AI The Heartstone woke before the trees did.
Rory stood between the ancient oak stones in Richmond Park with wet grass soaking the hems of her jeans, one hand curled around the deep crimson pendant at her throat. Heat beat against her palm in slow knocks, as if something beneath the ground had raised a fist and tapped back.
Nyx pooled at the edge of the clearing, taller than any human shadow had a right to be, violet eyes dim under the moon-washed branches. Isolde Varga crossed the grass without bending a blade. Her silver hair trailed down her back, pale as frost, and her lavender gaze fixed on the space between two stones where the air had begun to ripple.
“Tell me that isn’t normal.”
Isolde lifted one finger. The wildflowers at her feet turned their faces away from the stones.
“Normal is a coat mortals throw over things that bite.”
“Brilliant. Very helpful.”
Nyx’s outline thinned, then gathered again, blackness folding in on itself.
“The Veil opened its mouth.”
Rory felt the pendant pulse harder. The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled beneath her sleeve. She had delivered noodles through worse weather than this, had argued with drunk barristers twice her age, had stood in a London kitchen while Yu-Fei shouted over a broken extractor fan and three boiling woks. None of that had taught her what to do when the air peeled apart like skin.
The space between the stones split.
Amber light spilled out, thick and warm. It washed over the grove and turned Isolde’s hair to molten silver, Nyx’s edges to smoke, Rory’s hands to gold. Through the opening, she saw something like a vineyard, except the vines rose higher than houses and carried fruit that glowed under a honey-coloured sky.
A smell rolled through.
Roasted pears. Woodsmoke. Salt. Butter browning in a pan. Something darker beneath it all, rich as blood and old soil.
Rory swallowed.
“Dymas?”
Isolde’s mouth curved without warmth .
“The table of the unending guest. The orchard of second teeth. Belphegor’s sweet-breathed cage.”
“Could you just say yes once?”
“Yes.”
Rory blinked.
“Right. Hated that, somehow.”
Nyx extended one arm. Their hand passed through the amber light and came back edged with gold.
“Stable enough for flesh. Less fond of shadow.”
“Meaning?”
“It will notice me.”
“Everything notices you.”
“Not with appetite.”
Rory pulled the Fae-forged blade from the inside pocket of her jacket. The moonsilver dagger sat against her palm, cold enough to bite. Its leaf-shaped blade caught the portal light and answered with its own pale glow.
Isolde glanced at it.
“Do not draw blood unless you mean to feed the ground.”
“Another yes or no would’ve done.”
“Then no.”
Rory stepped through before her nerve could start billing her for overtime.
Heat wrapped around her. Not summer heat, not the damp press of London heat trapped between buildings, but oven heat, fragrant and dry, layered with spice. Her boots sank into dark red earth. The sky above held a warm amber glow without sun, as if the whole realm sat beneath stained glass. Behind her, the portal shimmered between two black-barked trees whose branches twisted into archways. Through it, Richmond’s moon looked small and cold.
Nyx followed, their body stretching thin as tar pulled across glass. For one breath they scattered, a storm of soot and violet sparks, then slammed back into shape beside her.
“Still with us?”
Their eyes narrowed .
“Mostly.”
Isolde came last. No soil took her footprints. The portal sealed behind her with a soft pop, like a cork leaving a bottle.
Rory spun.
“Oi. We might need that.”
“The door remembered us. It did not promise to wait.”
“That sounds like the kind of thing you mention before we step into demon wine country.”
A low note rolled across the vineyard. Not thunder. A horn, perhaps, blown from somewhere beyond the rows of giant vines. The leaves shivered. Every cluster of fruit chimed together, skins tapping skins with glassy clicks.
Rory stilled.
The grapes nearest her were the size of plums, translucent green shot through with veins of gold. Inside each one, tiny shapes drifted. Seeds, she thought at first. Then one pressed against the skin from within, five-fingered and frantic.
She stepped back.
“Those are not grapes.”
Isolde moved closer, her face unreadable .
“They are wishes that fattened.”
Rory tucked the blade low by her thigh.
“Anyone else getting less hungry?”
