AI “Duck.”
Aurora bent on instinct, and the branch whipped through the gap where her face had been, all thorns and white sap. It struck the standing stone beside her with a wet slap. The stone answered with a low note, like a bell buried under earth.
“Right,” she said, straightening . “Friendly place.”
Nyx slid between the oaks as a spill of shadow, then gathered into their tall, thin shape on the other side. Their violet eyes glimmered once in the dark seam between trunk and stone.
“It tasted you first.”
Aurora kept one hand on the Heartstone pendant at her throat. The deep crimson gem had gone warm the moment Isolde led them off the path in Richmond Park and towards the ring of ancient oaks. Now it pulsed against her skin, not with the sharp heat it gave near Hel tears, but with a slower throb , as if it listened to something large breathing beyond the trees.
Isolde stood within the stone ring and did not seem to touch the ground at all. Wildflowers pressed around the hem of her pale dress, foxglove, cowslip, black-eyed daisy, blooms from different months knotted into one patch of colour. None bent under her feet.
“Step where I step,” she said.
“That would help if you left footprints.”
The half-Fae turned her pale lavender gaze on Aurora. Silver hair spilled over one shoulder like water over polished metal.
“Mortals love a trail. The old places love losing them.”
“That a warning?”
“A courtesy.”
Aurora glanced back through the oaks. Parkland still showed beyond the ring, familiar grass, a line of benches, the iron rail in the distance. But the air between the stones wavered like heat over a road, thin as glass and far less honest. When Nyx passed through it, their edges frayed. When Aurora looked straight at it, it vanished. When she looked aside, it shone.
She touched the moonsilver dagger at her hip. The Fae-forged blade felt cold through her jacket.
“Tell me the rules before we’re inside, not after.”
“Do not give your full name.”
“Fine.”
“Do not eat.”
“Also fine.”
“Do not accept gifts.”
Aurora snorted.
“That one depends on the gift.”
Nyx tilted their head, listening to something she could not hear.
“Nothing in there is free.”
“Excellent. A haunted legal seminar.”
One corner of Isolde’s mouth moved, not quite a smile .
“Come.”
She stepped through the shimmer. The Veil rippled around her, a bright skin over water, then sealed.
Aurora followed.
The first thing that hit her was the silence . Not true silence , worse than that. The sounds of the park, distant traffic, a dog barking, the hiss of tyres on wet road, all of it fell away at once, and in its place came a hush full of tiny, patient noises. Petals rubbed together. Water clicked over stone. Leaves turned with a dry whisper , as if pages flipped in a library where no one had breathed for centuries.
The second thing was the smell. Honey. Crushed mint. Damp bark. Then, underneath, iron. Old and clean.
She took two steps and stopped.
The grove opened around them in impossible layers. The standing stones marked no simple clearing. Beyond them stretched a green country folded into itself, deeper than the park had any right to be. Oak trunks rose thicker than cars, their bark silvered in long seams that caught the light and gave it back as soft green fire. Branches crossed high above in arches like the nave of a drowned cathedral. Wildflowers blanketed the ground in drifting bands of colour, butter-yellow, bruised purple, blood-red, pearl-white, yet no bed ended where it should. It all bled into the next, each patch shaped with a strange intent, spirals, rings, long fingers pointing inward.
A stream ran ahead of them.
It also ran uphill.
Aurora stared at the water climbing a moss-covered bank in thin, shining sheets.
“No,” she said.
Nyx leaned over it. Their hand passed through the current, and the water darkened around their wrist before clearing again.
“Yes.”
The stream made no splash. It chimed. Each stone beneath it gave off a separate note, and together the notes formed a tune that never resolved .
Aurora crouched and touched the moss on the bank. It felt warm. Too warm for shade. The moss drew in under her fingertip, shy as skin.
She pulled her hand back.
“That’s revolting.”
“It likes you.”
“Your standards are low.”
Isolde moved on without rustling a single flower. Aurora rose and followed, boots sinking into loam that yielded like bread dough and sprang back clean, leaving only shallow marks. Nyx flowed beside the tree line, where shadows gathered thickest, though here the dark held colour inside it, deep plum, bottle green, drowned blue.
Something laughed in the branches above.
Aurora looked up fast. She caught only motion, pale limbs or bleached vines twisting out of sight.
“What was that?”
“A witness,” said Isolde.
“That narrows it down to nothing.”
The path, if it counted as one, revealed itself by absence. Fewer flowers. Bare earth braided with roots as white as bone. The roots shifted when Aurora looked away. Each time she glanced down, the pattern had changed, knotting and unknotting around her boots.
She slipped a ten-pence piece from her pocket and dropped it beside a root junction.
“Marking the route?”
Nyx’s whisper brushed her ear.
“Testing it.”
They walked ten more paces. Aurora looked back.
The coin had vanished. In its place grew a tight cluster of small blue flowers, each with a silver eye at its centre.
“Noted,” she said. “The grove destroys evidence.”
“The grove improves it,” Isolde said. “Metal sleeps badly here.”
Ahead, the trees thinned around a circle of low stones, older than the standing ring, worn almost featureless. Aurora saw shapes carved into their tops, then lost them when she blinked. A stag’s antlers. A crown of thorns. An open hand. The marks slipped from one symbol to another as if memory itself could not settle on the right version.
At the centre of the circle stood a narrow basin cut from a single pale stone. It held black water so still it looked solid.
Aurora edged near. Her reflection waited in the surface, dark hair, bright blue eyes, sharp jaw, the crescent scar on her left wrist pale against her skin. Then the reflection turned its head before she did and looked past her shoulder.
She stepped back at once, hand on the dagger.
