AI Aurora caught her wrist on the crescent-shaped scar and felt the pain answer the pendant in her palm.
The Heartstone Pendant throbbed, deep crimson warmth spreading up her fingers, while the air around the ancient oak standing stones rippled like thin glass under breath. Nyx drifted behind her, a humanoid smear of violet-grey shadow, and their whisper crawled across Aurora’s neck.
“Don’t step on the seam.”
Aurora tightened her grip anyway, because the seam was already under her boots. The moment her heel pressed into the faint, shimmering distortion that hovered at knee height, her world stuttered. Sound warped. Colour slipped sideways. The park behind her lost its edges like it had never belonged to Earth at all.
She jerked forward, heart hammering, and the sting of her wrist scar flared brighter than it should’ve.
The pendant pulsed once, then again, like it counted her breaths.
“Isolde!” Aurora snapped, voice sharp enough to cut through the wrongness.
Isolde appeared without footprints, silver hair falling in a slow curtain, as if she’d been standing there for centuries and only now allowed herself to be seen. She wore no cloak, no jewellery besides the faint gleam of something at her throat that might’ve been another charm , might’ve been nothing but light.
“Rory,” Isolde said, and the way she spoke Aurora’s alias sounded like a riddle with teeth . “You came hungry.”
Aurora lifted her chin. “I came because the Heartstone woke.”
Isolde’s pale lavender eyes reflected the shimmer, the Veil-like distortion hovering ahead. She spoke in riddles, but her words struck like thrown stones.
“Wakes do not mean doors, only invitations. Some invitations end in chewing.”
Nyx angled their glowing violet eyes towards Aurora’s pendant. Their silhouette sharpened, then loosened, as though they tasted the air with the parts of themselves that weren’t solid.
“I smell iron and sweet rot,” Nyx whispered. “Not Fae. Not Earth.”
Aurora swallowed. “Hel?”
Isolde’s smile did not reach her eyes. “The boundary listens. If you listen back, you’ll hear what it wants you to swallow.”
Aurora didn’t like prophecies that sounded like threats dressed up as advice . She didn’t have the luxury of dislike, not with her scar burning and her pendant warming like it had a pulse of its own.
She stepped again, past the seam.
The world slid.
Where Richmond Park should’ve been, a hidden clearing opened, impossibly intact and impossibly wrong. Ancient oak standing stones rose out of leaf-strewn soil, but the leaves looked too fresh, too bright, veins like ink lines on parchment. Wildflowers bloomed in riotous colours that refused seasonal logic, petals shining as if they’d been kissed by moonlight and bottled sunshine.
A soft, wet scent drifted from somewhere deeper in the grove, sweet at first, then cloying, the kind of sweetness that sat too long on the tongue.
Nyx’s whisper turned into a hiss.
“Time’s thicker here.”
Aurora felt it at the back of her eyes. Not dizziness, more like gravity changed rules midstep. The air thickened around her like syrup, and every sound stretched. A birdcall, distant a moment ago, arrived late, as though the grove had misfiled it and decided to deliver anyway.
She took one more step, then another, and tried not to let wonder slow her down. Wonder made you careless.
Isolde walked beside them with that effortless , silent certainty, leaving no footprints in the soil. Each time Aurora looked down, she saw the indentation where her own boot had pressed, then nothing where Isolde had moved. The difference felt deliberate.
“What is this place?” Aurora asked.
Isolde’s gaze tracked the standing stones, the gaps between them, the way the light refused to settle.
“A pocket where two worlds forget their manners,” she said. “A clearing that exists because the Veil grows thin at the seams. Some call it a grove. Others call it a mouth.”
“A mouth,” Nyx repeated, voice low, amused in the way a blade might be amused at being drawn . “So that’s why it smells like teeth.”
Aurora didn’t answer. Her pendant had stopped warming and started vibrating, a tight, rhythmic tremble that made her wrist ache. She kept it hidden under her palm, but the crimson light leaked between her fingers, faint inner glow seeping through like embers under ash.
The grove opened in stages. At first, it looked like any secluded pocket of nature , bright wildflowers and ancient trees stitched close. Then the details began to disobey reality.
The standing stones weren’t smooth like weather-worn rock. Their surfaces held shallow grooves, spirals that looked like old writing, except the grooves shifted when Aurora tried to focus. She glanced away and they steadied, as if the stones disliked being studied .
