AI The stone under Aurora's boot thrummed like a swallowed drum and she caught herself on a gnarled root, breath sharp in her chest.
"Don't do that," Nyx whispered, so close her hair lifted though no wind touched it.
Aurora set the small deep crimson pendant against the hollow of her throat with a fingertip, feeling its faint inner glow through the silver chain. The light did not warm her, but it seemed to listen. She drew her other hand to the hilt of the slender leaf-shaped moonsilver dagger at her hip, the metal exactly as cold as Isolde had promised. Cold and clean. Ready.
The standing stones ringed them, tall ancient oaks carved with spirals that had not been carved when human hands still obeyed kings. Moss crawled up the carvings like script learning to read. Between trunks, wildflowers burned colours the mind tried to name and failed. The scent startled her more than anything else, sweet and sharp and bruised, as if someone had been cooking something vast and sad.
"Time's folding in pockets," Nyx said, the words threaded through a sound like dry leaves, "and the ground remembers names."
Aurora wanted to ask what names, but the grove already answered. Her watch, the cheap one she always forgot to wind, ticked forward twice while she blinked. Her phone's screen showed the same minute for three different tries. She swallowed and kept moving.
Roots lifted underfoot as if the earth were adjusting its seating. The path they followed had no clear plan, more like the suggestion of a route from an artist who favoured curves. Birds sang in intervals that matched conversation, then stopped when she looked up.
"Isolde here?" Aurora said. Her voice sounded ordinary in the silk of that place. Ordinary felt like an accusation.
"Here?" Nyx smiled, which was not a thing they often did. "If here is a circle, yes. If here is a beginning, perhaps not."
A clearing opened, and the centre held a pool that did not mirror them at all. They leaned over the rim and saw constellations in the water that belonged to no sky she had known, stars arranged in patterns like a map for a traveller who never used roads. Their faces looked younger in that water. Nyx's shadow in the pool swam a fraction out of phase with them.
"A trick of reflection," Aurora muttered, but her fingers tingled where they rested on the rim . The air tasted of iron and citrus, as if someone had tried to stitch a market into a memory. Somewhere far off, laughter like spoons against glass chimed and made her teeth ache.
"Look," Nyx breathed. The faint violet in their eyes brightened. "The Veil has a seam."
Aurora followed their gaze. Between two leaning stones a shiver slid through the air, a thin crease of shimmer, like heat on tarmac but colder. When she focussed, the crease took on a hue that the rest of the grove refused to name. The pendant warmed almost imperceptibly, not the throbbing heat it produced near Hel portals, but a thread of warmth that suggested attention.
"That's not a rift," Nyx corrected, whispering a syllable that sounded like someone opening an old book . "It is a stitch. Someone tried to sew something shut and used the wrong thread."
"It's a wound with a dressing," Aurora said. Her mind mapped danger in neat shapes. "Who would stitch the Veil in Richmond Park?"
"Ask Isolde," Nyx said. "She keeps the needles and the gossip."
They moved deeper. Each step drew them into changes, small at first: a chorus of tiny bells began from the bracken, each ringing when their feet brushed dew that did not wet. Photons seemed polite in this space, sliding sideways to avoid touching faces . Aurora felt as if she were walking through music she had not yet learned to dance .
Isolde appeared at the edge of the next ring as if she had always been there, though no footprints led to her. Silver hair rippled to her waist, and her pale lavender eyes rested on Aurora like a question that remembered the answer. Leaves did not press down under her feet. The ground refused to sign her passage.
"Who comes looking for a lost thing," Isolde said, and the words uncoiled into a riddle rather than a greeting, "and finds instead a borrowed shadow?"
"We came to ask about a pendant," Aurora said. She kept her voice steady. "A Heartstone. It was given to me."
Isolde's smile had no teeth. "A Dymas token, small deep crimson and warm for sorrow." She spoke truthfully by compulsion but arranged her lies like a map with secret paths. "Why would a Hel gift like that find a human flesh?"
"Someone wants me to open something," Aurora said. She did not add that she had woken with the name Malphora in her mouth and no memory of the conversation that gifted the word.
Isolde leaned forward, and the world condensed into the sound of her breath. "Names are hungry," she said. "They gnaw until someone stops feeding them. You carry a meal."
Nyx circled the pool, voice a thread in the undergrowth. "The trees remember Aldric. They do not keep him kindly."
Isolde's face shifted. For a breath she looked as if centuries had folded in on her like a shawl. "Nyx calls my exile by the name of its maker," she observed, "and yet your shadow is also a ledger. A debt and a signature."
Aurora's hands tightened on the dagger. The blade was colder now, a stone soaked through with moonlight. "Stop speaking in riddles. Tell me what the pendant means."
Isolde's palms rose, slow and elegant, not to touch but to summon . The pool answered. A moth the size of a child's hand glided from the water's edge and landed on the surface, its wings patterned like a map of coastal towns. It drank a shimmer and left a trail of frost where it touched air.
"The Heartstone chooses temptation," Isolde said, in words meant to be half-savoury and half-warning. "It remembers a feast. If you follow the scent of plenty, you may find a table set for kings and have your teeth chipped."
