AI Aurora Carter shoved her hand through the gap between two ancient oak standing stones and felt the air bite back.
Not cold, not hot, something else, a pressure that pressed against her knuckles like a tongue tasting for weakness. The Heartstone pendant on her chest turned warm, then warmer, a slow pulse that matched her blood. Behind her, the park path and its sane, blunt world blurred as if someone had smeared oil across glass.
“Rory,” Nyx breathed, their voice a wind-borne whisper inside her ear, though they stood a pace behind. “The boundary notices you.”
“I noticed it first.” Aurora braced her palm against one stone. The surface felt like bark turned to rock, ridged with age, slick with an unseen film that clung to her skin. She swallowed the copper taste rising at the back of her throat. “If it bites, bite back.”
Nyx’s silhouette deepened, shadows knitting into a tall humanoid shape. Violet eyes glimmered, faint as dying embers.
“Teeth will not help,” they said. “Names will.”
Aurora pulled her hand back and flexed her fingers. Her left wrist flashed its small crescent scar, pale in the strange light. “Fine. We do this your way.”
She stepped through.
The world folded.
One moment her boot met packed earth and the familiar grit of Richmond Park, the next it sank into ground that felt like velvet over stone . Flowers crowded her ankles, not dainty spring things but thick-petalled blooms that looked carved from wax, their colours too saturated for nature. The air carried a sweet, bruised scent, like overripe pears and crushed mint. Somewhere close, water chimed without a stream.
Aurora turned, quick, expecting to see the stones behind her.
They stood there, yes, but the gap between them no longer framed the park. It showed a curtain of pale leaves, motionless, as if the grove had decided it liked privacy.
Nyx slid through the threshold without moving their feet, their body thinning into smoke and then gathering itself again. Their form cast no shadow. Nothing here did, not properly. Light came from everywhere and nowhere, a soft glow that made Aurora’s bright blue eyes sting.
“Right,” she said. “That’s not unnerving at all.”
Nyx tilted their head, as if listening to a sound Aurora could not hear .
“It hums,” they murmured. “Old wards. Old songs.”
Aurora touched the pendant. The deep crimson gemstone glowed with a faint inner light, and its heat spread into her sternum. “This thing’s happy. That makes one of us.”
They moved forward, because standing still felt like letting the grove close around them. The path did not announce itself. It formed under Aurora’s steps, a suggestion of flattened petals and darker moss, as if the place approved of motion and punished hesitation. Plants leaned towards them, not swaying, not stirred by wind, but bending with a deliberate curiosity .
A cluster of flowers rang like glass when Aurora brushed them with her sleeve.
She snatched her arm back. “Did I just make flora do a wind chime impression?”
Nyx reached down. Their fingers sank into the blossoms without crushing them, the petals accepting shadow like they accepted light.
“This place remembers courts,” Nyx said. “Music lived in its soil.”
Aurora’s mouth tightened. “Of course it did.”
She made herself look up, not down, because she refused to trip over enchanted daisies like an amateur. Ahead, trees rose in strange shapes, trunks braided as if two or three had grown together and decided never to separate. Their bark shimmered with faint patterns, like inked runes half erased. Between the trunks hung thin threads, almost invisible, that caught the light in sharp flashes.
Webs. No spiders.
She slowed. “Nyx. Tell me those aren’t—”
“Wards,” Nyx said. “Do not touch them.”
Aurora stopped with her boot poised. The thread ahead looked harmless, a strand of silk . Her pendant pulsed again, a warm knock against her skin, and she felt a faint resistance in the air, a tension that made her teeth ache.
She lifted her foot and placed it down on a patch of darker moss instead.
Nyx followed, flowing between the ward-threads as though they recognised them. Their shadow form thinned, edges feathering out, and the threads did not flash when they passed.
“Convenient,” Aurora muttered.
Nyx’s violet eyes turned towards her. “I am a trespass made flesh. Wards know my taste.”
“Lovely. So you’re the reason the security system’s jumpy.”
