AI The last of Richmond Park vanished behind them with the sound of a door closing underwater.
Aurora stumbled forward, boots sinking ankle-deep into something soft and warm. She caught herself on one hand, expecting mud. Her palm came away dusted in gold.
Not dust. Pollen.
She straightened slowly .
The sky was amber.
It stretched overhead in a seamless, glowing vault, neither day nor sunset, though the light had the rich, slanting colour of late afternoon in autumn. Immense clouds drifted through it in bruised purples and rose-gold, their lower edges lit as though fires burned inside them. Somewhere far away, a bell rang once. The note rolled across the land and came back altered, deeper and sweeter.
Rory looked over her shoulder.
The passage through which they had come had shrunk to a vertical shimmer between two black stones. The stones did not belong in the meadow around them. They were narrow, jagged slabs, charred-looking and slick with condensation. Beyond the wavering slit, she glimpsed Isolde’s grove: silver hair, green grass, the familiar grey light of a London morning.
Then the slit folded inward.
It did not close so much as get swallowed by its own shadow.
Rory’s fingers clenched around the Heartstone pendant at her throat.
The crimson gem had been warm while they stood among the oak standing stones. Now it burned against her sternum through her shirt, a small, steady coal. Its faint inner light pulsed between her knuckles.
“Well,” she said, because silence had suddenly acquired teeth. “That feels reassuring.”
Beside her, Nyx lengthened from the shadow cast by one of the black stones. In this place, their darkness looked wrong. It was too pure, too cool against the syrupy amber light; a tall humanoid absence with violet eyes hovering in the hollow where a face should have been.
“The way remains,” Nyx whispered. Their voice came from the warm wind and the dry grass at Rory’s boots. “For the moment.”
“For the moment,” Rory repeated.
Isolde stepped past them without disturbing the grass. Her long silver hair floated behind her, though no wind touched it. She had exchanged the pale dress she wore in the grove for a travelling cloak the colour of old moss, clasped at the throat with a crescent of bone. Her pale lavender eyes moved over the horizon.
The meadow spread away in tall grasses striped scarlet, saffron, and a blue so deep it seemed almost black . Great trees rose at intervals, their trunks white as polished ivory, their crowns festooned with fruits the size of lanterns. Some were translucent and held slow-moving sparks. Others had skins like hammered copper. Beneath one tree, a flock of tiny winged things worried at a fallen fruit, their beaks clicking like knitting needles.
Farther on, the land began to roll.
Vineyards climbed the hills in terraces so precise they could have been carved with a ruler. Between them, streams of something bright and ruby-coloured ran in channels of pale stone. Atop the nearest rise stood a palace or a temple—or perhaps both—its towers built of layered black glass. Wide staircases spiralled around them. Gold banners streamed from every height, though the wind went in no direction Rory could follow.
And beyond all of it, half-hidden in amber haze, something vast moved.
Rory could not decide whether it was a mountain changing shape or the shoulder of some enormous sleeping creature.
“Dymas,” Isolde said.
The word left a taste in Rory’s mouth: cloves, smoke, and the lingering sweetness of wine.
She looked down at the pollen on her hand. It had begun to melt into her skin. “It’s prettier than I expected.”
“Poison is often served on good china,” Isolde replied.
Rory rubbed her palm hard against her jeans.
Nyx turned their violet gaze toward the distant terraces. “The prince’s realm is close to the Veil tonight. Closer than it should be.”
The thought settled badly in Rory’s stomach . She pictured London beyond the sealed shimmer, buses crawling through rain, people queuing for coffee, her flat above Silas’ bar with its rattling pipes and the smell of stale beer caught in the floorboards. All of it separated from this impossible country by a thin, damaged membrane.
The Veil. A barrier, right up until it wasn’t.
“Then we find out who’s been opening holes in it,” Rory said, “and we get home before anyone can decide we’re ingredients.”
Isolde’s mouth lifted, not quite a smile . “The first bite is always given freely.”
“That’s not comforting either.”
“It was not intended to be.”
They started down the slope.
The grass bent away from Isolde’s feet without breaking. Around Rory’s boots it whispered in papery voices. She tried not to listen closely, but after a few minutes she caught fragments.
Hungry, said one blade.
Home, sighed another.
Little heart, little heart, little heart.
Rory stopped.
Nyx halted at once, their outline sharpening. “What is it?”
She glanced down. The grasses waved around her calves, bright as flames. “Nothing.”
Isolde looked at her wrist.
