AI The first oak stone stood where no oak should have stood.
Aurora nearly missed it.
Richmond Park lay behind them in all its ordinary winter muddle—wet grass, bare trees, the distant cough of traffic beyond the dark, deer watching from the slope with black patient eyes. The path underfoot was mud and crushed leaves. Her trainers had already given up pretending they were waterproof. Eva would have complained by now. Silas would have made a joke. Neither of them had come.
It was just Rory, Nyx, and the thing at her throat beating like a second heart.
The Heartstone pendant warmed beneath her jumper, a small deep-crimson ember on its silver chain. Not hot enough to burn. Not yet. Just enough to make her aware of every breath, every shift of fabric against skin.
Nyx halted ahead of her.
In the weak afternoon light, they looked almost solid: a tall humanoid shape, all edges and absence, like someone had cut a person out of the world and let night show through. Their faintly glowing violet eyes were fixed on the tree line.
“There,” they whispered.
Their voice slid over the grass like wind through a locked room.
Rory followed their gaze.
At first she saw only oaks. Old ones, twisted and winter-bare, their branches clawing the clouded sky. Then her eye caught on the trunk nearest the path, and the wrongness arranged itself. The bark was not bark. It was stone, weathered silver-grey and veined with brown, carved to mimic ridges and knots and split wood so well that her mind had filed it away as tree. Roots plunged into the earth in frozen coils, but no moss grew on them. No lichen. No damp.
A standing stone shaped like an oak.
Beyond it, another. Then another, half-hidden between living trees, marking a boundary no park map had ever bothered to mention.
Rory swallowed. “That’s subtle.”
Nyx turned their head. “The old things often are.”
“You say that like it’s reassuring.”
“I did not intend it to be.”
“Brilliant.”
She shoved cold fingers into the pocket of her coat and felt the hard outline of the Fae blade tucked inside its leather sheath. Even through the wrapping, it seemed to drink the warmth from her hand. Slender, leaf-shaped, moonsilver. Isolde’s gift. Rory still wasn’t sure if accepting a gift from a three-hundred-year-old half-Fae oracle counted as courage, stupidity, or a binding contract with footnotes written in invisible ink.
Probably all three.
They had come because the pendant had not stopped pulsing since dawn.
Warm at first, then insistent. Not the feverish heat it gave near a Hel portal, but a steady tug, as if some unseen hand had hooked a finger through the chain and drawn her south-west across London. Past buses, dog walkers, prams, and coffee kiosks. Past all sense.
Rory had learned, much to her annoyance, that sense rarely got a vote anymore.
She stepped closer to the first stone oak. The air changed before her boot crossed the line.
Not dramatically. No thunderclap. No choir of disembodied faeries singing in Welsh or Latin or whatever the supernatural preferred when showing off. Just a soft pressure in her ears, the way it felt when a train slipped into a tunnel, and then the world held its breath.
The park behind her dimmed.
Rory looked over her shoulder.
Richmond Park remained where it had been, but it seemed farther away than a few steps should allow . The muddy path blurred at the edges. A dog barked somewhere, the sound stretched thin and metallic, then snapped silent. Wind combed the ordinary trees, but none touched the ring of stone oaks.
Nyx lingered at the threshold, their shadow-shape stirring as if an unseen current passed through them.
“Problem?” Rory asked.
“Fae places do not welcome what exists between shadows.”
“Do they welcome humans with questionable life choices?”
The violet eyes flicked to her. “More often than they should.”
“Encouraging.”
Rory faced the boundary again. Her pulse thudded in her throat, under the pendant, in the small crescent scar on her left wrist she had worried with her thumb all the way here. She had come to London to escape one kind of monster and had somehow found an entire ecosystem of them, complete with etiquette, ancient grudges, and glowing jewellery.
Fine.
She stepped between the stone oaks.
For one disorienting second, she fell upward.
Her stomach lurched . Her knees bent of their own accord, braced for impact that never came. Light burst around her—not sunlight, not quite . Gold and green and pearlescent blue folded through one another like oil on water. She heard a thousand wings beat once, all together.
