AI Richmond Park should have been grey at that hour.
It should have been wet grass, bare branches, the distant hiss of traffic beyond the dark ribs of winter trees. It should have smelled of mud and dogs and London rain, of damp wool and old leaves crushed underfoot.
Instead, Aurora Carter stood before a ring of ancient oaks that had grown like stones.
Their trunks rose black and massive from the earth, each one twisted into a shape too deliberate to be natural. Bark folded over itself in ridges like carved runes. Roots gripped the soil in knotted fists. Between them, the air shimmered .
Not glowed. Not exactly.
It bent.
The space beyond the oaks wavered as heat did above tarmac in summer, though the evening was cold enough for Aurora’s breath to pale in front of her face. Something tugged at the small crimson pendant beneath her jumper, a faint pulse of warmth against her sternum. Once. Twice. Like a second heart waking.
Beside her, Eva muttered, “Please tell me you’re seeing that.”
Aurora glanced at her. Eva had her scarf pulled up to her nose and both hands jammed into the pockets of her red coat. Her eyes, usually bright with mischief or indignation, had gone wide and wary. On Aurora’s other side, Silas stood very still, broad shoulders hunched under his black pea coat, gaze fixed on the wavering air. He had the look he wore when bottles shattered downstairs at the bar and he was deciding whether a drunk could be reasoned with or needed carrying out by the collar.
Nyx waited half in the shadow of the nearest oak, though the shadow did not seem deep enough to hold them. The Shade’s outline wavered at the edges, a tall humanoid silhouette made from the place where light refused to go. Their violet eyes gave off the faintest glow.
“This is the boundary,” Nyx whispered, their voice sliding through the branches like wind. “Do not step between the trees unless you mean to enter.”
Aurora touched the pendant through the fabric of her jumper. Warm. Not burning, not warning exactly, but alive . “And if we change our minds?”
The oak nearest her creaked though no wind moved.
Nyx tilted their head. “Then change them now.”
A sensible person would have. Rory Carter, daughter of a Welsh teacher and an Irish barrister, former Cardiff law student, part-time delivery rider, survivor of one man’s fists and another world’s teeth, had spent most of her life trying very hard to be sensible. Sensible paid rent. Sensible kept your head down. Sensible told you not to walk into the shimmering gap between impossible trees because a half-Fae seer who spoke in riddles had sent word that the “knife of moon and mouth of shadow must return before the amber hunger wakes.”
But sensible had not stopped Evan. Sensible had not stopped Hel portals yawning open in London alleys. Sensible had not explained the Heartstone pendant or the leaf-shaped dagger strapped cold against her thigh beneath her coat.
Aurora exhaled. “We go in, we stay together. Nobody touches anything unless we know it won’t bite, curse, or marry us.”
Eva gave a strangled laugh. “That last one was oddly specific.”
“I’m learning.”
Silas nodded once. “After you.”
“Coward.”
“Bartender. Different skill set.”
Aurora drew the Fae blade.
It slid free without a sound. Moonsilver caught the thin winter light and returned something paler, cleaner, like moonlight remembered from a dream. The dagger was slender and leaf-shaped, its edge too fine to seem forged by any human hand. Cold bit through her glove the moment she gripped it. Not ordinary cold. It sank past skin and tendon, into memory, into old fear, until her fingers tightened out of spite.
She stepped between the oaks.
For one heartbeat, the world folded.
Sound vanished. Her stomach lifted as if she’d missed a stair. The air became thick and bright, pressing against her eyes, sliding over her teeth, filling her ears with the hush of distant wings. The scar on her left wrist prickled beneath her sleeve, a small crescent burning like a question.
Then London was gone .
Aurora stood in a clearing under a sky that was neither day nor night. Above her stretched a deep blue vastness threaded with slow-moving ribbons of green and silver light. Stars hung enormous and close, some caught in the branches of trees like dew. The air smelled of crushed mint, rain on warm stone, and flowers she had no names for. It tasted faintly of honey.