Nyx leaned over one cluster. The fruit nearest their face blackened at the edges and shrank.
A whisper seeped from inside it.
Please.
Rory’s stomach turned.
“Don’t touch anything.”
“I had not planned a picnic.”
The path ahead wound between the vines, paved with pale tiles that looked like bone until Rory saw grain in them, knots and rings, wood bleached by age. Each tile bore markings burnt into the surface: curling sigils, old names, tiny knives, cups, open mouths.
The vineyard breathed around them. Leaves flexed in time with some hidden pulse . Farther ahead, water ran somewhere, but it sounded too thick, a syrupy pour rather than a stream.
They walked.
Rory kept the Heartstone in one hand and the dagger in the other. The pendant pulled against its chain, not hard, just enough to choose a direction. Left at a fork lined with blue fig trees. Right past a trellis of white roses whose petals opened as they passed, each flower showing a little red tongue in its centre.
One licked the air near Rory’s elbow.
“Absolutely not.”
She smacked it with the flat of the dagger. Frost bloomed across the petals. The rose folded in on itself with a squeal like a kettle taken off the boil.
Nyx turned their head.
“You made an enemy of a flower.”
“It started it.”
Isolde paused beneath a tree heavy with yellow fruit shaped like lanterns. Their skins gave off soft light, and each one contained a moving scene: a banquet table, a woman weeping over a bowl, a child stealing pastry from a windowsill, a man signing a parchment with jam on his fingers.
Rory looked closer despite herself.
In one lantern-fruit, a chef in a white apron plated something delicate with tweezers while horned silhouettes clapped around him. His face had the stiff, hollow calm of a man who had forgotten sleep existed.
“Helbound souls?”
Isolde touched the air beside the fruit, not the skin.
“Some signed. Some were signed for. Ink has teeth here.”
Rory’s grip tightened around the pendant.
“Can we break contracts?”
“The right blade cuts words.”
The Fae dagger turned colder in her hand.
Nyx drifted past the tree. Their feet skimmed the ground; where shadow touched soil, the red earth recoiled into little cracks.
“Aurora.”
No one called her Aurora unless things had teeth. Rory moved to them.
The vineyard ended.
Beyond it stretched a garden so wide she lost the far edge in amber haze. Terraces stepped down into the distance, each one crowded with impossible growth. Silver-leafed herbs hissed steam. Mushrooms rose in towers with caps like parasols, dripping blue milk into carved channels. Pomegranate trees split open along their trunks, revealing red seeds packed inside the wood itself. Bees the size of sparrows crawled in and out of bell-shaped flowers, their wings making the air hum against Rory’s ribs.
At the centre of the nearest terrace stood a fountain.
It did not spill water. It poured soup.
Clear broth arced from the mouths of three stone beasts into a basin carved with laughing faces. Noodles coiled in it like pale eels. Chopped green herbs swam on the surface, spelling words before steam blurred them.
Rory stared.
“Yu-Fei would either die happy or commit murder.”
Nyx bent toward the steam and recoiled.
“It smells of memory.”
Rory caught it then: her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff, leeks softening in butter, rain needling the window, her father arguing case law at the table with a spoon in his hand. The scent shifted. Golden Empress stockpot at midnight. Ginger. Star anise. Yu-Fei smacking her knuckles with chopsticks for cutting spring onions too thick.
The basin steamed harder. The broth formed a shape on the surface: a doorway, a flat above a bar, a bed left unmade.
Rory stepped back fast enough to bump Isolde.
“Nope. Done with the soup.”
Isolde’s eyes stayed on the basin.
“Dymas seasons hunger with what you miss.”
“I don’t miss that much.”
The fountain bubbled. A noodle rose like a hooked finger.
Rory pointed the dagger at it.
“Back in the bowl.”
The noodle sank.
Nyx’s shoulders trembled . It took Rory a second to realise they were laughing .
“You threatened soup.”
“And soup listened.”
They moved down the first terrace. The tiles changed underfoot from pale wood to black stone veined with amber. Warmth came through Rory’s soles. The channels beside the path carried blue milk, red wine, honey, and something clear that rang like bells as it flowed.