Then her feet touched grass.
Real grass. Too green for January. Damp, springy, scattered with wildflowers that had no business blooming in winter: bluebells, foxgloves, tiny white stars, poppies red as fresh blood. The scent hit her next, so thick and sweet she almost coughed. Honey. Rain on warm stone. Crushed mint. Something sharp beneath it, like lightning about to strike.
Rory stood very still.
The grove opened before her in a clearing larger than it should have been. Much larger. The ring of oak standing stones curved away on either side, but the space inside bent distance like a lens. What should have been a pocket of woodland in Richmond Park stretched into a hidden valley of ancient trees, silver grasses, and pools that mirrored a sky she did not recognise.
Above, there was no London cloud cover.
There was twilight.
Not evening, exactly. A luminous in-between hung overhead, the sky bruised violet at the edges and pale gold at its heart. Two moons floated there, one slender as a fingernail clipping, the other full and faintly green. Long ribbons of light drifted across them like slow rivers. Now and then, a star moved against the rest, paused, and moved again.
Rory’s breath left her in a small, helpless sound.
“Oh,” she said.
Nyx emerged beside her a moment later, their form flickering around the edges. They seemed thinner here, less like a person made of darkness and more like a shadow cast by something not currently present. Still, their eyes burned steady.
“Do not eat anything,” they murmured.
Rory tore her gaze from the sky. “I wasn’t planning to lick the scenery.”
“Do not drink anything either. Do not promise anything. Do not answer if a voice calls you by a name you have not given it.”
“That last one feels oddly specific.”
“It is.”
Ahead of them, a narrow path wound through the flowers. No footprints marked it. No mud. The grass lay parted as if expecting them .
The pendant pulsed once, warm against Rory’s skin.
She touched it through her jumper. “This way, apparently.”
Nyx tilted their head, listening to something she couldn’t hear. “The grove has noticed us.”
“Noticed us how?”
The wildflowers nearest Rory turned their faces toward her.
She stared.
Every bloom, from the foxgloves to the starry white things, angled subtly in her direction. No wind moved them. Their petals trembled as if scenting the air.
“Right,” she said quietly . “Creepy flowers. Lovely.”
She started down the path.
The first few steps were easy. Too easy, maybe. The ground seemed to rise to meet her soles, softening each footfall . She glanced back automatically.
No footprints.
A chill crawled up her spine despite the sweet warm air. Isolde left no footprints when she walked. Rory had thought that detail strange when she first noticed it, then filed it under Fae adjacent weirdness, along with lavender eyes, waist-length silver hair, and the habit of answering yes-or-no questions with phrases like when the thorn drinks moonlight.
Now the grove itself swallowed Rory’s presence as if she had never passed.
Nyx glided beside her, silent.
The path led beneath trees unlike any in the park outside. Their trunks twisted in slow spirals, bark white as bone and smooth as porcelain . Leaves shimmered overhead in impossible colours—green from one angle, copper from another, transparent when backlit by the golden sky. Some leaves held tiny veins of light, pulsing in patterns that reminded Rory uncomfortably of blood through capillaries.
Something laughed in the branches.
Rory stopped.
The laugh came again: small, bright, delighted. A child’s giggle, almost. Then another answered from the opposite side of the path. Leaves shivered. A seedpod dropped, struck the ground, and split open with a soft pop.
Inside was a pearl.
At least, it looked like one. Round, luminous, the size of a marble . It rolled toward Rory’s boot and stopped.
Nyx’s shadow stretched between her and it. “No.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were considering.”
“I was observing.”
“You leaned.”
Rory looked at the pearl. It pulsed faintly, inviting as a sweet in a shop window. Her fingers tingled with the absurd urge to pick it up. Not greed, exactly. Curiosity sharpened into compulsion. What would it feel like? Warm? Cool? Would it whisper ? Would it—
She took a deliberate step back.
The pearl cracked.