As they went deeper, the grove shifted in small, impossible ways. A tree that stood ahead seemed to step aside when Aurora blinked. A stone that looked like a crouched animal in her peripheral vision became, upon direct inspection, a perfectly plain boulder, then became something else again when she looked away.
Aurora kept her chin up and counted her breaths. She had argued cases in mock courtrooms, stared down lecturers who liked to humiliate students for sport, walked away from a man who measured love in bruises. She refused to let a patch of haunted greenery make her flinch.
Then she heard laughter.
Not close, not far, and not coming from any direction that made sense. It sounded like children playing behind a wall, muffled and delighted, and it snagged her attention with a hook she could not see.
Nyx’s hand, cool as smoke, closed around her wrist.
“Do not answer,” they whispered.
Aurora’s throat felt tight. “I didn’t say anything.”
“The grove listens for more than words.”
The laughter rippled again, and this time Aurora caught a second sound beneath it, a low murmur like a crowd at a football match, all voices layered, all speaking at once. The hum of wards in the soil thickened until she felt it through her soles.
Her pendant’s warmth spiked. She sucked in a sharp breath and pressed her fingers to the gemstone. It throbbed , not with pain, but with a pulse that insisted, here, here, here.
“This isn’t just Fae,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “This is Veil-thin.”
Nyx’s silhouette sharpened. “Yes.”
Aurora looked at them. “You knew?”
Nyx’s eyes brightened, then dimmed, like a slow blink. “I smelled it on the stone boundary. Old tears mend poorly.”
A faint shimmer appeared ahead, barely visible, a distortion in the air like heat haze, except it carried colours that had no names. Aurora had seen that shimmer once before, in an alley behind the Golden Empress, when the world had rippled and the shadows had felt deeper than they should. Yu-Fei’s kitchen knives had clinked behind the back door like they sensed trouble.
The Veil.
Aurora’s pendant warmed again, almost hot enough to sting.
She let out a short laugh that held no humour. “So this is where my mystery jewellery wants to take me.”
Nyx released her wrist and drifted closer to the shimmer, their shadow-body becoming thinner, more interested.
“The Heartstone belongs to Hel,” they said. “It will always lean towards what it knows.”
“Great. I’m wearing a homing beacon for Hell.” Aurora dug her fingers under the silver chain as if she could rip it off, but she did not. The pendant had saved her before, or at least warned her. It had a way of making itself feel heavier when she considered abandoning it, as if it took offence.
They rounded a stand of trees and the grove opened into a clearing that did not behave like a clearing. The space felt larger than it looked, like a room built inside a pocket. Wildflowers covered the ground in thick drifts, and in their centre stood a circle of low stones, each one etched with shallow carvings that glimmered faintly. In the middle of the circle, an old, cracked basin held water so still it looked solid.
Aurora stepped closer and saw her reflection, then saw it split.
In the water, her face remained hers, but her eyes flickered pale lavender for the length of a heartbeat. Silver hair slid over her shoulders like a memory that did not belong to her. The image snapped back to normal before she could blink it away.
She jerked upright. “Nope.”
Nyx leaned over the basin. Their face did not reflect at all. The water showed only a darker patch, as if it refused to admit they existed.
“This pool lies,” Nyx said.
Aurora’s gaze tracked the circle stones. The carvings looked like letters and vines tangled together. She knew enough Latin to recognise when it was not Latin. The symbols seemed to move when she did not stare at them directly.
A soft footfall sounded behind her.
Aurora spun, her right hand dropping to her left wrist out of habit, as if she carried a watch or a weapon there. She carried neither. Her stomach dipped anyway.
A woman stood at the edge of the clearing, half in shadow, half in that everywhere-light. She looked young and ageless at once, her waist-length silver hair falling straight as poured metal. Her pale lavender eyes fixed on Aurora with a calm that felt sharpened.
She left no footprints in the flowers.
“You came with borrowed heat,” the woman said. Her voice held the cadence of old stories and careful omissions. “And a shadow that forgot its grave .”
