AI The standing stones did not look like a door.
They stood in a ragged crescent beneath the Richmond oaks, each one furred with moss and silver lichen, their surfaces scored by weather older than any road Rory had ever walked. Beyond them lay only a patch of winter grass and the dark, damp trunks of the park.
Then Isolde stepped between the stones.
She left no print in the mud.
The air folded around her like silk . For one breath, Rory saw the grove as a distortion—a shimmer trembling between the stones, the way heat wavered above asphalt. Then Isolde vanished.
Eva made a small, strangled sound.
Nyx tilted their head. Their violet eyes glimmered inside the hood of their shadowed face.
“Which side?” Rory asked.
“Where the path has not yet happened,” Isolde’s voice whispered from beyond the stones.
Rory glanced at Eva. “That clears it up.”
Eva swallowed. She had insisted on coming, had followed Rory through London’s rain and into Richmond Park with a courage that looked increasingly like poor judgment. “You first.”
“Already did.”
“Then you know it’s safe.”
“I know Isolde went through it.”
“Is that different?”
“Extremely.”
Nyx flowed forward. Their solid silhouette thinned as they crossed the boundary, becoming a smear of darkness between the stones. For a moment the grove’s pale lavender light shone through their ribs. Then they were gone .
Rory touched the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone lay warm against her skin, its deep crimson surface faintly lit from within. It had begun pulsing minutes ago, a slow, patient beat.
Not a heartbeat, she told herself.
It felt exactly like one.
She drew the Fae-forged blade from the sheath at her hip. The moonsilver dagger was cold enough to ache in her hand. Its leaf-shaped edge held a faint gleam beneath the gray afternoon sky.
Eva stared at it. “You’re bringing that in?”
“I’m bringing it everywhere.”
“Good. Because that looks like the kind of place that eats people.”
Rory stepped between the stones.
Cold struck first—not winter cold, but something deeper, a chill that seemed to pass through her skin and settle behind her eyes. Her stomach lurched . For an instant she felt herself falling sideways, though her boots remained planted.
Then the world opened.
The grove was enormous.
It stretched beneath a sky of pearl and violet, though no sun hung overhead. Wildflowers crowded the ground in impossible profusion: blue bells large as teacups, red blossoms shaped like open mouths, pale gold flowers that rotated slowly to follow Rory as she moved. Their scent shifted with every breath—honey, wet stone, smoke, crushed mint.
Behind her, the standing stones formed a narrow arch. Through it she could still see Richmond Park, but the view had shrunk to a wavering rectangle. Rain fell on the other side. Here, a warm wind stroked the grass.
Eva came through and stopped dead.
“Oh,” she breathed.
The word carried across the clearing and returned from somewhere high above, thinner and stranger.
Oh.
Nyx stood twenty paces away beside a stream that shone like black glass. Isolde waited on the opposite bank. Her silver hair spilled to her waist, untouched by the wind. She looked no older than thirty and no younger than the moon, which seemed to hang just above the horizon despite the absence of a sun.
“This is the Grove?” Rory asked.
“This is a Grove,” Isolde replied.
“That’s not the same answer.”
“A door is not a house, a name is not a soul, and a question is not a key.”
Eva leaned toward Rory. “Does she ever answer normally?”
“No,” Rory said.
“Yes,” Isolde said.
Eva blinked. “That was almost helpful.”
They followed Isolde along the stream.
The water made no sound. It ran uphill, curling over smooth stones and climbing toward a ridge where it disappeared into a hanging veil of mist. Fish moved beneath its surface, but they had too many fins and no visible eyes. One rose near Rory’s boot and opened a silver mouth.
She stepped away.
The fish sank.
“What did you feel?” Nyx asked.
Their voice came from beside her, though Rory had not seen them cross the stream. It sounded like wind slipping beneath a door.
“Something looking at me.”
“Something was.”
“Can it cross?”
“It has not decided.”
Rory tightened her grip on the dagger. “Comforting.”
“Comfort is a blanket laid over a hole.”
“Do you have any useful observations?”
Nyx’s violet gaze moved to the pendant. “The Heartstone remembers this place.”
Rory looked down. The crimson gem pulsed brighter, warmth spreading through the silver chain.
Isolde watched it without expression. “Stolen embers always remember the fire.”
“Who stole it?”
“Ask the hand that gave it.”
“I’ve asked.”
“And did the hand answer?”
“No.”
“Then you asked the wrong hand.”
Rory filed that away, though she had no idea where to put it.
They climbed the ridge. The grass brushed Rory’s knees, each blade translucent and tipped with a bead of blue light. When she touched one, it chimed. A hundred nearby blades answered.
The sound was delicate at first, like distant glass. Then it gathered into a chord that passed beneath her feet and through her bones.
Eva flinched. “That wasn’t there before.”
“Things here notice when they are noticed,” Isolde said.
“Can we stop noticing things?”
“Not while you remain alive.”
At the top of the ridge, the landscape unfolded.
Beyond the Grove’s flowers stood a forest of white-barked trees, their branches twisting together into arches. Leaves like thin plates of copper fluttered overhead without falling. In the distance, mountains floated upside down, their peaks pointing toward the lavender sky. Between them hung a vast, dark ocean, suspended in the air. Rivers streamed from it in shining ropes and vanished into the clouds below.
Rory forgot to breathe.
Even Nyx went still.
“What is that?” Eva whispered.
“An old sea,” Isolde said.
“In the sky?”
“Once it was elsewhere.”
A low tremor rolled through the ground.
The copper leaves shivered. The silent stream stopped flowing. Far beyond the forest, one of the floating mountains cracked open, revealing a vein of red light.
