AI The Heartstone burned through Aurora’s jumper before the gate appeared.
One moment Richmond Park stretched ahead in wet grass and black-limbed trees, the sort of London dark that carried fox stink, traffic hum, and last orders from pubs miles away. The next, the air folded between two ancient oaks, and a seam of amber light split the night from root to crown.
Aurora stopped with one boot in a puddle.
“That wasn’t there.”
Nyx gathered out of the shadow beneath a hawthorn, tall and thin, their edges fraying in the drizzle. Violet eyes opened in the dark of their face.
“It was there. It chose not to show you.”
Isolde Varga stood barefoot beside the nearest oak, silver hair dry despite the rain. No mud clung to her soles. No bend marked the grass under her feet. Her pale eyes fixed on the crimson pendant at Aurora’s throat.
“The door answers the hungry key. The key answers the hungry door.”
Rory pinched the Heartstone through the fabric. Heat thudded beneath her fingers, slow and stubborn, like a pulse that belonged to someone else.
“Can you give me a version that won’t make me want to hit my head on a tree?”
Isolde lifted one hand. The rain bent around her wrist.
“Do not eat what praises you. Do not drink what remembers your name. Do not bargain with anyone who bleeds gold.”
“Brilliant. Tourist advice from a nightmare.”
Nyx drifted closer to the amber seam. Their shadow-body thinned at the edges, pulled into long threads.
“Hel lies beyond. Not the whole of it. One court. Dymas.”
The name pressed against Rory’s teeth, sweet and sour. The pendant warmed until her skin prickled. She drew the Fae-forged blade from the sheath at her hip. Moonlight slid along the leaf-shaped moonsilver, faint and cold, though clouds smothered the sky.
Isolde watched the blade as if it had spoken.
“Cut where the light bruises.”
Rory swallowed, set the blade to the amber seam, and dragged it down.
The air split with the sound of a ripe fruit torn open. Heat rolled out, thick with cinnamon, charred sugar, crushed herbs, roasting meat, wet earth after sun. Her stomach clenched hard enough to hurt.
Beyond the cut waited a sky the colour of honey held over a flame.
Aurora stepped through.
Grass vanished under her boots. Warm stone took its place, smooth as bone and veined with green. Behind her, London’s damp night shrank to a slit between two leaning pillars of dark wood. Nyx flowed after her, then Isolde, whose feet touched the stone without a sound.
Rory turned in a slow circle.
The world had no horizon she understood.
Terraces of orchards climbed into the amber distance, stacked in impossible shelves that curved up and away like the inside of a shell. Vines looped between white columns carved with open mouths. Fruit hung in clusters the size of lanterns—blue pears with silver freckles, pomegranates that glowed behind their skins, grapes big as eyes and clear enough to show tiny storms turning within. Far below, a river moved through the valley in a ribbon of dark red, not water, not quite wine . Steam rose from it and formed shapes that almost became faces before the wind tore them apart.
Somewhere, knives struck boards in a thousand kitchens.
Chop. Chop. Chop.
Then laughter.
Then a bell, deep and soft, rolling through the warm air.
Aurora took one breath and tasted butter, salt, smoke, honey, blood-orange peel.
“Nope.”
Nyx’s shoulders tilted. “Nope?”
“That’s my official legal position.”
“You abandoned law.”
“I retained opinions.”
Isolde moved past them down the stone path. Wildflowers grew between the paving cracks, but each bloom looked wrong on second glance. One had petals like tiny tongues. Another opened to reveal rows of seed-teeth. A cluster of white bells rang without wind as Isolde passed.
Rory kept the blade low against her thigh.
“Are the flowers dangerous?”
“All things here wished to be consumed or to consume,” Isolde answered. “Some had better manners.”
The path sloped through an arch of braided vines. As Rory passed beneath, the leaves turned their pale undersides towards her. Each vein pulsed red. The Heartstone answered with a throb .
Nyx stopped under the arch.
“Carter.”
Rory looked back.
A strand of vine had looped around her wrist, just above the crescent scar. It had done it with such care she had not felt the touch. Tiny tendrils traced the old mark as if reading it .
“Get off.”
The vine tightened.
Nyx’s hand became a blade of shadow and sliced through the tendril. It fell to the path, wriggled, then curled into a shape like a question mark. Clear sap oozed out and smelled of pears.