Behind her, Eva stumbled through and grabbed Aurora’s sleeve. Silas came next, swearing under his breath. Nyx emerged last, not stepping so much as pouring from the shadow of one oak into the shadow of another.
The trees around them were oaks, perhaps, but only in the way a wolfhound was related to a sketch of a dog. Their branches spiralled upward in slow corkscrews. Leaves grew in shades of copper, violet, and luminous green, each veined with light. Some leaves turned as Aurora watched, their surfaces blinking like sleepy eyes before settling again.
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing though it was December outside. Bluebells, foxgloves, snowdrops, and blossoms like tiny lanterns nodded together in impossible season. A pale moth the size of Aurora’s hand drifted past her face, its wings patterned with shifting constellations.
Eva whispered, “Oh.”
It was not her usual theatrical oh. It was small. Reverent. It made Aurora’s chest ache.
Somewhere ahead, water sang over stones. Somewhere farther off, something laughed—a bright, chiming sound that almost became words and then decided not to.
Aurora looked back.
The ring of oak standing stones stood behind them, but through the gaps she saw no park, no rain, no dark London path. Only more clearing, more trees, deeper blue. The threshold had vanished.
Silas noticed at the same time. “That’s not ideal.”
“No,” Aurora said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “But not unexpected.”
“Speak for yourself.”
Nyx’s shadow-form stretched taller, edges fraying. They seemed thinner here, less solid, as if the grove tugged at the pieces of them that did not belong to Earth. “The path will reveal itself when it wishes.”
Eva turned slowly . “I hate that sentence.”
Aurora did too.
She started forward because standing still only let fear settle. The grass gave under her boots with the softness of moss, yet when she looked back, she had left no footprints. None of them had. Even Silas’s heavy boots failed to mark the ground. The wildflowers straightened untouched behind them.
“That’s comforting ,” Silas said. “We’re trespassing in a place that hides the evidence.”
“Try not to think like a criminal for five minutes,” Eva told him.
“I own a bar in Camden. It’s a survival mechanism.”
Aurora kept the blade low at her side. The Heartstone pulsed again, faint warmth under her jumper, then quieted. It had pulsed near Hel tears before—in alleys where the air stank of smoke and iron, in a restaurant kitchen where steam had curled the wrong way and the tiles had sweated amber light. Here, its warmth felt confused , flickering in answer to something far away.
Not Hel, then. Not exactly.
The grove deepened by degrees. The clearing narrowed into a path that had not been there until they needed it. Branches arched overhead, interlacing into vaulted tunnels. Pale fruit hung among the leaves, translucent as blown glass; within each one, tiny shapes moved. Aurora glimpsed a storm trapped inside one, lightning crawling soundlessly beneath its skin. In another, a miniature horse ran forever over a hill of green flame.
Eva raised a hand.
Aurora caught her wrist. “No touching.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You absolutely were.”
“I wanted to know if the horse was real.”
“The horse is busy.”
Eva lowered her hand, scowling, but not hard enough to hide wonder.
They crossed a stream no wider than Aurora’s stride. Its water ran uphill over black stones polished to a mirror shine. As they passed, the surface flashed with images: a kitchen full of steam and ducks hanging lacquer-red in the window; Yu-Fei Cheung frowning over receipts at the Golden Empress; Cardiff Bay under a low sky; her father in a suit, younger than he had been when Aurora last saw him, laughing at something just out of view.
Aurora stopped.
The stream held the image another second, then broke it apart over the stones.
“Rory?” Eva asked softly .
“I’m fine.”
It was a lie, but not a dangerous one.
Nyx hovered at the bank, violet eyes on the water. Their shape rippled, and for an instant Aurora thought she saw a man instead of shadow: a gaunt face, dark hair tied at the nape, eyes hollow with terror and candlelight. Then the water chimed, and Nyx was only Nyx again.
