AI The standing stones in Richmond Park looked nothing like stones once the Heartstone woke.
Aurora had expected lichen, old oak roots, damp earth under her boots. She had expected a cold midnight walk and Isolde’s silver hair catching stray moonlight between the trees. Instead, the ancient oaks bent inward as if listening, their bark splitting along seams of gold. Sap beaded in the cracks, thick and luminous, and the air smelt of rain on hot iron.
The pendant at Aurora’s throat pulsed once.
Heat pressed through her shirt.
She curled her fingers around the deep crimson stone. It throbbed against her palm, no bigger than her thumbnail, yet it beat with the rude confidence of something alive.
“Don’t let it choose your steps,” Nyx murmured from the shadow of an oak.
Their shape had gathered into a tall, dark silhouette, violet eyes floating where a face should have been. Leaves passed through the edges of them and came out rimed with frost.
Aurora glanced at Isolde.
The Seer stood barefoot on the moss. No footprints marked the wet ground behind her. Her pale lavender eyes fixed on the space between the stones, where the air had begun to pucker and fold.
“Doors prefer hungry hands,” Isolde murmured. “But doors open wider for those who refuse the meal.”
“That counts as advice where you’re from?”
“It counts as mercy.”
The pendant burned hotter.
Aurora drew a breath through her teeth and looked down at her left wrist. The small crescent scar there caught a thread of gold light. Childhood accident, her mother had called it. A slip. A sharp edge. A lesson about running indoors.
Now the scar prickled as if someone had laid a needle under her skin.
The space between the standing oaks split.
No thunder. No flash.
The Veil peeled back in a long, wet curve, like skin tugged from fruit. Beyond it, amber light spilled over the grove and painted the wildflowers copper. Warm air rolled out, rich with spices, roasted sugar, crushed herbs, yeast, blood-orange peel, smoke, and meat turning over coals.
Aurora’s stomach clenched before her mind caught up.
“Dymas,” Isolde breathed.
Nyx’s edges drew in. The shadows around them tightened like a cloak.
“I hate this place already.”
“You’ve been?”
“No. It remembers things that have eaten in the dark.”
Aurora swallowed.
“Grand. That’s comforting .”
Isolde lifted one hand. The portal widened into an arch framed by twisting roots and strips of molten-looking bark. Beyond it lay a road paved in black glass, glossy as still water, curving beneath a sky the colour of warm honey. Far away, green terraces climbed hills in impossible layers, each one heavy with vines, orchards, and flowers too large for Earth. Bright shapes moved among them. Winged insects, perhaps. Or servants with lanterns.
The Heartstone tugged against Aurora’s grip.
She stepped through.
Heat wrapped around her. Not summer heat. Kitchen heat. Oven heat. The kind that shoved sweat from the skin and filled the lungs with salt and fat and spice.
Her boot struck black glass.
It rang.
The sound travelled beneath her, down into the road, and came back as a murmur of voices.
Aurora froze.
The road had faces.
Not carved. Not painted. Faces lay beneath the glass, stretched in smoky layers, mouths open as if speaking through water . Their eyes followed the light from the portal. Some slept. Some wept. One turned as Aurora shifted her weight and pressed both palms against the underside of the road.
She jerked her foot back.
“Don’t stand still,” Nyx warned, sliding through after her. “It notices weight .”
Isolde stepped last, and the portal folded shut behind her with a soft bite of air. The grove vanished. No park. No London damp. No distant traffic. Only amber sky, rolling green abundance, and the road beneath their feet whispering in a language Aurora almost understood.
“Those are people.”
“Contracts,” Isolde replied. “Signed mouths. Sealed bellies. Paid appetites.”
Aurora looked at the faces under the glass. A woman with pearl earrings stared up through smoke, lips moving around silent words.
“She can’t lie,” Aurora muttered, more to herself than to Nyx . “But she can make me wish she would.”
Isolde moved forward.
“Wish after sunrise. Walk before the road asks your name.”
They followed.
The black road ran between two rows of trees with silver trunks and leaves shaped like spoons. Fruit hung from their branches in clusters: purple pears with translucent skins, golden figs that opened and closed like gills, pale globes filled with drifting sparks. When the breeze touched them, the fruit chimed. Not bells. Cutlery against porcelain .
Aurora kept her hands in the pockets of her jacket and left every branch alone.
