AI Nyx dragged Aurora’s sleeve through the gap between two standing stones, and the world tore like thin paper.
Aurora’s Heartstone Pendant pulsed against her throat, deep crimson warmth blooming under her collarbone as the silver chain pulled tight. Nyx’s violet eyes flickered, then steadied, and their whisper crawled over her skin.
“Don’t step where the shade looks hungry.”
Isolde stood on the other side of the stones without moving her feet, silver hair hanging like moonlit wire. She didn’t smile. She didn’t need to. The air around her kept its shape, as if it feared to touch her.
“Enter with empty hands,” Isolde said, voice threaded in riddles. “Leave with weight you did not carry.”
Aurora tightened her grip on the parcel she’d brought, its paper already damp from sweat. The parcel held nothing magical, only the replacement drone battery for her delivery shifts and a bundle of spare cloth. Useless. Still, she kept holding it, like refusal might count as an offering.
Nyx leaned close, their form half-solid, half-shadow, their outline skimming the ground at the speed of thought. When they spoke again, the whisper sounded as if it came from behind Aurora’s ear and under her tongue.
“Isolde feeds only on truth. The grove feeds on want.”
The moment Aurora crossed the boundary, her breath caught and then vanished.
The standing stones disappeared behind her, replaced by oak roots that braided themselves across a narrow path. Wildflowers bloomed along the edges in colours Earth could not keep straight, petal edges sharp as cut glass. Their scent hit her first, sweet and green and bruised, like crushed leaves pressed to a warm wrist.
Somewhere deeper inside the grove, laughter rolled through unseen branches. It should have sounded bright. It didn’t. It sounded thick, like syrup poured over teeth.
Aurora took one step, then another. The ground held her weight without complaint. No instant trap. No sudden snapping branches. That calm felt like the pause before a blade found skin.
Nyx moved beside her, gliding rather than walking, their shoulders hunched as if they listened to something the rest of the world refused to admit.
Isolde drifted ahead, silent as falling ash. She left no footprints, and the moment Aurora tried to track her steps, the grass healed behind them, blades knitting back together with a soft, impatient whisper .
“Where are the paths?” Aurora asked.
Isolde turned her head just enough for her hair to sway.
“The grove makes routes out of questions,” she said. “Follow the thing that changes its taste when you notice it.”
Aurora’s tongue tasted iron.
She had the strange sense that the air wanted to be swallowed. Each inhale brought a faint crackle, like sugar burning in a pan. Her bright blue eyes searched for seams in the illusion, for the Veil that separated Earth from Hel and Fae realms. She had seen shimmering distortions before, glimpsed them through barriers during her first encounter with Nyx. This place felt closer, as if the boundary hung thin enough to see through.
Her Heartstone Pendant pulsed again, deeper this time. The crimson glow didn’t light her skin. It coloured her thoughts, stroking them with warm insistence.
She touched the pendant with her scarred wrist without meaning to. The crescent scar tightened, a reflexive flinch. The warmth pushed back.
Nyx saw the motion. Their whisper turned sharper.
“Don’t wake it by looking.”
“I’m not looking,” Aurora said, and hated how steady she sounded.
Isolde’s gaze landed on Aurora’s wrist anyway, lavender eyes steady and unblinking.
“Wounds remember openings,” Isolde said. “The grove collects all the ways you learn to survive.”
Nyx’s silhouette rippled, and for a heartbeat they looked almost human, almost solid. In that flicker , Aurora saw the faint outline of hands that weren’t theirs, as if Aldric’s memory tried to inhabit the shadow.
Then the grove swallowed that likeness again.
They walked beneath arching branches that bent away from them, as if making room for something sharper than footsteps . The trees carried hanging tendrils like lanterns, but the lanterns held no flame. Instead, amber light pooled inside, slow and viscous, like syrup held in glass.
Aurora’s stomach tightened.
The laughter grew louder, and with it came other sounds, distant and layered. A chopping rhythm. The hiss of oil. The clink of porcelain . The far-off thud of something heavy settling onto a table.
Reality tried to join the feast. It failed. That failure made it worse.
“Do you hear that?” Aurora asked.
Nyx’s violet eyes flicked to the roots underfoot.
“I hear mouths that don’t belong to any throat on your side of the Veil,” they said. “It will try you, delivery girl.”
