AI The air in Richmond Park held the damp chill of a London afternoon, the sky a flat, uniform grey. Rory pulled her jacket tighter, the small crescent scar on her wrist itching beneath her sleeve. Nyx moved beside her, their form a solid silhouette of shadow that seemed to drink the light from the overcast day . Isolde walked ahead, her silver hair a beacon against the dull greens and browns of the winter park. She left no footprints in the mud.
“The threshold is not a place, but a moment,” Isolde said, her voice like wind through dry leaves. She stopped before a copse of ancient oaks that looked no different from any other. “A breath held between heartbeats.”
Rory scanned the trees. “I don’t see anything.”
“You are looking with your eyes.” Isolde raised a hand, and the air before her shimmered , a faint distortion like heat haze off asphalt. The outline of massive, rough-hewn stones resolved within the shimmer, standing in a rough circle amongst the oaks. They were not of any stone Rory knew; they looked like petrified wood, deep grey and striated, crowned with moss and ivy.
Nyx’s whisper came from right beside her ear, though they hadn’t moved. “The Veil is thin here. It sings.”
Rory felt it then—a subtle pressure in her ears, a low hum just below hearing. The Heartstone Pendant against her chest remained inert, a cool weight . This was not a door to Hel.
“Follow closely,” Isolde instructed, and she stepped between two of the monoliths.
The world did not tear or twist. It simply changed. One moment, the damp chill of an English park. The next, a warmth that held no source, and a light that came from everywhere and nowhere. The hum escalated into a chorus of whispers, then faded to a background sigh.
Rory stumbled forward, Nyx a steadying presence at her elbow. They stood in a clearing, but it was a clearing that defied reason. The sky above was not sky, but a canopy of intertwined branches so vast they blotted out any concept of ceiling, glowing with a soft, bioluminescent moss that cast everything in a perpetual twilight. The air was thick, sweet, and heavy with the scent of blooming things—jasmine, honeysuckle, and stranger, spicier notes.
“Where are the standing stones?” Rory’s own voice sounded muffled, absorbed by the dense air.
“Behind us,” Nyx murmured. Their violet eyes glowed brighter in the gloom . “They are a frame. The painting is within.”
The ground underfoot was springy with moss and fallen petals. Wildflowers bloomed in impossible profusion—velvet blossoms in shades of indigo and silver, bell-shaped flowers that chimed softly when a breeze Rory couldn’t feel passed through them. There was no wind, yet the leaves in the distant canopy rustled with a sound like distant conversation.
Isolde had walked ahead, her pale lavender eyes scanning the grove with a familiar , weary affection . “Time here is a river with many currents. Do not wander far.”
Rory moved forward, drawn to a cluster of the chiming flowers. She reached out, but hesitated an inch from the silver petals.
“Go on,” Isolde said, not turning . “They will not harm you. They remember the touch of curiosity.”
Rory’s fingertip brushed the cool, metallic surface. The chime it produced was clear and pure, a single note that hung in the air and seemed to pull an answer from a flower deeper in the grove. A soft, blue light pulsed once within the blossom.
“They communicate,” Nyx observed, gliding past her. Their shadowy form seemed more substantial here, the edges less defined, as if the grove’s magic was feeding them. “Light and sound. A simple language.”
The discovery sent a thrill through Rory, a scientist’s excitement cutting through the wonder. She looked around with new eyes. The grove wasn’t just beautiful; it was intelligent. The patterns in the moss, the arrangement of the trees, the way the light shifted—it all felt deliberate.
They walked deeper. The glowing moss provided enough light to see, but it created pools of illumination and canyons of deep shadow. From those shadows, things moved. Not creatures, precisely . More like suggestions of motion—a swirl of darker air, a flicker at the corner of the eye. Rory’s hand went to the leaf-shaped dagger at her belt, the Fae-Forged Blade Isolde had given her. The moonsilver hilt was cold, a comforting shock against her palm.
“They are watchers,” Isolde said, answering the unspoken question. “Echoes of those who have passed through and left a piece of their wonder behind. They are harmless. Mostly.”
