AI Wildflowers pressed their faces to Rory’s ankles as if they knew her name. The oak stones ringed the clearing, trunks weathered into pillars that leaned like old men listening. Even with London humming somewhere beyond the trees, the grove held stillness that swallowed sound. The air tasted like new rain and mint. The pendant against her sternum throbbed once, twice, a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.
“Not your usual park walk,” Rory rubbed the crescent scar on her wrist and glanced at the nearest oak that had grown bark into whorls of script.
Dreamlike violet light shimmered between the stones and spilled Nyx out of it. Their outline gathered shape the way morning built shadow, tall and thin, edges gone indistinct where darkness pooled.
“Dreams fall apart when you touch them,” Nyx’s voice brushed across her ear without crossing the space between. “This place holds.”
“It holds because it listens,” silver hair slid out from behind a trunk like moonlight poured along a blade. Isolde moved without bending the grasses. Her feet left the dew untouched. “And a listener answers when called at the right hour.”
Rory checked the sky between boughs. Cloud. Street glow far off. Her phone read ten past midnight, though minutes stretched long here. “Right hour meaning—”
“The hour when hunger names you.” Isolde tilted her face toward Rory’s chest, to the dull crimson stone tucked beneath jacket and T-shirt. “That little heart thieves heat from a door. You bring it close, and it breathes.”
“It’s burning,” Rory slipped the pendant free and held it in her palm. The gem glowed from within like coals under ash. Heat sank into her skin, not painful, only insistent. “Show me where.”
Isolde’s mouth curved the way a lock shaped to its key. “Walk in a circle and trip over an edge. The edge hides in the centre of a ring.” She nodded toward the stones . “Here. There. Everywhere you bring will.”
Nyx drifted closer to the oaks, lay their palm against bark. The trunk’s fissures darkened, began to spill a thin seam of shadow. “Here enough,” the whisper carried a smile. “The world thins where you have pressed it thin before, Seer.”
“I have pressed nothing.” Isolde’s pale eyes flicked to the seam. She lifted a hand, fingers long and fine, and swept a slow arc. Light bent across her knuckles and left a ripple in the space before her like heat over tarmac. “Belts cinch and loosen. Winter bites through holes.”
Rory tucked the pendant into her bra strap to keep it close to her heart. She slid a hand to the Fae blade at her hip. The moonsilver handle chilled her palm to the bone, as it always did, not numbness, but a cold that made her every nerve crisp. “What waits?”
“Tables groaning and mouths singing. A sea of wine without waves. Orchards that swallow their pickers whole.” Isolde’s voice never lost that lilting music, nor the shine of truth beneath each layer of sound. “You will not meet kindness at a feast built for debt.”
Nyx leaned until their face hovered near Isolde’s. Features formed more solid as they looked at her, a suggestion of eyes cut from night. “You could stay,” the breeze of words curled around ear and jaw. “Your courts won’t summon you home if you vanish between breaths.”
Isolde looked through Nyx and then around them to Rory with the same calm. “If I step into that kitchen, I return changed. I cannot cook with flame I did not borrow. You do not want me to owe that place.”
“You won’t even taste?” Rory felt the pendant heat like a warming amber. The seam in the bark had widened to show a dim, moving light beyond, not daylight, something thicker. From it rolled the damp breath of cellars, cool and old, spiced thick as markets. Her stomach twitched, then twisted. She hadn’t eaten since a lukewarm noodle dish six hours ago.
“I will wait where time stains nothing.” Isolde put a finger under Rory’s chin and met her eyes. Pale lavender held no lie. “Tread in with the blade unsheathed and your hand closed. Leave without swallowing. Simple steps. Hard to walk.”
Rory gave a short laugh that tasted of nerves. “Your riddles could use subtitles.”
“The meaning already sits in your mouth.” Isolde lowered her hand. “Do not chew.”
The oak seam peeled itself wide enough to step through. Light bled amber around the edges, soft and thick. The glow painted Nyx’s outline honey-gold. They tilted their head. “You first. If it eats, it eats me second.”
“That supposed to be comforting ?” Rory slid the blade free of its sheath. The edge carried moon, a long leaf shaped to part gristle and veil with equal ease. She took one breath that filled her chest with mint and rain, and stepped into the amber.
Heat kissed her as gentle as a living hand, then pulled away. The temperature flipped. The air on the other side weighed more, richer, as if loaded with steam and buttery fog. The sky lay above like a ceiling of poured resin, warm and glowing, veined with slower currents of darker gold. A horizon sat too close and too far all at once, hills folding and refolding under vineyards that climbed in terraces, strings of grapes hung larger than fists, skin taut as lacquer.
Nyx poured out of her shadow and went ahead, their feet not quite touching the rust-red soil . “The light tastes sweet.”