A fig split as they passed. Steam unfurled from its pink flesh. Inside, a miniature banquet table sat laid with tiny plates, each dish no bigger than a fingernail. Tiny roasted birds. Tiny puddings. Tiny cups of red wine. A smell like Christmas morning and a Cardiff chip shop drifted out together.
Her mouth flooded.
Nyx leaned close without footsteps .
“It will taste like the first thing you ever wanted and the last thing you’ll regret.”
Aurora shut her mouth, bit the inside of her cheek, and tasted blood.
“Then it can get in the queue.”
The tree leaves rattled. The fruit closed with a damp little snap.
The road curved downhill, and Dymas opened beneath them.
Aurora stopped despite Isolde’s warning.
The valley sprawled wider than sight. Vineyards braided around canals of dark syrup. Orchards rose in rings, each level tended by figures in white aprons and iron collars. Beyond the fields, domes and towers clustered around a lake of gold liquid that steamed in the amber light. Bridges arched over it like ribs. At the centre stood a palace shaped less like a building and more like a feast frozen mid-collapse: columns like stacked bones of sugar, balconies draped in grapevines thick as ship ropes, roofs glazed crimson and green, fountains spilling wine into basins where silver fish leapt and dissolved into foam.
The sky held no sun. It glowed from everywhere.
Clouds drifted low, soft and white, but as one passed above the nearest vineyard Aurora saw crumbs fall from it. Workers lifted baskets and caught the pieces before they struck the soil.
A horn sounded somewhere across the valley.
Hundreds of birds burst from the orchards. Their feathers flashed peacock blue and pomegranate red. They wheeled in formation, then plunged into a distant courtyard where flames roared up to meet them.
Aurora stared.
“Did those birds just fly into a grill?”
A man’s scream floated up from one of the terraces, cut short by applause.
Isolde’s silver hair stirred in the warm wind.
“In Dymas, even pain came dressed for supper.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It was never meant to be one.”
Nyx crouched at the road’s edge and pressed a shadowed hand to the glass. The faces beneath rippled away from their touch.
“Something passed here within the hour. Horned. Heavy. Dragged a chain with seven links.”
Aurora looked down the slope. The black road threaded towards a market built beneath enormous crimson mushrooms. Lanterns hung from their caps, and crowds moved below them: horned demons with polished tusks, grey-skinned merchants in embroidered coats, pale human souls carrying trays that bent their backs, and creatures Aurora had no names for. One had too many elbows. Another wore a cage over its head filled with singing moths.
The Fae blade rested cold against her hip under her jacket. Its chill cut through the heat, a thin clean line.
“Is that where we’re going?”
Isolde tilted her head.
“The mouth before the throat.”
“Again with the—”
“The market first,” Nyx cut in. “Questions cost less there than they do at the palace.”
Aurora started walking.
The slope steepened. The road sang under each step, and the faces below the glass changed as they moved. Old men. Children. Chefs. A soldier with half a moustache. A woman wearing a wedding veil. Some reached upward. Some turned away. One boy grinned at Aurora with blackened teeth and tapped the glass three times.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The Heartstone answered with three pulses.
Aurora stopped dead.
Nyx’s arm flowed across her path, shadow becoming a bar.
“What did it do?”
“The pendant.”
“Show me.”
She lifted it from beneath her shirt. The crimson gem glowed from within, bright as banked coals. The boy beneath the road pressed his face against the glass, grin stretching wider. His eyes had no whites.
Isolde stepped between Aurora and the road. Her bare feet made no sound.
“Not that one.”
The boy’s grin vanished. His head snapped backwards as if yanked by a hook. Smoke swallowed him beneath the glass.
Aurora tucked the pendant away, hand still clenched around it.
“Was he one of Belphegor’s?”
Isolde’s gaze followed the place where the boy had disappeared.
“He belonged to his hunger before any prince claimed him.”
Nyx rose, taller than before, shoulders broadening into a shape that blocked the worst of the amber glare.
“Keep moving.”
They reached the market as a bell rang from a tower made of stacked plates.
Noise struck first.
Vendors shouted over one another in languages that scraped and purred. Knives chopped. Oil spat. Chains clinked. Something in a copper vat burped and begged for lemon. Laughter burst from a tent striped in green silk , followed by the crack of a whip and the smell of burnt cinnamon.
Aurora stepped beneath the mushroom canopy and looked up.
