AI The oak standing stones leaned out of the mist like the ribs of something too old to have a name.
Rory stopped three paces short of them.
They were not stones at all. Up close, bark ridged their surfaces, silver-grey and knotted, though no roots broke the earth beneath them and no branches crowned their blunt tops. Six stood in a ragged circle among the bracken. Wildflowers crowded their bases in impossible abundance: bluebells beside poppies, snowdrops under foxglove, summer roses opening through a skin of frost.
Richmond Park lay behind her. She knew it did. Ten minutes ago she had passed a woman walking a pair of spaniels, and somewhere beyond the trees traffic had muttered along the road.
Now there was only mist and the slow, wet sound of something breathing.
“Tell me that’s a deer,” Rory said.
Nyx tilted their head.
In solid form, the Shade stood well over six feet, a humanoid absence among the pale trunks. Mist passed through their shoulders in thin white streamers. Two violet eyes glimmered where a face ought to have been.
“It is not a deer.”
“Could’ve lied.”
“No,” said a woman’s voice from inside the circle. “That is my burden, not theirs.”
Isolde Varga stepped from behind the nearest oak pillar.
Rory had met beautiful people before. London was infested with them. Isolde’s beauty belonged to a different and less comfortable category—the beauty of moonlight on deep water, of a fox watching from a roadside at three in the morning. Her silver hair fell to her waist without stirring in the damp breeze. Pale lavender eyes regarded Rory with an intimacy that felt almost surgical.
She wore no coat. Her bare feet touched the mud and left it smooth.
Rory’s right hand went to the dagger concealed beneath her jacket. The moonsilver hilt chilled her palm through the leather sheath.
Isolde’s gaze dipped to the movement.
“A gift may still be drawn against its giver,” she said. “That is why gifts are more interesting than chains.”
“You asked me to bring it.”
“I asked you not to come unarmed.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“Few important things are.”
Nyx flowed forward, their feet dissolving into shadow over the bracken. “The boundary is open.”
Isolde looked past them at the ring of oaks. “It has been open since dawn.”
Rory glanced at the sky. What little she could see through the mist had the colour of dirty wool. “Dawn was hours ago.”
“On your side.”
The Heartstone stirred beneath her shirt.
It began as a faint warmth against her sternum, easy to mistake for body heat. Then the deep crimson gem pulsed once. Its silver chain tightened as if the pendant had taken a breath.
Rory drew it out. A dull red glow seeped between her fingers.
Nyx’s violet eyes narrowed . “There is Hel in the grove.”
“Not yet,” Isolde said.
Rory looked sharply at her. “Not yet?”
The seer smiled without warmth . “You wished for truth.”
“No, I wished for useful information. Truth was meant to be part of the package.”
A sound rolled through the mist beyond the standing oaks: a low exhalation, followed by the delicate chiming of glass struck with a fingernail.
Isolde turned towards it. “The path has noticed us.”
“That sentence has put me off the path.”
“Then stay here.”
There was no challenge in her voice. That made it worse.
Rory thought of the pendant’s warmth . Of the tears in the Veil that Wardens watched and catalogued, and of all the little failures between one report and the next. Winter had gnawed the Barrier thin. Something from Hel had found the weak place in Isolde’s grove, or the grove had found it.
Either way, standing in Richmond Park and hoping reality sorted itself out seemed optimistic .
She released the dagger but kept her hand near it. “Lead on.”
Isolde passed between two of the oak pillars.
The world folded.
There was no flash, no rush of wind, no dramatic wrench in Rory’s stomach . She simply took one step on muddy English earth and the next onto moss that shone like a drowned constellation.
Mist vanished behind her. The trees ahead rose in columns wider than houses, their bark white as old bone and translucent in places. Gold sap moved within them in sluggish streams. High overhead, branches knitted into a canopy of violet leaves, but there was no sky between them. Instead, a dark green depth stretched above, flecked with drifting lights. It had the breadth of night and the shifting weight of an ocean.
Rory stared up until vertigo tugged her sideways.
Something enormous passed across that green height.
Its silhouette had fins.
“Oh,” she said.
A school of tiny silver fish followed it, swimming above the treetops. Their bellies flashed as they turned. One broke away and descended through the air, nosing around Isolde’s hair before darting back upwards.
Nyx emerged from the boundary behind Rory. Their shadowed outline rippled, less solid here.
“The grove has grown,” they whispered.
