AI
The pendant burned against Rory's collarbone the moment she stepped between the oaks.
Not the gentle warmth she'd grown accustomed to, that faint pulse like a second heartbeat whenever she passed too close to the wrong alley or the wrong door. This was different. The crimson stone flared hot enough to brand, then cooled so fast her teeth ached.
"You felt that," Nyx said. Not a question. Their voice slithered from everywhere and nowhere, a whisper dragged across glass.
"Hard to miss."
The standing stones rose on either side of a gap she could have sworn hadn't existed thirty seconds ago. Ancient oaks, but wrong. Their bark bore the texture of petrified wood, grey-white and smooth as bone, and they curved inward at the top like ribs. She counted seven. No, eight. The number kept slipping.
"Once you cross, the park won't remember you left." Nyx pooled at the base of the nearest stone, their shadow-form bleeding into the roots. Violet pinpricks of light studied her from the dark. "Time bends here. An hour, a minute, a week. No guarantees."
"Brilliant. Just what my delivery schedule needed."
She touched the Heartstone through her jacket. The silver chain had gone cold. Whatever had triggered the flare, it had passed, or it waited ahead. She adjusted the Fae blade at her hip, the moonsilver dagger Isolde had sent through channels Rory still didn't understand. A gift from a woman she'd never met, forged in courts she couldn't name. The blade's chill leaked through its leather sheath and numbed her thigh.
She stepped through.
Sound died first. The distant hum of the A307, the rustle of Richmond's ancient deer herds, a jogger's playlist bleeding from cheap earbuds, all of it collapsed into a silence so total her own breathing sounded obscene. Then the silence filled. Not with noise but with presence, the way a room feels different when someone stands behind you in the dark.
The grove opened ahead like a wound in the world.
Wildflowers carpeted the ground in impossible density, bluebells tangled with foxglove tangled with something she had no name for, something with petals the colour of a bruise that opened and closed in slow rhythm like sleeping mouths. The air tasted of honey and copper, sweet at first, then metallic at the back of her throat. Above, the canopy knitted so tight that no sky showed through, yet light poured down anyway, sourceless and golden-green, the light of a stained-glass window in a church that worshipped something older than God.
Nyx materialised beside her, their silhouette sharper here, more defined. The shadows that composed their form moved with a strange fluidity, as though the grove's odd light gave them better substance.
"You look more solid."
"I feel more solid." They flexed a hand, and Rory caught the suggestion of individual fingers for the first time, long and elegant, the hands of the sorcerer they'd once been. "This place sits between. Closer to the spaces I inhabit."
"Closer to the place that trapped you, you mean."
The violet lights flickered . "Proximity to a cage doesn't make one caged."
She let it go. Nyx's history was their own, and she'd learned fast that pressing a being of living shadow for emotional honesty yielded nothing but cold shoulders, literally.
They moved deeper. The flowers shifted colour as she passed, not dramatically, not the way things changed in films, but subtly, the way a mood changes in a room when one person stops smiling. Blues bled toward violet. Whites took on the faintest green. And the bruise-coloured ones, those nameless breathing blossoms, they turned to follow her.
"Don't touch those," Nyx said.
"Wasn't planning on it."
"Good. They digest."
The path, if she could call it that, wound between trees that grew at angles no earthly oak would tolerate. One trunk spiralled like a corkscrew, its bark riddled with knotholes that leaked something luminous and viscous. Another had split down the centre and grown around a stone the size of a coffin, swallowing it half into heartwood. Moss covered everything in thick green pelts, and beneath the moss, when her boot scuffed it aside by accident, she saw carvings. Spirals. Concentric circles. Symbols that tugged at something behind her eyes, not pain but recognition, the sense that she'd seen this alphabet before in a dream she couldn't retrieve.
"Nyx."
"I see them."
"What language is that?"
"Older than language. The Fae didn't write words. They wrote intentions." The shadow knelt, or approximated kneeling, their form pooling lower. "This one means boundary. And this," a dark finger traced a spiral that turned inward like a drain, "means consumption."
"That's comforting ."
"It isn't meant to be."
Something moved in the canopy. Rory's hand found the Fae blade's hilt, and the cold bit into her palm. She tracked the motion, a ripple in the leaves, too large for a bird, too fluid for a squirrel. It circled overhead, then stopped directly above them.
