AI “Stop pulling, it bites.”
Aurora jerked her hand back as a thorned vine snapped where her fingers had been. The branch recoiled with a wet hiss and slid into the ring of ancient oak stones ahead, as if the grove itself had taken offence at being manhandled . Beside her, Nyx lengthened out of the shade under a leaning yew, violet eyes faint in the dark of their face.
“I did say the boundary dislikes impatience.”
“You said, ‘Mind the green bits.’ That’s not a warning, that’s gardening advice.”
Aurora rubbed her stinging knuckles against her coat and stared through the stone ring. On the other side, the clearing in Richmond Park had folded into something else. Wildflowers still crowded the grass, but they no longer grew in any season she knew. Glassy blue foxgloves chimed without wind. White roses opened and shut like slow mouths. Beyond them, trees rose in impossible layers, silver bark under black bark under bark that shone like old pearl. Paths crossed and recrossed each other, then vanished when she looked at them straight on.
No footprints marked the moss before Isolde.
The seer stood within the ring of oaks in a gown the colour of bruised lilac. Her silver hair hung to her waist, untroubled by the snapping vines, the twitching roots, the long grass that leaned away from her. She held one pale hand out, not in welcome, not quite, more like she invited a wager.
“The first step belongs to the truthful,” she said. “The second to the hungry. The third to the one already half lost.”
Aurora exhaled through her nose. “Right. Obvious as ever.”
Nyx tilted their head.
“She means you should go first.”
“That’s not better.”
“It is accurate.”
Aurora touched the Heartstone Pendant through her shirt. The deep crimson gem had been warm all afternoon, a pulse against her sternum that had grown stronger with every turn through the park. Now it throbbed like a second heart. Not Hel, then, not exactly, but near enough to a seam in the Veil to wake whatever lived inside the stone.
She looked from the pendant’s faint glow through the fabric to Isolde’s unreadable face.
“If this place spits me out a week from now,” Aurora said, “I’m billing you.”
“Time has teeth here,” Isolde said. “Enter before it chews another shape.”
Aurora stepped through the stones.
Cold licked her boots first. Then her knees buckled as the ground dipped and rose in the same breath. She caught herself on a trunk smooth as polished bone. The air tasted sweet, then metallic, then sweet again, as if someone kept changing the world in secret between one blink and the next. Sound bent with it. Somewhere nearby, water ran uphill. Farther off, a bird sang with too many notes, each one hanging in the air after the next began.
Nyx flowed across the boundary rather than walked. Their edges frayed for a moment, shadow thinning to smoke before thickening again.
Isolde came last, and the grove sealed behind them with a soft crackle. The oak stones did not vanish. They merely stood farther away than they should have, half veiled by fern and luminous mist.
Aurora turned once, measuring distance by habit. “That’s already wrong.”
“Only if you worship straight lines,” said Isolde.
“Straight lines built London.”
“And graves.”
That shut her up for three steps.
The path beneath them had not been there when Aurora first looked. It gleamed faintly, a pale ribbon pressed into dark moss. Tiny lights moved below its surface like trapped fish. On either side, flowers nodded on stems made of clear crystal . Some held liquid instead of petals, each blossom a trembling cup of colour. When Aurora passed too close, one tipped towards her and released a scent like burnt sugar and rosemary. Another smelt of wet stone and opened with a click.
She kept one hand near the leaf-shaped Fae-Forged Blade hidden inside her sleeve. The moonsilver dagger sat cold against her wrist, colder than the pendant was warm. Between the two, her body felt divided down the middle.
“So,” she said, keeping her voice light because the silence around them felt too attentive, “you exile yourself to a place where the shrubbery assaults people, time goes feral, and flowers smell like a witch’s pantry. You really know how to pick a neighbourhood.”
“This is not my grove today,” Isolde said. “It has turned its face.”
Nyx went still.
“From what?”
“From mercy.”
Aurora glanced at them both. “That sounds like the sort of thing one mentions before we come in.”
“You would have refused.”
“Fair point.”
The path curved around a pool no bigger than a dining table. Aurora stopped at once. The water showed no reflection. Not her black hair, not her bright blue eyes, not the pale slash of Isolde’s gown, not the moving silhouette of Nyx. It showed a sky of warm amber and the dark line of terraces climbing a distant hill.
Dymas.
She knew it from Yu-Fei’s stories traded over late kitchen clean-downs, from whispers in Silas’s bar, from the pendant itself, which now pulsed hard enough to hurt. Vineyards under an amber sky. Gluttony dressed as paradise.