Isolde glanced at them. “Or you have diminished.”
Nyx’s fingers lengthened into dark wisps, then pulled themselves back into shape. “Neither possibility comforts me.”
Behind them, the way out had disappeared.
Rory found no oak pillars, no mist, no opening between worlds—only a wall of pale ferns whose fronds curled and uncurled in time with her breathing.
She resisted the urge to touch them.
The path before them was a ribbon of black earth running between banks of flowers. Every colour seemed too intense. Red blooms glistened like fresh blood. Yellow petals cast their own small halos. A cluster of bluebells rang as Nyx passed, producing notes so low Rory felt them behind her ribs.
No birds sang. The forest made other music. Leaves whispered in overlapping voices. Sap clicked inside the trees. Somewhere far off, water laughed with a child’s breathless delight.
Rory stepped closer to Isolde. “How long have you lived here?”
“Long enough to know it dislikes that question.”
One of the bone-white trunks creaked.
“Of course it does.”
They followed the path.
The moss dimmed beneath Rory’s boots and brightened again once she had passed. She looked back and saw Isolde’s feet had left no mark, while her own prints filled with tiny luminous mushrooms. Nyx cast no prints at all. Their shadow ran ahead of them, occasionally splitting at forks that did not yet exist.
The air smelled of rain, crushed mint, and something sweetly rotten beneath both.
Rory’s pendant pulsed again.
This time the warmth sharpened.
She stopped. “Wait.”
Nyx turned at once. Isolde took two more silent steps before looking back.
Rory lifted the Heartstone. Its crimson glow had strengthened, laying bloody colour across her knuckles. The silver chain trembled towards the left side of the path.
There, half-hidden behind curtains of flowering ivy, stood a stone arch.
No wall joined it. No ruins surrounded it. The arch rose alone among the trees, built from blocks of amber-coloured rock. Grapevines twisted over its surface, heavy with dark fruit. Beyond it lay not the forest but rows of hills under a warm amber sky .
Rory smelled roasting meat.
The scent arrived rich with smoke and rosemary, followed by baked bread, wine, caramelised pears, pepper, and hot sugar. Her stomach clenched so suddenly it hurt. She had eaten before leaving the flat. Tea, toast, half an apple. The memory seemed absurd now, like recalling a meal from childhood .
Beyond the arch, vineyards rolled towards distant towers. Orchards sagged under jewel-bright fruit. White pavilions dotted the slopes, and music drifted from them—strings, drums, laughter, the clash of goblets. Long tables shone beneath awnings. Figures moved between platters too large for ordinary hands to lift.
Dymas.
Rory knew it without being told . Gluttony did not look like a furnace or a pit. It looked like abundance so complete that wanting became agony.
A drop of juice swelled on one of the grapes wound around the arch. It ran down the purple skin.
Rory reached for it.
Nyx caught her wrist.
Their hand was solid and colder than the Fae blade.
The small crescent scar on her left wrist whitened under their fingers. Rory blinked, and hunger crashed out of her as if someone had opened a sluice.
“Don’t,” Nyx whispered.
Across the threshold, one of the distant figures stopped.
It stood beside a banquet table, little more than a dark mark beneath the amber sky. Slowly, impossibly, it turned its head towards them.
The laughter in Dymas ceased.
Not faded. Ceased.
Rory drew the dagger.
Moonsilver slid into the grove’s strange light, slender and leaf-shaped. Cold bit into her palm. Along the blade’s edge, a pale luminescence kindled.
The vines around the arch recoiled.
Every grape opened an eye.
Hundreds of slick black pupils fixed on Rory.
“Well,” she said, because panic was trying to climb into her throat and sarcasm had always been cheaper than courage. “That seems unfriendly.”
The arch lurched forwards.
Roots tore from the black soil. Stone blocks ground against one another as the whole structure took a step without possessing legs. The amber view widened, spilling feast-smells and hot wind into the grove.
Nyx flung out an arm. Shadow struck the opening like a sheet thrown over flame. For one heartbeat, Dymas vanished behind darkness.
Then teeth pressed through the shadow from the other side.
They were human teeth. Thousands of them.
Nyx recoiled with a sound like wind screaming down a chimney.
“Cut the seam,” Isolde said.
Rory saw no seam. The arch, the shadow, the shimmering air around it—all blurred together.
“Where?”
“Where the two hungers meet.”
“Speak English.”
“I am speaking English.”
