AI The last of Richmond Park’s daylight thinned behind them and caught on the oak stones in a dull green smear, as if the evening had struck glass and bent. Aurora stopped with one boot half over the root-laced earth beyond the ring and looked back.
The city had already fallen away. No traffic. No dog walkers. No children. The air behind the stones sat flat and ordinary, damp with cut grass and London cold. The space ahead breathed against her face with the scent of crushed mint, wet bark, and something sweet enough to make her tongue ache.
“That’s it?”
Her voice sounded wrong here. It didn’t travel. It folded into the clearing and vanished.
Isolde stood between two standing stones, silver hair hanging in a straight sheet to her waist, pale as frost in the deepening dusk. No mud clung to the hem of her dress. No leaf bent under her weight .
“You expected trumpets. The old doors dislike applause.”
Aurora glanced down at the Heartstone pendant against her jumper. The crimson gem held a low ember-glow, faint but steady. Warm. Not the hot throb it gave near trouble, but enough to press at her skin .
Nyx rose out of the shadow of the nearest stone in one long unfurling motion, violet eyes opening in the dark like embers breathed awake. Solid enough now to cast a shape on the ground, though the edges of them still smoked into the air.
“I dislike it when places swallow sound.”
Aurora gave them a look.
“You dislike most places.”
“I do.”
She stepped through first.
The world changed under her boot.
The ground felt soft, then firm, then neither, as if she had planted her foot on moss laid over old bone. Cold climbed her calf and passed. The second step took her into light that had no source she could name. Above her, the sky hung open and huge, but not the sky she knew. It stretched in layered bands of lavender, pearl, and a green so pale it almost broke into silver. No sun. No moon. Light came from the air itself, from the petals banked along the clearing edge, from thin streams winding through the undergrowth with water bright as polished metal.
Aurora turned in a slow circle.
The trees rose in impossible shapes. Oaks, maybe, if oak had dreamt itself into towers. Their trunks twisted into arches large enough to walk through; their bark shone with lines of gold sap that pulsed under the surface like veins. Branches spread wide and low, then climbed again, woven together overhead in living vaults. Flowers grew from root, branch, stone, even air: foxgloves with glass bells, black roses dusted in blue pollen, wild violets the size of plates. Some flowers opened as she watched and let out notes instead of scent, thin chimes that drifted away into the leaves.
She forgot to breathe for a beat.
“Right.”
Her hand went to the pendant again, then to the small knife at her side before she remembered the weapon hidden under her coat now belonged in another category. Isolde’s gift lay strapped against her hip, the Fae-forged blade cold through leather and wool, like a strip of winter kept against her skin.
“This isn’t a grove.”
Isolde smiled without warmth .
“Names on mortal tongues shrink things.”
Nyx moved past her, each step leaving the grass untouched. They tilted their head up at the braided canopy.
“The boundary lies thicker here.”
Aurora crouched and brushed her fingers over a cluster of white flowers near her foot. Their petals recoiled from her touch, not closing but leaning into each other like a flock turning in one motion . She pulled her hand back.
“Does everything move?”
“Only what sleeps lightly .”
A breeze crossed the clearing. It carried whispers with it, half-heard phrases that broke apart before they made sense. Aurora straightened at once.
“Did you hear that?”
Nyx’s gaze tracked the dark beneath the roots.
“Yes.”
“People?”
“No.”
That answer lodged in her spine.
Isolde stepped ahead through a curtain of hanging leaves. The leaves glimmered on both sides, green on one face, silver on the other, and showed a different landscape in each tilt: forest, riverbank, starlit field, a hall made of antlers and ice, then forest again.
“Walk where I walk.”
Aurora followed.
The path, if it was a path, revealed itself only when she looked directly at it. Pale stones pressed into the ground in a curling line. When her eyes slipped away they vanished beneath clover and fern. Tiny lights bobbed at ankle height along the edges, not fireflies exactly. Each one burned in a different colour—amber, indigo, rose—and each one kept just beyond reach.
“Comforting place.”
Nyx’s whisper moved from one side of her to the other though their shape stayed beside her.
Aurora snorted.
“You’ve got the face of someone at a funeral.”
“My face no longer does much else.”
One of the floating lights darted up to Nyx’s shoulder and hovered by their cheek. It turned from blue to violet. Nyx stared at it. The light held still, then darted off into the brush.
Aurora looked over.
“Friend of yours?”
“It asked for my name.”
“And?”
“I kept it.”
The path narrowed. Branches leaned in overhead, and the air cooled enough to pebble Aurora’s skin. The sounds changed with every dozen steps. First the bright bell notes of flowers. Then far-off running water. Then something like a choir singing under its breath. Then silence so complete that the crunch of her own boots sounded rude.
She spotted shapes among the trunks and had to squint to understand them. Not statues. Not animals. Figures grown from wood and thorn, half-human in outline, with antlers tangled in the branches and hollow chests where moths nested. Some bent as if mid-bow. Others held out empty hands, palms full of rainwater.
Aurora slowed.
“Those were trees, once?”
Isolde did not turn.
“Once is a blunt knife. Here, one thing wears many hours.”
“That didn’t answer me.”
“It spared you three false answers.”
Aurora muttered something under her breath and kept moving. Her crescent scar itched on her left wrist, a little sting that always arrived when her nerves climbed too high. She rubbed it with her thumb.