Aurora bristled at the nickname. It sounded familiar in Nyx’s mouth, as if they’d learned it from watching her. She forced her voice to stay cool.
“Show me where the danger is.”
Nyx extended a hand. Their fingers looked like smoke given edges. They pointed at a patch of wildflowers, a cluster of blossoms that should have looked harmless.
Instead, every petal carried tiny lines like veins. Aurora leaned closer and realised the lines shifted when she focused. They arranged themselves into letters.
A menu, written in living veins.
Her heartstone pulsed hard enough to sting. The crimson warmth spread along her chain, down into the soft tissue around her collar. The pendant didn’t want her to read. It wanted her to accept.
Isolde watched Aurora’s eyes track the shifting letters.
“You came with a key,” Isolde said, and the riddle carried a knife-edge . “So the door will find you. Doors dislike patience.”
Aurora snapped her gaze away from the menu-flower. She stared at the nearest oak trunk instead, at the bark that looked like braided leather .
“Where’s the rift point?” Aurora asked.
Isolde’s smile finally appeared, thin as a drawn line .
“Rifts do not sit,” she said. “Rifts hunger. When it arrives, you will taste it before you see it.”
Nyx gave a soft sound, half laugh, half warning.
“The Veil tastes like iron too,” they whispered. “This taste is different. This taste is salt on sweet.”
Aurora didn’t respond. She had felt that wrong taste before, when she’d first stepped near a portal in a basement at Silas’ bar, when Nyx had warned her not to follow the tug in her bones. She’d ignored it then because survival demanded choices fast. Now she didn’t have the luxury of ignoring anything.
They moved deeper. The grove’s sounds thickened into a slow tide.
As they passed between two boulders, the air shimmered in a faint distortion Aurora could finally see with her own eyes. It didn’t shimmer like heat. It shimmered like reality forgetting how to hold still.
The Heartstone Pendant glowed brighter, and the crimson pulse matched the throb in Aurora’s wrist.
Nyx stopped.
Their whole body contracted into shadow, then expanded again, the silhouette shifting as they looked at the distortion. When they spoke, the whisper sounded closer to a hiss.
“Someone has opened a mouth in the Veil.”
Isolde raised one pale hand. She moved without leaving prints, but her fingers still seemed to part the air.
“Not opened,” she corrected. “Invited.”
Aurora followed Isolde’s gesture to a hollow oak. The tree looked ordinary at a glance. Up close, its interior held a dark circle like a pupil. Vines curled around the opening with careful tenderness , as if they wanted to keep it cradled.
The scent came again, stronger now. Warm grapes. Roasted meat. Sweet spices. It hit Aurora in the teeth and made her swallow, even though no one told her to.
Her parcel in her grip suddenly felt too heavy.
Nyx leaned forward and the shadow around their shoulders spread thin, tasting the darkness in the oak. Their violet eyes glimmered, then dimmed, as if something inside responded and pulled at them.
“Hel,” Nyx said, voice sharpening . “Not the entire realm. A contract-pocket. A gluttony spill.”
Isolde stepped closer to the oak hollow. The blossoms around her trembled , petals bending away like frightened tongues.
“Prince Belphegor’s cooks love boundaries,” Isolde said. “They cut their feasts from everywhere they can reach.”
Aurora couldn’t stop herself now. She reached for the Heartstone Pendant and pressed it against the hollow oak’s rim.
The tree shuddered.
A shimmer tore open inside the dark circle, revealing not an interior but an amber-lit landscape where vineyards stretched in orderly rows and orchard trees hung heavy with fruit the size of fists. The sky above it glowed warm amber, and far away, a long table glimmered with silver cutlery.
Faces turned towards Aurora, silhouettes without features, heads angled like prey.
Aurora’s throat went dry.
Her blade hung in its wrap at her hip, Isolde’s gift. She hadn’t drawn it yet. She wasn’t sure if drawing it here would count as feeding the grove’s hunger or slashing at the boundary itself.
Nyx moved first. They slipped into the shadow of the oak hollow like ink poured through a crack, their silhouette stretching, thinning. For a heartbeat, Aurora saw their older form, Aldric’s outline like a memory trapped in smoke.
Then the shadow snapped back, and Nyx’s whisper cracked with irritation.
“They’ve noticed the key,” Nyx said. “The mouth wants payment.”