The ‘mostly’ did nothing for Rory’s nerves. The unease was a cold thread in the warm, scented air. It was the silence between the chimes. The feeling of being studied by the very landscape.
They came to a small, still pool. The water was black as obsidian, yet it reflected the glowing canopy above with perfect , mirror clarity. Rory knelt at its edge. Her reflection looked back, but her eyes in the water were not her bright blue. They were pale lavender, like Isolde’s. She jerked back.
“The water shows not what is, but what might be,” Isolde said from behind her . “Or what once was. It is seldom clear.”
Nyx flowed to the pool’s opposite edge and crouched, their reflection a void of deeper darkness. “I see nothing. This place has no claim on my past… or my future.”
“You are a creature of between,” Isolde acknowledged. “The water has no anchor for you.”
Rory stood, tearing her gaze from the deceptive pool. “Why are we here, Isolde? You said you had something to show us. A truth.”
“I said the grove had truths to tell. I am merely the guide.” The seer pointed a slender finger toward a great tree at the center of the clearing. It was an oak, but of a size that made the ancient trees of Richmond Park look like saplings. Its trunk was gnarled and twisted, and in its bark, faces seemed to form and dissolve—not human faces, but expressions of wood and leaf and time. Roots like great serpents breached the mossy floor, creating arches and tunnels.
As they approached, the light changed. The soft glow from above concentrated, beams of luminescence spearing down to illuminate specific spots: a root curled like a bench, a flat stone before the tree, a hollow in the trunk at eye level.
“It remembers,” Isolde whispered, and for the first time, her voice held something like awe . “Every visitor, every secret whispered, every tear shed. The memory is in the wood, in the light, in the air.”
Rory reached the hollow in the trunk. Inside, resting on a bed of fresh, green moss, was a simple circlet of woven willow. It was old, dry, but intact. Without thinking, she reached for it.
The moment her fingers touched the withered wood, the grove vanished.
She stood in the same clearing, but the light was different—golden, dappled, like a summer afternoon. The tree behind her was younger, less burdened. A woman sat on the root-bench, her head bowed, weeping silently. She wore a dress of simple linen, and the willow circlet was fresh and green upon her brow. A man, his features blurred as if seen through fog, stood before her, speaking words Rory could not hear. He placed something in the woman’s hand—a small, rough gem that flashed crimson. Then he turned and walked away, dissolving into the trees. The woman clenched the gem in her fist, her weeping turning to something harder, colder. She removed the circlet and placed it gently in the hollow of the tree.
The vision snapped away. Rory gasped, stumbling back from the tree, the ancient circlet crumbling to dust between her fingers. The grove was once again the twilight place of soft glows and whispering shadows.
“What did you see?” Nyx was at her side instantly, their cool, shadowy hand on her arm.
“A woman. A gift. A heartbreak.” Rory’s voice was shaky. The Heartstone Pendant now felt warm against her skin, a deep, rhythmic pulse . She looked down at it, the crimson gem glowing with an inner light that matched the flash in her vision. “She was given a stone. Like this one.”
Isolde’s lavender eyes were wide. “The grove does not often share such clear memories. You touched a thread of its history. A moment of binding.”
“Binding to what?”
Before Isolde could answer, a deep, resonant chime echoed through the grove, not from the flowers, but from the great tree itself . The beams of light shifted, sliding away from them, pointing like accusing fingers toward the way they had come.
“The current shifts,” Isolde said, her ageless face tightening . “Our time here is ending. The grove reminds us we are guests.”
The sense of unease crystallized into urgency. The welcoming, wondrous atmosphere hadn’t vanished, but it had grown watchful, impatient. The shadows between the trees seemed deeper, the chiming of the flowers more insistent.
“We must leave the same way we entered,” Isolde said, already moving back toward the direction of the standing stones. “Now.”
Rory cast one last look at the monumental tree, the faces in its bark now still and solemn. She turned, the pulsing warmth of the Heartstone a constant beat against her chest, and followed Isolde into the dappled, deceptive twilight, Nyx flowing silently in her wake.