A stream cut through the clearing, but it didn’t reflect. It drank the light. When Aurora leaned over it, she saw her own face warp in the surface, the scar on her wrist looking larger, crescent-shaped like a bite mark.
Nyx hovered near the waterline, their shadow-body rippling. They did not lean in. They watched, as though the stream could recognise them and decide whether to keep or discard.
“Is the seam the stream?” Aurora asked.
Isolde lifted a hand and pointed, not at the water, but at the space above it . A faint shimmering distortion hovered there, like heat above a road, visible only when Aurora made herself look without staring.
“The Veil hides its teeth,” Isolde said. “But it grows used to the bite. It leaves marks. You came for marks, not for answers.”
Aurora tightened her grip on the pendant until the chain bit into her skin. “What does the Heartstone have to do with Hel?”
Isolde’s hair shifted with no breeze. Silver strands caught the grove’s odd light and turned it strange.
“It comes from where your world prays with hunger,” she said. “Dymas does not only feast on souls, it teaches them cravings. The pendant remembers.”
Nyx’s glowing eyes narrowed . “Cravings. Yes. That’s what I hear under the flowers.”
Aurora held still. Under the blooming colours, beneath the late-arriving birdcall and the too-clean scents, she felt a pressure in her bones. It wasn’t sound, not exactly. It was the expectation of chewing. A rhythm, slow and patient, like someone turning a key in a lock.
She reached into her jacket and drew the Fae-Forged Blade.
The dagger came cold, colder than it should've, and the leaf-shaped edge caught the grove’s light in a faint, luminescent shimmer. Isolde had given it to her before, but this was the first time Aurora had felt it react. Not by warmth , not by heat. It responded by wanting.
Wanting to cut.
Wanting to end something that tried to cross boundaries with taste instead of feet.
“Stay close,” Aurora said, and she meant it more as a command to herself.
Nyx slid a step behind her, their form thinning as though they could slip through cracks in reality if needed. “If it’s a mouth,” Nyx whispered, “then don’t feed it your fear.”
Aurora almost snapped back, but the grove answered for them.
A flower head trembled .
Then another.
The wildflowers didn’t sway in wind, because there wasn’t wind. They shuddered like something had passed underneath the soil and pressed back up. Petals curled inward, not wilting, not dying, more like a throat tightening.
The stream darkened. The surface stopped drinking light and began to spit it, tiny reflected flashes dancing across Aurora’s boots.
Isolde tilted her head, as though listening to a story she’d heard before, just in a different voice .
“Belphegor’s pantry stirs,” she said. Her riddles sharpened, edges taking on urgency. “When hunger wakes, it calls what it lost.”
Aurora’s pendant vibrated harder. The crimson glow brightened until the inner light made her fingers ache.
“I didn’t call it,” Aurora said.
Isolde’s smile returned, thin and unreadable . “Nothing calls without being called.”
Nyx’s whisper went razor-quiet. “There’s a tear.”
Aurora followed Nyx’s attention. In the air above the stream, the shimmering distortion deepened, the Veil thickening into a visible seam. For a moment, the space around it looked like liquid glass .
Then something pressed from the other side.
Not hands. Not claws. Pressure first, then a suggestion of shape. The smell that rose from the seam wasn’t just sweet rot now. It carried spice, thick and syrupy, the kind of scent that belonged in kitchens lined with copper pots and heavy aprons, except this kitchen carried blood underneath the cinnamon.
Aurora stepped forward before she could stop herself.
The pendant yanked her attention like a leash, heat trying to bloom in the ruby gem, even though it had gone cool. Her wrist scar burned as if the crescent mark had begun to open from inside.
“Stop,” Isolde said.
Aurora stopped, but only because Isolde’s voice cut through the grove like a command you couldn’t ignore. Isolde didn’t move closer. She didn’t need to. Her words made the air heavier.
“Rory,” Isolde said, each syllable shaped like a warning . “You hold a key with no teeth. It will open the wrong mouth if you walk straight in.”
Aurora’s jaw tightened. “Then tell me where to look .”
Isolde’s eyes flicked to the standing stones, to the spirals on their surfaces. “Look where the stone pretends it has never been written on.”
Aurora turned, blade still in her hand, and stared at the closest standing stone. The grooves shimmered , and now Aurora could make out faint marks, like charred ink rubbed into rock.
Not words she recognised.
But patterns. Hunger made mathematical.
A spiral, a pause, a spiral again. A cadence that matched the slow chewing rhythm she’d felt under the flowers. The grove itself had been trained to repeat it.