Silas had gone quiet. His jaw worked as if he had words caught behind his teeth. Aurora followed his stare to the stream. She saw nothing there now but impossible water.
“What did it show you?” she asked.
“Nothing I wanted.” He stepped over.
They moved on.
The air warmed. Not summer warm, not Dymas amber-sky-and-overripe-fruit warm, but living warm, as if the grove had a body and they had wandered near its heart. The flowers grew taller here, brushing Aurora’s knees, then her hips. Some turned their heads to watch them pass. A cluster of white blooms opened as Eva neared, revealing rows of tiny golden teeth.
Eva made a noise and sidestepped into Silas.
“Careful,” he said, steadying her.
“I am being careful. The daisy has molars.”
“It’s not a daisy.”
“That is not the point.”
Aurora nearly smiled.
Then the trees whispered her name.
Not aloud. Not in any language she could pin down. The sound slid through leaves and along the back of her neck.
Aurora.
She stopped so abruptly Eva bumped into her.
“What?” Eva said.
Aurora tightened her grip on the dagger. “You didn’t hear that?”
Silas looked around. “Hear what?”
Nyx’s eyes narrowed . “The grove knows you carry Fae silver.”
The dagger’s cold intensified, biting into Aurora’s palm. Moonlight—or what passed for it here—gathered along the blade’s edge, a faint luminescence that made the surrounding flowers lean away.
Ahead, between two silver-barked trees, something moved.
A deer stepped onto the path.
At first Aurora thought it was white. Then it shifted, and she saw its coat was made of frost patterns laid over muscle and bone, every breath misting into tiny falling stars. Antlers branched from its skull in impossible symmetry, hung with strips of red thread, tiny bells, and what looked very much like human teeth. Its eyes were pale lavender.
Aurora’s stomach dropped.
The deer looked at the blade, then at Aurora.
One bell rang though the animal had not moved.
Eva whispered, “Nope.”
“Don’t run,” Aurora said.
“I wasn’t going to run. I was going to politely die.”
The deer lowered its head.
Not an attack. A bow.
Aurora, after one frozen second, lowered the dagger slightly and inclined her head in return. She felt ridiculous. She also felt watched by every tree in the grove.
The deer turned and walked away down a path that had not existed a moment before. After a few steps, it looked back.
“Invitation?” Silas asked.
“Or bait,” Nyx whispered.
Aurora stared after the deer. The lavender eyes. The red threads. The way the bells rang without sound reaching her ears until after she felt it in her bones.
“Both, probably.”
“Excellent,” Eva said. “Love a multitasking death omen.”
Aurora followed.
The path wound through a stand of trees with bark like old ivory. Their branches grew low and heavy with hanging charms: feathers dipped in silver, cracked mirrors, spoons, keys, small glass bottles filled with captured sighs. As Aurora passed, one of the mirrors flashed. She saw herself not as she was but crowned in black thorns, eyes bright blue and furious, the Heartstone burning crimson at her throat. Behind that reflection stood a sky of warm amber and tables groaning beneath impossible feasts.
Dymas.
The image vanished as quickly as it came.
Her pendant pulsed hard.
Aurora hissed through her teeth and pressed a hand to her chest.
Nyx drifted closer. “The realms pull at what has touched them.”
“I haven’t been to Dymas.”
“Not in body.”
That was not reassuring.
The deer led them into a hollow where the trees opened around a pool. The water was dark and perfectly still, reflecting stars that were not overhead. In the center of the pool rose a stone plinth covered in moss and flowers. Upon it rested a bowl of black wood filled with what looked like clear water, though steam curled from its surface.
Around the pool, the ground glittered.
Aurora crouched before she could think better of it. Embedded in the moss were thousands of tiny objects: buttons, coins, snapped quills, milk teeth, wedding rings, a brass military badge, a child’s blue marble . Offerings, maybe. Or payments.
Eva knelt beside her, careful now. “Are these from people?”
“Some.”
“You say that like the rest are worse.”