Rory rubbed her wrist.
“Thanks.”
“The grove sampled you.”
“Again. Nope.”
A sound carried from the orchard below: singing, low and rhythmic . Rory walked to the terrace edge before Isolde could stop her.
Rows of trees stretched beneath them, every trunk black and glossy, every branch heavy with gold-skinned apples. Between the rows moved men and women in white coats, their sleeves rolled to the elbow, their wrists locked in thin brass cuffs. Some sang while they picked fruit. Some wept without changing their tune. A woman with cropped grey hair sliced an apple open with a hooked knife, caught the seeds in a porcelain bowl, and flinched when the bowl chimed.
A squat creature in a burgundy waistcoat waddled behind the pickers. Its skin had the polished sheen of liver. Two curled horns pushed through its powdered wig. It carried a ledger nearly as large as its body.
“Seventeen seeds short, Madame Clary. His Indolent Grace dislikes shrinkage.”
The grey-haired woman held up her bleeding palm.
“The fruit bit me.”
“The fruit had cause.”
Rory’s grip tightened around the dagger.
Nyx stood beside her, their face unreadable .
“Contracted souls.”
“They’re prisoners.”
“They signed.”
“That doesn’t make it clean.”
Isolde did not look down at the orchard. Her lavender gaze followed the path ahead.
“In Dymas, the full plate hid the shackle.”
Rory watched the woman return to slicing. Blood spotted the white coat, bright as jam.
“Can we help them?”
Nyx’s voice thinned, wind through a keyhole. “Not by drawing every servant of Belphegor to this terrace.”
Aurora stepped back from the edge. The heat no longer felt lush. It settled on her skin like a hand.
They moved deeper.
The path widened into a promenade paved with mosaic tiles. Each tile showed a feast: silver fish with human eyes, roast birds crowned in rosemary, cakes tall as towers, goblets spilling rubies instead of wine. The pictures shifted when Rory glanced away. A painted fish turned its head. A sugared saint lifted a marzipan hand in blessing. A tiled mouth opened under her boot and whispered in a voice like her mother’s.
“Cariad, you’ve gone thin.”
Aurora froze.
Nyx passed through her shadow and rose at her side.
“Do not answer.”
“I know.”
The tile-mouth smiled with Jennifer Carter’s lips.
“Just a bite, love.”
Rory drove the Fae blade into the tile. Moonsilver met mosaic with a crack that rang across the promenade. The mouth split. The tiles around it rippled away, rearranging into bowls of plums.
“Rude little place, isn’t it?”
Isolde’s mouth curved, not quite a smile .
“It had a thousand years to learn appetite.”
A flock of glass-winged insects burst from a hedge of rosemary and circled Rory’s head. Their bodies resembled cloves. Their wings chimed against one another, high and bright. They descended towards the Heartstone, drawn to its crimson glow.
Nyx spread one arm. Darkness unfurled from them like ink poured into water. The insects struck it and dropped, stunned, onto the paving. One landed near Rory’s boot and ticked on its back.
“Everything wants this pendant.”
“Not everything.” Isolde pointed ahead.
Beyond the promenade, a market opened beneath canopies of stretched silk . Stalls lined both sides of a canal filled with pale green liquid. Boats shaped like sauce spoons drifted without oars, carrying baskets of truffles, sleeping eels, flowers packed in ice, and jars in which small lights flickered .
The market crowd moved in bursts: horned cooks with knives tucked into belts; women with antlers lacquered in gold; boys made of smoke pulling carts; demons with too many fingers weighing saffron on scales carved from bone. No one shouted. They murmured, tasted, sniffed, signed papers with quills that twitched like plucked feathers.
Rory’s stomach growled.
She pressed a fist against it.
Nyx turned their violet gaze on her.
“I heard.”
“Congratulations.”
“You ate before we came.”
“I ate a packet of crisps in a car park while a half-Fae oracle argued with a gate.”
Isolde glided towards the nearest stall. The vendor behind it resembled a tall man until he smiled; then his jaw opened too far and showed blue gums. Strings of candied fruit hung from hooks above his head. Each piece contained a tiny moving scene: a ballroom, a battlefield, a nursery with a rocking cradle.