"Belphegor," Nyx whispered, and the name tasted like a coin that had been held in a greedy mouth . "Dymas always leaves crumbs."
A hollow sound came from the trees, as if someone far away set a heavy lid down. From the branches came the faint suggestion of voices, a hundred low conversations in a language that changed syllables whenever you tried to learn one. The grove was not silent. It spoke in background noise, the way a city sighs when you press your ear to the pavement.
"Is the Veil thin here?" Aurora asked.
Isolde flicked her fingers and the seam stepped wider like an eyelid. Through it Aurora saw a sliver of another world: an orchard stretched under an amber sky, fruits like lanterns hung heavy on the branches, and beyond them a banquet table groaning with meats that steam with a smell so lush her mouth watered despite herself. Faces lifted from the table, pale and eager, wearing collars of nettles. The sight lasted only a heartbeat.
"Prince Belphegor's appetites wander," Isolde said quietly. "They graze where the boundary thins. They are curious about trinkets that hum."
Aurora's pendant pulsed once, as if embarrassed to be noticed. Her fingers ached to press it to her lips, to hear any sound it kept inside. Instead she asked the question she would have sworn she would not ask a stranger in a hidden grove.
"Can the Fae help?" Her voice was blunt . "Can you close stitches?"
Isolde's limbs arranged like someone considering a chess move, and her mouth delivered the answer in a way that both consoled and warned. "I can show the seam a mirror," she said, "I can make the trees stand in a circle and sing. But mirrors double fates and songs bind the singer. To mend, one must cut. To cut, one must sacrifice."
"Who sacrifices?" Nyx asked. The softness in their voice hinted at long hunger.
"Names," Isolde said. "Old names. New names. The kind you carry around your neck."
Aurora's jaw tensed. She thought of the name Malphora again, how it had pushed against the back of her teeth when she woke. Isolde could not lie, but she could keep an entire truth folded inside a single harmless phrase. Aurora had the sense that the seer had already counted out a cost on an abacus made of roots.
"Enough riddles," Aurora said. "Tell me what you want."
Isolde's gaze slid to Nyx, who had draped their shadow around a stone like a cloak. "I want a favour, which is not a want but an account," she said . "Bring me a branch that has never fallen. Take it from a tree that has not lost a name. Drink the water the leaves remember. Sing it a child's song. Then I will show you how the stitch will close."
"That's impossible," Aurora said.
"Impossible is a polite word for dangerous," Nyx agreed. "You do appreciate danger, don't you, Rory?"
Aurora's name on Nyx's tongue felt like a folded map opened too quickly . She wanted to say no. Instead she asked the question she had been carrying since the pendant had been thrust into her palm.
"If I close the seam, will it stop pulling on me? The dreams, the hunger, the—" She stopped. The words were linen being frayed .
Isolde's silver hair trembled and a single leaf descended from nowhere to rest on Aurora's shoulder. "A stitch closes the seam," she said, "but stitches do not erase the hand that sewed. They merely hide its fingerprints."
A sound moved through the grove then, sharper and nearer, the crack of a branch like the report of a gun. The pool's surface puckered as if something below had inhaled. From the seam in the air spilled a scent not of the grove, thick and indulgent, and Aurora understood without being told that the place beyond the Veil did not come empty-handed. It brought appetite.
Nyx's form gathered like a shadow pulled tight. Their voice thinned to a blade. "They test. They prod. They will send a curiosity at first."
Isolde's smile cut with the precision of a lover's knife. "If it is curious and small, you will practice with it. If it is greedy and large, you will learn to bleed."
The pendant pulsed , a small obedient heartbeat. The seam widened, no longer a neat stitch but a raw slit. From it a thin thing uncoiled, something like an earthen rope braided from vine and candlewax. It smelled of roasted fruit and old laughter. It tasted of feasts held in basements. Something small and ravenous rotated in the pool's reflection, and when it straightened its mouth did not open like a jaw but like a door .
"Now," Isolde said, hands lowered, face unreadable . "Will you take a branch the tree will not miss? Will you sing to it without caring for your throat? Will you come back with a name that is not yours and give it away?"
Aurora thought of Evan's palms, rough and sure, of the way he had tried to own the space around her. She thought of her father's practiced arguments, of her mother's patient schoolroom voice. She thought of the pendant's glow against her skin. She thought of standing stones that hummed and the small creature in the pool. She felt the hunger in that amber orchard and saw the netted collars at the table.
"Yes," she said, and the word left her like a blade . "Yes, I will."
Nyx shifted and the shadow clung to Aurora's boots as if in solidarity. "Good," they said, and their whisper was a promise of scales tipping . "Practice is a useful thing. The first lesson will always be given in a lull."
The vine in the pool shuddered and reached, and Aurora brought the dagger up, moonsilver glinting cold and certain.
The world inhaled. The seam widened again, and from it a nibble of laughter that smelled of jam and coins slipped through like a child crawling under a door.
Isolde's eyes shone, pale lavender catching the grove's secret light. "Then move quickly while the mirror is warm," she said.
Aurora stepped forward, dagger raised, and the vine, tiny and curious and hungry, uncoiled to meet her.