Nyx bent over the basin. Nothing reflected in them except a deeper patch of night.
“Something peers through.”
“Can it cross?”
“Not yet.”
Isolde circled the basin once. No footprints. No bent grass. She laid her fingers on the rim.
“This was a door, once.”
“Once?”
“Doors sulk when left unopened.”
Aurora’s pendant beat warm against her chest. Once. Twice. Three times. The rhythm did not match her pulse .
She drew the Heartstone free of her shirt and held it up. Crimson light glowed in the gem’s core, dim but stubborn.
Isolde’s gaze sharpened.
“It wakes for Hel.”
“I know what it wakes for.”
“Then your unknown friend gave you a lantern and forgot to mention the fire.”
Aurora slipped the pendant back under her collar. The warmth lingered on her fingertips.
“I’ve had a week full of generous strangers. It’s done wonders for my trust issues.”
The ground beyond the basin rose in a low ridge draped with fern and white bells of flower. They climbed it and found the grove altered again on the other side.
Here the trees stood farther apart. Their trunks bent at odd angles, not broken but shaped, as if patient hands had trained them over centuries into archways and screens. Thin ribbons hung between the branches, woven from grass, hair, and things Aurora did not care to name. They tinkled when no wind touched them. Beneath them lay a long stone table cracked through the middle and half-swallowed by roots.
Silver plates rested along its length.
No tarnish. No dust.
Aurora stopped at once.
“You said no gifts. You forgot no invitations.”
“An invitation is only dangerous if you answer,” said Isolde.
“A table set in a dead grove section feels like an answer.”
Nyx glided to the far side of the slab. They stared at the plates, head tilted.
“This place was not dead. It was fed.”
Aurora looked closer. The roots gripping the table had a dark sheen to them. Not sap. Oil. No, thicker. Wine spilled and dried. The smell rising from the cracks no longer held only mint and bark. Now came richer notes, roasted fruit, sugared peel, cloves, fat hitting flame.
Her stomach tightened before her mind caught up.
Dymas.
The word had no business in a Fae place, yet the smell called up exactly what Yu-Fei’s kitchen became in the last half hour before service, only grander, older, tainted with ritual and appetite. The Heartstone heated against her collarbone hard enough to sting.
Isolde’s expression went still.
“Who’s been here?” Aurora asked.
“A guest with a greedy mouth.”
“That’s not a name.”
“It is the truest part of one.”
Aurora moved along the table without touching it. Each plate held only a folded napkin of pale green cloth. At the head of the table sat a cup carved from amber. Liquid moved inside it though the cup did not tilt. Thick gold folds rolled over one another, and buried in that gold floated dark things, grape skins, ash, a finger bone.
“Lovely,” Aurora said. “Your caterer needs prison.”
Nyx lowered themselves until their face hovered inches above the cup.
“Hel clings to this.”
“Can you tell how long?”
“No.”
“That means?”
“They hid the hours.”
A soft sound rose from beneath the table. Not a scrape. A chew.
Aurora stepped back and drew the moonsilver dagger in one smooth motion. The blade came free with a clean, bright whisper . Its leaf-shaped edge glimmered against the green dark.
The chewing stopped.
Every ribbon in the branches gave one small chime.
Isolde lifted one hand, palm down.
“Still.”
Aurora obeyed. Beside her, Nyx thinned and spread across the roots, ready to sink into every shadow at once.
Another sound followed. This one came from deeper in the grove, beyond the table, where the trees leaned close around a pale glow.
Not chewing now. Singing.
A woman’s voice. Then two. Then ten. High, sweet, perfect , and wrong enough to roughen Aurora’s skin. The melody rose with the same notes as the uphill stream, but where the water never resolved , the song promised release on the next breath and withheld it every time.
“Do Fae sing like that?” Aurora asked.
“Not when they are pleased,” said Isolde.
“Comforting.”
They moved towards the glow.
The flowers thinned. Bare roots broke the ground in arching loops, and beneath them the earth shone through in a strange pale colour, not soil but packed dust the shade of old ivory . Aurora realised after a moment that it was not earth at all. It was bone ground fine over centuries and tamped hard by feet.
She said nothing. Nyx had already seen it. Isolde had known before they came.
The glow ahead came from a pool wider than the first basin, round as a coin and edged with standing stones no taller than Aurora’s knee. The stones were carved with tiny clustered figures, feasting, dancing , kneeling, clawing. As she neared, the carvings shifted. Dancers bowed into supplicants. Feasters bared teeth.
The pool should have reflected branches overhead.
It did not.
Amber light spread across its surface. Rows of vineyards rolled beneath a sky the colour of old honey. Long banquet tables ran between the vines. Figures moved around them in robes of wine-red and cream, carrying silver platters high above their heads. The smell of spice and roasting meat poured out over the rim.
Aurora’s pendant burned.
“There it is,” she said through her teeth. “That’s a tear.”
“A wound,” Isolde corrected. “A tear heals. This was fed open.”
The singing under the amber sky swelled. One figure on the far side of the reflected vineyard lifted its head. Though the image wavered, Aurora saw its face with awful clarity, smooth skin stretched over a jaw too wide, lips glossy with grease, eyes black and eager.
It smiled at her.
Then the water in the pool bulged upwards.
Nyx snapped into solid form and seized Aurora’s shoulder.
“Back.”
The bulge rose higher, taking shape from liquid and amber light, first a head, then shoulders, then long arms slick with gold broth and black earth. Rings gleamed on swollen fingers. Vines wrapped its wrists like chains it had eaten through.
Isolde’s voice sharpened into iron.
“Do not let it speak first.”
The thing’s hand slapped onto the stone rim.
The carvings around the pool opened their tiny mouths and screamed.