AI Rory pushed through the last band of bracken and stopped so hard the soles of her trainers scraped wet earth.
The trees opened up without warning.
One second, Richmond Park had pressed close around her with its dark trunks and slick undergrowth. The next, she stood before a clearing that felt wrong in the best possible way. Ancient oak standing stones rose at the edge of it, broad as chapel walls, their bark twisted with age and threaded through with pale lichen that caught what little light slipped through the canopy. Beyond them, wildflowers crowded the ground in thick drifts, bright enough to sting the eyes. Bluebells. Foxgloves. Things she could name, and things she couldn’t, stems arched with petals that looked cut from silk and smoke.
A low breath left her.
“Bloody hell.”
Nyx drifted out from the shadow of a standing stone, their shape sharpening as they crossed the boundary. Their violet eyes caught the light and held it for a beat before it slid off them.
“It looks calmer than it tastes,” they murmured, voice like wind worrying through a crack in a door.
Rory glanced back at them, then at Isolde, who stood at the grove’s edge with her silver hair hanging down her back in one shining fall. The Seer had no mud on her boots. No, that was wrong. She had no footprints at all. She rested one hand against the bark of a stone, pale lavender eyes half-lidded as if she listened to something buried under the roots.
“This is the place?” Rory’s fingers tightened around the strap of her bag. “Feels more like I’ve walked into a dream someone had after a bad pint.”
Isolde’s mouth curved a fraction.
“Dreams,” she said, each word placed like a pebble in water, “often borrow their bones from old things.”
Nyx tilted their head toward the flowers nearest Rory’s boots. “And what do these old things feed on?”
“Careful,” Isolde replied, gaze settling on them without heat. “Some blooms hear curiosity and answer with teeth.”
Rory looked down at a cluster of white flowers shaped like little bells. The petals quivered though no wind touched them. She took one step back, and the bells stilled.
“Right,” she muttered. “No touching anything pretty. That’s already a solid rule.”
Isolde moved first, gliding into the clearing. The grass did not bend where she walked. The flowers leaned aside in a soft ripple, then sprang upright again behind her.
Rory followed. So did Nyx, keeping half a pace to her left, shadows gathering and thinning around the edges of their form like a cloak that couldn’t decide whether to stay. The air inside the grove changed at once. It smelled of rain on stone, green stems crushed under bare feet, and something sweet beneath it all, like pears split open in sunlight.
The sounds changed too. Outside, the park had carried the distant hum of traffic, the barking call of a dog, the crack of a branch under some jogger’s boot. Here, those noises faded to a dull murmur, as if the grove had wrapped them in moss. In their place came another rhythm: a hush of leaves rubbing together overhead, the soft click of insect wings, a slow drip of water somewhere unseen.
And under that, barely there, Rory heard singing.
Not a voice. Not quite. A thread of tone slipped through the trees, thin and high, then gone when she tried to catch it.
She frowned. “Did you hear that?”
Nyx’s eyes moved through the grove, not settling anywhere. “The stones are humming.”
Isolde gave a small nod, silver hair brushing her waist. “The boundary remembers.”
Rory stared at the nearest standing stone. Up close, it was not oak in the way a tree was oak. It had bark and rings and knots, but the grain beneath the surface swirled in patterns too deliberate to be natural, like a hand had carved hidden script under the bark and then buried it under centuries. Faint lines of pale gold glimmered in the grooves when she shifted her angle.
She leaned in.
The air pressed cold against her cheek. The gold flared once, just enough to make her blink.
She jerked back. “It does that on purpose, yeah?”
“A warning,” Isolde said.
“To me?”
“To the fool who touches what has not been invited.”
Nyx made a low sound that might have been a laugh. Rory shot them a look, but the corner of her own mouth tugged despite herself.
She walked deeper into the grove.
The ground sloped gently downward, and the flowers thinned into a lane bordered by roots that rose from the earth like stone fingers. Between them, pale mushrooms clustered in rings, their caps mottled silver and blue. Some glowed with a light so faint she had to squint to see it. The light did not come from them exactly. It seemed to breathe from inside the caps, a pulse she could feel in her teeth.
Rory crouched before one of the rings.
“Those weren’t there a second ago.”
Isolde stopped beside her. “They were.”
“I would’ve noticed.”
Nyx’s shadow stretched over the mushrooms, and the ring shifted. One cap turned toward them, not with motion, but with intent, as if a face had been hidden in the shape all along.
Rory straightened fast.
“Yeah. No. That’s enough of that.”
The path bent around a basin where water sat black and still as polished glass. Ferns ringed the pool, each frond edged in frost despite the mild air. Rory looked closer and saw faces in the water. Not reflections. Faces. Laughing, then vanishing under the surface as ripples passed. A child with bright braids. A woman with antlers made of branch and blossom. A man with a mouth full of ash.
She stepped back so quickly the heel of her trainer skidded in mud.
Nyx’s voice dropped to a whisper . “Do you see them too?”
Rory swallowed. “Do you?”
“No.”
Isolde knelt at the water’s edge, her fingers hovering a finger-width above the surface. The pool darkened around them, then steadied.