A flock of birds burst from a row of spice bushes. Their feathers were cinnamon sticks, their beaks curved cloves. They circled once, shedding fragrant splinters, then vanished into a canopy of green glass leaves.
Rory followed them with her eyes until her gaze snagged on the horizon.
There, above the orchards and gardens, rose a city.
Its towers resembled stacked cakes, glazed domes, copper pots, and rib bones. Bridges looped between them in elegant sweeps. Smoke rose in perfumed columns. Bells rang from somewhere inside, not church bells but dinner bells, dozens of them, overlapping until the sound became a command in the blood.
Her stomach clenched.
“I ate before we came.”
Isolde’s pale eyes cut to her.
“Your body remembered. Your will must disagree.”
“Great. My stomach ’s a traitor.”
A shout floated up from the next terrace.
“Mind the press! If the pears bruise, the prince docks fingers!”
Rory crouched beside a hedge of purple leaves. Nyx melted flatter, their body pouring into the shadow of a mushroom tower. Isolde stood in plain view because apparently ancient exile came with no sense of cover.
Three figures stumbled along a lower path, pushing a wooden cart stacked with enormous pears. They wore aprons over mismatched clothes: one in a tracksuit, one in a stained shirt and tie, one in chef whites with the sleeves ripped off. Iron bands circled their throats. Each band held a small hanging tag that glowed orange.
The man in the tie wiped sweat from his forehead.
“Left, left, you daft cow, left!”
The woman in the tracksuit shoved the cart wheel off a root.
“I know left. You keep saying left when you mean your left.”
“My left is left.”
“Your left is my right when you’re facing me, Terry.”
The chef-white man grabbed the cart before it tipped. His throat band flashed. He hissed through his teeth and clutched it.
“No names. Tags heard you.”
Terry froze. The orange tag at his neck brightened.
From the soil beside the cart, a mouth opened.
Not a creature. Just a mouth, wet-lipped and full of square teeth, set straight into the path.
“Terry,” it crooned.
The man’s face drained.
The woman slapped a pear into the mouth.
“No, it didn’t.”
The mouth chewed. Juice ran over its lips.
“Ter—”
She rammed another pear in.
“Full, aren’t you? Lovely. Keep eating.”
Rory watched the ground mouth swallow, satisfied. It sank back into the path, leaving only a damp mark.
The cart rolled on.
Nyx rose from the mushroom shadow.
“Humans.”
Rory glanced at the blade.
“Contracts.”
Isolde watched the workers disappear between trees shaped like hands.
“Every feast needed kitchens. Every kitchen needed wrists.”
Rory moved before she finished speaking.
Nyx caught her sleeve with fingers that felt like cold smoke .
“Three souls do not make a rescue.”
“No, but three collars make a direction.”
She pointed with the dagger to the orange glow fading below. The Heartstone pulsed in agreement, warmer now, tugging toward the same path.
Isolde’s smile thinned.
“The red heart wants the pantry beneath the crown.”
“Is that where contracts are kept?”
“The prince ate the key. The lock still sulks.”
Rory closed her eyes for half a second.
“I missed normal metaphors.”
They followed at a distance, keeping behind hedges heavy with black berries that muttered in Latin. The lower terrace narrowed into an avenue of trees unlike the others. Their trunks had grown from marble plates stacked one on top of another, roots gripping silver cutlery buried in the soil. Fork tines poked through moss. Knife handles gleamed under crawling vines. Spoons reflected Rory’s face in warped fragments: blue eyes too bright, black hair clinging to her jaw, mouth set sharp.
At the end of the avenue stood a gate.
It rose from two enormous jawbones planted upright. Between them hung chains of candied fruit, hardened sugar, and tiny brass bells. Beyond the gate, a courtyard spread around a long stone table cracked down its centre. No food sat on it. No guests. Only plates, thousands of them, embedded in the walls, the floor, the archways, each painted with a different name.
Rory stepped through the gate.
The bells chimed once.
Every plate turned towards her.