A thin sigh escaped it. Then it collapsed into grey ash, which scattered though there was still no wind.
The laughter in the branches soured.
Rory’s mouth went dry. “Noted.”
They moved on.
The deeper they went, the less the grove resembled a clearing and the more it became a world folded small enough to hide between London and elsewhere. A brook crossed the path, its water running uphill over stones that glowed blue beneath the surface. Fish made of silver thread darted through the current, unravelling and re-forming as they swam. When Rory crouched near the bank, careful not to touch, she saw images flash in the water: Cardiff rain on a university window; her father’s hands flattening papers at the kitchen table; Eva’s grin over two paper cups of terrible coffee; Evan’s face, twisted mid-shout, before she had learned that leaving could feel like chewing off a limb.
She stood so quickly her vision spotted.
Nyx watched her, expression unreadable because they had no expression, only the suggestion of a brow in darkness.
“What did you see?” they asked.
“Nothing I ordered.”
“The grove shows what it can use.”
“Use for what?”
“To pull.”
Across the brook, stepping stones rose from the water one by one. Pale green slabs, slick-looking but dry under Rory’s boot when she tested them. Halfway across, the sound changed.
London had been silent since the threshold. The grove had been all murmur and wingbeat and leaf-whisper . Now, beneath the water’s chatter, Rory heard music.
Not instruments. Voices. Low, layered, wordless. They came from below the stream, or above the sky, or inside the bones of her ears. The melody lifted the hairs on her arms. It was beautiful in the way deep ocean was beautiful: vast, indifferent, full of pressure.
The pendant warmed again.
This time the Fae blade answered.
Cold speared through her coat pocket and into her thigh. Rory hissed, clapping a hand over it.
Nyx’s head snapped toward the trees ahead. “We are not alone.”
“That’s been true since the giggling murder plants.”
“No. Something else.”
The path beyond the stream narrowed between hedges heavy with berries. Each berry was translucent, filled with swirling sparks. Some glowed crimson like the Heartstone. Others shone violet like Nyx’s eyes, or pale lavender like Isolde’s. Rory kept her hands firmly at her sides.
A figure moved at the far end of the hedge corridor.
For a heartbeat Rory thought it was Isolde. The height was right, the movement too smooth to belong to anyone ordinary. But the figure slipped behind a tree, and when it emerged again it was smaller, hunched, wearing a cloak of stitched leaves. A long hand curled around the trunk. Too many knuckles. Nails black and hooked.
Rory froze.
The creature’s face was narrow and bark-brown, with eyes like wet seeds. It sniffed the air. Its mouth opened too wide, revealing teeth like splinters.
“Rory,” it called in Eva’s voice.
Her stomach dropped through the soles of her feet.
Nyx went utterly still.
The creature smiled with Eva’s mouth. “Rory, come here. I found the way out.”
For one stupid, aching instant, she wanted to answer. Not because she believed it. She didn’t. Eva was at work in Camden, probably threatening a supplier over late invoices and drinking tea strong enough to strip paint. But the voice was perfect . The exact upward lilt . The exact warmth . It slipped past Rory’s defences because it knew where the old doors were.
Nyx’s whisper cut across the path. “Do not.”
Rory’s fingers closed around the Fae blade.
The cold steadied her.
The creature cocked its head. “Rory?”
She drew the dagger.
Moonsilver slid free with a sound like ice cracking over deep water. The blade caught the strange twilight and glowed faintly, leaf-shaped and sharp enough to divide light from shadow. The hedges recoiled. Berries dimmed.
The creature’s stolen smile vanished.
“Not my name to you,” Rory said.
Its seed-eyes narrowed .
Then it folded backward into the tree. Not behind it. Into it. Bark stretched around its limbs like skin, swallowed the hooked fingers, the splinter teeth, the wrong face. A final whisper scraped from the trunk.
“Carter.”
Rory held the blade up until the tree stopped shivering.
Her heart hammered so hard she could feel it in the crescent scar on her wrist. “I hate that.”
