AI The standing stones did not look ancient from a distance. They looked abandoned.
Grey oak trunks, stripped and hardened into pillars, leaned in a ring between the bracken and the winter-thin trees of Richmond Park. Moss climbed their cracks. Deer tracks cut the mud around them. A dog barked somewhere far off, then the sound bent out of shape, stretched thin, and vanished.
Aurora stopped short.
“That’s it?”
Eva snorted behind her.
“You expected fireworks?”
“I expected more than dead wood.”
Nyx stood half in the shade of a yew, their outline leaking into the dusk. Their violet eyes fixed on the stones, then on the air between them, where nothing showed at first except a faint twitch in the light.
“It opened already.”
The whisper of their voice brushed the back of Aurora’s neck. She rubbed her arms through her jacket and stepped closer.
The Heartstone pendant rested under her jumper, warm against her chest. Not hot. Just enough to feel awake.
Isolde moved ahead without a sound. Her silver hair caught what little light remained, though the clouds had smothered the moon. She passed between two of the standing stones and did not leave so much as a mark in the soft earth.
“The door has no hunger for the doubtful,” she murmured. “Come with your fear in your hand, not on your back.”
Eva folded her arms.
“She always talk like that?”
Aurora glanced at her.
“You came anyway.”
“I came because you said shadow-creature and murder-grove in the same sentence.”
Nyx turned their head.
“Unkind.”
“Accurate.”
Aurora breathed out a laugh, thin and brief, then stepped up to the ring.
From this close, the space between the stones looked wrong. The air held a sheen like oil on water, but silver, not rainbow. It quivered when she leaned in. Her own reflection flashed back at her for a heartbeat, warped and pale, then slid sideways into something else. Trees under a green-gold sky. Flowers opening in darkness. A hand that might have been hers, covered in glittering pollen.
She jerked back.
“You saw it too?” Eva asked.
“You didn’t?”
Eva’s face lost some of its colour.
“Right. Brilliant.”
Isolde lifted one elegant hand and touched the air. Rings spread from her fingertips with no water there to carry them. The shimmer widened until it stretched between the stones like glass breathed into shape.
“The Grove keeps its own clock,” Isolde said. “If you hear bells, do not count them. If you meet yourself on the path, do not answer. If the flowers ask your name, lie.”
Eva stared.
“Flowers ask names?”
“They have excellent manners,” Isolde replied.
Aurora slipped a hand under her jumper and closed her fingers around the Heartstone pendant. Warmth climbed into her palm.
“After you,” Eva muttered.
“No chance.”
Nyx drifted forward first. One moment they stood in solid shape, all dark edges and tall limbs; the next, they thinned and flowed through the silver barrier like ink through water. The shimmer barely disturbed.
Eva looked at Aurora.
“If I come out with antlers, I’m blaming you.”
“You’d wear them well.”
“That wasn’t comfort.”
Aurora drew a breath and stepped through.
Cold touched her face first. Not winter cold. Riverbed cold. The sort that slid between skin and bone. Then the ground tipped, though her feet stayed planted, and a burst of scent hit her so hard she shut her eyes—wet leaves, crushed mint, blossom, rain on stone, smoke from some spice she could not name.
When she opened them again, Richmond Park had gone.
The clearing stretched wider than it had any right to. The standing stones now rose like cathedral pillars, their oak surfaces threaded with pale sap that glowed beneath the bark. Wildflowers crowded the ground in impossible colour—blue so deep it bled toward black, white petals with silver veins, red bells shaped like drops of wax. Trees ringed the place, though no trunks stood straight. They curved around one another in arches and spirals, their branches woven with strands of light that swayed without wind.
Above them hung a sky the colour of pearl inside a shell. No sun. No moon. The light came from everywhere and nowhere.
Eva walked through a second later and stumbled into Aurora’s shoulder.
“Christ.”
Her voice came back altered, as if a choir had whispered the last inch of every word.
Aurora turned slowly . Beyond the clearing, paths split through the flowers, each one edged with stones that glimmered under moss. She could hear water in the distance, and birdsong, though no birds flew overhead. Somewhere deeper in the Grove, something laughed. The sound rang like glass tapped with a fingernail.
Nyx had taken solid form again. In this place, their edges looked less stable. Shadows peeled from their arms and slipped across the ground ahead of them, then curled back.
“The barrier is thin here,” they murmured. “Not torn. Woven.”
Aurora crouched and touched one of the flowers nearest her boot. Its petals folded around her finger with a pulse like muscle.
She snatched her hand away.
Eva made a noise low in her throat.
“No. Don’t touch anything. Rule one of enchanted forests.”
“Bit late for rules,” Aurora said, but she wiped her finger on her jeans all the same.
A line of tiny gold insects drifted past at eye level. Their bodies looked like flecks shaved from coins, their wings clear as soap film. They left a soft chiming in the air.
Isolde stood in the centre of the clearing and watched them with pale lavender eyes.
“You walk where roots remember old bargains,” she said. “Mind where you place your promises.”
Eva leaned toward Aurora.
“I miss London already.”
Aurora’s hand found the crescent scar on her left wrist, thumb brushing the old ridge as she surveyed the paths.
“Which way?”
Isolde smiled, not kindly, not cruelly either. Like someone listening to a tune no one else could hear.
“The Grove shows the straight road to liars and the crooked road to the honest. We’ll take the one with teeth.”
She moved toward the narrowest path.
Eva let out a breath through her nose.
“Of course we would.”
They followed.
The flowers thinned after a few minutes, giving way to low ferns with fronds made of something almost metallic. They clicked against one another as the group passed, a dry, articulate sound, like fingernails drumming on a table. The air grew warmer. Aurora tasted sweetness on it, then bitterness beneath, a sharp edge that sat at the back of her tongue.
