ballpoint pens. At the centre, where all three circles overlapped, a small hollow dipped, smooth and perfectly round. The exact size of the Heartstone.
Nyx stopped opposite her. For once, their form felt solid, anchored.
"They got this far."
"Who?"
"Whoever pushed a Dymasian artefact into the hands of a girl from Cardiff."
Her jaw tightened.
"You know more than you let on."
"I know patterns. Intent."
They reached out, fingers hovering over one of the circles. The air above it shimmered . For a heartbeat, Rory glimpsed three worlds layered:
One held a forest like the one they'd walked, silver leaves and cool mist. Another burned with vineyards under an amber sky, vines heavy with too much fruit, tables loaded until they groaned. The third looked like London at night, just before last call, lights flickering on rain-soaked streets.
Then the images snapped away.
Rory's hand moved to her chest. The Heartstone thumped against her sternum, loud enough she felt it in her teeth.
"If I put it there," her voice came out hoarse, "something happens."
"Yes."
"What kind of something?"
Nyx's violet eyes watched her across the carved worlds, unreadable in the glow.
"Only one way to learn."
The pendant burned against her skin. The circles on the table waited, their grooves black as old ink. Somewhere high above, fruit pulsed , in time with her heart, in time with the stone.
She wrapped her fingers around the pendant and drew it out into the amber light.