Rory followed her gaze and saw the pale crescent scar there, just above the cuff of her jacket. The scar had always been a small thing, a relic of a stupid childhood tumble through a broken greenhouse pane. Here, beneath Dymas’s amber sky, it had reddened sharply .
“You have been noticed,” Isolde said.
“By what?”
The Seer looked toward the vineyards. “Everything that eats.”
Rory pulled her sleeve over the scar.
They passed beneath the first of the ivory trees. Its fallen fruit lay split open in the grass. The flesh inside was not flesh but a dense mass of tiny black seeds, each seed fitted with a wet, blinking eye.
Rory veered around it.
Nyx drifted closer to the trunk. “Do not touch the bark.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
The tree’s pale surface rippled.
For an instant, a human face pushed outward from the trunk: a man’s face, broad and sweating, mouth stretched wide in an expression that might have been laughter. Then the wood smoothed over him.
Rory’s breath hitched.
Isolde did not slow. “Or the fruit.”
“That was also not on my list.”
“The list grows.”
The path became visible only when they reached it: a narrow road of pale tiles laid between the grass. Every tile bore an image in mosaic —cups overflowing with red wine, roast birds on silver platters, mouths with too many teeth, hands lifting lids from steaming dishes. The workmanship was exquisite. The faces in the images looked almost alive .
Rory stepped on a tile depicting a pomegranate split down the middle.
A soft, desperate voice said, “Please.”
She jerked back.
The voice stopped.
Nyx’s violet eyes lowered to the road. “The old roads remember offerings.”
“Human offerings?”
“The road does not make that distinction.”
Rory picked a tile with no faces on it and kept walking.
As they descended, the air thickened with scent. At first it was ordinary enough: warm bread, crushed herbs, roasting meat. Then the smells became stranger. Salt spray. Her mother’s lavender soap. The buttery pastry from the bakery near Cardiff University, the one she used to buy before morning lectures. She had not thought of that bakery in years. Suddenly she could taste the flaky crust and hot apple filling as clearly as if she had bitten into it.
Her stomach twisted.
Ahead, a low arch rose over the path, made from the intertwined roots of two ivory trees. Dozens of copper bells hung from it. None of them moved, yet they chimed in a delicate, overlapping chorus.
On the other side, someone had laid a table.
It stood alone in the grass, long enough to seat twenty, covered in immaculate white linen. Silver platters crowded its surface. Steam rose from bowls. Crystal decanters caught the amber light and broke it into pools of ruby and violet across the cloth.
There were no chairs.
At the head of the table sat a girl in a yellow dress.
She could not have been more than ten. Her dark hair was tied in two uneven plaits. She held a spoon in one hand and stared fixedly at a bowl before her. Her cheeks were hollow. Her wrists looked thin enough to snap.
Rory stopped so abruptly Nyx’s shadow brushed her shoulder.
“Hello?” she called.
The girl did not look up.
On the table in front of her sat a mountain of food. Pears glistening with syrup. Whole fish lacquered in dark sauce. Tiny cakes dusted with glittering sugar. A steaming tureen that smelled, horribly and unmistakably, of beef stew.
The girl lifted her spoon. Her hand trembled . “I don’t want any more,” she whispered.
Rory moved toward the table.
Nyx’s arm became solid across her path, a bar of cold darkness. “No.”
“She’s a child.”
“She is bait.”
The girl raised her head.
Her eyes were the same black as the seeds in the split fruit. Her mouth opened too wide, jaw unhinging with a wet crack. The tablecloth heaved. Beneath it, dozens of pale hands scrabbled against the linen.
Rory stumbled back, her hand flying to the dagger at her belt.
The Fae-forged blade came free with barely a sound. Its leaf-shaped length held a faint moonlit glow despite the amber sky. Cold bit into her palm through the hilt.
The thing in the yellow dress hissed.
Every bell on the root-arch began to ring at once.
Nyx moved first. They dissolved into a rush of shadow that swept beneath the table. The white cloth collapsed inward. Hands clawed at darkness. A shriek tore through the meadow, high and hungry.
Rory did not wait to see what emerged. She slashed at the nearest grasping wrist.
Moonsilver met grey flesh.
The blade went through it as if she had cut smoke, but the hand fell away screaming. Black liquid pattered onto the tiles and smoked where it landed.
The girl’s shape buckled. Her yellow dress emptied, then filled again with something long-limbed and pale. A mouth opened in the middle of its chest.
Isolde raised one hand.
“Guest without invitation,” she said softly . “Table without host. Hunger without end.”
The root-arch groaned.