“Good,” Nyx said. “Hatred can be useful.”
“Can we put that on a motivational poster?”
“If we survive.”
She laughed once, breathless and unwilling, then realised her hand was shaking .
Nyx saw. Of course they saw. They said nothing, which she appreciated more than sympathy would have allowed.
The hedge corridor opened into a glade.
Here the wonder returned so abruptly it stole the fear from her lungs.
A great tree stood at the centre, older than age, wider than a house. Its roots rose from the earth in arches tall enough to walk beneath, forming chambers and doorways, alcoves filled with moss and sleeping light. The trunk was neither oak nor ash nor anything Rory could name. Its bark held shifting patterns: knots becoming eyes, lines becoming rivers, scars becoming constellations. Silver leaves hung from its branches though no wind stirred them, and from each leaf dangled a drop of liquid moonlight.
Around the tree, wildflowers bloomed in rings of colour. White, blue, red, gold, violet. Tiny creatures moved among them on delicate legs, carrying thimbles of nectar, their wings glass-clear and veined like leaves. One paused to stare up at Rory. It had the body of a dragonfly, the face of an elderly man, and a moustache made of pollen.
Rory stared back.
It sneezed, offended, and zipped away.
Despite herself, she smiled.
At the base of the tree lay objects half-buried in moss. A rusted Roman coin. A cracked mobile phone with a screen still glowing faintly. A child’s red mitten. A sword hilt wrapped in black leather. A porcelain teacup filled with stars. Offerings, maybe. Or leftovers. The grove collected what passed through it.
The pendant tugged her toward one of the root arches.
She stepped beneath it and found the air cooler. The music grew clearer, the wordless voices now braided with the sound of turning pages. The hollow under the root was not dark. Pale green light seeped from veins in the wood, illuminating carvings etched along the inner curve.
Rory leaned closer.
The markings shifted when she looked at them. Spirals became letters, letters became thorned vines, vines became images. A barrier of shimmering light stretched between worlds. On one side, human cities flickered —towers, roads, sodium lamps, rain. On another, Hel burned and glimmered in fractured colours. She caught a glimpse of warm amber sky over sprawling vineyards, orchards heavy with impossible fruit, tables groaning beneath golden platters. Dymas, though she had never seen it with her own eyes. Gluttony dressed as paradise.
Her Heartstone flared hot.
Rory gasped and clutched it. The crimson gem glowed through the fabric of her jumper, a thumbnail-sized coal.
Nyx moved close, their shadow spilling over the carvings. “A rift memory.”
The image changed.
Something pressed against the shimmering barrier from the Hel side. Not a hand. Not claws. A hunger with shape. The Veil bowed inward. Fine cracks spidered across the light.
Then silver flashed through the vision—a leaf-shaped blade, impossibly familiar —and the cracks sealed.
Rory looked down at the dagger in her hand.
Its moonsilver edge gleamed.
“Well,” she said, voice thin . “That’s not ominous at all.”
From the far side of the glade, someone spoke.
“When the knife remembers the wound, the hand that holds it learns where to cut.”
Rory turned.
Isolde Varga stood among the flowers as if she had grown there between one breath and the next. Silver hair spilled to her waist, untouched by the damp. Her pale lavender eyes held too much light. She wore a gown the colour of mist over heather, and the wildflowers bent away from her bare feet.
No footprints marked her path.
Rory exhaled slowly . “You know, most people say hello.”
The Seer’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “Most people are spared the answers they request.”
Nyx inclined their head, wary. “Seer.”
“Shadow-who-was-Aldric.” Isolde’s gaze slid to them, gentle and sharp. “You thin at the edges. This root drinks the dark between worlds. Linger, and you will leave pieces in its teeth.”
Nyx drifted back a fraction.
Rory tightened her grip on the Fae blade. “Did you bring us here?”
“The door opens for the key. The key mistakes the door for a summons.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It is not a no.”
“Fantastic. Very clear. Five stars.”