The grove opened without warning.
She stepped out from the close-woven trees onto the edge of a lake clear as blown glass. No wind touched the surface. Lilies spread across it in white and red constellations. Beneath the water, long strands of silver weed waved over a bed of black stone. Fish glided below, translucent except for their bones, which shone like threads of moonlight. In the centre of the lake stood a circle of pillars, slender and pale, each one carved with lines that shifted if she tried to focus on them. They rose out of the water without reflection.
Aurora crouched by the bank.
The lake smelled of rain on slate. She reached toward it, then stopped short when the water mirrored not her face but a much older woman’s, black-haired and sharp-boned, with Aurora’s blue eyes set deeper under a stranger’s brow. The woman in the water frowned first, before Aurora did.
She jerked back.
“Right. No. Absolutely not.”
Nyx was beside her at once, the air around them dropping cold.
“What did you see?”
“Myself.”
She swallowed.
“Not myself.”
Isolde stood a few paces away, watching the pillars in the lake.
“Waters here keep the shape of what a traveller carries.”
Aurora rose.
“I carry a migraine, if this helps.”
“Then the lake had mercy.”
Nyx crouched where Aurora had been and looked into the water. For a moment the surface held only silver glare. Then it darkened. Aurora caught a glimpse of candlelight in a stone room, a hand covered in ink, a man’s face turning in alarm, and the whole image blew apart into ripples. Nyx went still as cut obsidian.
Aurora looked at them.
“You all right?”
The violet in their eyes narrowed to threads.
“I had forgotten his jaw.”
She left that alone.
A low, resonant sound rolled across the lake. Not thunder. Too clean for thunder. It came from the pillars, from the carved lines running over them. The marks lit one by one in pale gold, racing from base to crown. The lilies nearest the circle folded their petals and sank.
Aurora’s hand snapped to the Fae blade.
“Tell me that’s normal.”
Isolde watched the light travel over the stone.
“Normal is another mortal habit.”
“Useful one.”
“The grove noticed you.”
“Good for the grove.”
The sound deepened. Water gathered in rings around the pillars, each ring rising above the last until the centre of the lake stood wrapped in thin, suspended walls. Inside them moved shadows of antlered heads, wings, and hands with too many joints. Aurora took a step back.
Nyx rose without disturbing the grass.
“They cannot cross unless invited.”
“That sentence contained ‘unless’, which I hate.”
Isolde finally turned to her. For the first time since they entered, something like approval touched her face .
“And still you stepped beyond the stones.”
Aurora looked past her to the path they had taken.
Except there was no path now. Only trees pressed close together, trunks braided into a living wall thick with white blossom. The standing stones had vanished. So had the dusk. The strange sky above the grove had drifted darker, though no star had appeared.
She laughed once, short and joyless.
“Of course.”
A shape skimmed over the lake. One of the silver-boned fish broke the surface, but it had wings now, thin and iridescent, and it flew a low arc above the water before diving again without a splash. More followed, a shoal taking to the air in silence . Their scales flashed colours she had no names for.
Aurora stared despite herself.
“That is disgusting.”
Nyx’s whisper thinned with amusement.
“You like it.”
She did. Enough to make her chest hurt.
Along the shore, reeds bent all at once, though nothing moved among them that she could see. The whispering returned, clearer here. Not words. Laughter, perhaps, if laughter came from mouths full of river stones.
Isolde drifted toward a flat slab of rock near the bank. Moss parted under her bare feet. On the stone lay objects Aurora would have sworn had not been there a moment before: a crown woven from dead bramble and fresh blossom, a cup made from a horn tipped in gold, a handful of bones no larger than sparrow legs, and a key of green metal furred with age.
“Do not touch what greets you.”
Aurora folded her arms.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
Her eyes kept slipping to the key.
The rock beside the offering stone held marks cut deep into its face. Not letters from any script she knew. They looked more like branch scars, frost patterns, cracks in ice. When she leaned closer, the shapes rearranged themselves into English for a heartbeat.
ASK WITHOUT HUNGER
She blinked and the words broke apart again.
“Did you do that?”
Isolde stood on the other side of the stone, expression unreadable .
“The grove speaks in whatever wounds you least.”
“That’s a grim sort of hospitality.”
“It keeps guests alive.”
Nyx’s head turned sharp to the left. Their form thinned at the shoulders, shadow bleeding outward.
“We are no longer alone.”
Aurora had already felt it. The skin between her shoulders tightened. The reeds shivered again. Across the lake, between two pale trunks, a figure stood where nothing had stood before: tall, narrow, dressed in layers of something that moved like smoke or silk depending on how she looked at it. No face she could make out, only a white oval blur and the rise of branching antlers above it.
The figure lifted one hand.
Every light along the path behind them went out.
Aurora drew the Fae-forged blade in one smooth motion. Moonsilver caught the strange sky and answered with a pale glow of its own, clean and cold.
The antlered figure tilted its head at the sight of the dagger.
Nyx slid forward, not quite shielding her, not quite not .
Isolde’s voice dropped into the hush like a pebble into still water.
“Stand. Speak only if spoken to.”
Aurora held the blade low, heart knocking against the warm pulse of the pendant, and fixed her eyes on the figure across the lake as it stepped to the water’s edge and the surface did not break beneath its feet.