The black veil over the arch split. Amber light knifed through. The Heartstone burned against Rory’s chest, hot enough to blister.
Two hungers.
The portal wanted the grove. The pendant wanted the portal—or wanted home, if an object could remember the realm that had made it.
Rory ripped the Heartstone free of her shirt and let it hang from its chain. The gem jerked sideways, not towards the centre of the arch but towards its upper-left corner , where one block met empty air.
There.
She lunged.
The vines snapped at her. One wrapped her forearm, thorns punching through her sleeve. Another coiled around her ankle. She hit the ground hard enough to bite her tongue. The portal surged nearer. Heat washed over her face.
Beyond the arch, banquet guests crowded close now.
Their silk clothes gleamed with grease. Their smiles stretched too far. Gold masks covered some faces; others had mouths where eyes should have been. At the centre stood a vast shape in plum-coloured robes, one hand resting on the back of an empty chair.
The chair waited at the head of the table.
For her.
Rory rolled onto her back and slashed the vine around her ankle. The Fae blade passed through it without resistance. The severed tendril shrieked in the voice of a boiling kettle and sprayed wine-dark sap.
She drove herself up, caught the Heartstone in her fist, and stabbed where its heat hurt worst.
The moonsilver blade met empty air.
Empty air broke.
A crack raced out from the dagger point, bright and thin as lightning trapped in glass. For an instant Rory saw the Veil itself: not a wall, but countless translucent layers pressed together, each trembling with images of other places. A black sea beneath red stars. A city built upside down. A field where headless statues knelt in snow. The amber hills of Dymas bulged through a torn layer like flesh through ripped cloth.
The blade cut deeper.
The world made a sound too large for hearing.
Isolde seized Rory by the back of her jacket. Nyx’s shadows closed around both of them. The arch folded inward, stone bending like wet paper. Every grape-eye burst at once.
The last thing Rory saw through the collapsing threshold was the figure in plum robes lifting a goblet to her.
Then Dymas snapped shut.
Silence crashed over the grove.
Rory landed on her knees. The dagger remained clenched in her hand. Its edge steamed with a faint golden vapour. The Heartstone had gone cold.
Where the arch had stood, there was now a shallow pool no wider than a dinner plate. Amber light glowed beneath its surface. A single black grape floated in the centre.
Rory stayed very still.
The grape blinked.
She stabbed it.
The pool flashed and vanished, leaving the blade buried two inches deep in ordinary-looking soil.
Nyx began to laugh.
It was a dry, astonished rustle, barely louder than leaves, but it was unmistakably laughter.
Rory pulled the dagger free. “Glad someone enjoyed that.”
“You stabbed a fruit.”
“It looked at me.”
“It did,” Isolde said. “And now it will tell no one what it saw.”
Rory turned on her. Blood from the thorn cuts warmed her forearm. “You knew that thing was here.”
“I knew a door would grow. I did not know what shape it would choose.”
“You could have mentioned the carnivorous architecture.”
“You would have come prepared for a door.” Isolde’s lavender eyes settled on the blade. “You needed to come prepared for surprise.”
“Next time, surprise can handle itself.”
A soft chiming passed through the forest.
The bluebells bowed. High above, the silver fish scattered through the green sky. One by one, the gold streams inside the white trees stopped flowing.
Nyx ceased laughing.
Darkness spread between the trunks—not nightfall, but a stain moving against the direction of every light .
Rory rose. Her knees ached. “Was closing the portal supposed to do that?”
“No,” Isolde said.
For the first time, the seer sounded afraid.
The path behind them had vanished beneath a carpet of white flowers. Ahead, the black earth continued into the deepening forest, where the trees curved inward like ribs around a vast sleeping heart.
Something moved there.
Not the portal. Not a creature from Dymas. This motion belonged to the grove itself. Roots shifted under the soil. Branches lowered. The alien stars in the moss winked out in widening circles.
The Heartstone gave one faint pulse .
Not warm now.
Cold.
Nyx’s shape thinned, spilling into the nearest shadows. “The tear was not opening from Hel.”
Isolde watched the dark between the trees. Her silver hair lifted around her as though she stood underwater.
“No,” she said. “Hel was trying to escape through it.”
A sound came from deeper in the grove.
Slow. Wet. Awake.
Rory tightened her grip on the moonsilver dagger.
Behind her, the way to Richmond remained gone. Ahead, the living forest drew a long breath, and every impossible flower turned its face towards them.