Isolde looked at the pendant beneath Rory’s hand. The Heartstone’s glow faded to a sullen warmth . “Dymas remembers its own. Crimson hunger wrapped in silver restraint. A gift with no giver is a hook with no fisherman in sight.”
Rory’s skin prickled. “Do you know who gave it to me?”
Lavender eyes lifted to hers. “A name is a net. Some fish bite through.”
“Isolde.”
The half-Fae seer tilted her head. For an instant, the ageless mask thinned, and Rory saw weariness underneath. Not human tiredness. Something older, like a stone worn smooth by centuries of rain.
“I cannot lie, Aurora Carter.” Isolde’s voice softened, which somehow made it worse. “So hear the truth I may give: the pendant came from Dymas, but not all who dwell beneath amber skies serve the prince who feasts there.”
Prince Belphegor. The name sat behind Rory’s teeth though she did not speak it.
Around them, the glade seemed to listen. The dragonfly-men vanished into flowers. The silver leaves stilled. Even the brook’s uphill chatter faded.
Rory looked back at the carved root, at the image of the Veil cracking under pressure. “Why show me this?”
“The grove shows what it can use,” Nyx murmured.
Isolde’s gaze flicked approvingly toward them. “And what may yet use it.”
Rory did not like that distinction. “Something is trying to come through.”
“Always.”
“Soon, then.”
Isolde’s smile vanished. “Sooner is a knife word. It cuts differently depending on who holds time.”
“Could you, just once, pretend I’m not being graded on riddle comprehension?”
A soft rustle passed through the flowers. It might have been laughter.
Isolde stepped closer. The blooms bent, not toward her, but aside, clearing her way . “The winter solstice thins the Veil. Old doors remember hinges. New wounds seek old scars. You carry three invitations: blood-warm stone, moonsilver tooth, and a name spoken in places you have not walked.”
Rory’s mouth went dry. “Malphora.”
The grove darkened.
Only slightly . Enough.
Nyx’s shadow flared outward, then tightened around them. The flowers nearest Rory closed their petals. High above, one of the moving stars stopped.
Isolde’s expression sharpened. “Some names are seeds. Do not plant them in listening soil.”
“Right.” Rory’s fingers pressed the pendant hard enough to hurt. “Good to know after the fact.”
“You learn quickly .”
“I learn under protest.”
“That is still learning.”
The ground trembled .
Not an earthquake. A shiver passed through the great tree, down its silver leaves and along its arched roots. Drops of moonlight fell and burst on the moss. Each burst released a tiny scene: a banquet table under amber sky; a black gate veined with red; a woman’s hand reaching through shimmering air; Rory herself, face pale, blade raised.
Then, from somewhere deep beneath the tree, came a knock.
Once.
The sound was low and enormous.
Rory felt it in her ribs.
Nyx whispered something in a language that made the shadows recoil.
The knock came again.
The root carvings flared. The image of the Veil reappeared, larger now, trembling with light. On the other side, amber bled through.
Warmth surged from the Heartstone.
Rory cried out. Heat spread across her chest, bright and hungry. The pendant’s inner glow blazed crimson through her jumper, painting her fingers red where they clutched it. At the same moment, the Fae blade turned so cold frost climbed its hilt and bit into her palm.
Hot and cold. Hunger and restraint.
A lock and a key, she thought wildly. Or two keys for different doors.
Isolde lifted one hand. Her silver hair stirred in a wind that touched nothing else. “The guest smells the feast.”
“What guest?” Rory demanded.
The third knock struck.
A crack opened in the air beneath the root arch.
It began as a shimmer, a faint distortion like heat above pavement. The Veil, visible now not as metaphor or carving, but as a wound in the world . Beyond it glowed amber sky. Rory smelled roasted meat, overripe peaches, wine, cinnamon, butter browning in a pan. Her empty stomach clenched with sudden, vicious hunger.
Tables flickered in the gap. Gold plates. Dark grapes bursting with juice. Chefs in white moving like dancers. Orchards heavy with fruit so ripe they split on the branch. Dymas. Excess and sweetness and appetite, beautiful enough to make starvation of every sensible thought.
