AI The oaks didn't creak. That was the first wrong thing.
Rory pressed her palm against the nearest trunk and felt nothing. No bark, no roughness, no pulse of sap beneath living wood. Her hand sank an inch into the surface and she jerked it back. The bark sealed behind her touch like water closing over a dropped stone.
"Don't linger at the threshold." Nyx's voice drifted from somewhere above, carried on a wind that didn't touch the branches. "Standing stones mark the boundary. Once crossed, they expect you to keep walking."
She glanced up. The Shade clung to the canopy in a patch of shadow too dark for the hour, violet eyes two faint embers in the gloom . Since when did Nyx warn her about anything? Since when did they care about thresholds and boundaries and the expectations of ancient places?
She kept walking.
The standing stones waited ahead, six oaks arranged in a loose circle with their trunks grown together at the base. They shouldn't have been standing at all. The roots jutted from the earth like the knuckles of buried hands, thick as Rory's torso, and the ground between them sloped downward into a darkness that swallowed her torchlight in three paces.
"Richmond Park," she muttered. "Just a walk in the park."
"A park," Nyx echoed, now at her shoulder. Their form had solidified enough for her to catch the edges of their outline, a humanoid silhouette that bent the light around it rather than reflecting it. "Is that what the Wardens called it when they sealed this place?"
The Wardens. Rory's hand drifted to the Heartstone pendant beneath her jacket. It hung cool against her sternum, silent. No warmth , no pulse . Whatever portal it was meant to detect, this wasn't one of them.
Between the standing stones, the air thickened. Not fog, not mist. Something denser. She tasted it on the back of her tongue, a sweetness like overripe plums, cloying and faintly metallic. Her ears popped as though she'd climbed several storeys in a lift.
Then the trees opened.
The grove stretched before her, and for a long moment Rory forgot how to breathe.
It shouldn't have existed. The canopy above filtered light that had no source, a soft amber glow that clung to the leaves like trapped sunlight. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in every colour she could name and several she couldn't, blooms that shifted hue when she moved her head, petals that caught light in ways that made her eyes water. The air smelled of honeysuckle and thunderstorms and something older, something that reminded her of her grandmother's garden in Cardiff before the cancer took hold, that particular scent of earth disturbed after decades of peace.
"This is real," she said. Not a question.
"Real enough." Nyx drifted past her, their shadow-form stretching thin across the flowers. The blooms didn't wilt where they touched. Curious. "Reality is a matter of perspective here. Time, too."
Right. Time moved differently. Isolde's grove existed in a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm, and an hour inside could pass as minutes or days in London. Rory checked her phone. No signal. The screen displayed 14:23, frozen.
"When did we enter?"
"By your reckoning? Perhaps twenty minutes."
"And outside?"
Nyx's silence answered better than words.
She started forward. The grass gave beneath her boots, springy and soft, each step cushioned as though she walked on moss. No. Not moss. The ground itself breathed. A slow, rhythmic undigation, subtle enough to dismiss as imagination until she stopped and felt it: the inhale-exhale of something alive beneath her feet.
Don't think about it.
The path, if it could be called that, wound between clusters of wildflowers that grew taller as she progressed. Waist-height stems topped with blooms the size of dinner plates, their centres dark and velvety. When she passed close to one, the flower turned. Followed her. She caught the movement in her periphery and spun, but it had already settled back into stillness.
"They're watching," Nyx said.
"Helpful."
"I state what is."
The path curved around a boulder that hadn't been visible from the entrance. Pale stone, shot through with veins of deep violet crystal that pulsed with a faint inner light. Rory reached for it without thinking and Nyx caught her wrist. Their grip was cold, impossibly cold, the temperature of a cellar in February.
"The stones remember touch," they said. "Yours. Mine. Every hand that's reached for them in the last thousand years."
She pulled free. "Isolde's grove. Isolde's rules?"
"Isolde's cage, more like." Nyx released her and drifted ahead, their form flickering between solid and transparent. "Exile has a particular weight . The Fae Courts don't banish their own lightly . When they do, they make sure the prison feels like paradise."
A cage. Rory looked around at the impossible flowers, the breathing earth, the light that had no source. Some cage.
They rounded the boulder and the grove revealed its centre.
The clearing was small, perhaps twenty paces across, ringed by a circle of standing stones that matched the entrance but older. These bore carvings. Spirals and knotwork that shifted when Rory tried to focus on them, patterns that rearranged themselves into new configurations the moment she blinked. At the clearing's heart, a pool of water sat in a natural depression of pale stone. Still as glass. Dark as ink.
And beside the pool, a figure sat with her back to them.
Silver hair cascaded to the woman's waist, catching the ambient light and refracting it in ways that hair shouldn't. She wore a dress of deep green, simple and unadorned, and her bare feet rested on the grass without pressing it down. No footprints. Rory remembered the codex entry. Isolde Varga left no footprints.
The Seer didn't turn. She spoke to the pool instead.
"Three paths diverge at the old oak. The one who walks the middle path carries a stone that burns cold." A pause. "But you already knew that."