Rory licked her lips and caught sugar on her tongue. The breeze itself seemed laced with syrup . She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and moved down a path between vines wound on trellises made of bones that weren’t bones, pale arches like old antlers fused into lattices. Grapes brushed her arm, skin cool and almost breathing. Each cluster gave a faint hum like a throat clearing behind her.
“You hear that?” She kept the blade low and the pendant tucked safe, felt it pulse , a steady thump. “They’re… singing?”
Nyx closed their fingers around a grape without plucking it. The surface dented, then relaxed. “Murmuring. Recipes. They remember how they were undone.” The whisper of their voice shivered the leaves.
A long table stretched through rows beyond, lacquered black, already laid, though no one sat there. Platters mounded with fruits too bright to be real, slices that held shape without falling, pomegranates split to show seeds pulsing faintly as if each carried a heartbeat. Flies like shards of glass drifted lazy loops, their wings throwing prisms onto the cloth.
Rory’s stomach growled, and the noise skittered along the table to echo close by, as if the world had thrown her hunger back at her. “Let’s keep moving.”
They crossed from vineyard to orchard. The trees wore opera gowns of blossom and fruit both, heavy bows of pears, apples with skin like polished jade, citrus peeled itself and refolded, orange segments slipping back into their rinds, the smell bright enough to sting. Bees with sugar bodies landed, sank, and rose, legs dusted in gold that glittered too bright to be anything from Earth.
A fountain burbled ahead where four carved boars cradled an open bowl. Wine rose from nowhere, deep purple edged blue, but when Rory dipped her fingers she touched something with heft and slickness more like satin poured into liquid form. Her finger came away stained, and she almost lifted it to her mouth. The blade in her other hand kissed her wrist with cold hard enough to bite. She let her stained hand fall, clenched it until the knuckles went white .
“Hungry enough to lick dye from a wall?” Nyx watched her through the dusklight of their hollowed face. The grapes behind them rustled as if they recognised the jest and wanted to correct it.
“Hungry enough to not be stupid,” Rory wiped her fingers on the hem of her jacket until the stain lost most of its colour. The smell wormed into the back of her throat, offered ten memories of kitchens and laughs that had nothing to do with now. She put a foot onto the path that led deeper, felt how the soil gave under her like a mattress, springy with roots and something slower, as if this whole realm took a breath and let it out around her.
They passed a tiered kitchen built outdoors, a stadium of steps where figures in stained aprons leaned over cauldrons the size of cars. The chefs’ motions moved with that same steady purpose that belonged to tide and sleepwalkers. Some had faces she could almost name, features blurred the way tears blurred glass. Their hands flew, chopping and stirring, and steam billowed up with voices in it—low mutters, startled laughs, someone telling a story about a stolen pie and a dog. The steam brushed Rory’s cheek with damp heat and tried to curl inside her ear. She shifted back, the blade raised without thinking.
“Don’t breathe it,” Nyx’s voice threaded through the roaring kitchens. “It fills the ribs and pushes the heart down out of the way.”
“I noticed.” She skirted the lowest tier . A ladle swung toward her as if it had noticed her, spilling something that glittered like sugar ground fine mixed with salt. The grains hit the ground and sprouted at once into pale threads that whipped like the arms of sea anemones. Rory jumped to the side. The threads groped and then stilled, sank back, sugar re-forming into shine on the dirt.
Past the stadium kitchens, the world fell into a terraced valley. Poplars with trunks of blackened sugar edged the slopes. At the valley’s base, a hall opened, not built in any way she recognised, its walls made of layered crusts—bread, pastry, phyllo that crackled as a breeze passed. Light glowed from within thick as yolk. Drums pounded somewhere deep inside, a rhythm not quite human, each beat arriving a fraction too late .
The pendant against her chest went hot enough to scald. Rory hissed and pressed it flat through fabric, as if crushing it would hush it .
“It likes that,” Nyx drifted to her left. “That place throbs under the same skin. You are close.”
“Close to what?” The blade’s cold found her bones and let her focus hang from it.
“The mouth,” Nyx’s reply curled like smoke against teeth. “All these paths end at a mouth.”
She swallowed and looked away from the hall. The valley held more than kitchens. Gardens lay ordered into squares and circles, hedges clipped into the shapes of animals midway through swallowing fruit. A stag chewed a cluster of figs; its leafy throat worked, and the figs travelled down before returning up again in the mouth of a hedgehog sculpted three hedges over. Fountains spat wine into basins and wine back into fountains until the liquid forgot where it had started. The sound soaked into every gap. Laughter rode on it, though no faces turned to watch.
A trellis barred their way, brass and thorn and chain all woven tight. Flowers the colour of bruises opened and closed on the arch. A sign hung crooked on one chain, letters carved into smoke so they shifted as she stared, never letting her fix the words.
“Lovely.” She ran the blade’s flat along the trellis. The metal hummed, a low warning. She leaned her weight in and felt something yield on the other side of the barrier, a give as if the trellis anchored more than vines.
