AI The air in Richmond Park held the damp, green smell of late afternoon, a familiar London chill seeping through Rory’s jacket. She followed the path of trodden grass, her boots sinking slightly into the soft earth. Beside her, Nyx moved without sound, their form a solid silhouette of deepening shadow against the slanting sunlight. To any casual observer, they might have been a tall, oddly dressed friend. Only the faint, violet glow where eyes should be betrayed their true nature.
“The stones should be just ahead,” Nyx whispered, their voice like dry leaves rustling in a distant corner of a room. “The boundary is thin here. Can you feel it?”
Rory shook her head, but her left wrist itched where the small crescent scar lay against her skin. A nervous habit. She touched the Heartstone pendant at her throat; it was cool, inert. No Hel portal nearby, then. This was something else.
They rounded a thicket of hawthorn and there they were: three ancient oaks, but grown in a perfect , impossible triangle, their trunks too straight, their bark smooth and silvered like old metal. They weren’t merely trees; they were monoliths. The space within the triangle shimmered , a heat-haze distortion that made the world beyond—the rolling parkland, a distant herd of deer—waver and dance .
“The standing stones,” Nyx said, a note of reverence in their whisper . “A door.”
“How do we knock?” Rory asked, her own voice sounding too loud in the hushed clearing.
“We step through.”
Nyx extended a hand, which seemed to bleed into the shimmering air, becoming insubstantial. They flowed forward, a shadow merging with a greater shadow, and were gone . Rory took a deep breath, the scent of grass and damp earth suddenly overpowered by a wave of wild, sweet perfume—honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, though it was neither night nor the season for either. She stepped between two of the oak sentinels .
The world folded.
It wasn’t a step so much as a dislocation. The chill vanished, replaced by a soft, ambient warmth that held no source. The light changed; it was the golden, honeyed light of a perpetual late summer evening, coming from everywhere and nowhere. The sound of London—the distant hum of traffic, the faint shouts of children—was utterly absent. In its place was a profound , living silence , punctuated by the gentle rustle of leaves and the soft drone of unseen insects.
She stood in a clearing, but it was unlike any part of Richmond Park. The grass was a deep, emerald velvet , scattered with wildflowers in impossible profusion: blooms of sapphire blue, fiery orange, and a purple so deep it was almost black, all glowing with their own inner light. The air itself seemed to sparkle with motes of drifting pollen that caught the eternal twilight. Nyx stood a few feet away, their shadow-form somehow more defined here, the violet glow of their eyes brighter against the gloom .
“Welcome to the borderlands,” Nyx murmured.
Rory took a tentative step forward. The grass yielded softly , releasing another wave of fragrance. She looked down and saw that her boots left faint impressions, which slowly sprang back, erasing her passage. She glanced at Nyx’s feet; they left no mark at all.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, and the words felt inadequate.
“It is old,” Nyx corrected gently . “And it remembers everything. Walk softly .”
They moved deeper into the grove. The three standing oaks were behind them, but now Rory saw they were not alone. Other trees, twisted and graceful with bark like polished bone, formed a loose circle. Between them, ribbons of silvery mist curled and drifted, sometimes resolving into faint, shimmering shapes—a running fox, a flock of birds, a dancing figure—before dissolving again. The light had no single source, but the entire canopy above seemed to be a tapestry of living leaves that emitted a soft, bioluminescent glow.
A sense of profound peace washed over her, followed immediately by a spike of vertigo. The peace felt like a drug, a lure . The unease was the knowledge that she was an intruder in a place that did not obey the rules she knew. Time felt sticky, thick. She checked her watch; the second hand was motionless. She tapped it. Nothing.
“Time moves to its own rhythm here,” Nyx said, noticing. “An hour inside could be a minute outside. Or a day. There is no telling until we leave.”
They came to a small, perfectly circular pool. The water was mirror-still and black as obsidian, yet it reflected not the glowing canopy above, but a field of stars —a night sky that existed nowhere in this twilight world. Rory knelt, drawn to it. As she leaned over, her reflection stared back, but her eyes in the water were not her bright blue. They were a pale, knowing lavender. She jerked back.
