AI The pendant kicked against Aurora’s breastbone.
Not swung. Kicked.
She stopped between two Richmond oaks, one boot suspended above a mat of wet leaves. The Heartstone’s warmth soaked through her jumper and sharpened until the silver chain stung the back of her neck.
Behind her, Nyx poured from the shadow of a hawthorn and gathered into a tall human outline. Their violet eyes opened last.
“You have found it.”
“I’ve found a rash.” Aurora hooked one finger under the chain. The crimson stone pulsed against her skin like a tiny, furious heart. “You’re the one who claimed you could smell a tear in reality.”
“Not smell.”
“Sense, taste, hear the anguish of creation. Pick one.”
“Remember.”
The word brushed her ear, though Nyx stood three paces away.
Aurora lowered her foot. The dead leaves gave no crunch beneath her sole. She tested her weight, pressing harder. Silence held.
“Nyx.”
“I noticed.”
Even their whisper seemed muffled. A magpie hopped along a branch overhead, its beak opening on a sound the woods swallowed. Beyond it, the afternoon sky hung pewter-grey above Richmond Park. Ahead, gold light leaked between the trunks.
Aurora drew the Fae-forged blade from inside her coat.
Moonsilver misted in the cold air. The leaf-shaped dagger chilled her palm through the leather wrapping its hilt, and a pearl sheen moved along its edge.
“That’s encouraging.”
“The blade recognises Fae craft.”
“Or dislikes the neighbourhood.”
Nyx’s head tilted. The motion stretched their neck into smoke for half a breath before it settled again.
“This place has no neighbourhood.”
A path waited where none had been a moment before. Narrow and green, it threaded through bramble without bending a thorn. Wildflowers pressed along its edges: bluebells in the wrong season, foxgloves tall as children, white blooms with translucent petals and black veins. Each turned towards Aurora as she passed.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The route behind them had closed. Oaks interlocked in a wall of bark.
“No neighbourhood,” she murmured. “No exit.”
“There will be an exit.”
“Your confidence sounded almost human.”
“I recall exits.”
She looked back at them.
Nyx had gone still. Their edges shifted in the pale light, shedding wisps that crawled towards the nearest shadows before snapping back into their body.
Aurora faced the path again.
“Stay close.”
“Is that concern?”
“It’s an instruction.”
The green lane ended at a ring of standing stones.
At first, Aurora mistook them for ancient oaks stripped of their branches. Bark wrapped each pillar in deep, twisted furrows, yet no roots broke the earth around them. Amber sap shone through runes cut into the wood, crawling from symbol to symbol in slow drops. The pillars leaned towards one another without touching, enclosing a curtain of empty air.
Beyond that curtain lay another forest.
Sunlight spilled across waist-high flowers. It carried the colour of late evening and the heat of midsummer, though winter clung to Aurora’s back. The boundary shimmered , as thin and bright as oil spread over water.
“The Veil?” She lifted the dagger towards it.
“A skin grown over a wound.”
“That’s a yes, then.”
“No. The Veil separates realms. This has been folded.”
“Folded by whom?”
A woman’s voice slipped between the pillars.
“By hands which knew the cloth.”
Isolde Varga stood on the other side.
Her silver hair fell to her waist, bright beneath the amber sun, and her lavender eyes fixed on Aurora with the calm attention of someone watching a stone sink through clear water. She wore no coat. Bare feet showed beneath a gown the colour of moth wings.
Aurora pointed the blade down, though she kept it in hand.
“A warning would’ve been nice.”
“Warnings are doors, Aurora Carter. Some keep danger out. Others keep the warned from entering.”
“Still allergic to straight answers?”
“Only to straight roads.”
Isolde turned and walked into the flowers. Stems bowed from her gown, but the soil kept no trace of her passage.
Aurora stared at the shining threshold.
The Heartstone struck once, hard enough to steal her breath.
Nyx glided to her side.
“She expected you.”
“She’s three hundred years old. She’s had time to practise looking smug.”
“Her face did not move.”
“Exactly.”
Aurora pushed the dagger through first.
The Veil clung to the moonsilver. Light stretched in threads from the boundary, winding around the blade before parting with a low note that Aurora felt in her teeth. She stepped through.
Cold vanished.
Warm air poured across her cheeks, scented with crushed mint, hot stone and something sweet enough to sit on the tongue. Her boot touched grass. The blades curled round the leather in little green spirals.
Nyx followed.
The threshold seized them.
Their solid shape burst apart into streaming ribbons of black. Violet eyes flared within the tangle, and the boundary gave a chime like glass tapped under water.
Aurora caught their wrist—or where their wrist had been. Shadow ran between her fingers, cold and fine as sifted ash.
“Come on.”
“The Grove refuses me.”