Aurora’s fingers tightened around the parcel. Paper tore. Batteries and cloth shifted. She heard the small sound and felt foolish, like the grove could care about her delivery tools.
It did care.
The taste of salt on sweet sharpened until it scraped.
Isolde lifted her chin and spoke in riddles that refused to be soothing.
“Stand still, but do not settle,” she said. “A seer can mislead a hungry door, never a hungry contract.”
Aurora didn’t understand the last part until the vines around the oak hollow began to move. They didn’t slither like living things. They flexed like muscles preparing for a grip.
From inside the Hel-pocket, something scraped along the Veil’s edge, unseen but close enough that Aurora felt the distortion press against her skin. The shimmering boundary rippled. Amber light leaked outward in threads.
Then a hand reached through.
It wasn’t a human hand. It looked assembled from plated silver and dark velvet , fingers too long and jointless. The palm carried crimson stains, as if it had gripped too many hearts.
It grabbed Aurora’s wrist.
Her scar flared. Pain bit through skin, sharp and immediate, and the Heartstone Pendant pulsed hard enough to feel like it drove a nail into her bones.
Aurora reacted without thinking. She yanked her wrist free with a grunt, but the hand held on, tightening like a vice.
Nyx surged towards her, solid enough now to make the shadows around their feet writhe. They raised one arm and the air around the oak hollow darkened, as if someone had poured night into the gap.
“Back,” Nyx whispered, the word carrying the weight of an order no mouth could refuse. “Back, you meal.”
The hand recoiled a fraction.
Isolde moved then, finally leaving Aurora’s side, her pace smooth and unreadable . She drew near the oak hollow’s rim and placed her fingers against the shimmering distortion without flinching.
She didn’t lie to the grove. She couldn’t.
“You want hunger?” Isolde said, voice like carved glass. “Then take what was offered.”
Aurora understood too late. The vines had tightened around her parcel. The torn paper and cloth shifted, lifting. The Hel-mouth inside the oak hollow leaned towards the movement, as if the scent of her supplies carried a promise.
Aurora snatched the wrap bundle and threw it away from the oak hollow with all her strength.
It sailed through the amber light that leaked out, vanished, and landed somewhere inside the Hel-pocket with a wet, celebratory thump.
For a breath, the hand loosened.
Aurora didn’t wait for that mercy to become a mistake. She drew the Fae-Forged Blade in one clean motion.
The moonsilver dagger came out cold, colder than it had any right to be. When Aurora gripped it, the steel numbed her fingers, then steadied her grip. Moonlight from nowhere caught the leaf-shaped blade and made it glow faintly along its edges.
She swung for the wrist-holding hand.
The blade met resistance, not flesh but a ward anchored to the Veil . The moonsilver bit through it, and the shimmer tore like fabric.
The Hel-hand screamed without sound. Amber light splattered outward across Aurora’s sleeve and the oak bark, burning without heat.
Nyx lunged through the distraction, shadow spilling into the crack Aurora had opened. Their silhouette flattened against the boundary, and their voice turned razor-thin.
“Aldric’s end,” Nyx whispered. “Unmake your contract.”
The oak hollow’s interior flared. The amber landscape blurred, warped, like a painting smeared by a thumb.
Isolde leaned back, eyes widening only a fraction. She spoke one more riddle, quick and sharp enough to cut.
“Do not close it. Cut it.”
Aurora understood the direction a heartbeat too late.
The Hel-pocket didn’t shrink. It widened.
A second mouth opened inside the shimmering distortion, bigger, meaner. This one carried teeth made of chopped fruit and bone-thin plates. A scent surged into the grove, thick as wine, thick as blood.
The ward she’d cut with the moonsilver blade began to knit itself back together incorrectly, like a wound trying to heal with the wrong hands.
The creature pushed through the gap fully.
It looked like a chef assembled from gluttony itself, torso wrapped in aprons stitched from vines, head crowned with grape clusters that dangled like ornaments of devotion. Its face was a mask of plated silver with a grin that never learned restraint.
It lunged for Aurora again.
Nyx stepped between them, shadow spreading like a blade of its own, and Isolde lifted her hand to redirect whatever the grove chose to offer.
Aurora raised her moonsilver dagger, the cold blade humming against her palm.
The chef-chewed grin widened.
Then it grabbed for her Heartstone Pendant instead.