The path bent left and opened onto a stream.
Aurora stopped dead.
Water ran uphill.
It streamed over black stones in smooth ribbons, climbing a bank lined with luminous moss before vanishing into the roots of a white tree whose bark shone like bone under milk. Fish moved within the current, but they swam through air above the water, their translucent bodies lit from inside with pale green light.
Eva laughed once, breathless and unbelieving.
“Right. Fine. Why not.”
Aurora stepped closer to the stream. Her reflection did not match her movement. In the water, she stood still while her mirrored self looked over one shoulder, as if someone had called her name from behind.
She spun round.
No one.
Nyx had gone motionless. Their head tilted toward the tree.
“Do not drink.”
Aurora looked back.
She had not realised she had reached for the water until she saw her hand suspended above it. She pulled it back hard.
The tree’s branches shivered. Thin white leaves turned their silver undersides toward them all at once. A flock of tiny birds burst from the crown, though birds was the nearest word, not the right one. They had too many wings and no visible eyes. Their cries sounded like snippets of flute music broken into pieces.
Eva backed away from the stream.
“Did that thing just watch us?”
“Everything here watches,” Isolde answered.
“That wasn’t the reassuring option.”
Isolde knelt by the bank. The stream parted around her hand without wetting it. She traced two fingers above the current, and a pale image bloomed in the water: a road under London, old brick slick with damp, then a dark iron door marked with a symbol Aurora did not know. The image shivered and dissolved.
“The Grove remembers roads that should not meet,” Isolde said.
Aurora crouched beside her.
“That was in London.”
“London has cracks in its teeth.”
“That helps no one.”
“It helped me.”
Eva pointed at the water.
“You can do that the whole time and never thought to lead with it?”
Isolde rose in one fluid movement.
“Prophecy offered too early curdles into choice. Come.”
They left the stream behind. The path narrowed until the ferns brushed their knees. Every few steps, Aurora caught movement in the corners of her vision—faces in bark, eyes among the roots, a child darting behind a tree in a coat sewn from leaves. Each time she turned, she found only branches and flowers and the pale wash of the strange sky.
The sounds shifted too. The water faded. In its place came a murmur that might have been voices, too low to catch. Not speaking to them. Speaking around them.
Eva heard it as well. Aurora could tell from the way her shoulders crept up.
“You hear that?”
Nyx answered before Aurora could.
“Yes.”
“What are they saying?”
Nyx’s shape thinned at the edges.
“Not for mouths.”
That shut Eva up for a full ten seconds.
The path opened again without warning.
A meadow spread before them, ringed by standing stones smaller than the ones at the entrance. Wildflowers rose waist-high in drifts. In the centre stood a pool, perfectly round, its surface still as polished metal. Light gathered above it in slow-turning strands, braiding and unbraiding themselves. Each strand carried images inside it so quick Aurora barely caught them—a fox with antlers, a burning crown laid in snow, a hand made of roots, a feast under an amber sky where goblets overflowed and fruit split open under silver knives.
The Heartstone pendant flared warm against her skin.
Her hand flew to it.
Nyx looked at her chest.
“It knows that place.”
Aurora swallowed.
“Dymas.”
The word felt heavy here.
Eva shifted nearer.
“What did you see?”
“A table. Fruit. Gold, I think. Too fast.”
Isolde walked to the edge of the pool. No ripple touched the mirrored surface beneath her.
“Some realms shout. Some sing. Dymas licks its fingers and leaves grease on every threshold.”
Eva pulled a face.
“That’s revolting.”
“It was meant to be.”
Aurora stepped to the pool and looked down.
At first she saw only herself: black hair, bright blue eyes sharpened by the strange light, the line between her brows deeper than she remembered. Then the reflection changed. Not her face this time, but a city she did not know . Towers shaped like twisted horns rose under an amber sky. Gardens spilled from terraces in impossible abundance—grapes black as ink, figs split with crimson flesh, rivers of wine-dark water threading marble courtyards. Music carried over it all, rich and thick enough to taste.
The pendant pulsed once, hot.
She hissed and yanked it free of her jumper. The deep crimson gemstone glowed in her palm like banked coal.
Eva took one look and stepped back.
“That did not do that before.”
“No.”
Nyx came close, their shadow falling over the pool. The reflection of the amber city clouded.
“The Veil thins where realms recognise one another,” they said. “The Grove feels Hel through that stone.”
Aurora closed her hand around the pendant until the heat bit her skin.
“So this place can point us there?”
Isolde turned from the water.
“This place points nowhere. It opens what already leans.”
Eva gave a short, frustrated laugh.
“That sentence should be illegal.”
Before anyone answered, the murmur in the meadow thickened.
Aurora stiffened.
The flowers had begun to move.
Not with wind. There was no wind. Stem by stem, bloom by bloom, they angled toward the group. Hundreds of faces turned in silence . White petals, blue cups, red bells. All of them fixed on Aurora’s clenched fist .
A thin voice rose from somewhere near her boots.
“What is your name?”
Eva grabbed Aurora’s sleeve.
“Don’t.”
Another voice, high and clear as a child’s.
“What is your name?”
Then ten more, from all across the meadow.
“What is your name?”
The flowers trembled , eager. Their petals opened wider. In each dark centre sat not seeds but tiny wet mouths .
Aurora’s pulse slammed against her throat.
Isolde did not look surprised. Nyx’s shape spread across the grass like spilled ink.
Aurora drew a breath through her nose, tasting mint and iron and something rotten under the sweetness, and stared at the field of waiting mouths.