“Don’t touch it,” Nyx said.
Aurora had not realised she was crouching until she felt the pull in her thighs. She straightened. “Wasn’t going to.”
The pool burped once. A ripe smell rolled out of it, figs split open in heat, wine, roasted meat, honey over smoke. Hunger hit with such force that Aurora’s mouth filled. Not simple appetite. A deep, old want. A need to kneel by the water and drink until the amber sky swallowed her whole.
Nyx’s hand, all cool dusk and sharpened absence, closed around her elbow.
“Look away.”
Aurora did. It took more effort than she liked.
“Convenient trick,” she muttered. “Show people what they crave, then drown them in it.”
“Not what they crave,” said Isolde. “What craves them.”
They moved on.
The deeper they went, the stranger scale became. Mushrooms taller than lampposts glimmered beneath drooping boughs. Their caps shone from within, revealing delicate veins like lungs. Tiny deer, no bigger than cats, watched from the roots with black, lidless eyes and antlers made of braided twigs. Once, Aurora heard children laughing just beyond the trees. She veered towards the sound before catching herself. The laughter turned brittle at once, too high, too many voices hitting the same note.
Nyx said nothing, but they shifted to block that way .
Ahead, the path narrowed between two standing walls of woven briars. Fine silver threads ran through the thorns, taut as harp strings. As Isolde passed, the briars sang. Not music, not quite. More like a memory of music, heard through stone. Aurora felt it in her teeth.
“Those are new,” Nyx whispered.
“You say that as if the murderous singing hedge should reassure me.”
“It means the grove anticipates guests.”
“It hates us artistically. Marvellous.”
At the end of the briar corridor, the world opened.
Aurora halted with a sharp breath.
A vast hollow spread before them, too large to fit inside the boundaries of any London park. Trees circled it in terraces, roots braided into balconies and bridges. At the centre stood a lake suspended in the air, a perfect sphere of dark water hanging above the ground. Silver streams lifted from the earth into it rather than fell from it, ropes of water climbing in silence . Within the sphere, shapes turned slowly , pale fish the length of wolves, and larger things below them that never quite rose near the surface.
All around the hollow, bells hung from branches. Thousands. Bone bells, glass bells, hammered copper bells green with age. None moved. Yet a low chiming filled the air, not from the bells themselves but from the space between them .
For one long moment, none of them spoke.
Aurora felt awe first. Clean and sharp, almost childish. Then the unease came after, crawling up behind it. Places this beautiful never stayed kind for long.
“What is this?” she asked.
Isolde’s gaze rested on the floating lake. “A place that remembers doors.”
“Helpful.”
“A wound healed badly,” Nyx said. Their whisper had roughened. “The Veil thinned here long before your city laid its first stone. Fae. Hel. Mortal dreams. They bled into one another, then crusted over. Most crossings rot. This one learned to sing.”
Aurora looked at them. “You’ve been here before.”
“Near it. Never within.”
That, more than the impossible lake, sent a tight shiver down her back. Nyx, ageless thing of shadow and thresholds, sounded wary.
As they descended the nearest root stair, the bells changed tone. Several turned their mouths towards Aurora though no hand touched them. One clear bell rang with a note like struck ice. Another answered in a thick copper groan. Her pendant flared hot enough to burn through cloth.
She hissed and pulled it free. The deep crimson stone blazed in her palm, bright threads moving within the gem like blood in a capillary.
Isolde’s eyes narrowed . “It has chosen to answer.”
“To what?”
Before she finished, one of the silver streams feeding the suspended lake darkened. Amber bled through it. Not water now, but liquid light . A smell rose from below, rich and overripe. Fermented fruit. Spice. Fat hitting coals. The same Dymasian lure from the pool, magnified until it coated the back of Aurora’s throat.
The bells nearest that stream began to toll.
Not softly . Not sweetly . They clanged in jagged bursts that shook bark from the trees. The tiny deer vanished into the roots. The crystal flowers along the path snapped shut. Across the hollow, the air tore open in a vertical shimmer, a wound of amber light edged in soot-black fire.
Aurora drew the Fae-Forged Blade in one smooth motion. Cold raced up her arm.
“That’s not a metaphor, is it?”
“No,” Nyx said.
Shapes moved behind the tear in the Veil. Broad shoulders. Horns, or hooked helmets, hard to tell through the distortion. One hand reached through first, clawed and ringed in gold, and gripped the edge of the rift as if it were fabric.
Isolde stepped forward, silver hair lifting though no wind touched the grove.
“The hungry have found the table,” she said.
The claw tore the opening wider.