The gills of the fungi glowed pink and gold. Drops of nectar swelled along the ridges, then fell into waiting glass bowls. A demon child with curling ram horns darted between stalls, catching stray drops on a stick of spun sugar. Its mother seized it by the scruff and hissed through teeth filed to points.
“No freebies, grub. You want a sweet tongue, sell one.”
Aurora’s hand moved to the blade.
Nyx caught her wrist, not with fingers, but with a band of cool shadow .
“Not here.”
“That kid—”
“Isn’t human.”
“That makes it fine?”
“That makes it complicated.”
Isolde drifted past a stall where skinned fruits twitched on hooks.
“In Dymas, pity had a price tag and a butcher’s thumb on the scale.”
Aurora pulled free of Nyx and followed, jaw tight.
A chef with four arms tossed pale dough into the air. The dough unfolded into a map before slapping back onto his bench. Another vendor bottled aromas in tear-shaped glass: first kiss, hot bread, funeral ham, mother’s kitchen, enemy’s defeat. Human souls queued for the bottles with coins clutched in shaking hands.
One woman in a stained apron held out a copper coin.
“Just one breath of the sea. Please. I had a cottage in Tenby.”
The vendor uncorked a blue vial and held it beneath her nose. The woman inhaled. Her face crumpled. She dropped the coin, and the vendor snatched it before it hit the ground.
Aurora turned away and walked into a stall hung with cages of flame.
Inside each cage burned a different colour. Emerald fire. Violet fire. Black fire that gave off pale frost. The stallholder had no face, only a smooth mask of skin with a vertical mouth in the throat.
“Earthborn,” the mouth rasped. “Fresh marrow. Fresh questions. Fresh fear. Which one did you bring to trade?”
Nyx moved beside Aurora.
“None.”
The stallholder’s throat-mouth stretched.
“Shade. Old ash. Old mistake. You smelt of a failed circle.”
Nyx became still.
The violet in their eyes sharpened.
Aurora took one step forward, letting her jacket fall open enough for moonsilver to catch the mushroom light.
The stallholder’s mouth closed to a thin seam.
“Didn’t bring fear,” Aurora replied. “But I can pick some up if you’re short.”
For a moment, even the cages of flame bent away from her.
Then the stallholder reached beneath the counter and drew out a small dish of salt-black crystals.
“Warden road toll. Palace patrols searched the lower vineyards. A girl with a red stone made the kitchens whisper this morning.”
Aurora’s fingers tightened near the dagger hilt.
“I’ve never been here.”
“Dymas tasted you before you arrived.”
Isolde appeared at Aurora’s shoulder, lavender eyes reflecting the caged fires.
“Who carried the whisper ?”
The stallholder turned its throat towards her.
“Seer. Half-court exile. Your answers rot before they ripen.”
“Then sell me the rot.”
A pause. The market clamour pressed around them, heavy and hot. Somewhere nearby, a cleaver chopped through bone in a rhythm too close to a heartbeat.
The stallholder slid the dish of crystals closer.
“Three stalls down. The baker with brass teeth. He bought a name wrapped in red silk . Human name. Cardiff salt still clinging to it.”
Aurora felt the word Cardiff like a hand at the back of her neck.
Nyx looked at her.
“Rory.”
“I heard.”
Isolde lifted one of the black crystals between two fingers. It hissed against her skin.
“Truth with burnt edges.”
The stallholder’s throat-mouth opened again.
“Payment.”
Nyx placed their palm over the dish. A ribbon of shadow peeled from their wrist and dropped into the crystals. The salt drank it. The flames in the cages leaned close, hungry.
The stallholder shuddered with pleasure.
“Go before I decide I undercharged.”
They left the stall without another word.
Aurora pushed through the market crowd. Heat gathered beneath her collar. Spices clawed at her nose. A tray passed inches from her face carrying roasted apples that blinked human eyes from their split skins. She didn’t slow.
Three stalls down, the baker with brass teeth worked under a red awning.
His ovens were built into the backs of kneeling stone giants. Fire glowed in their open mouths. Loaves emerged from their chests, stamped with symbols that shifted when Aurora looked at them. The baker himself was squat and wide, with arms dusted in flour to the elbow and teeth like polished gears.
A strip of red silk lay on his counter.
Something inside it moved.
Aurora stopped at the edge of the awning. The Heartstone pulsed once, hard enough to hurt.
The baker’s brass teeth clicked into a smile.
“Ah. There she was.”