AI
The pendant burned against Rory's collarbone the moment she stepped between the oaks.
Not the faint pulse she'd grown accustomed to, that gentle heartbeat warmth it gave off near the rift points Nyx had shown her in Bermondsey and under Waterloo Bridge. This was different. The crimson gemstone flared hot enough to make her flinch, and when she pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket, the heat sank into her fingers and held on like something alive.
"That's new."
"The Grove remembers what you carry." Nyx's voice drifted from somewhere to her left, though she couldn't pin exactly where. Their form had thinned to a smear of violet-edged darkness winding between the tree trunks. "Dymasian stone crossing into Fae-touched earth. The old magics don't mix well."
Rory kept her hand over the pendant and walked on.
Richmond Park in November should have been bare branches and frost-stiffened mud. She'd jogged here twice with Eva last spring, knew the paths, the deer enclosures, the coffee van near the car park. What lay before her now bore no resemblance to any of that. The standing stones, seven of them, had looked like ordinary oaks from the outside, gnarled and unremarkable. But the moment she'd passed between the two largest, the world behind her, well, it hadn't vanished. She could still see it if she turned. Grey sky, brown grass, the distant silhouette of a jogger. All of it played out behind a faint shimmer, like heat rising off summer tarmac.
Ahead, everything was wrong. Beautifully, impossibly wrong.
The clearing stretched wider than any space the park should have contained, bordered by trees she couldn't name, trees with bark the colour of burnt copper and leaves that shifted between green and silver depending on which way she tilted her head. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in scattered constellations, purples and golds and a shade of blue she'd only ever seen in stained glass. They swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel. The air itself tasted different, thinner but richer somehow, like the first breath after climbing a mountain, tinged with something floral and old.
"Don't touch the flowers."
"Wasn't going to."
"You were leaning."
Rory straightened up. Fine. She'd been leaning.
The silence bothered her most. Not silence exactly, but the absence of the right sounds . No traffic hum. No planes overhead. No bird calls she recognised. Instead, a low, continuous tone hung in the air , somewhere between a cello's resonance and the ring of wet crystal . It lived at the edge of hearing, felt more in the chest than the ears.
She glanced down. The grass beneath her trainers left impressions, each footprint filling slowly with a faint luminescence that faded after a few seconds. She stopped, stepped back, watched the glow pool and dissolve.
"This place is recording us."
"Noticing." Nyx coalesced beside her, their form more defined now, a tall humanoid silhouette of ink and smoke. Violet pinpricks where eyes should be studied the glowing footprints. "The Grove sits between. Earth and Fae, layered over each other like pages pressed together. The boundary remembers everything that crosses it."
"Reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be."
They moved deeper. The copper-barked trees grew denser, their canopy weaving overhead into a lattice that filtered light from a source Rory couldn't locate. No sun visible. No sky, exactly. Just a warm ambient glow, the colour of late afternoon in a place where afternoon might not exist.
She reached for a low-hanging branch and caught herself a centimetre away. The bark pulsed . Faintly, rhythmically. Like a heartbeat.
"Nyx."
"I see it."
"The trees are alive."
"All trees are alive."
"You know what I mean."
Up close, she could see it, thin veins of silver running through the copper bark, carrying light the way blood vessels carry, well, blood. The pulse moved from root to canopy in slow, measured waves. She held her breath and counted. One pulse every four seconds. Every tree she could see shared the same rhythm.
"They're synchronised."
"One organism." Nyx's whisper carried that particular quality it always did, like hearing someone speak through a wall in a house you shouldn't be inside. "The Grove isn't a forest. It's a body. We're walking through it."
The pendant gave another sharp flare. Rory hissed and tugged the silver chain, pulling the Heartstone free of her collar. The deep crimson gemstone pulsed in counterpoint to the trees, its rhythm faster, agitated. She held it at arm's length and turned in a slow circle. The glow intensified when she faced north, or what she assumed was north. The direction where the trees grew thickest.
"That way."
"Obviously."
They pressed on through a corridor of copper trunks. The undergrowth here had changed, the cheerful wildflowers replaced by something more deliberate. Low hedges of a plant with leaves like folded parchment, arranged in patterns too geometric to be natural. Spirals. Interlocking circles. Rory recognised a few from the symbols Nyx had sketched for her on napkins at Silas's bar, basic ward configurations.
"Defensive garden."
"Ward garden," Nyx corrected. "Designed to slow anything with hostile intent. You're not feeling sluggish?"
"Should I be?"
