AI The standing stones did not stand so much as lean in, old oak slabs bent towards one another like elders sharing a secret over Rory’s head.
She stopped at the gap between them.
Richmond Park lay behind them in a wash of grey afternoon light, bare branches and damp grass, a dog barking somewhere far off. Ahead, the air quivered . Not heat. Not mist. A thin, glassy tremor that warped the trunks beyond it until they looked painted on water.
The Heartstone pendant rested against her sternum, warm through her jumper. Not hot. A pulse . Slow. Watchful.
Eva drew up beside her and shoved both hands into her coat pockets.
“It still looked smaller in my head.”
Rory glanced over. “A doorway?”
“A forbidden magical doorway in a park, yeah.”
Silas gave a low grunt behind them. “You can still turn back.”
That almost made Rory laugh. Almost. She kept her eyes on the shimmer between the stones.
“You first, then.”
Silas’s mouth twitched. He rolled one shoulder as if easing a knot, then stepped through.
The Veil took him without drama. One moment he filled the gap, broad and dark in his black coat. The next he blurred, stretched thin like ink pulled through water, and vanished.
Eva swore under her breath.
Rory touched the crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb. A habit she hated because it only showed when her nerves got a grip on her. Then she looked at Isolde.
The seer stood a few feet away, silver hair hanging straight to her waist, pale lavender eyes fixed somewhere past the stones, past the trees, past the three of them. The winter mud left no mark under her boots.
“You didn’t mention the bit where people smear apart,” Eva muttered.
“The grove swallowed no one who belonged to their own step.”
“That clears nothing up,” Rory said.
Isolde smiled as if that had been the point. “The path opens for those willing to be changed by seeing.”
“Useful.” Eva exhaled through her nose. “Right. Fine.”
Nyx waited in the shadow of a twisted hawthorn, taller than the rest of them, shape held together by dim violet eyes and the suggestion of shoulders and hands. The wind passed through them and brought back a whisper .
“It is thinner today.”
Rory’s fingers closed around the pendant. “Because of the Veil?”
Nyx tipped their head. “Because this place remembers other worlds.”
That answer settled in her stomach like a stone and a spark at once.
She stepped forward before she could talk herself out of it.
Cold passed over her skin first, sharp enough to lift every hair on her arms. Then warmth flooded in beneath it, deep and sweet, with the smell of crushed green things and rain on hot stone, and the ground lurched under her feet as if she had missed a stair.
She stumbled out the other side.
The breath left her.
The grove did not look hidden. It looked impossible.
The clearing spread wider than the park had any right to hold, a bowl of luminous green beneath a sky washed in pearl and pale gold. No sun sat above them, yet light poured from everywhere at once, caught in the long blades of grass, in the silver undersides of leaves, in drifts of white blossoms floating through the air without wind enough to carry them.
The trees around the clearing rose in shapes no earthly tree would permit. Some twisted up in smooth spirals, bark gleaming blue-black like wet slate. Others spread branches that shone like antlers cast in old silver, each twig hung with glass-clear fruit through which tiny motes of light drifted. Wildflowers crowded the ground in colours Rory had no names for—petals that shifted from lilac to copper when she blinked, bells of translucent green, little stars the colour of moonlit milk.
A stream crossed the clearing ahead, narrow and bright. It ran uphill.
Eva came through the Veil with a yelp and collided with Rory’s shoulder.
“Oh, that is wrong,” she breathed, staring at the water climbing over polished stones. “That is deeply wrong.”
Silas followed with more dignity, though his hand went at once to the knife hidden under his coat. His eyes tracked the tree line, the stream, the air itself.
Nyx did not enter so much as gather from the shadows between the stones and the roots nearby, their form knitting together with a rustle like pages turned in another room. The dim violet of their eyes brightened.
Even Isolde looked touched by the place, though perhaps it had always touched her. Her face softened; the hard edge of exile slipped.
“Walk lightly ,” she said. “The grove notices greed.”
Eva looked down at her boots. “I’ve got bus fare and half a packet of mints. It can relax.”
Rory took a step and felt the grass bend under her soles with a faint musical note, not a squeak or rustle but a struck-glass tone that faded into the air. She froze.
Eva stared. “Did you hear that?”
Silas shifted his weight . Another note answered, lower this time.
They all stood still.
Around them, the clearing listened. Then, one by one, the flowers nearest their feet chimed back in soft, uneven tones until the grass held a scattered melody.
Rory let out a slow breath. “So we’re walking on an instrument.”
“Of course we are,” Eva said. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
Nyx turned their head towards the trees. “It measures intent.”
“That sounds cheerful,” Silas muttered.
Rory crouched and brushed her fingers near a cluster of star-white flowers. The petals folded inward from her touch, then opened again around a bead of liquid light sitting in the centre like dew. It reflected her eye back at her, bright blue and warped.
“Don’t take anything,” Isolde said.
“I wasn’t.”
The seer’s gaze slid to Eva, who removed her hand from a low branch with a look of pure offence.
“I wasn’t either.”
They moved deeper into the grove.
The edge of the clearing gave way to a path that appeared only while they looked at it, woven from pale roots just beneath the moss. On either side, ferns taller than Rory’s waist unfurled as they passed, their fronds lined beneath with flickering gold. The air changed every few yards. One stretch held the clean bite of frost and made her breath fog. The next brushed her cheeks with summer warmth and the smell of ripe peaches. Somewhere above, unseen creatures sang in layered notes too precise for birds and too wild for any instrument she knew.
The deeper they went, the less Earth clung to the place.