Something moved behind the feast.
Large. Slow. Interested.
Rory’s knees wanted to buckle toward the scent. Her mouth flooded with saliva. She had eaten breakfast. She knew she had. Toast grabbed on the way out, coffee too hot to taste. But the hunger rising in her now had nothing to do with food. It was want stripped to bone. Want for safety, answers, power, revenge, rest. Want for everything she had denied herself because survival had demanded smaller portions.
The crack widened.
Nyx lunged, becoming a sheet of darkness across the opening, but amber light burned through their edges. They recoiled with a sound like wind torn in half.
“Blade,” Isolde said.
Not a riddle. A command.
Rory moved before fear could negotiate.
She stepped into the root arch, boots sinking into moss that tried to grip her soles. The heat from the pendant scorched. The cold from the dagger numbed her fingers. The crack pulsed ahead, its edges shimmering, a tear in the Veil no wider than her forearm and growing.
On the other side, something breathed in.
Her scent, she realised.
It smelled her.
“Absolutely not,” Rory said through clenched teeth.
She drove the Fae blade into the crack.
The world screamed.
Light exploded, silver against amber. The blade did not meet empty air; it struck resistance like thick muscle. Rory shoved with both hands. Frost raced up her sleeves. Heat blasted her face. For a moment she saw through the tear with awful clarity.
A figure stood beyond the banquet tables, tall and indistinct, crowned in curling horns or perhaps only smoke. Around it, souls cooked and carved and plated delicacies with hollow, desperate smiles. The amber sky stretched endless above vineyards heavy with fruit.
The figure turned.
Not fully. Just enough for Rory to feel its attention slide over her like a tongue.
Then the moonsilver edge bit.
The crack sealed with a snap that threw her backward.
Nyx caught her before she hit the ground. Their arms were barely solid, cold shadow bracing her shoulders. The Heartstone dimmed at once, leaving a tender ache beneath her breastbone. The blade steamed in her hand, its glow fading to a faint moonlit sheen.
For several breaths, no one spoke.
The grove slowly remembered itself. The brook resumed its impossible chatter. Silver leaves trembled . Somewhere, the tiny dragonfly creature swore in a high, musical voice.
Rory stared at the place where the crack had been.
Only bark remained. Smooth, unmarked, innocent as a closed mouth.
Her legs shook.
“I,” she said, and had to swallow before trying again. “I think I’d like to go home now.”
Isolde regarded her with unreadable lavender eyes. “The first door has closed.”
Rory laughed weakly. “Of course it was the first.”
Nyx steadied her until she found her balance. Their form flickered , but they did not let go too soon.
The Seer’s gaze dropped to the blade, then to the pendant, then to Rory’s face. “Wonder is the honey on the rim of the trap. Remember the taste, but do not trust the sweetness.”
Rory slid the dagger back into its sheath with fingers she could barely feel . “You’re saying this place is dangerous.”
“I am saying it let you leave.”
Beyond the great tree, the path through the flowers curved back toward the stone oaks, though Rory was certain it had not been there before. The twilight sky shimmered overhead. Two moons watched in silence . The wildflowers, all of them, turned their faces away now, as if pretending they had never been interested .
Rory touched the pendant. Warm, but quiet.
She looked once more at the impossible grove—the silver leaves, the uphill brook, the offerings in moss, the ancient tree with roots like doorways—and felt wonder rise again despite everything. It frightened her more than the hunger had. Some part of her wanted to stay. To ask. To learn the rules and the names and the shape of the worlds pressing against her own.
That, she suspected, was how places like this kept people.
Nyx drifted to her side. “Aurora.”
“Yeah,” she said softly . “I’m coming.”
She started toward the path, each step leaving no mark behind. Behind her, Isolde’s voice followed, gentle as falling petals.
“When next the amber door opens, bring no empty stomach .”
Rory did not turn around.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, and walked deeper into the flowers that would lead her out.