"No. That's interesting."
The path, and it was a path now, flagstones of pale stone half-buried in moss, wound between the ward hedges and opened into a second clearing. This one was smaller, more intimate, ringed by standing stones of a different kind. Not oak trees disguised as pillars, but actual stones, waist-high, carved with script that moved when Rory looked at it directly. She'd learned that trick by now. Fae markings only held still in peripheral vision. Stare at them head-on and they slithered like eels.
At the centre of the clearing sat a well.
No bucket, no rope, no quaint little roof. Just a circle of pale stone rising knee-high from the earth, its interior dark and still. Rory approached it and looked over the rim. The water, if it was water, reflected nothing. Not her face, not the sourceless light above, not the purple wildflowers dotting the rim. It was the blackest surface she had ever seen, a hole cut into the fabric of the ground and filled with absence.
"Don't."
"I'm just looking."
"The well looks back."
She pulled away. Slowly, as if speed might offend it.
Something chimed. Not the ambient tone that permeated the Grove, but a bright, clear note, like someone striking a tuning fork against bone. It came from everywhere and nowhere, and when it faded, the silence that replaced it was different. Watchful.
A voice filled the clearing.
"The stone you wear was forged in fire that feeds on wanting." The words arrived without direction, without source, as if the copper-barked trees had learned to speak. "The blade you carry was made from grief pressed into metal. Together they sing a song I haven't heard in a hundred years."
Rory's hand moved to the leaf-shaped dagger at her hip. The Fae blade Isolde had given her through intermediaries, passed hand to hand through a chain of drops until it reached Nyx, who'd left it on her kitchen counter beside a note that read simply: *You'll need this soon.* The moonsilver felt like touching ice water, even through the sheath.
A figure stepped from between two standing stones, though *stepped * wasn't quite right. She was simply not there, and then she was, the way a memory surfaces without warning. Silver hair to her waist. Pale lavender eyes that held the unfocused quality of someone watching two things at once, one of them somewhere else entirely.
Isolde Varga left no footprints on the luminous grass.
"The Seer." Nyx's form flickered , a ripple of something Rory hadn't seen from them before. Deference, possibly. Their violet eyes dimmed.
"The Shadow." Isolde smiled. It reached exactly halfway up her face and stopped. "Still wearing Aldric's guilt, I see. It fits you poorly."
"We came for answers."
"Everyone does." Those lavender eyes shifted to Rory, and the sensation of being examined by them was physical, a pressure behind the forehead, like the onset of a migraine. "The Carter girl. You look like your grandmother."
Rory's mouth dried. "You knew my grandmother?"
"I know everyone's grandmother. That's the trouble with time, it moves in all directions when you stop pretending it doesn't."
Isolde circled the well, trailing her fingers along its rim. Where she touched, the black surface below rippled outward in concentric rings.
"Ask your question."
"The Veil's thinning. We've counted six rift points in South London alone in the past month. Something's pushing through."
"That's not a question."
Rory gritted her teeth. "What's pushing through?"
"Ah." Isolde stopped circling. The ripples in the well stilled. "That's the wrong one, but I'll allow it because you don't yet know the right one."
She pressed both palms flat against the well's rim. The black water, the not-water, surged upward in a smooth column, defying every law Rory had memorised and forgotten in Cardiff. It didn't splash or spill. It rose like smoke frozen in glass, and inside its darkness, shapes moved. A city Rory didn't recognise, bathed in warm amber light. Sprawling vineyards. Orchards laden with fruit that seemed to glow . Grand tables stretching the length of avenues, laden with food, and figures seated at them, eating, their faces blank, their hands moving mechanically from plate to mouth.
"Dymas," Nyx whispered.
"Dymas," Isolde confirmed. "And its prince grows hungry for more than what he has."
The column of black water twisted. The amber-lit feast hall dissolved, replaced by something closer, familiar . The Thames at night. Tower Bridge. And along the riverbank, hairline fractures in the air itself, barely visible, like scratches on glass, each one leaking a warm golden light that had no business existing in London.
"Belphegor's not pushing through." Isolde lifted her hands from the rim. The column collapsed back into the well without a sound. "He's being invited."
The pendant at Rory's throat blazed white-hot. She grabbed it, ready to rip the chain free, and froze. The crimson gemstone had changed. A sigil glowed inside it, visible through the facets, turning slowly like something submerged.
Isolde studied it with an expression Rory couldn't parse.
"You asked what's pushing through. The answer is: the one who gave you that."