Aurora picked out a coin near her boot without touching it. The face stamped on it was not any monarch she knew. Too many eyes. Too many mouths.
Silas stood over them, arms folded. “I vote we don’t pay the haunted pond.”
The deer stepped onto the surface of the pool.
Water did not ripple beneath its hooves. It crossed to the plinth, lowered its antlered head, and breathed over the black bowl. Steam rose higher, twisting into shapes. A tower. A door. A mouth opening in an amber sky.
Then a woman’s voice came from behind them.
“To enter hungry is to be eaten. To enter armed is to be asked what wound taught the hand.”
Aurora turned.
Isolde Varga stood at the edge of the hollow as if she had always been there.
She was smaller than Aurora remembered, or perhaps the grove made everyone seem temporary. Silver hair fell to her waist in a sheet that caught the strange starlight. Her face was ethereal, ageless, too lovely in the way frost on a window was lovely: delicate, distant, dangerous to touch. Her pale lavender eyes matched the deer’s. The hem of her gown brushed the moss, but when she walked, she left no footprints.
The deer was gone .
Eva made a faint sound. Silas straightened. Nyx’s shadows drew close around themself.
Aurora sheathed the Fae blade because her instincts, for once, were unanimous. “Isolde.”
“Rory Carter.” Isolde’s gaze dipped to the pendant hidden beneath Aurora’s jumper, then to the dagger at her thigh. “Moon in one hand. Heart of hunger at the breast. You do collect storms.”
“I was told you asked for me.”
“I ask many things. Few listen in the right direction.”
Silas muttered, “That tracks.”
Isolde’s eyes flicked to him, amused or merely cruel in the way cats were cruel. “The keeper of cups carries broken glass in his sleep.”
Silas went still.
Eva stepped half in front of him before she seemed to realize she had. “And what do I carry?”
Isolde tilted her head. “A red coat. A brave mouth. A door you should have closed and did not, because you loved the hand knocking.”
Eva’s face drained of colour.
Aurora moved then, putting herself between Isolde and both of them. The grove seemed to inhale. Flowers trembled around her boots. “If you brought us here to prod old bruises, we can leave.”
“Can you?”
The question settled into the hollow like a stone dropped into deep water.
Aurora held Isolde’s gaze. Her own heart beat too fast, but her voice stayed level. “Yes.”
Isolde smiled faintly. Because she could not lie, Aurora had learned to listen hardest when the seer said nothing.
The black bowl on the plinth began to hum.
Low at first, then deeper, a note that vibrated through Aurora’s bones. The Heartstone warmed in answer. The crimson gem’s glow seeped through her jumper, painting a small red pulse over her chest.
Nyx shifted uneasily. “Something presses against the Veil.”
Isolde looked to the bowl. “Amber hunger dreams with its mouth open.”
Dymas again. Prince Belphegor’s realm, though Isolde did not say his name. Aurora had never seen it except in flashes: warm amber sky, orchards heavy with impossible fruit, tables that groaned beneath abundance while something beneath the abundance rotted.
The bowl’s steam formed a vineyard under an amber sky. Grapes hung swollen and dark. Chefs in white moved among long banquet tables, their faces blurred. Then the image dipped lower, beneath soil tangled with roots, to a seam of light splitting open like a wound.
Aurora stepped closer despite herself.
The air above the bowl smelled suddenly of roasted meat, caramelised sugar, spiced wine. Her stomach clenched with fierce hunger though she had eaten before they left. Eva inhaled sharply . Silas cursed and turned away.
“No,” Aurora said, mostly to herself .
The hunger sharpened. It was not just food. It was comfort. It was safety. It was being warm, full, wanted. It was her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff and Yu-Fei pressing extra dumplings into a takeaway bag and Eva laughing barefoot on the sofa in the flat above Silas’s bar. It promised everything she had been running toward since she left Evan and everything she feared she would never deserve.
Aurora’s hand drifted toward the bowl.
