AI The standing stones in Richmond Park rose from the grass like old teeth, oak-dark and split with age. Moss packed their cracks. White flowers climbed the lower halves in thick ropes, though frost silvered the field beyond them.
Aurora stopped a pace short of the circle.
Her Heartstone pendant pressed heat into her skin, one slow pulse after another, as if something on the other side kept a giant buried heart. She hooked a finger under the silver chain and pulled it off her throat for a second. The crimson stone glowed through her knuckles.
“That’s never done that this hard before.”
Nyx stood beside her, a tall cut of darkness where dusk had failed to settle. The amber from a distant park lamp bled through them and turned violet in the pits where their eyes watched the stones.
“The Veil thinned here,” they murmured. “It did not like us noticing.”
Isolde moved between the stones without bending a blade of grass. Her silver hair drifted behind her, light as thistle silk , though the air sat still.
“The door disliked being called a door.” Her pale gaze skimmed Aurora’s pendant. “Yet it answered.”
Aurora flexed her left hand. The crescent scar on her wrist flashed pale when she drew the Fae-forged blade from inside her coat sleeve. Moonsilver caught the last of the evening and held it in a cold, clean line.
“You gave me a knife that cuts wards.”
Isolde’s mouth curved.
“And you brought a key that warms for Hel.”
Nyx tilted their head towards the stones.
“Step through before the park remembers itself.”
Aurora breathed once, slow and steady, then crossed the boundary.
The world changed with no flourish, no thunderclap. Sound dropped first. The rustle of distant traffic vanished. So did the hiss of tyres on the road and the bark of some dog far off in the dark. Cold peeled from her skin like wet cloth. The air inside the grove held spring and summer at once: damp earth, crushed mint, hawthorn bloom, the sharp green snap of new stems. Flowers crowded the clearing in drifts that had no business sharing soil—foxgloves beside crocus, bluebells under roses, white wild garlic pushing through fern.
Aurora turned in a full circle.
“That is wrong.”
Nyx glided over the roots at her feet. Their outline thinned, thickened, then settled into something closer to flesh.
“Wrong and gentle. A rare pair.”
Above them, the trees bent inwards. Their trunks twisted together in arches that looked grown rather than built, bark braided around bark, silver-grey and black. Light hung in the branches with nowhere to come from. It washed the grove in a pearled glow that erased any clear hour.
Aurora glanced back.
The standing stones still ringed the clearing, but the gaps between them held no park, no field, no London. Mist pressed against those spaces like wool packed into wounds.
“Is that normal?”
Isolde walked ahead, and no footprints marked the moss where she passed.
“Normal belongs to clocks and councils.” She touched one of the braided trunks with the backs of her fingers. “This place preferred older manners.”
Aurora followed, boots sinking into moss thick as carpet. When she brushed a spray of tiny gold flowers, they folded shut around her knuckle, then opened again after she passed, as if tasting the air she left behind .
“I hate that it’s beautiful.”
Nyx’s mouth, if it counted as a mouth in that shifting face, drew into something amused.
“You hate that you want to stay.”
Aurora gave them a look.
“Don’t start.”
They drifted closer to a bank of white blossoms. The petals turned towards them, then shivered and shut, their stems bending away from the shade of their body.
Nyx paused.
“Rude.”
Isolde did not turn back.
“The flowers remembered sunlight.”
The path through the grove did not stay a path. It appeared where Isolde stepped, pale roots lifting out of the moss to make a low ribbed walkway above beds of luminous fungus and black water. Small fish moved beneath the surface of that water. Their bones glimmered through transparent flesh like etched silver.
Aurora crouched at the edge.
“Those aren’t fish.”
Nyx looked down.
“They are now.”
A low sound ran through the grove then, deep and plucked, like someone had dragged a thumb across harp strings hidden underground. It made the roots tremble under Aurora’s boots.
She straightened with the blade in hand.
“What was that?”
Isolde stopped before an opening between two ancient yews whose trunks had fused into a gate. Beyond them, the grove ended at a wall of shimmer. It hung upright in the air, taller than a house, thin as oil on water and full of colours that did not settle into names.
“The Veil,” Isolde breathed. “A skin stretched over hunger.”
Aurora’s pendant burned hot enough to make her wince. The Heartstone threw a red pulse into her throat and down the front of her coat. The shimmer answered. A dark oval took shape in its centre, as if a thumb had pressed against wet silk from the other side.
Warm air spilled through first.
It carried roasted figs, charred rosemary, wine lees, orange peel, smoke from fruitwood, and something iron-rich beneath it all. Not blood. Older. Denser. The smell of a kitchen built in a temple.
Aurora swallowed.