“Samples for travellers.” He held out a sliver of translucent fruit on the tip of a silver knife. “Memory-melon. First taste free. Second taste honest. Third taste binding.”
Rory leaned away from the knife.
“Hard pass.”
The vendor’s eyes slid to Isolde.
“Seer. Your exile seasoned well.”
Isolde’s expression did not change.
“Your tongue still outran your wit.”
His smile snapped shut. He wrapped the fruit in waxed paper and busied himself with a jar.
Rory bent close to Nyx.
“Do people here know her?”
“People in old places recognised old wounds.”
“I heard that,” Isolde called without turning.
“You were meant to.”
They crossed a narrow bridge over the canal. The liquid below reflected not their faces but plates set for dinner . Rory saw a long table under candlelight, three places laid, one with a Cardiff University mug beside the cutlery. She moved faster.
At the far end of the market, an archway rose from a wall of living fig trees. The figs were not fruit. They were bells of dark purple flesh, and inside each one a tiny tongue struck the skin from within.
Dong. Dong. Dong.
No sound left them, yet Rory felt each strike in her ribs.
The Heartstone flared.
Heat speared across her chest. She gasped and clutched the pendant. Its crimson centre glowed, bright enough to stain her fingers red.
Nyx’s form sharpened, taking on the solid edges of shoulders, hands, a narrow face without features except those violet eyes.
“Portal stone.”
Isolde knelt in front of the fig arch, though her knees did not crease the moss. She brushed aside a curtain of roots. Beneath them, an old lintel showed through: black stone carved with a circle inside a mouth inside a crown. At the centre sat an empty socket the size of Rory’s thumbnail.
The pendant thudded once.
Rory looked from the socket to the gem at her throat.
“Of course. Why would anything in my life be subtle?”
Nyx touched the carved mouth. Their fingers smoked where shadow met stone.
“This was not built for market traffic. Older. Hidden beneath Belphegor’s later grafts.”
Isolde traced the crown without touching it.
“A prince planted gardens over bones and called it abundance.”
Rory unhooked the silver chain. The Heartstone lay in her palm, hot and alive, its inner glow twisting like a trapped coal. The market noise thinned behind her. Knives, murmurs, bells, the canal’s slow lap against stone—all of it pulled back until she heard her own breath.
A child of smoke rolled a cart past the arch and stopped. He stared at the pendant with hollow eyes.
“Miss. You shouldn’t feed that door.”
Rory held still.
“What happens if I do?”
The child looked at Isolde, then at Nyx, then at the ground where Isolde left no footprints.
“It opens hungry.”
Nyx moved between the child and Rory.
“Who told you that?”
The child’s cart wheels squeaked. Inside the cart, black figs trembled .
“The chefs. The ones who came back without names.”
Rory closed her fingers around the Heartstone until the silver chain bit into her skin. The scar on her wrist tingled where the vine had touched it.
Isolde rose.
“A door with teeth still led somewhere.”
“That’s not a reason to walk through it.”
“No.” The seer’s pale eyes rested on Rory’s hand. “It was a reason to decide whether you held a key or bait.”
Aurora looked at the carved mouth, at the empty socket, at the amber sky pressing down over orchards and markets and brass-cuffed hands. Then she looked at the pendant.
“Nyx.”
The Shade’s head turned.
“If that thing bites, pull me back.”
Their shadow stretched across the moss and wrapped around her boots like an anchor.
“Put the stone in.”
Rory set the Heartstone into the socket.
The arch inhaled.
Every fig-bell opened at once, and instead of tongues, each held a tiny crimson eye. The market fell silent behind them. The black stone warmed under Rory’s fingertips, softer than stone should have been, yielding around the pendant like flesh around a splinter.
The carved mouth parted.
Inside waited a corridor lined with roots of gold and bone, lit by slow pulses of red light. The air that rolled out smelled of old wine, hot bread, and rain on London pavement.
Rory did not step in. Not yet.
She looked down at the Heartstone locked in the ancient door, and the symbol behind it revealed itself in a ring of light: the same crowned mouth etched in miniature along the pendant’s silver setting, hidden until now beneath tarnish and skin-warmth .
“Well,” she murmured, blade cold in her other hand. “That answers one question.”