Cold seized her thigh.
The Fae blade, through sheath and coat, burned icy enough to hurt. The pain snapped the world back into focus.
She jerked her hand away.
Isolde watched, expression unreadable . “Good.”
Aurora rounded on her. “You could have warned us.”
“I did.”
“No, you spoke in decorative nonsense.”
“Warnings rarely wear the shape we prefer.”
Eva had backed away from the pool, one hand clamped over her mouth. Silas stood beside her, pale and furious. Nyx’s form had thinned almost transparent at the edges, drawn toward the steam and resisting it.
Aurora swallowed the last ghost of hunger. Her skin felt too tight. “What is this place?”
“The first room,” Isolde said.
“Of what?”
The seer’s smile faded. For the first time, something like sorrow crossed her face . “Of the path underneath the path. Before roads were cut between courts and kingdoms, before Hel named its hungers and mortals named their fears, there were places where the worlds leaned close enough to listen. This grove remembers.”
The trees rustled overhead. Aurora had the unsettling sense they were pleased.
Isolde lifted one hand toward the pool. “It remembers every bargain buried under moss. Every gate opened with blood, bread, song, blade, or kiss. It remembers the taste of those who entered certain they would return.”
“And did they?”
“Some returned. Some became the reason others were warned.”
Eva made a small, disgusted noise. “I liked it better when she was being vague.”
Aurora looked into the bowl again, careful not to breathe too deeply. The amber seam widened. Something moved beyond it, enormous and slow.
A portal. Or the beginning of one.
Her pendant pulsed with sickening warmth .
“The Veil is weak,” Nyx whispered. “Not solstice-weak. Cut-weak.”
Aurora touched the hilt of the dagger. “Can the blade close it?”
“Moon cuts what binds,” Isolde said. “It may cut what opens. It may cut the hand that tries.”
“Helpful as ever.”
“A straight answer is a narrow bridge. Some truths are too large to cross that way.”
Aurora wanted to shake her. Instead she forced herself to look around the hollow, to catalogue, to think. That had saved her before. Panic made rooms smaller; attention made doors.
The offerings in the moss. The pool. The bowl. The deer with teeth hanging from its antlers. The trees watching. A place that remembered bargains.
“What does the grove want?” she asked.
Isolde’s lavender eyes brightened.
Nyx turned toward Aurora, and even without a face, they looked approving.
Isolde stepped aside. Behind her, between two trees, a new path opened. This one sloped downward, though the ground beyond the hollow had been flat. Its edges were lined with flowers shaped like small open hands. Far below, something glimmered red and gold.
“The grove wants witnesses,” Isolde said. “The hungry door wants a name. The one who gave you the Heartstone wants to remain unknown. All three desires cannot be fed.”
Aurora’s mouth went dry. “You know who gave me the pendant.”
“I know the shadow of the hand.”
“Tell me.”
“I cannot give what has not yet been paid for.”
Silas barked a humourless laugh. “There it is. Haunted pond does want payment.”
Aurora ignored him, though he wasn’t wrong. “What payment?”
Isolde’s gaze slid to Aurora’s left wrist. To the small crescent scar hidden beneath sleeve and glove, as if fabric meant nothing. “Not blood. Not yet. A memory.”
Eva said immediately, “No.”
Aurora did not look away from Isolde. “Whose?”
“The grove will choose what you can afford to lose.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only honest one.”
The hollow fell silent except for the humming bowl and the uphill stream whispering somewhere behind them. Aurora became aware of her own breathing, of the cold hilt against her palm, of Eva close enough to grab her if she tried anything stupid. She became aware, too, of the impossible beauty around them: the star-filled pool, the luminous flowers, the trees older than nations leaning in to listen.
Wonder and unease braided together so tightly she could not tell one from the other.
She had wanted, once, a life made of ordinary choices. Law lectures. Bad coffee. Maybe a decent flat with a washing machine that didn’t sound possessed. She had wanted not to be afraid of footsteps behind her.