“That’s Hel.”
Nyx’s violet eyes narrowed .
“One of its mouths.”
Isolde laid a hand against the Veil. Colours gathered around her fingers in rings.
“The glutton’s garden waits with a full table and sharp teeth.”
Aurora slid the blade back beneath her coat and touched the pendant instead.
“You could answer straight for once.”
“I just did.”
The dark oval widened until it stood open as a doorway. On the other side lay no corridor of light, no spinning void. A stone path stretched away under an amber sky.
Aurora stared.
“That sky looks cooked.”
Nyx leaned past her shoulder, their whisper thinning into something almost human with interest.
“It carried no moon. No sun either. Only heat.”
The first step through the Veil felt thicker than the first one into the grove. Pressure closed around Aurora’s head and chest. Her ears popped. The pendant hit her sternum with a hot, hard knock as she came out the other side.
She stopped dead.
Terraces ran across the land in broad descending bands, each carved from red-gold stone that shone as if it held embers deep inside. Vines draped over trellises taller than houses. Their leaves flashed copper underneath when a warm breeze turned them. The grapes hanging there were not the dusty purple she knew. They glowed in clusters—smoky blue, opal white, one row the colour of split plums and candle flame. Farther off, orchards spread across rolling ground: pears long as forearms, pomegranates with skins like polished lacquer, citrus the size of helmets, their rinds dimpled with gold.
In the distance, bells rang from somewhere hidden among the terraces. Between each note came the metal rhythm of knives striking boards. Chopping. Steady. Precise. It drifted over the vineyards with the same lazy confidence as birdsong.
Aurora let out a breath she had not noticed holding.
“Right. That’s not London.”
Nyx stepped onto the path behind her. The amber light settled on them and gave edges to their form. For a moment they looked almost solid, coat and long limbs and the fall of dark hair, before the illusion slipped and the wind passed through their shoulder.
“This place had weight .” They looked at the vines, then at the distant hills. “Shadows tasted ripe.”
Isolde crossed last. The Veil sealed behind her without sound. At once the air grew denser. It pressed against Aurora’s teeth. Each breath came laced with sugar, spice, yeast, and growing things.
The stone beneath her boots held warmth like sun-baked pavement. Fine gold dust gathered in the cracks. When she knelt and touched it, the dust clung to her fingertip and melted into a smear that smelled faintly of saffron.
She rubbed it off on her jeans.
“Please tell me the ground isn’t seasoning.”
Isolde looked along the terrace walls. Niches had been cut into them at intervals, each holding a clay lamp shaped like an open mouth. No flame burned in them, yet they glowed from within, deep orange.
“Everything here wished to be consumed,” she replied. “Even stone dressed for the part.”
Aurora rose and scanned the nearest rows of vines. Copper tags hung beneath the leaves, each stamped with symbols she did not know. Some looked like letters twisted around forks . Others resembled small biting mouths. The vines rustled, though the air had fallen still.
“Do they know we’re here?”
Nyx’s head turned with the sound.
“They have known since your pendant started knocking.”
Aurora’s hand flew to the Heartstone. Heat radiated from it in clear beats now, not random pulses. A rhythm. Forward. Down the terraces.
She nodded towards the lower levels.
“It’s pointing.”
“Of course it is,” Nyx murmured. “Artifacts loved purpose. People only borrowed it.”
They started down the path.
Each terrace held its own weather. On the first, dry warmth stroked Aurora’s cheeks and carried the dusty perfume of grapes. On the next, cool mist drifted through low espaliered trees heavy with pale fruit furred in silver. The skin on her forearms pebbled with cold. One level below that, heat rose again from black soil packed around stalks that bore pods like lanterns; inside each translucent shell floated seeds shaped like teeth.
Aurora stopped at one and frowned.
“That should not grow.”
Nyx reached for it. The pod split before their fingers touched it. A plume of steam escaped, rich with cinnamon and pepper. The seeds clicked against one another and settled.
“Everything grew here with an audience in mind.”
From farther down the terraces came laughter. Not cheerful. Not cruel either. The laughter of people too busy to look up from work. Metal clanged. Something heavy scraped stone.
Aurora drew the Fae blade again, more from instinct than decision. Its moonsilver edge looked stark in the amber light, cold enough to frost the air around it.
Isolde glanced at the blade, then at the far orchard where trees had been trained into vaulted tunnels.
“Do not cut what offers fruit.”
Aurora kept walking.
“If it grabs me, I’m cutting it.”
They passed a fountain shaped like a giant shell set into the terrace wall. No water flowed from it. Dark red liquid streamed instead, thick as wine and bright at the edges where it caught the light. It spilled into a basin crowded with carved stone cups.