Her breath caught. Not turned like plates should not turn, but shifted in their settings, round faces angling, painted names sliding across ceramic. Some had English names. Some used alphabets she did not know. Some held only scorch marks. A plate near her boot bore fresh paint that had not dried.
TERRY WILKES.
Rory crouched.
“Got you.”
Nyx entered after her, and half the plates cracked in thin hairline fractures. Whispers rose from them, layered and hungry.
Shadow. Shade. Between-thing. Not meat. Not guest.
Nyx drew themselves taller.
“Rude.”
Isolde stopped beneath the jawbone arch. No bell rang for her. No plate turned.
Rory looked back.
“You don’t count?”
“I was not invited, and I did not enter.”
“You’re standing right there.”
“Thresholds disagree.”
Rory rose, scanning the courtyard. The Heartstone tugged so hard the chain bit the back of her neck. Across the stone table, a doorway had been carved into a wall of plates. No handle, no hinges. Just an outline, sealed by writing that crawled over the surface in red script.
The Fae blade hummed in her grip.
Nyx came close enough that the air cooled against Rory’s cheek.
“Wards.”
“Can you read them?”
“Parts. Hunger. Debt. Tongue. Bone. A warning against theft.”
“Lovely. We’ll be polite burglars.”
Isolde’s voice carried from the gate.
“The door opens for a price, a name, or a cut.”
Rory stared at the red script.
“Can I cut the ward instead of myself?”
“The blade can.”
“See? That was nearly straightforward.”
The plates whispered louder. Names lifted and overlapped until the courtyard sounded like a packed dining room with no bodies in the chairs. Rory stepped to the sealed doorway. The cold from the dagger crept up her wrist, over the crescent scar, into the bones of her forearm. The red writing twitched away from the blade.
A plate beside the doorway showed a woman’s name in chipped blue paint.
MARIAM ADEYEMI.
A voice slipped from it, thin as steam.
“If you open it, they count the plates.”
Rory froze.
Nyx turned, violet eyes narrowing at the plate.
“Who counts?”
A pause. Ceramic trembled in its frame.
“The stewards. The mouths. The ones with ladles for hands.”
Rory leaned closer.
“Mariam, were you in the cart?”
“No. I was fish course.” The plate gave a small, dry scrape against the wall. “Still am, when they remember.”
Rory’s jaw locked.
The Heartstone pulsed against her throat, almost painful now. Through the sealed door came a smell unlike the garden’s rich temptations: dust, iron ink, old parchment, cold storage. The place behind it held records, not food. Her hand steadied.
“Nyx, if something with ladles for hands turns up, distract it.”
“By charm or violence?”
“Your pick.”
“Violence has cleaner grammar.”
Rory pressed the Fae blade against the first line of red script.
The ward screamed.
Not loud. Not through the air. It rang through her teeth, through the scar on her wrist, through the pendant burning at her chest. The red letters writhed, peeling away from the blade like worms from salt. Plates rattled across the courtyard. Somewhere beyond the garden, a dinner bell stopped mid-ring.
Isolde’s eyes flashed pale lavender.
“Cut down, not across.”
Rory adjusted her grip.
“You could’ve led with that.”
“I did not see you choose wrong until you chose.”
“Seers are exhausting.”
She drew the blade down.
The red script split cleanly. For a breath, the whole courtyard fell silent. The sealed outline in the wall deepened, shadow filling the carved seam. Then the stone door sank inward with a heavy scrape.
Cold air breathed out.
Rory smelled parchment. Wax. A cellar after rain. Beneath it, hundreds of human voices murmured in sleep.
Nyx slipped to her left, shadow gathering around their arms like smoke around coals.
Isolde remained at the gate, one hand lifted but not crossing.
Rory looked into the dark beyond the opened door. Shelves waited inside, stacked from floor to ceiling with glowing tags, iron bands, folded contracts, and plates wrapped in black cloth. At the centre of the room, under a beam of amber light that fell from no window, stood a lectern made from bone-white wood.
On it lay a single open ledger.
The ink on the page moved. Names crawled, rearranged, vanished, returned.
Rory stepped over the threshold.
The Heartstone burned warm enough to make her gasp, and every collar-tag in the room answered with a faint orange glow.