Rory’s pendant flared hot.
The warmth became pain.
She tore the chain from her neck. The Heartstone hung in her fist, crimson light spilling between her fingers. Beneath the skin of the gem, something moved—a thin black line twisting like a trapped insect.
Nyx turned toward the forest. Their form darkened, edges dissolving into smoke.
“We are not alone,” they said.
Isolde’s pale eyes fixed on the trees. “No one enters a story alone.”
“That’s not what they meant,” Rory said.
A sound came from the forest.
It began as a wet clicking, irregular and distant. Then another answered. Then a third, closer.
Between the white trunks, something moved.
Rory saw a limb first—long, jointed, and pale as peeled willow. It withdrew behind a tree. A second limb appeared on the opposite side. The creature was circling them.
Eva reached for Rory’s arm.
Rory raised the moonsilver dagger. Its blade brightened, catching no visible light. The air around it tightened.
“Isolde,” she said, “what is that?”
“A question with too many legs.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It is hungry.”
The clicking stopped.
A face emerged between the trees.
It was almost human, if a human face had been stretched thin over a skull and set with four black eyes. Its mouth opened sideways. Inside, rows of tiny pale teeth flexed like grass in wind.
Eva whispered a curse.
The creature took one step into the clearing. Its feet ended in hands. Each finger pressed into the soil, testing it.
Rory felt the Heartstone pull toward it.
Not toward the creature itself.
Toward something behind it.
The black line inside the gem writhed.
“There,” Rory said.
The creature lunged.
Nyx became a wall of shadow.
The impact struck with a crack like a tree splitting. Nyx’s form scattered across the grass, then gathered again behind the creature. Isolde lifted one silver hand and spoke a string of words that sounded like bells breaking underwater .
The creature convulsed.
Rory ran.
Not away. Toward the trees.
“Rory!” Eva shouted.
The creature twisted after her, but Rory slashed the dagger across the space between them. The blade did not touch flesh. It cut something invisible.
A ward snapped.
The forest screamed.
Every white-barked tree bent at once, branches whipping downward. The creature jerked backward, its mouth opening in a sound that stabbed into Rory’s teeth. Behind it, between two trees, a narrow rift flickered into view—a vertical tear in the air, showing not forest but amber light, red stone , and the shadow of something immense.
The Heartstone burned in Rory’s hand.
The rift pulled at her.
For one dizzy second she smelled roasted fruit, hot soil, and sugar. She heard distant music and the roar of a crowd. Somewhere beyond the tear, someone shouted her name.
Not Rory.
Aurora.
The voice carried the weight of a throne.
She dug her boots into the earth. “Nyx!”
The Shade struck the creature from behind. Darkness poured over its pale limbs, pinning them. Isolde’s words sharpened into command. Eva seized Rory’s coat and hauled her backward.
The rift narrowed.
The creature thrashed, tearing strips from Nyx’s shadow. Violet eyes flashed in the darkness.
“Close it!” Eva cried.
“I’m working on it!”
“How?”
Rory looked at the blade, the pendant, and the rip in the world. Quick thinking had always been easier when the problem obeyed ordinary rules.
The Heartstone pulsed .
The rift pulsed with it.
Rory understood.
She thrust the pendant toward the opening.
The gem answered with a burst of crimson light. The amber world beyond the rift surged forward, hungry and bright. Heat washed over her face. Something on the other side reached through—a hand with too many knuckles, fingers tipped in golden claws.
Rory drove the moonsilver blade into the ground.
The dagger sank through soil, stone, and whatever lay beneath both. Cold exploded outward. Silver lines raced across the clearing, stitching the rift shut.
The claw withdrew.
The amber vanished.
The creature collapsed into a heap of pale limbs. Then it folded inward, becoming a knot of roots that sank into the earth.
Silence returned.
Rory remained crouched over the dagger, breathing hard. The Heartstone had gone dark. The silver chain hung broken between her fingers.
Eva knelt beside her. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“That sounded like a lie.”
“I’m not bleeding.”
“Not what I asked.”
Rory looked toward the forest. Her left wrist throbbed beneath the small crescent scar she had carried since childhood. “I’m fine.”
Nyx re-formed near the stream. Their outline flickered , one shoulder missing before darkness filled it in.
“Your wound is not where you look,” they said.
“Everyone here is a poet when I need a medic.”
Isolde approached. She bent and pulled the dagger from the ground. Despite the violence around them, the blade remained spotless, cold, and faintly luminous.
“You have opened the first gate,” she said.
“I closed it.”
“A gate may be opened by closing it.”
Rory snatched back the dagger. “What did we just see?”
Isolde looked past her, toward the distant floating sea.
“An appetite beneath the world. A prince’s road. A promise wearing a stranger’s voice.”
The pendant warmed again, faintly this time.
Far away, beyond the white forest, bells began to ring.
Not the delicate chiming flowers. These were deep, enormous bells, each note rolling through the Grove until the flowers bowed and the black stream shuddered.
Nyx turned toward the sound.
“Something knows we are here,” they whispered.
Isolde’s silver hair lifted in the wind.
“Something knew before you arrived.”
The path ahead opened between the trees, though no one had touched them. Copper leaves peeled back from the branches, revealing a descending stairway carved into the earth. Each step glowed with amber light.
Eva stared into the depths . “We’re not going down there.”
Rory looked at the broken chain in her hand, then at the Heartstone’s stubborn pulse beneath her palm.
“No,” she said.
The bells rang again.
Rory stepped onto the first stair.
“We’re going to find out who called me.”