"We didn't come for riddles," Rory said.
"No one comes for riddles. They come for answers. And answers are riddles dressed in different clothes." Isolde turned, and Rory met eyes the colour of pale lavender. They were too large, too bright, pupils slit vertically like a cat's. Half-Fae. The human half showed in the shape of her face, the set of her jaw. The other half showed in everything else.
"The Heartstone." Those alien eyes fixed on Rory's chest, on the pendant hidden beneath layers of fabric. "It brought you here."
"It brought me to Richmond Park. You brought me here. Your note, your cryptic message to Eva, your little breadcrumb trail."
"Semantics." Isolde rose in a single fluid motion, her body unfolding like a paper crane being creased into existence. She stood barely five-five but the air around her pressed outward, a subtle displacement that made Rory's skin prickle. "The Heartstone knows where it needs to go. I merely clear the path."
"And Dymas?" Rory asked. "The pendant pulses near portals to Hel. Specifically to the realm of Gluttony. You said you could tell me why."
"I said I could show you. There is a difference."
The pool rippled. Nothing had touched it. The surface broke in concentric circles that spread outward from the centre, and in the dark water, colours bloomed. Deep amber. Gold. Crimson. A sky the colour of heated copper stretched across the pool's surface, and below it, landscapes materialised: vineyards heavy with impossible fruit, gardens that sprawled to horizons, towers of pale stone rising from orchards where the trees bore fruit in every season.
Dymas. The realm of Gluttony.
Rory's stomach turned. Not from disgust. From hunger. A sudden, clawing emptiness that gripped her midsection and squeezed. She staggered, caught herself on the edge of the pool's stone lip. The Heartstone at her chest blazed hot, a pulse of warmth that cut through the false hunger like a blade.
"Careful." Isolde's hand was on her shoulder, grip delicate but firm. The Seer's skin was cool, smoother than silk , and Rory caught a scent beneath the honeysuckle and ozone. Something wild, something that didn't belong to Earth. "The pool shows what Dymas wants you to see. What it wants you to feel. Prince Belphegor's realm is built on appetite. Even a glimpse can hook the unwary."
Rory tore her gaze from the water. The hunger faded, but the memory of it lingered, a phantom itch behind her ribs. "Is that what happened to the helbound souls? They got hooked?"
"Hooked, cooked, served on silver platters at Belphegor's table." Isolde's voice carried no inflection, but her fingers tightened on Rory's shoulder. "The Heartstone chose you. That pendant cannot be chosen, only given, and only to those who can survive what follows."
"Survive what?"
The Seer released her and stepped back. Her lavender eyes moved to Nyx, who hovered at the clearing's edge, a dark smudge against the impossible colours of the grove.
"The Shadow knows."
Nyx said nothing. Their violet gaze met the Seer's and held. Something passed between them, a conversation conducted in silence and the subtle shifting of light. Rory looked between them, the Shade and the Half-Fae, and felt like a child caught between adults discussing something beyond her comprehension.
"I hate being the last to know."
"You're not the last." Isolde turned back to her, and for the first time, something like warmth crossed her ethereal features. "You're the first to ask the right questions. That is rarer than you think."
She reached into her sleeve and produced something that caught the grove's light: a slender blade, leaf-shaped, its surface shimmering with a faint luminescence. Moonsilver. The Fae-Forged Blade. Rory had read about weapons like this in the codex fragments Eva had decrypted, but seeing one in person was different. It was beautiful and terrible in equal measure, and the air around it hummed with a frequency she felt in her teeth.
Isolde held it out, hilt first.
"For the path ahead."
Rory took it. The blade was cold to the touch, a deep cold that sank through her fingertips and settled in her bones. The crescent scar on her left wrist ached at the contact, a phantom pain from a childhood she'd rather forget. She tested the weight . Light. Almost weightless. The moonsilver caught the amber light and threw it back in silver-blue fragments that danced across the clearing.
"This cuts through wards," she said. Not a question.
"Wards, enchantments, demon-flesh." Isolde's voice dropped. "And other things I cannot name. Not yet. Names have power here, and some names, once spoken, cannot be unspoken ."
The pool rippled again. Harder this time. The amber sky in its depths darkened, and the vineyards and towers of Dymas blurred as though seen through rain. Something moved in the reflection, a shadow that was too large, too deliberate, crossing the surface like a cloud passing before the sun.
Isolde's head snapped toward the pool. Her silver hair lifted, caught by a wind that touched nothing else in the clearing.
"It knows you're here."
The Heartstone pulsed again. Hot. Urgent. A heartbeat against Rory's sternum, and this time it didn't fade. It grew stronger, insistent, a summons she felt in her marrow.
In the pool's dark surface, the shadow paused. Turned. Faced upward, as though it could see through the water, through the veil between realms, through to where Rory stood with a Fae blade in her hand and a stone that burned against her chest.
Two pinpricks of amber light opened in the shadow's form. Eyes. Watching. Hungry.
The flowers in the grove began to wilt.