Nyx bent over the basin. Their reflection did not appear. Instead the liquid showed a brief flash of a long oak bar polished by a thousand elbows, glasses lined in amber ranks, and Aurora herself laughing at something out of frame. The image vanished when they drew back.
Nyx stiffened.
“It pulled memory.”
Aurora moved beside them and looked in. The red surface rippled. For a breath she saw Cardiff rain on a bus window and her mother’s hand pushing hair behind her ear. Then the basin held only the dark liquid again.
She stepped back at once.
“Lovely place. Hate that.”
Isolde’s gaze remained on the cups around the rim.
“Dymas fed appetite through the mouth, the eye, the hand, the oldest ache in the ribs.” She touched none of it. “Drink, and it would ask what else you missed.”
Aurora dragged her eyes away and followed the pendant’s pull.
The terraces narrowed as they descended. Vines gave way to kitchen gardens laid out in precise spirals and squares. Leaves the size of shields overlapped in glossy fans. Blue herbs sprouted from cracks in the paving and released sharp scents when brushed. Fruit trees rose from circular beds edged with knives hammered blade-first into the soil, hundreds of them, their handles wrapped in red thread gone dark with age.
“Who gardens with cutlery?” Aurora muttered.
Nyx crouched beside one of the knives. Their fingers passed through the handle, then solidified enough to feel the metal.
“Not cutlery.”
Aurora joined them. The hilt held the worn shape of a weapon, not a kitchen tool. Thin. Balanced. The blade in the soil bore tiny notches along one edge.
“Ceremonial?”
“Useful,” Nyx answered. “This realm did not separate hunger from war.”
A branch shifted above Aurora’s shoulder. She wheeled, blade up.
The tree there stood no higher than her chest, twisted and black-barked, its leaves dark green on top and silver underneath. Pear-shaped fruit hung from it, but each fruit wore a seam like lips pressed shut. One split open while she watched. Inside lay not flesh and core but layers of folded crimson petals packed around a glossy pit .
Warm perfume poured out. Rose, clove, and something heavier that made her mouth flood.
“Don’t.”
Nyx’s warning cut through it.
Aurora took a step back. The fruit snapped shut.
“Wasn’t going to.”
Nyx’s violet gaze slid to her. One brow lifted.
“Your pupils argued.”
She snorted despite herself.
Past the garden the land dipped into a broad hollow. At its centre stood a structure that made her slow without thinking: part hall, part ruin, part kitchen, built from the same ember-coloured stone as the terraces, but older, stained dark around the arches as if centuries of smoke had licked it. Columns shaped like bundled wheat held up a roof open to the amber sky. Massive bronze doors stood wide, and from beyond them came the sounds they had heard all along—knives, low voices, the crackle of ovens, the clatter of ladles against metal.
No one stood in sight.
Yet the place felt occupied down to its bones.
Aurora stopped at the edge of the hollow.
“That’s where the pendant wants.”
The Heartstone knocked once, hard enough to sting.
Nyx looked towards the open doors. Their body blurred at the edges, then pulled tight again, as if something in the hall tugged at whatever held them together.
“There were wards in there,” they whispered. “Old ones. Torn, not gone.”
Isolde descended beside them without disturbing a single pebble.
“The house of appetite kept every guest and every debt.” Her lavender eyes rested on the doorway. “Enter with an empty hand, and it would fill it. Enter with a full one, and it would count.”
Aurora stared at the hall, then at the bronze doors. Reliefs covered them from top to bottom: banquets, vines, harvest carts, open palms, shackled wrists, mouths laughing, mouths praying, mouths split in silent screams. The bronze had been polished by time or touch until the raised lips shone brighter than the rest.
She tightened her grip on the cold hilt of the Fae blade.
“Brilliant. We’ve come to a haunted dining room.”
A gust rolled out through the doors and lifted the ends of her black hair. It smelled of bread crust, burnt sugar, seared meat, peeled citrus, and old ash buried under sweetness.
Nyx moved one step down into the hollow.
“Not a dining room.”
They raised their chin towards the darkness beyond the threshold.
“A larder.”
Aurora went after them, boots crunching over a scatter of pale fragments that had once been shells, or bones, or glazed crockery. At the first step up to the bronze doors she paused and looked inside.
Rows of long stone tables stretched into the dim. Copper pans hung from chains thick as wrists. Hearths lined the far wall, each large enough to stand inside, their interiors glowing with banked coals no one tended. Between the tables ran narrow channels cut into the floor, and through them streamed dark red liquid, steady and silent, feeding a circular basin at the centre of the hall.
In that basin, something moved.
Aurora drew in a slow breath.
“Tell me you both saw that.”