Roots burst from the earth around the false feast, thick as a man’s waist. They wrapped the table legs, crushed the platters, and dragged the whole writhing thing down into the ground. The yellow dress vanished last. For one second the little girl’s face reappeared above the swallowing earth.
“You should have eaten,” it said.
Then the grass grew over it.
The bells fell silent.
Rory stood with her dagger raised, heart punching hard enough to hurt. The smell of stew lingered in the air.
Nyx re-formed beside her. A ragged edge of their shadow smoked at the shoulder, though they gave no sign of pain.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I am less substantial than I was.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“It is the answer.”
Isolde approached the place where the table had been. No marks remained except a crushed patch of scarlet grass and one overturned spoon. She picked it up between finger and thumb.
The spoon was silver on one side. On the other, a tiny face had been engraved into its bowl, mouth open in a howl.
“An old appetite,” Isolde said. “It has learned to fish near the road.”
“You knew it would be there?” Rory asked.
“I knew something would be waiting for what you carry.”
Rory looked down at the Heartstone. It pulsed warmly in her fist. “This.”
“The stone has a scent.”
“Everything here does, apparently.”
“Not everything,” Nyx said.
Their voice had gone quieter.
Rory followed their gaze.
Beyond the arch, the vineyards began.
The vines were taller than any she had seen on Earth, trained over frames of bronze and dark wood. Their leaves were broad, iridescent, and trembling though the air stood still. Clusters of grapes hung beneath them, each grape the size of a plum. Some were dark purple, nearly black. Others were translucent green and held tiny storms within them: flashes of lightning, whorls of cloud.
Figures worked between the rows.
At first Rory thought they were farmers. They wore broad straw hats and long aprons. But they moved too slowly , each one repeating the same gesture: reach, cut, place. Reach, cut, place. Their hands were grey and cracked. Their faces had the slack, polished look of wax.
A cart rolled along a track between the vines, pulled by two enormous animals with antlers like branching coral. The cart overflowed with grapes. As it passed, one grape rolled free and burst at Rory’s feet.
A child’s laugh spilled out of it.
Then the sound faded.
Rory’s mouth had gone dry.
“No one goes into the rows,” Nyx said.
“Wasn’t about to,” she said, though she had taken a half-step toward them without meaning to.
The path continued beside the vineyard, leading toward a structure she had mistaken for a shrine. Up close it was a gatehouse, ancient and extravagant. Its walls were made of stacked rib bones, each one taller than Rory. Vines threaded through the gaps. At the centre stood bronze doors embossed with a feast in progress: hundreds of tiny figures reclining around a circular table while a crowned man watched from a high-backed chair.
The man’s face had been rubbed smooth.
Before the doors waited three guards.
They were human-shaped, but their armour seemed to have grown from their bodies: layered plates of dark red shell, slick at the joints. Each wore a helmet fashioned as an animal skull. One had a boar’s tusks. One, a stag’s antlers. The third bore the long, needle teeth of some sea creature.
Their weapons were forks.
Not ordinary forks. Each had three black tines as long as swords.
Rory instinctively reached for the Fae blade again.
Isolde caught her wrist. Her fingers were cool and light, but her grip did not yield. “Steel answers questions here. Do not let it speak first.”
“They’re guarding the way.”
“Then we shall offer them another reason to open it.”
The guards had noticed them. The boar-skull guard stepped forward. Beneath the helmet, something wet clicked its tongue.
“Names,” it said.
Its voice came out thick, as if it spoke through a mouth full of food.
Rory felt Nyx gather at her back like a storm cloud. The Heartstone flared hot enough to make her flinch.
The guard’s skull-face tilted toward her chest.
“Oh,” it said.
The other two guards turned.
Rory saw their attention settle on the pendant, felt it like greasy fingers along her throat. In the bronze doors, the faceless crowned man seemed to lean nearer.
She could lie. She could say the pendant was worthless, stolen, cursed. None of that would matter if the stone really did have a scent.
So she looked at the gatehouse, at the watchful guards, at the vineyard rows full of workers who might once have been people. Then she looked at Isolde.
The Seer’s lavender eyes revealed nothing.
A small group, Rory thought. Three people walking into a realm ruled by hunger, carrying a key none of them understood.
Fine.
She had made worse decisions in London.
Rory stepped forward until the boar-skull guard’s fork was close enough that she could see old blood caught in the seams of its tines.
“My name is Aurora Carter,” she said. “And I think someone in there has been using my world as a pantry.”
For the first time since they crossed the threshold, the guard went still.
Then, from somewhere behind the bone doors, a great many voices began to laugh.