AI By the time Aurora saw the standing stones, the rest of Richmond Park had gone strangely quiet.
A minute earlier there had been wind in the grass, the far-off bark of a dog, the hiss of tyres from the road beyond the trees. Now the world felt muffled, as if someone had cupped both hands over its mouth. Even the air looked different ahead of her—thicker somehow, green light caught in it like dye in water.
The stones stood between two ancient oaks, half-swallowed by bark and ivy. Not grand, not dramatic. If she hadn’t been looking for them, she might have mistaken them for a ragged clutch of old trunks. But the longer she stared, the less they looked like wood and the more they looked like something older pretending to be trees.
Her fingers closed around the Heartstone pendant at her throat.
It throbbed once against her skin, a faint pulse of warmth through the deep crimson gem.
“Comforting,” she muttered.
Beside her, Nyx stretched taller out of the evening shadows. In the failing daylight they were almost featureless, a long-limbed silhouette cut from midnight, with only those faint violet eyes to hold a shape together. “If the trinket is waking here,” they whispered, voice thin as a draft under a door, “I would advise against finding that comforting .”
Aurora gave them a sideways look . “You always this encouraging?”
“Only when deserved.”
Ahead, Isolde Varga waited between the stones with her hands folded in front of her. Silver hair spilled over her shoulders and down her back in a straight shining fall, bright enough to catch what little light remained. Her pale lavender eyes looked washed in moonmilk. She wore no coat, though the air had sharpened with evening, and the grass around her lay untouched. Aurora’s trainers had already darkened with damp; Isolde stood in the same dew without leaving so much as a bent blade behind.
“You came before the last bird called,” Isolde said.
“That was the idea,” Aurora replied.
“The idea is a lantern,” Isolde said mildly . “It shows enough to miss the pit at your feet.”
Nyx made a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so soft. Aurora exhaled through her nose. She was getting better at listening past the performance with Isolde. Better, not good.
“This is it?” Aurora asked, glancing at the stones. “Your hidden grove?”
Isolde tilted her head. “This is the mouth. Whether it swallows depends on how politely you enter.”
“Do I need to bow to it?”
“If it asks.”
Aurora looked from the stones to the trees beyond. Nothing there but a narrow seam of darkness, a gap between trunks where mist hung low and silver in the undergrowth. Perfectly ordinary, if ordinary things didn’t make the back of her neck prickle.
She rubbed absently at the crescent scar on her left wrist. The old mark had gone cold. That, more than Isolde’s riddles or the pendant’s warmth , made her uneasy.
Nyx drifted a step closer. In solid form they stood over her by half a head, all lean edges and shadow-smoke. “You can still turn around,” they murmured.
Aurora snorted. “And let you both have all the fun?”
She stepped first.
The change hit on the second stride.
The air tightened around her like silk dragged over bare skin. The smell of wet grass vanished. In its place came a rush of scents so layered they almost staggered her—bluebells and crushed mint, ripe peaches, rain on hot stone, cold iron, candlewax, woodsmoke. The world gave a tiny lurch . Not beneath her feet; inside her, somewhere behind the sternum. Her ears popped.
Then she was through.
Aurora stopped dead.
The gap between the stones should have opened onto a patch of woodland no larger than a garden. Instead, the grove spread before her in impossible depth, a clear green world folded inside itself. Trees rose in vast pale columns, their bark silver-grey and smooth as bone. Their branches braided high overhead, but the canopy did not block the sky so much as remake it. Between leaves she glimpsed a twilight that shifted while she watched—soft blue in one gap, pearl dusk in another, a wash of rose beyond that, and deeper in, a scatter of stars hanging where no stars ought to be yet.
Wildflowers covered the ground in rich, riotous drifts, blooming as though every season had emptied its pockets there at once. Bluebells crowded against foxgloves. Snowdrops nodded beside open roses. There were black irises veined with gold, and low white blossoms that shone faintly from within like lanterns hidden in petals. Nothing looked planted. Everything looked arranged.
A stream cut through the clearing to her right. She stared at it for a second before she understood what was wrong.
It was running uphill.
Water, clear as blown glass, slid over smooth stones and climbed toward a higher bank in a thin singing ribbon. Tiny silver fish drifted within it, motionless and still somehow traveling with the current.
Aurora heard Nyx pass behind her, though when she looked their feet were smoke and shadow, barely touching the flower-dense earth.
“Well,” she said quietly . “That’s not normal.”
“Normal is a fence built by frightened men,” Isolde said behind her. “Step over enough of them and you find the old roads.”
Aurora turned in a slow circle. The standing stones were still there, but farther away than they had any right to be. The distance between them had stretched into a dim archway framed in moss and twisting roots. Beyond it, the park had become a flat smear of grey-green, like a picture seen through dirty glass.
No dogs. No cars. No London.
