AI “Step where I step.”
Isolde crossed the ring of oak stones without bending a blade of grass. Aurora followed at once, one hand on the deep crimson Heartstone at her throat, the other shoved into her coat pocket to stop it shaking. Nyx came last, not so much walking as pouring between the shadows cast by the stones, their tall silhouette thinning and thickening with each pace.
The instant Aurora’s boot touched the clearing beyond, the ground gave a soft, breath-like sigh.
She stopped.
The park vanished behind her. Not all at once. It folded away in layers, as if someone peeled London from the air and tucked it out of sight. The distant hum of traffic thinned into nothing. No dog barked. No aeroplane crossed overhead. Silence rushed in first, then sound returned in stranger shapes, glassy chimes from somewhere above, a rustle like silk dragged over bark, a low pulse beneath the soil that matched the faint warmth of the pendant against her skin.
“Right,” Aurora said, too briskly . “That’s not Richmond Park.”
“No,” said Isolde.
The clearing spread far wider than it had from outside. Wildflowers climbed in soft banks around pale pools, but their colours refused common names. One patch held petals the hue of bruised pearls. Another flashed green, then gold, then a shade Aurora only saw from the corner of her eye. Ancient trees rose in twisting columns, their bark silver in one glance and dark as ink in the next. Lantern-like fruits hung from low branches and glowed with trapped light. Their scent drifted through the grove, sweet at first, then sharp enough to sting.
Nyx tilted their head. Their violet eyes glimmered within their faceless shade.
“The air is crowded here,” they whispered. “Old bargains. Older songs.”
Aurora swallowed and took another step. The grass yielded like velvet . Cold licked through the soles of her boots, then warmth followed, as if the earth could not settle on one season. Her crescent scar prickled on her wrist.
“You said a grove,” she said.
Isolde glanced back, silver hair brushing the small of her back. “Would you have entered if I had called it a mouth?”
“That depends. The honest answer?”
“I only speak those.”
Aurora gave her a tight look. “Then no.”
A smile touched Isolde’s lips, slight and distant, as though it belonged to someone hearing a joke from another room. She went on between the trees. Aurora kept pace beside her. Behind them, Nyx drifted close to every patch of darkness, touching trunk and stone and pool edge with long black fingers that sank a little into the surfaces before sliding free again.
The grove narrowed into a living corridor. Branches arched overhead and twined together in patterns too neat for chance. Leaves turned as the group passed. Hundreds of pale undersides flashed at once. Aurora caught herself counting them, then stopped when she hit thirty-seven and realised the same cluster hung over her twice, though she had not looked back.
“Tell me there’s a rule for that,” she said.
“There are rules for all things here,” said Isolde.
“Useful ones.”
“No.”
They entered a wider space where the ground dipped into terraces, each ringed with roots thick as walls. Water slid down from one level to the next without a sound. Aurora crouched by the nearest runnel and stared. Silver fish glided in it, except their bones shone through translucent flesh, and their eyes looked human for one awful beat before they turned away.
She rose at once.
“Do not drink,” said Isolde.
“That was not on my list.”
“Good. It steals names.”
Nyx crouched by the same water and let one finger hover over the surface. Ripples shivered out in perfect circles, though they had not touched it.
“This place remembers a court,” they said. “Trumpets. White antlers. Silk soaked in blood.”
“Everything remembers a court,” said Isolde. “That is the trouble with the Fae.”
Aurora let that sit . She watched the runnel wind away between roots veined with faint blue light. Small moths clustered under the terrace ledges. Their wings resembled torn parchment covered in tiny moving script. When one lifted and settled on the back of her hand, letters crawled across her skin, cold and damp.
She jerked.
The moth burst into ash. The script stayed for a second longer, then sank into her sleeve.
“Did that just write on me?”
Isolde looked at her hand and then at the sleeve as if inspecting a stain on a tablecloth . “A greeting.”
“What did it say?”
“If it liked you, welcome. If it did not, leave.”
“That helps.”
Nyx’s whisper brushed her ear though they stood three paces away. “It did not bite. Count that as affection .”
They moved on. The deeper they went, the less the grove behaved like a place with distance. A copse stood far off, then bent close around them in five steps. A fallen log lay ahead covered in white fungus that rang like little bells when windless air passed through it. Aurora put out a hand and the log shifted under her palm, not rotting wood at all but an immense sleeping creature with bark-grown hide . One amber eye opened in its flank, watched her, and shut.
“Did I imagine that?”
“No,” said Isolde.
“Are you ever going to say anything reassuring?”
“Yes.”
Aurora waited.
Isolde did not continue.
They came upon a field of standing reeds taller than a man. Their stems were clear as blown glass. Within each one, sap rose and fell in threads of light. When Aurora parted them, music spilled out, not notes exactly but fragments, a child laughing, someone weeping, a chorus of many voices speaking in a language she felt in her teeth.
She stopped dead when one reed sang in her mother’s voice.
“Aurora?”
Her breath caught. She stared at the stem. Inside it, light climbed in a steady ribbon.
“Aurora Carter,” the reed said again, soft and familiar , “don’t leave angry, love.”
Nyx snapped their hand round her wrist before she could move closer. Their touch brought no heat at all, only the clean shock of a cellar stone.