Nyx’s form tightened, edges crisping. “Isolde Varga.”
Isolde’s gaze slid to Nyx. “Nightwhisper.”
Aurora lifted her chin. “You’re the Seer.”
Isolde walked closer, and the flowers did not bend under her feet. The air around her carried the scent of crushed violets and paper, like a book opened too fast.
“I am the one exiled for speaking,” Isolde said. “You are the one hunted for listening.”
Aurora’s pulse jumped. “I’m not hunted.”
Isolde’s mouth curved, not quite a smile . “Then you have never looked over your shoulder and seen a space shaped like fear.”
Nyx moved beside Aurora, not protective in a human way, more like a shadow choosing where to fall. “We seek a path,” they said. “And the price.”
Isolde’s eyes dropped to the Heartstone pendant. The crimson gem glowed through Aurora’s fingers. Isolde’s expression did not change, but the clearing felt as if it drew a breath.
“Dymas,” Isolde said. The word tasted like honey and rot . “Gluttony’s garden. Belphegor’s pantry.”
Aurora stiffened. She did not ask how Isolde knew. She already knew the answer. “So it’s real.”
“Real is a blunt knife,” Isolde replied. “It cuts, but it does not carve.”
Nyx’s voice lowered. “The Veil thins here.”
“It thins where vows were broken,” Isolde said, and she stepped into the stone circle without pausing, as if the wards recognised her. “And where appetites were fed.”
Aurora kept her feet outside the circle. “We didn’t come for poetry.”
Isolde’s lavender gaze snapped up. For a moment, Aurora felt pinned like an insect on velvet .
“You came for survival,” Isolde said. “You came for leverage. You came because your crimson stone burns when it smells a door.”
Aurora’s grip tightened on the pendant. “Tell me how to close the door.”
Isolde tilted her head, listening, not to Aurora, but to the hum under the ground . “You cannot close what you did not open.”
“Then tell me how to lock it,” Aurora said.
Nyx’s whisper threaded through the air. “Or how to step through without being devoured.”
Isolde’s eyes flickered , a quick, unreadable movement. She lifted one hand, palm up, and the still water in the basin shivered.
Aurora’s pendant pulsed hard. Heat surged into her chest.
The shimmer in the air at the far end of the clearing thickened, colours twisting like oil on blood. The hum of wards rose, then stuttered, as if someone plucked a harp string too hard.
Aurora took a step back. The flowers beneath her boot rang again, sharp and brittle.
“What did you do?” she demanded.
Isolde’s voice stayed calm. “I listened. And the grove answered.”
The shimmer tore.
Not a clean rip, but a jagged wound in the air, edges fraying with light . The smell hit Aurora first, rich and sickening, like roasted meat left to spoil, sweetened with wine. Heat rolled out, heavy and humid, and she heard something beneath it, a low roar like a feast hall full of mouths.
Her Heartstone pendant turned scalding.
Nyx’s shadow-body flared, widening as if they could blot out the tear by force. “Hel.”
Isolde stepped back out of the circle with the ease of a woman leaving a room. “A door was already here,” she said. “Your stone only knocked.”
Aurora’s skin prickled. The tear in the Veil widened another inch, and something moved on the other side, a silhouette framed by amber light. It looked tall. It looked hungry. It carried a sound like wet cloth dragged across stone.
Aurora’s mouth went dry. “That is not a friendly welcome party.”
Isolde’s gaze pinned her again. “If you step through, do not eat, do not drink, do not accept a name offered with a smile.”
“Brilliant,” Aurora snapped. “How about we don’t step through at all?”
A clawed hand pushed into the tear, fingers thick and dark, nails like polished bone. The air screamed in a thin, high note as the Veil fought to seal.
Nyx surged forward, shadow spilling over the rip like ink. Their violet eyes burned brighter.
“Rory,” they said, and their whisper cut like a blade. “Move.”
Aurora reached for the only thing she had, the scalding Heartstone pendant, and yanked it up and away from her chest, chain biting into her neck as the tear widened with a wet, eager sound.