Her phone was in her coat pocket. She took it out on instinct. No signal. The lock screen read 6:14, flickered , and changed to 11:52, then to 6:14 again before going black entirely.
“Useful,” she said, shoving it away .
They walked.
The grove did not have paths so much as invitations. Patches of flowers thinned and thickened ahead of them, guiding their feet between the trees. Every few steps Aurora caught some new wrongness at the edge of her eye: a spiderweb strung with droplets that held tiny moving scenes instead of water; a cluster of red mushrooms that slowly turned their caps to follow her; a birch trunk with a seam in it like closed lips.
The silence wasn’t complete. The place breathed with sound. Leaves whispered overhead in languages her ears almost recognized. Somewhere deeper in, bells chimed in no steady pattern. The uphill stream sang to itself. At intervals something winged passed through the higher branches—not birds, not quite—she saw flashes of translucent wings and long trailing tails that caught the light in opal colours and vanished before she could fix them.
Nyx slowed near one of the silver-barked trees. Their head tilted, listening to something she couldn’t hear. “The shadows don’t behave here,” they whispered.
Aurora glanced at the ground.
They were right. Shadows pooled oddly in the grove, not cast by any single direction of light. They gathered in the roots, under stones, between petals. Some moved a second too late after their source shifted. Some moved before.
“Does that bother you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
That alone made her stomach tighten.
Ahead, Isolde glided between the trees without disturbing anything. No bent grass, no prints in the dark loam, no whisper of cloth catching branches. She seemed less like someone walking through the grove than someone the grove had agreed to carry.
Aurora lengthened her stride to catch up. “You said the boundary’s thin here.”
Isolde touched the bark of a tree as she passed. “Thin things are not weak things.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“No,” Isolde said. “But it was the answer nearest its shape.”
Aurora bit back a sigh. “Is there a portal in here or not?”
Isolde’s pale eyes flicked to the Heartstone at Aurora’s throat. “There are doors in every old house. Some have forgotten they are doors. Some remember too well.”
The pendant warmed again, stronger this time.
Aurora drew it out from under her jumper. The gem’s faint inner glow had deepened, crimson richening toward the colour of banked coals. It gave a pulse against her palm—slow, deliberate, like a second borrowed heartbeat.
Nyx’s violet gaze settled on it. “That is new.”
“Not my favourite development.”
They went on, deeper under the woven boughs. The light shifted from green to silver. The wildflowers thinned. In their place came low ferns with fronds as fine as lace, and broad black leaves that reflected the sky in broken shards. The air turned cooler. The smell of fruit and flowers gave way to mineral damp and something sweet beneath it, almost cloying.
Aurora heard laughter.
She stopped so abruptly Nyx nearly flowed into her.
The sound had come from somewhere ahead and to the left—bright, warm, unmistakably human. For one insane instant it sounded like a crowded restaurant kitchen at rush hour: the clash of pans, someone shouting over steam, the burst of a laugh near her ear. Then it was gone, leaving only the stream-song and the bells.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
Nyx’s gaze sharpened. “Yes.”
Isolde did not turn. “Hungry places call in familiar voices.”
Aurora looked down at the pendant burning in her hand. “Hungry places?”
“The realms are close enough here to smell one another.” Isolde’s silver hair moved as she tilted her head, listening to some distant thing. “One of them has an appetite.”
The sweetness in the air thickened. Not floral now. Richer. Roasted pears glazed in honey. Warm bread. Mulled wine heavy with cloves. Hunger stirred low in Aurora’s belly though she’d eaten an hour ago. It wasn’t just food. It was comfort disguised as scent: winter kitchens, candlelight, a table laid too full.
The trees parted.
At the grove’s heart lay a circular hollow ringed by roots as thick as walls. The earth there was bare except for a wide pool dark as polished obsidian. Not water, or not only water. Its surface held no reflection of the trees above. Instead it shimmered with a faint distortion, like heat rising from stone. The air over it wavered .
Aurora felt the Veil before she consciously saw it. A pressure at the front of her skull. A subtle tension in the world, as though two pieces of fabric had been stitched together at that exact point and were straining in opposite directions. Then her sight adjusted, and the shimmer sharpened into a vertical ripple over the pool, a fault line in the air itself.
Beyond it, for half a heartbeat, she saw another sky.
Warm amber spread above distant terraces of green and gold. Vineyards climbed sunlit slopes in neat impossible lines. Long tables glittered under hanging lanterns. Figures moved between orchards heavy with fruit so bright it looked lacquered. Smoke rose in fragrant threads from outdoor hearths. The scent hit her a second later, lush and intoxicating.
Dymas, she thought, though no one had named it aloud.
The Heartstone flared hot enough to sting. She hissed and nearly dropped it.
Nyx’s hand—if that cool darkness could be called a hand—closed around her sleeve and held her back.