“Not all doors open the same way,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Rory asked.
The Seer turned her head. The pool cast pale light up into her face, turning her eyes almost luminous. “It means this place has its own appetite. It shows each visitor what sits nearest their ribs.”
Rory stared at the water, at the way the faces no longer looked like faces but like shapes made by memory and fear. She folded her arms tight over her chest.
“Brilliant,” she muttered. “So it’s nosy.”
Nyx drifted closer to the pool. Their reflection did not appear. The water beneath them remained black, unbroken.
“Rory.”
She heard the change in their tone and looked up.
Their gaze had gone past her shoulder.
Something moved between the trees.
Rory turned and found a line of pale movement crossing the grove. At first she thought it was deer, but the shapes were wrong. Too tall. Too thin. Their bodies caught the light in strips, as though made of bark and bone and moonmist. One stepped between two oaks and paused. Its head angled toward her with a stiffness that made her skin tighten.
No eyes. Just hollows where eyes should have been.
Rory’s hand went to the inside pocket of her jacket before she remembered she still wore the city clothes she’d left home in. Her fingers brushed the cool outline of the Fae-forged blade tucked there, moonsilver under leather, a gift she had not expected and still hadn’t quite decided how to trust .
Nyx moved without sound, half their body slipping into shadow. “Are those yours?”
Isolde’s head lifted. The air around her seemed to still.
“No,” she said.
The creature in the trees opened its mouth.
A scent spilled out — wet leaves, copper, and a sweetness that turned her stomach . The thing made a sound like a branch snapping in deep frost, then the nearest trees answered with another, and another, until the grove filled with it. Shapes moved in the undergrowth. Not rushing. Watching. Holding the line.
Rory’s pulse hammered against her throat.
“Do they come closer?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“Only if invited,” Isolde said.
“That’s meant to comfort me?”
Her eyes flicked to Rory’s face. “No.”
Nyx’s shoulders seemed to sharpen, their form thinning as if the shadows around them had grown eager. “It’s not a threat?”
Isolde rose to her feet in one clean motion. “Everything is a threat to something.”
The creature in the trees tilted its head again, then stepped back. The others followed, vanishing as though the grove had swallowed them.
Rory let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she held.
“Right. Lovely. That’s one answer I’d have been happy never getting.”
She looked at Isolde. “You brought us in here blind.”
“I brought you in here alive.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“It is the correct one.”
Nyx’s attention moved to the far side of the clearing, where the flowers parted around a narrow arch of roots and branches. Something rested beyond it, hidden in a dip of the land. Rory followed their stare and saw a shape half-sunk into moss: a stone slab with carvings worn almost smooth by time.
Letters? Not letters. Older than that. Curving marks cut deep into the stone, some filled with pale green lichen, others touched with the same thin gold that glimmered in the standing stones.
She stepped toward it despite herself.
The air around the slab felt warmer. Not comfortable -warm. Alive-warm. Her skin prickled.
Rory crouched and brushed a fringe of moss aside with two fingers. The carvings shifted in the light, and for a second she saw them not as marks but as channels, channels that ran in loops and circles through the stone like veins.
Nyx came up beside her, gaze fixed on the centre of the slab. “It’s been sealed.”
Rory looked up. “You can tell that from a glance?”
“I can smell the warding.”
Isolde’s expression did not change, but something in the air around her went still and sharp. “The seal was broken once,” she said.
Rory’s eyes narrowed . “Was?”
The Seer’s gaze moved over the stone, then the roots above it, then the flowers beyond. “Old magic leaves a taste.”
Rory traced the edge of one carved line with the tip of her fingernail. The stone hummed under her touch, low enough to feel more than hear. A faint tremor ran up her arm and settled in the crescent scar on her wrist. She jerked back.
“Ow.”
Nyx turned at once. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” She flexed her hand, then stared at the skin. The scar had gone pale, as if something beneath it had caught light. “It just went weird.”
Isolde’s eyes sharpened. “Show me.”
Rory held out her wrist. Isolde did not touch her. She only looked, and the grove seemed to lean in with her. The scar gave off a faint warmth , a thread of heat just under the skin.
Rory frowned. “I swear that wasn’t doing that before.”
“No,” Isolde murmured. “It was waiting.”
For a moment none of them moved. The flowers trembled in their beds. Somewhere above them, a branch groaned under its own weight . The water in the hidden pool gave one small, deliberate ring.
Rory drew her hand back and stood, keeping her eyes on the stone slab. “Whatever’s down there, it knows I’m here.”
Nyx’s violet gaze flicked from the slab to the dark lanes between the trees. “And it knows we brought company.”
Rory straightened, dusting damp grit from her jeans. The grove felt larger now than when she’d first stepped in, as though the space had stretched while she wasn’t looking . The standing stones watched from the edge of the clearing. The flowers shone against the shade. The hidden paths between the roots seemed to shift, just enough to make her uneasy.
Still, she didn’t back away.
She looked from Isolde to Nyx, then at the stone again.
“Then let’s stop standing around and have a proper look.”