Silence.
A flower fell from the canopy. One of the bruise-coloured ones. It drifted down with the lazy certainty of a thing that knew exactly where it wanted to land and settled on the moss two feet from Rory's boot. Its petals opened.
Inside, where a stamen should have been, sat an eye. Pale lavender.
It blinked.
"She knows we're here," Nyx said.
"I gathered." Rory crouched, studying the eye-flower. The iris contracted as she leaned closer. Intelligent. Amused, even. "Isolde, I presume?"
The eye closed. The petals folded shut. And along the path ahead, a chain of identical flowers bloomed in sequence, one after another, a trail of bruised lanterns leading deeper into the grove. Each one opened as the last one closed, a breadcrumb trail made of living tissue and someone else's sight.
"She wants us to follow."
"Observation of the century, Nightwhisper."
"Don't call me that."
They followed the flowers. The grove grew denser, the air thicker, and the light shifted from golden-green to something closer to amber, the colour of the Dymasian sky she'd seen in dreams she was no longer sure were dreams. The Heartstone pulsed once, faintly, and she pressed her palm against it. Warm. Not hot. A greeting, not a warning.
The trees opened without warning into a clearing. A perfect circle, as though someone had pressed a vast glass into the forest and lifted it clean. Wildflowers ringed the perimeter in rings of descending colour, red to orange to gold to white, and at the centre stood a table carved from a single stump, wide as a dining table and polished to a dark mirror sheen. Objects cluttered its surface: clay bowls, dried herbs, a cracked hourglass, a bird skull with gilded teeth, and a hand-drawn map pinned beneath a stone that glowed with its own faint inner light.
And behind the table, cross-legged on the moss, sat a woman who left no mark upon the ground where she rested.
Silver hair pooled around her like spilled mercury. She wore a dress of something that might have been silk but moved like water, grey and shifting. Her skin held no lines, no blemishes, nothing to anchor her face to any particular decade or century, and her eyes, when she raised them, matched the ones in the flowers. Pale lavender, ancient, and lit with the amused patience of someone who'd been waiting three hundred years and found the delay mildly entertaining.
"The pendant brought you," she said. Her voice carried the cadence of a nursery rhyme, singsong and deliberate. "Or you brought the pendant. The distinction matters less than you think and more than you'd like."
"Isolde Varga?"
"A name I've worn. Sit."
Rory didn't sit. "You sent me a blade."
"I sent a blade to the place it needed to be. You happened to be standing there." Isolde's gaze drifted to Nyx. Something in her expression shifted, recognition sliding beneath her ageless composure like a fish beneath ice. "Aldric."
The temperature plummeted. Nyx's form went rigid, edges hardening to obsidian.
"That name died in 1643."
"Names don't die. They hibernate." Isolde rose in a single motion, no hands, no leverage, simply upright where she had been seated . Her bare feet pressed the moss, and the moss bore no impression. "You've come because the Veil thins. Because the pendant burns. Because something stirs in Dymas that shouldn't stir, and you, girl from Cardiff with law books and bruises, you feel it in the crescent on your wrist."
Rory's left hand closed on instinct, hiding the small scar.
"How do you know about that?"
"I see what the world intends to hide. It is the reason my kin cast me out and the reason you stand in my grove." Isolde circled the stump-table and picked up the glowing stone, lifting it to the light like a jeweller inspecting a gem. "Your pendant came from Dymas. Belphegor's domain. Feasts and excess and hunger that never ends. Someone wanted you to carry a piece of Hel against your heart."
"Who?"
"The wrong question." Isolde set the stone down and fixed Rory with those ancient lavender eyes. "Ask instead: what hatches when a Heartstone warms?"
A sound split the grove. Not a crack or a rumble but a vibration that bypassed the ears entirely and struck the bones, the ribs, the marrow. Rory's pendant blazed white-hot and she ripped it from beneath her shirt on instinct, holding it at arm's length. The crimson gem had changed. A fracture ran through its centre, hairline thin, and from the fracture bled light the colour of amber.
The colour of a Dymasian sky.
Isolde's composure broke for the first time. Her lips parted. Her hands, steady for three centuries, trembled .
"It's already begun."
The ground beneath the clearing shuddered, and every flower in the grove closed at once.