Nyx ghosted through and materialised on the other side for a breath, their edges firming. They drew a line with their finger through the air. The line refused them. “Warded. It wants names and it wants tithes.”
Rory rolled her shoulders and set the blade against the nearest knot of metal and thorn. The moonsilver ate the distance between it and the barrier. Where blade met braid, frost spread, not white, but an absence of colour that erased shine. Thorns curled away, reluctant. The chain sighed like string cut from a harp and dropped in a loop. She cut through where the knot had begun, and the whole arch loosened. Flowers withered from the edges without falling, their petals drinking their own colour and collapsing inward.
“Give me three inches.” She pressed with her hip, widened the gap. The opening yawned to fit them, though the thorns that remained turned, thirsty. She kept the blade between their bodies and the metal and pushed through, the pendant hammering against her bones.
They emerged into a garden stitched with narrow paths and beds overflowing with herbs she couldn’t name. Leaves oiled the air with scents that fought at the back of her tongue—anise and fennel, tomato vine after rain, something musky that felt like meat . Tiny bells hung from sticks along the edges, and as they brushed past, the bells chimed, releasing notes that tasted rather than sounded. A low tone slid over Rory’s tongue like smoke from peat; a high one cracked like roasted sugar. Her mouth watered against her will, then dried when a note turned bitter without warning.
Nyx reached out and caught one bell with a hooked finger. It sang a tone that didn’t end. Their outline blurred along the edges. “Hunger lulls, too.”
“Don’t let it.” Rory picked a path that sloped downward. She felt the world tilt and correct under her feet, like stepping across the belly of a sleeping giant.
The path opened into a space lit by a hundred glass globes filled with liquids of different colours, each glowing on its own. They hung in the air like fat raindrops suspended mid-fall. Beneath them, a marble floor rippled in waves frozen a breath from cresting, and on each frozen wave, plates waited. Chairs angled themselves to face wherever her gaze landed. At the far wall, an oven taller than a two-storey house breathed flame from a mouth carved in the shape of a lion. The heat curled her hair back from her ears and tugged the smell of scorched sugar into her sinuses.
Rory forced herself not to step closer. The pendant matched the oven’s breath for breath. Her memory pitched and upended itself. For an instant, she stood in her mother’s tiny kitchen back in Cardiff, Sunday roast steaming, carrots candy-bright with glaze, her father’s laugh the only warm thing in the whole flat. The heat in this place seized that picture and kneaded it with sticky hands, pressed her teeth to something sweet as sin and old as burnt ends scraped from a pan. She gripped the blade harder until her knuckles felt skinned raw.
Nyx watched the flame and then turned to the globes, drifted close enough to leave fog against one glass skin. “Souls,” the word exhaled across the surface and left no mark. “Or their tastes.”
“Don’t.” She didn’t look at the shapes she almost saw inside—shadows swirling tea-dark, hints of faces the way light made faces in clouds, a girl’s profile, a man’s laugh denting the side of a jar.
A hum rolled through the hall, deeper than the oven’s wind. Somewhere, a door gave and shut with the wet sound of lips parting and closing. A gust of air ran over the suspended globes and set them into slow rotation, and with each turn, the colour within changed shade.
Rory steered them past, kept her shoulders square, moved toward another arch at the room’s far side. The arch wore garlands of herbs braided with citrus peel, and knives hung from hooks along the lintel, blades a hundred kinds, each one turned out as if the next hand to reach would find exactly the edge it wanted. Her gaze snagged too long on a chef’s knife with a handle of carved bone. She dragged it away, lifted the Fae blade—the only edge she meant to hold.
They reached the arch, and with it came a shift in air, as if beyond lay a different season. Cool slid under her warm clothes, clean and sharp as new sheets hung outside to dry on a blue day. She paused and took in the view.
Beyond the arch, the vineyards continued, but altered. The terraces dropped steeper and the grapes shrank to pearls, frost on their skins, each one holding a point of white light. Trees bore icicles shaped like crescents of sugar glass, their curves catching the resin sky. No tables waited here. No knives. Only rows and rows and the quiet of an orchard kept in a breath just before it spoke a vow.
Rory stepped to the threshold and felt the pendant cool enough to no longer burn. Her fingers loosened on the blade’s grip without permission.
“We go in,” she let the quiet flatten the words, not to challenge the orchard, but not to defer to it either .
Nyx rolled their shoulders, light gliding across emptiness like water on polished stone. “In. Before the kitchen remembers our names.” They glanced back once, toward the oven’s glow, then forward, toward frost and fruit and the hush that aftertaste always left.
Rory kept her eyes on the road ahead, to the first stair cut into that new terrace, to the thin line where warmth gave way to clean cold, to the way the vines leaned without wind as if curious to see who would walk into them. She raised the blade and stepped where the air changed.