“Not yours,” they whispered.
Aurora nodded once, but the muscles in her throat had tightened. She pulled free and walked on without speaking. The reed-bed sang after them. Her father’s dry barrister tone rose next, then Eva’s laugh, then a voice she had spent two years wishing to forget. Evan. Low and coaxing. Sweetened rot.
“Rory.”
The pendant at her throat flared warm enough to hurt.
She gripped it through her shirt until the chain bit. “Keep moving.”
Isolde led them over a bridge grown from intertwined branches. Beneath it lay no stream. Instead, a depthless black shimmered between the roots like polished obsidian. Shapes moved far below, slow as drowned moons. Aurora did not look too long. On the far side, the air changed again. Copper sharpened it. Spice followed, rich and dark, clove and roasting fruit, then an undertone of fat dripping onto flame.
Aurora stopped.
“That,” she said, “does not belong here.”
Nyx had already gone still. Their outline roughened, edges feathering into smoke.
“Hel,” they whispered. “A thin place.”
The Heartstone pendant pulsed once against Aurora’s chest. Warmth spread through her skin, steady and urgent. She drew it out from under her shirt. The crimson gem glowed from within, like a coal nursed back to life.
Isolde watched it with unreadable lavender eyes.
“So the red heart wakes,” she said.
“You know what this is.”
“I know where it hung before it reached your throat.”
Aurora looked from the gem to the half-Fae. “You could have mentioned that before we walked into a dream with teeth.”
“I mention what matters when it ripens.”
“That is a ridiculous way to share information.”
“It is an old way.”
Nyx drifted to the edge of the path where ferns with mirror-bright leaves crowded round a low bank. Between their stems, the earth had split along a line no wider than a knife cut. Amber light seeped through from below. Not grove light. Not Fae. This light carried appetite. Aurora felt it on her tongue, salt and sugar and smoke.
She stepped closer despite herself.
The crack widened as she watched. A breath exhaled from it, hot and fragrant. For an instant she saw another place beneath the torn skin of the world, long tables under an amber sky, platters heaped with impossible fruit, goblets dark as garnets, figures in rich silks laughing with open mouths too full of teeth.
Then the vision snapped shut to a slit again.
“Dymas,” said Isolde. “The province of mouths.”
Aurora kept her gaze on the glowing seam. “Gluttony. Hel.”
“You know the shape of the map.”
“I know enough to dislike it.”
Nyx bent lower, their violet eyes brightening. “The Veil is frayed here. Not ripped. Picked. Pulled by patient hands.”
Aurora crouched beside them. The bank smelled of damp roots and roasting meat. Tiny black seeds ringed the crack in an almost perfect circle. She pinched one between finger and thumb. It oozed red, sticky as blood, then shrivelled into ash.
“Someone fed it,” she said.
“Someone courts it,” said Isolde.
Aurora looked up fast. “Who?”
The half-Fae traced one pale finger through the air above the slit. Lines of light sparked and hung there, a net of wards so old they seemed woven from frost and breath . Several strands had been sliced clean through. Others looked gnawed.
“The hungry never eat alone,” Isolde said.
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the nearest one.”
Aurora rose and brushed dirt from her palm. “Fine. We seal it and argue later.”
“You cannot seal what has been invited,” said Nyx.
“Can I stab it?”
At that, Isolde studied her with more focus than before, as if a lens had shifted behind her eyes. She reached into the folds of her pale gown and drew out a slender leaf-shaped dagger. Moonsilver caught the grove’s strange light and gave it back colder. The blade had no ornament save a faint line down the centre, like the vein of a leaf. Even from an arm’s length away, Aurora felt the chill bite.
Isolde held it out.
“A key, a tooth, a promise.”
Aurora took the dagger by its hilt. Cold shot up her arm. “That clears nothing up.”
“It cuts what should not bar a road,” said Isolde. “And what should.”
Nyx watched the weapon with a stillness that felt like distrust .
“Court steel,” they whispered. “Expensive mercy.”
Aurora tested the balance. Light, quick, vicious. “You chose now for gifts?”
“You chose now for need.”
The slit in the earth gave a wet, sucking sound.
All three turned.
The bank bulged. Roots strained and twisted apart as if something beneath them had rolled its shoulders. Amber light bled wider through the crack. The scent from below thickened until Aurora could taste wine, honey, burnt sugar, marrow split on hot stone. Hunger struck her so fast her stomach clenched. Not for food. For everything. Heat. Rest. Touch. More.
She stepped back at once.
“Don’t breathe through your mouth,” she said.
“Sound advice in many realms,” said Isolde.
The crack widened from a knife line to a hand span. Something pressed up from beneath, slow and obscene. Not a hand. Too many knuckles. Too many joints. The skin looked lacquered, black and shining, but where the amber light touched it, mouths opened and closed across it in silent little kisses.
Aurora’s grip tightened on the Fae-forged blade.
“Tell me that isn’t meant to happen in the nice magic forest.”
“No place stays nice for long,” said Isolde.
Nyx spread into a taller shape, all edges and dark intent. Shadows poured off them and stitched themselves to the trees.
“It has smelt the heartstone,” they whispered. “It climbs for the bearer.”
The ground heaved.
The thing below laughed with a hundred tiny throats, and the bank split open.