Now she stood in a Fae-touched grove bargaining with an exile who could not lie, while a realm of Hel pressed its mouth against the world.
Aurora let out a slow breath. “If I say no?”
“Then the path remains a path. The door remains hungry. The unknown hand remains gloved.”
“And if I say yes?”
Isolde glanced down the newly opened way. “Then you go deeper.”
Of course.
Eva caught Aurora’s sleeve. “Rory.”
Aurora finally looked at her. Eva’s eyes were bright with fear, but her grip was steady. Silas stood just behind her, grim and ready to drag them all bodily out if he found an exit. Nyx watched from the edge of the hollow, violet eyes dimmed, ancient sorrow flickering in their shadowed shape.
Aurora was afraid . She would have been an idiot not to be.
But the amber seam in the bowl widened another fraction, and the smell of honeyed meat curled through the grove.
She thought of London. Of the Golden Empress at closing time. Of Silas’s bar under her flat, warm with spilled beer and bad music. Of Eva asleep on her sofa with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. Of all the ordinary fragile things that did not know a hungry realm had begun to dream of them.
Aurora pulled off her left glove.
The cold bit her fingers. The crescent scar on her wrist gleamed pale in the strange light.
She stepped to the edge of the pool.
“All right,” she said. “But the grove can choose from me. Not them.”
Isolde’s expression softened, which somehow frightened Aurora more than any riddle. “Brave mouth. Bright blade. Bruised heart.”
“Was that a yes?”
“That was a warning.”
Before Aurora could ask which part, the pool rippled.
A single thread of water rose from its surface, thin and shining. It reached toward her bare wrist like a curious finger. Every instinct screamed to pull back. She held still.
The water touched her scar.
The grove vanished.
For a heartbeat she was seven years old again in her mother’s kitchen in Cardiff, standing on a chair to reach a jar she had been told not to touch. Glass breaking. Blood on tile. Her mother’s hands around her wrist, warm and sure, voice firm but kind: Hold still, cariad. Hold still. I’ve got you.
Pain flashed white.
Then the memory loosened.
Aurora felt it go—not the fact of it, not entirely, but the warmth at its center . Her mother’s exact tone blurred. The smell of lavender soap faded. The shape of being held without fear slipped from her like a ribbon drawn through fingers.
She gasped.
Eva swore and grabbed her shoulders as Aurora stumbled back. Silas’s hand closed around her other arm. The pool stilled.
Aurora stared at her wrist. The crescent scar remained. Of course it did. The body kept records even when magic stole the footnotes.
Something inside her had gone quiet.
She swallowed hard. “Did it work?”
The black bowl cracked.
Steam burst upward, not white now but crimson shot through with gold . The image of the amber seam sharpened, and within it appeared a mark: a sigil shaped like an open mouth encircling a thorned heart.
Isolde went very still.
Nyx whispered a name Aurora did not catch. It sounded old and full of dread.
Down the sloping path, the red-gold glimmer flared in answer.
Aurora’s pendant burned hot against her chest.
The grove around them came alive. Flowers shut their petals. The hanging charms clattered in a wind that touched nothing else. Far above, the close stars blinked out one by one, as if something vast had passed between them and the sky.
Isolde turned toward the descending path. “The first room opens.”
Eva’s voice shook. “That was the first room?”
Aurora flexed her cold fingers around the dagger’s hilt. The stolen emptiness inside her hurt less than she expected. That worried her.
Ahead, the path breathed warm air that smelled of ripe fruit and smoke.
Aurora looked once at the place where the threshold home had vanished, then at the friends who had followed her into the impossible. She wanted to tell them to stay. She wanted to tell them to run. But there were no footprints behind them, no visible way back, and the grove had taken its payment.
So she did the only thing left.
She drew the Fae blade again, its moonsilver glow a thin defiance against the red-gold dark.
“Stay close,” Aurora said.
And together, they went deeper.