Nyx’s shadow shifted across Aurora’s boots, stretching towards the stone. “There,” Nyx whispered. “The boundary’s stitched. Someone’s moved the stitch.”
Aurora crouched, careful not to let her weight rest on the seam hovering near the stream. Her blade hovered above her fingers, ready. She brushed her fingertips across the groove’s surface.
The stone wasn’t cold.
It was warm, like skin after a fire. Under her touch, the groove tightened into a line so crisp it felt freshly carved.
Then the warm skin-bitterness surged into her hand.
Pain snapped through her wrist, and the scar on her left wrist flared in response, a crescent of heat blooming under her skin. Aurora gasped and jerked back.
The standing stone answered with a sound.
Not a crack, not a rumble. A dry, satisfied click, like a lock accepting a key.
Isolde’s gaze hardened. “You answered it.”
Aurora staggered a step, keeping her blade between herself and the seam. “I touched a groove. That’s it.”
Isolde’s voice stayed calm, but her riddle had turned into a blade of its own. “Hel always counts. Touch one part of its story, and it thinks you chose the whole paragraph.”
The seam above the stream bulged.
The shimmering distortion thickened, and for an instant Aurora saw not Hel nor Earth, but a third image overlaid on everything, like the world couldn’ t decide which face to wear. Amber light. Tables too long. Smiles too wide.
Then the image collapsed into a single presence pushing through.
A figure emerged in a rush of warm, spiced air. It looked humanoid, but wrong in all the places where wrongness mattered. Its limbs ended in thick, spoon-like shapes, fingers widened like ladles, joints moving with a rhythm that matched the groove’s clicking.
Its mouth opened and closed without sound, yet Aurora heard the wet intention of eating. The creature’s skin carried a sheen like sugared fruit, and its eyes reflected amber like embers trapped in glass.
Behind it, the seam widened, letting through more than a body. A smell rolled over the grove, heavy with fat and herbs, and the wildflowers near the stream curled tighter, as if drawn to it.
Nyx stepped forward just enough for Aurora to see their form sharpen against the creature’s arrival. Violet light brightened in their eyes.
“Helbound,” Nyx whispered, and their whisper sounded almost offended. “Not a demon of fire. A demon of appetite.”
Isolde lifted her chin, silver hair sliding like a curtain. “Belphegor sends a taster.”
Aurora’s pendant flared crimson.
The Heartstone Pendant pulsed so hard it burned through her palm. The ruby gem’s glow cast a deep red over her scar, turning the crescent mark into a beacon .
The creature’s head snapped towards her like it had smelled the pendant’s warmth .
It lunged.
The grove’s air snapped tight, as if someone pulled a string. Aurora reacted on instinct, bringing the Fae-Forged Blade up and out.
The dagger cut through nothing first, because the creature moved faster than sense. Then it found shape. The blade struck, not flesh, but the outline of a ward the creature wore like a second skin . When the moonsilver edge met that ward , the air flared cold, and the creature hissed, a sound like syrup poured onto stone.
Aurora twisted her wrist, driving the dagger deeper.
The spoon-hand splayed wide, trying to catch the blade, and Aurora saw what was underneath the skin: not bone, not muscle, but layered rings of carved hunger, as if appetite had been stacked into a body.
Nyx moved in at Aurora’s side, a living shadow sliding across the creature’s feet.
The moment Nyx’s shadow touched the creature, the creature’s legs buckled. Its spoon-fingers clenched, and its mouth opened again, wider than any mouth should open.
This time, the grove produced sound with it.
A chorus of chewing clicked through the standing stones, the spirals responding like they’d been waiting for permission.
Isolde’s voice cut through, sharp now. “Now you see the trap. It isn’t only coming through, it’s calling the grove to hold it.”
Aurora yanked the blade free, bloodless but cold, and the creature staggered back a step, seam behind it widening wider, like a hungry throat learning to breathe.
Aurora planted her feet and thrust the dagger towards the shimmering boundary, aiming not at the creature but at the stitch in the Veil .
The moonsilver met the seam.
For a heartbeat, the whole clearing went silent, even the late birdcall. The amber glow inside the creature’s eyes flared brighter.
Then the Veil seam screamed without sound, splitting open like paper under a blade.
And from the widening gap, something else pushed through, larger than a taster, heavier than a body should be, dragging the smell of Dymas across the Fae Grove in a tide that tasted like copper and sugar and teeth .