Only then did she realize she had taken a step toward the pool.
The air around the rift hummed. Not loud. Persuasive. The sort of hum a wasp nest made from a safe distance. The sort of sound that promised pain if you got closer.
Aurora planted her feet. Her pulse kicked hard against her throat. “That,” she said, a little breathless, “is definitely not just a decorative pond.”
“No,” Isolde said softly . “It is a mouth remembering feast days.”
Aurora dragged her gaze away from the amber vision. The roots around the hollow had been carved , she saw now, cut long ago with patterns so worn they blurred into the grain. Spirals. Knots. Sharp little crescent marks. In some places the bark had grown over them; in others they remained exposed, pale and raw, as if freshly scored.
“Someone built this,” she said.
“Someone bound it,” Isolde corrected.
The difference sat cold in her spine.
Nyx released her sleeve. “This tear is old.”
“How old?”
Their shadowed face turned toward the rippling air. “Older than my present shape. Younger than the first roots.”
Which was, Aurora suspected, the closest thing to a date she was going to get from either of them.
The shimmer over the pool flexed. For an instant the amber world beyond sharpened again. She caught the glint of goblets, the purple-black shine of grapes, a row of silver platters carried by faceless attendants. The sight dragged at her in a way she didn’t trust. Too lush. Too inviting. Excess polished to seduction.
Isolde stepped to the edge of the hollow. Still no footprints. Her reflection should have shown in the black pool, but there was only the tremor of amber light and that hungry shimmer. She reached into the sleeve of her pale coat and drew out a dagger.
Moonsilver caught the shifting light and held it. The blade was slender and leaf-shaped, elegant enough to mistake for ornament until she saw the edge. It looked honed beyond sharpness, thin as thought. Even from where she stood, Aurora felt the cold of it.
Isolde offered it hilt-first.
“For me?” Aurora asked, because her mouth had to say something while her brain caught up.
“A door is kinder to those who bring the right key.”
Aurora took the dagger.
Cold bit instantly into her palm, clean and deep. Not the dead cold of metal left outside, but something purer, almost lunar . The blade gave off a faint glow where the false twilight touched it. It was lighter than she expected, balanced so perfectly it seemed eager to move .
“Moonsilver,” Isolde said. “Fae-forged. It cuts what pretends it cannot be cut.”
Aurora turned the dagger, watching pale light slide along its edge. “That’s a very poetic way of saying it’s sharp.”
“It is also a very practical one.”
For the first time since entering the grove, Aurora smiled.
Then the rift buzzed louder.
The amber vision swelled across the pool’s surface. Heat rolled off it now, carrying the smell of wine, baked figs, caramelized sugar. The world on the other side seemed to lean closer, curious. A table appeared at the lip of the opening where no table had been before, piled high with glossy fruit and gold-skinned birds and pastries lacquered in honey. Impossible. Obvious bait. Her stomach still clenched at the sight.
Nyx moved in front of her in a spill of black. Their outline blurred, broadening. The violet in their eyes brightened to embers. “It sees the stone,” they whispered.
“The pendant?” Aurora asked.
“The thing wearing the pendant.”
She swallowed.
The Veil shivered. The shimmer thinned until it looked like stretched sugar . Aurora saw movement beyond it—something large passing between the lantern-lit tables, too tall, too smooth, its outline wavering in the amber haze.
“Can it come through?” she asked.
Isolde’s gaze stayed fixed on the rift. “Not tonight, unless invited. Appetite is not the same as entry.”
“That’s not as reassuring as you seem to think.”
“Reassurance is often a narcotic.”
Aurora tightened her grip on the moonsilver dagger and forced herself to think past the smell, the beauty, the wrong pull of the thing. The roots. The carvings. The bound place. The shimmer was strongest at three points where the ripple snagged on the roots around the pool, like cloth caught on nails. Anchors.
She pointed with the blade. “Those marks in the roots. They’re pinning it, aren’t they?”
Isolde’s mouth curved—not quite approval, but near enough . “A bright bird pecks the right seed now and then.”
“If those are failing, can they be cut loose or reinforced?”
“Either,” Nyx said before Isolde could answer. “Though one is much safer than the other.”
Aurora looked from the dagger to the roots. The blade in her hand hummed faintly, as if it recognized the work waiting for it.
Behind her, somewhere in the impossible depths of the grove, bells chimed again. Not random this time. Three notes, clear and cold.
Time, she thought, though she had no idea what that meant here.
She drew a breath full of flowers, iron, sugar, and shadow. The grove felt vast around them, ancient and awake, every tree listening. Wonder still moved in her chest, bright and sharp, but it had made room for something harder now. Not fear exactly. Readiness.
When she stepped forward to the edge of the black pool, the moonsilver blade cast a pale line over the rippling amber light, and the other world seemed, for the first time, to hesitate.