A cluster of stones rose on the left, each one balanced on its point, turning by fractions though no hand touched them. A pond appeared to their right, black and still, its surface reflecting not the pearl-gold sky above but a field of stars wheeling in a dark violet night . Eva crouched at the edge and leaned over.
“That’s not ours.”
“No,” Isolde replied.
Eva looked up. “Whose?”
“The pond keeps its own company.”
“That’s infuriating.”
Rory smiled despite herself and then lost it when the water rippled.
Not from the surface. From below. As if something vast had turned in its sleep under those stars.
“Move,” Silas said at once.
Eva moved.
They left the pond behind.
Soon the trees grew close enough to knit a canopy overhead. Light dripped through in pale shafts. Thin threads hung between branches, silver at first glance, then shifting to reveal themselves as strands of water suspended in the air. Tiny fish swam through them, no longer than Rory’s little finger, scales flashing pink and blue. One darted close to her face and she flinched.
Eva laughed, quick and breathless. “Flying fish. Brilliant. Horrid. Both.”
Nyx lifted one shadowed hand. A fish paused before their palm, turning in place as though curious. Its body shone clear for a beat, revealing a tiny skeleton made of light, then it flicked away into the stream-thread and vanished into the leaves.
Rory looked at Nyx. “You know this place?”
“I know places that forgot the border between thought and soil.”
“That was nearly a sentence.”
Their whisper carried what might have been amusement. “Careful. Wonder makes mortals bold.”
They came to an arch formed from the roots of two enormous trees grown together overhead. Beyond it, the grove opened again, but not into a clearing. Into a hall.
Rory stopped dead.
Trunks the width of cottages rose in ordered rows, their bark pale as old bone, smooth and faintly luminous. Their crowns spread so high she could not see where they ended. Between them hung lantern-like pods, each one the size of a lantern indeed, glowing from within in shades of amber, rose, and cool white. The ground beneath the trees had no grass. It held a floor of dark moss soft as piled velvet , patterned with veins of silver that flowed in slow pulses underfoot.
At the centre of the hall stood a ring of shallow stone basins. Water hovered above each basin in perfect spheres, turning without spilling. Inside the spheres moved images—hands, faces, storms, a tower with no door, a fox running through snow with fire in its mouth.
Eva walked a pace forward before checking herself. “That’s…”
“Not for us,” Isolde said.
Rory did not move. The silver veins under the moss matched the beat of the Heartstone at her chest. She slipped her fingers beneath her collar and drew the pendant into view.
Its deep crimson glow had sharpened. Warmth spread across her palm.
Silas saw it and swore.
“You said this was Fae-touched.”
“It is,” Isolde answered.
“That thing’s reacting.”
“The worlds do not stop at their own fences.”
The silver veins in the moss brightened. Across the hall, one of the hovering water-spheres shook. The image inside it broke apart into crimson threads.
Rory closed her fist over the pendant. Heat bit her skin now.
“Isolde.”
The seer’s face had gone still in a way Rory had learned to dislike.
“Put it away.”
“It was under my jumper.”
“Hide it from the hall.”
Rory shoved the pendant back beneath the fabric. The heat remained. The crimson threads in the nearest sphere did not vanish. They curled and spun faster, gathering into the shape of an archway rimmed in black stone. Beyond it, for one flashing second, she saw a sky of warm amber and long terraces heavy with vines.
Dymas.
The image snapped away.
Silas moved in front of Rory on instinct, half a shield, half a barricade. “What did it see?”
Eva had gone pale under the colour in her cheeks. “Tell me I imagined that.”
“No,” Nyx whispered.
The pods overhead dimmed. Then brightened. Then dimmed again, as though the hall had blinked.
Something passed between the farthest trunks.
Not a body. The absence of one. A seam in the light, tall and narrow, gliding from one row to the next.
Rory felt the hairs rise along the back of her neck. “Did anyone else—”
“Yes,” Silas cut in.
Eva took one step closer to Rory. “I hate this bit.”
Isolde did not look frightened. She looked attentive, which often proved worse.
“The grove asks who knocks with a borrowed heart.”
Rory stared at her. “That’s aimed at me, I assume.”
“The hall rarely wasted a question.”
Another seam slid through the trees, closer now. The lantern-pods nearest it guttered to blue-white. The silver lines in the moss drew together like filings pulled by a magnet, all of them bending, inch by inch, towards Rory’s boots.
The air thickened. Not hot, not cold. Dense. As if the whole hall held one breath and had not chosen whether to keep it.
Rory dragged the Fae-forged blade from inside her coat. The moonsilver dagger came free with a low, clean whisper . Cold rushed into her grip. Its leaf-shaped edge caught the strange light and answered with its own pale glow.
Eva looked at the knife, then at the moving dark between the trunks.
“Well,” she said, voice thin and steady at once . “That feels like a bad sign.”
Nyx’s violet eyes fixed on the seam in the light. Their shape loosened at the edges, shadow spilling along the moss.
“It comes to inspect.”
Silas planted his feet. “Can it be killed?”
Isolde tilted her head, listening to something none of them heard.
The seam stopped three rows away.
The nearest water-sphere burst without sound, its contents hanging in the air as bright droplets, each one holding a different image of Rory’s face—older, younger, bloodied, laughing, asleep, furious, crowned with thorns, wreathed in amber fire, standing in darkness with the crimson pendant at her throat.
Eva made a small, sharp noise.
Rory tightened her grip on the dagger until the cold burned.
The droplets trembled between her and the waiting dark.