“The pool shows what is, what was, and what may be,” a new voice said. It was melodic, each word precise and ringing like a small bell. “It is rarely kind to the present.”
Rory turned. A woman stood beside a tree that hadn’t been there a moment before. She was of average height, with a waterfall of silver hair that seemed to move in a breeze Rory couldn’t feel . Her face was ageless, neither young nor old, but etched with a quiet sorrow. Her eyes were the same pale lavender Rory had seen in the water. She wore a simple dress of grey moss and woven bark, and her feet were bare on the grass. Where she stood, no impression was left in the velvet sward.
“Isolde,” Nyx said, dipping their head in a gesture that was almost a bow.
“Shadow-walker,” Isolde replied, her gaze flickering over Nyx with a hint of distant recognition. “And you bring a child of law and order into the wild places.” Her eyes settled on Rory. “Aurora Carter. You have left one court and now seek another. The threads around you are tangled indeed.”
Rory stood, forcing her voice to work. “I was told you could help. That you see things.”
“I see what the world shows me. It is a compulsion, not a gift.” Isolde took a step closer, and Rory caught a scent like cold stone and dried lavender. “You carry a stone of Hell’s forge. It is quiet here. This place is not of that fire. It is of the older, cooler magic.”
Instinctively, Rory’s hand went to the pendant. “Will you help me?”
“I cannot lie,” Isolde said, a faint, bitter smile touching her lips. “So I will say this: help is a river that sometimes drowns those it carries. You seek answers about the man who hurt you, the shadow he casts, and the larger darkness gathering. You look backward and forward at once, and so you stumble in the now.”
The words, cryptic and precise, hit Rory with the force of truth. She felt exposed, as if Isolde had peeled back her skin and read the fears written on her bones. “What should I do?”
“The Veil thins and thickens with the sun’s journey. It is weak now, in the mortal winter. Shadows grow long, and doors left closed creak open.” Isolde’s lavender eyes seemed to look through her, into some other vista. “You will walk a path of knives and feasts. You will be offered everything you ever wanted, and it will cost you everything you are.”
A chill that had nothing to do with temperature raced down Rory’s spine. The wonder of the grove suddenly felt predatory, the beautiful flowers like watchful eyes. “That’s not an answer. That’s a… a riddle.”
“It is the only answer there is.” Isolde turned and glided to the base of the bone-white tree. From its roots, she drew forth a long, slender object wrapped in grey cloth. “You came seeking sight. I offer a blade. A trade of sorts.”
She unwrapped the cloth. The dagger within was leaf-shaped, forged from a metal that looked like liquid moonlight made solid . It glowed with a soft, internal radiance, and the air around it grew noticeably colder. Rory could see her breath fog.
“Moonsilver,” Nyx whispered, a rare edge of awe in their voice. “Fae-forged. It is a great gift.”
“And a great burden,” Isolde said. She held it out, hilt first. “It can cut through glamours and wards. It bites deep into demon-flesh. It is a tool for a path you have already chosen, whether you know it or not. Take it.”
Rory reached out, her fingers closing around the hilt. It was freezing, so cold it burned, but the pain was clean, sharp. The blade felt alive in her hand, humming with a silent frequency. As she held it, the faint glow intensified, casting her own shadow, stark and black, against the glowing grass.
“Remember,” Isolde said, her voice beginning to fade as if she were receding down a long tunnel. “The Grove remembers. It has shown you a reflection. The blade does not change your path. It merely makes it possible to walk it without being devoured. Now go. The twilight here is long, but even it must end.”
The silvery mist thickened, swirling around Isolde until she was gone , absorbed back into the grove. Rory stood holding the luminous dagger, the weight of it foreign and terrifying in her hand. The wonder of the place had curdled into a deep, resonant unease. She had come for knowledge and had been given a weapon. The message was clear enough.
Nyx placed a cool, semi-solid hand on her shoulder. “We should return. The longer we stay, the more the outside world slips away.”
Rory nodded, sheathing the dagger in her belt. She took one last look at the impossible clearing, the star-filled pool, the glowing flowers. It was beautiful. It was ancient. And it had looked at her and seen a need for a knife. She turned and followed Nyx back toward the shimmering boundary, the velvet grass erasing her steps behind her as if she had never been there at all.