“Get in line. Everything refuses you.”
The Fae blade shone. Aurora drove its point through the trembling air beside Nyx, cutting down.
The boundary split.
Nyx spilled through and struck the grass on one knee. Their hand formed beneath Aurora’s grip, long fingers closing around hers with crushing force. Darkness crawled up her sleeve, searching the seams.
She clenched her jaw .
“You can let go.”
Their grip opened.
The shadow withdrew from her cuff. Nyx rose, but their silhouette wavered , patches thinning until the flowers showed through their chest.
“Does that hurt?”
“I recall pain.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Nyx looked towards Isolde, who had stopped beside a stream fifty yards ahead.
“It was close enough.”
Aurora sheathed the dagger and took in the Grove.
The clearing had looked small from outside. Within, it spread past any sensible horizon. Meadows rolled beneath a sky untouched by cloud, and enormous trees stood miles apart, their crowns linked by bridges of flowering vines. Islands of soil floated among the branches. Water spilled from their undersides in silver ropes, broke into droplets halfway down, then rose again in glittering swarms.
Birds flew beneath the earth-islands. Their wings were leaves. Their bodies were knots of polished wood, and each beat produced a flute note. A flock crossed above Aurora, scattering a melody over the meadow.
Something vast moved behind the far trees.
Not through them. Behind them, as though the trunks were bars before a second, larger world.
Aurora’s hand found the pendant.
The crimson gem had cooled. Its inner glow remained, a coal banked beneath dark glass.
“Hel portal’s gone quiet.”
“Not gone.” Nyx lifted one hand. Shadow streamed from their fingertips towards the western edge of the clearing, where clusters of red flowers nodded under a copper-leaved tree. “Hidden beneath older magic.”
Isolde waited beside the stream.
Water flowed uphill between banks of white moss. Tiny lights moved in its depths against the current. Aurora crouched and discovered the lights belonged to fish no longer than pins, each one built from a sliver of transparent bone around a blue flame.
One stopped beneath her reflection.
The water showed her at nine years old.
Child-Aurora knelt by a broken greenhouse pane, blood tracking down her left wrist. Her small face pinched as she wrapped the cut in the hem of her shirt. Behind her, someone called her name from the house.
Aurora jerked back and covered the crescent scar beneath her cuff.
The fish scattered. Her adult reflection returned, black hair framing a face gone tight.
“What was that?”
Isolde’s toes hovered a fraction above the moss.
“The stream keeps what time drops.”
“I didn’t drop that here.”
“Here has shallow pockets and long fingers.”
Nyx stood over the water.
Their reflection wore a human face.
A narrow one. Hollow cheeks, dark hair tied at the nape, and eyes bruised by sleepless nights. He wore a stiff collar and a black doublet, one shoulder marked with a circle of chalk. Candle flames convulsed behind him. His mouth shaped a word the stream did not release.
The face vanished as Nyx stepped back.
Aurora rose.
“Aldric?”
Their shoulders pulled high, sharpening the silhouette.
“Do not call me that.”
The flute-birds ceased.
Across the meadow, flowers closed in a wave. Petals folded from the stream outward until thousands of bright faces disappeared, leaving fields of green fists. Even the ascending droplets paused under the floating islands.
Isolde watched Nyx.
“A name placed in the right mouth becomes a hook.”
Aurora kept her voice low.
“I’m sorry.”
Nyx’s body loosened. The shadows around their feet stopped writhing.
The birds resumed their broken song, one uncertain note at a time.
Aurora looked towards the copper-leaved tree.
“Whatever we came for, it’s that way?”
Isolde crossed the stream without touching the water.
“Red seeks red. Hunger recognises its kin.”
“That could mean the Heartstone. Or blood. Or those flowers. Or a fox with questionable motives.”
“Yes.”
Aurora stepped into the stream.
Warm water closed over her boot. For one instant, the sole met rounded pebbles. Then the current thickened and pulled sideways, not at her leg but at something behind her ribs . Images flashed under the surface: Eva laughing over a scorched saucepan; her father’s hand flattening a university prospectus; Evan blocking a Cardiff doorway with his forearm; a paper bag from the Golden Empress bleeding grease across her bicycle basket.
Aurora lunged for the opposite bank.
Nyx caught the back of her coat and hauled her clear. She landed on white moss, palms down, breath lodged in her throat.
The stream continued uphill.
“That thing bites.”
“It drinks only what spills.” Isolde’s gaze rested on Aurora’s clenched hands.
“Then it needs a better definition of spilling.”
Aurora stood and wiped water from her palms. It left no dampness, only a pale sparkle that sank into her skin.
Nyx remained on the first bank.
Their violet gaze tracked the stream. The water darkened beneath them, its tiny fish clustering into a blue-lit knot.
“Don’t touch it.” Aurora pointed upstream. “There’s a narrow bit by those roots.”
“I do not need a bridge.”
Nyx collapsed into shadow.
They crossed as a black stain over the stream, but midway the water rose in a clear hand. Five liquid fingers closed around their darkness. Human faces surfaced along the wrist, mouths open in soundless cries.
Nyx snapped back into solid form above the current.
For half a second, Aurora saw the man from the reflection suspended inside their silhouette—arms spread, face contorted, chalk symbols blazing across his chest.
Then Nyx tore free and landed beside her. Frost whitened the moss under their feet.
Isolde’s pale eyes narrowed .
“The Grove remembers the cut that made you.”
Nyx’s voice scraped through the clearing.
“And I remember Fae hands holding the knife.”
Aurora moved between them before the silence sharpened further.
“Save the centuries-old grievance until we’ve dealt with the active problem.”
Isolde turned away.
“Old grievances are seeds. Active problems are what breaks the soil.”
“Charming. Walk.”
They followed the stream west.
The meadow changed as they passed. White moss gave way to grass tinted blue at the roots. Blossoms hung in the air without stems, opening whenever Aurora looked away and closing when she faced them. A cluster of pale mushrooms whispered from beneath a fallen log.
“Carter.”
Aurora stopped.
The mushrooms’ frilled caps trembled .
“Carter. Malphora. Laila. Rory.”
Her fingers tightened around the dagger hilt.
Nyx crouched beside them. The nearest mushroom leaned towards their violet eyes.
“Nightwhisper,” it breathed. “Ald—”
Nyx pressed one finger to its cap.
Every mushroom turned black.
Aurora nudged their shoulder with her knee.
“Subtle.”
“It had poor manners.”
“You killed it.”
A fresh white cap pushed through the soil beside their hand.
“Rude,” it squeaked.
Nyx stood.
Aurora bit the inside of her cheek and continued before either of them noticed the smile.
The copper tree grew larger with each step, not by perspective but in lurches . One moment it stood twenty feet high; after Aurora blinked, its crown grazed the belly of a floating island. Copper leaves rang against one another without wind. Beneath them, red flowers crowded around an arch of black stone sunk into the earth.
The Heartstone warmed again.
Each step drew more heat from it. By the time Aurora reached the first red blossom, sweat prickled under the chain.
She bent over the flower.
Its petals had the sheen of raw meat. At the centre, instead of stamens, a tiny mouth worked over a row of glass teeth.
It bit the air near her finger.
Aurora straightened.
“Those can stay exactly where they are.”
The mouths turned towards her. Hundreds opened with soft, wet clicks.
Nyx’s shadow expanded around Aurora’s boots. The nearest flowers recoiled from it, petals shivering.
Isolde lifted one pale hand.
“Do not feed them fear. They have eaten richer meat and learnt no restraint.”
“What have they eaten?”
“A feast’s crumbs.”
The black arch stood taller than Aurora now. Carvings covered its surface: vines heavy with fruit, long tables bowed beneath platters, figures pouring wine into mouths that widened beyond the limits of their faces. Amber light glimmered within the stone’s grain.
Through the arch, she saw no meadow.
Vineyards rolled under a warm amber sky. Orchards climbed terraces in precise green ranks. In the distance, white palaces rose between gardens, their domes shaped like covered serving dishes. Bells rang beyond sight—deep, bronze notes answered by cheers from a multitude.
Hot air breathed through the opening, carrying roasted spice, fermented fruit and the iron scent of fresh blood.
The Heartstone burned.
Aurora dragged it from beneath her jumper. Crimson light beat through her fist, timed to the bells beyond the arch.
Nyx stood at her shoulder, their form pulled towards the portal in thin black threads.
“Dymas.”
The word left them with the weight of an old verdict.
Aurora raised the pendant. Its glow spread over the carvings, and hidden lines appeared in the black stone: a web of Fae runes stitched across the arch, cut so deep that shadows pooled inside them.
“The Grove didn’t hide a Hel portal.” She traced the air above one rune without touching it. “It caged one.”
Isolde’s silver hair stirred in the hot breath from Dymas.
“A cage keeps two promises. What lies within cannot leave.”
Aurora glanced at the meadow behind them. The red flowers clicked their teeth. The copper leaves chimed overhead. Far off, the stream carried stolen memories uphill beneath floating islands.
“And what stands outside,” Isolde continued, “cannot enter.”
Aurora drew the Fae-forged blade .
Its moonsilver edge flared white beside the warded arch. Frost spread across her knuckles while the Heartstone scorched her other palm.
Nyx leaned close, their whisper threading beneath the distant bells.
“The wards know your blade.”
The runes had begun to move.