AI The Heartstone began to beat before Aurora saw the door.
One pulse , hot against her sternum. Then another.
She stopped between two ancient oaks whose trunks had grown together overhead, their bare branches knitted like arthritic fingers. Behind her, Nyx flowed soundlessly across the carpet of year-round wildflowers. Ahead, Isolde walked without bending a single stem.
“Tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” Rory said.
Isolde glanced back. Her pale lavender eyes caught light where there was none. “That depends upon what you think.”
“A portal.”
“Then I cannot tell you.”
The deep crimson stone pulsed again. Heat spread through Rory’s shirt, sharp enough to sting. She hooked a finger beneath its silver chain and drew it out. The thumbnail-sized gem glowed from within, not reflecting the grove’s thin winter daylight but manufacturing its own, like an ember that had remembered being a star.
Nyx gathered beside her, solidifying into a tall humanoid silhouette. Two violet eyes opened in the darkness of their face.
“The boundary is close,” they whispered.
“No,” Rory said. “Really?”
Their eyes narrowed faintly. She had learned this meant amusement. Possibly.
The winter solstice had thinned the Veil across London. Rory had seen tears in it before: oily shimmers at the edge of sight, reality wrinkling as though stretched over something trying to claw through. This was different. Between the joined oaks, the air had become clear.
Too clear.
Through it lay a sky the colour of warm honey.
Rory stepped closer. The Fae-forged dagger at her hip turned so cold that the chill seeped through its sheath and into her thigh. Beyond the oaks, rows of vines climbed a rust-red hillside beneath that impossible amber sky. Their leaves gleamed green and gold, though no wind moved them. Farther off, pale towers rose among orchards heavy with fruit. They were too slender to stand and too tall to be sane.
The grove remained visible around the opening: silver-haired Isolde, bluebells nodding at her feet, Richmond’s grey morning caught in bare branches. But inside the arch, summer waited with its mouth open.
“Dymas,” Nyx breathed.
The word seemed to cross the threshold ahead of them. On the other side, the vines shivered.
Rory looked at Isolde. “You’re certain this is where the mark led?”
“The mark led here.”
“Not the same answer.”
“No.”
Isolde’s expression remained serenely infuriating. Her silver hair hung to her waist without a strand out of place. She had brought them through paths in Richmond Park that did not exist, past deer that watched with human stillness, and into a grove where Rory’s phone had advanced three hours and then counted backwards. Now she stood before a door into Hel and offered riddles.
“What happens if it closes?” Rory asked.
“Then the way back will no longer be open.”
“Useful. Thank you.”
Nyx extended one shadowed hand toward the arch. Their fingers blurred at the edge, thinning into smoke. The moment they touched the clear air, light rippled across it in concentric rings.
Something vast rang in the distance.
Not a bell. A glass struck by a knife, perhaps, magnified until the note passed through Rory’s bones.
Nyx snatched their hand back. Their outline wavered .
“What?” Rory asked.
“There are wards.”
“That’s why you brought the blade,” Isolde said.
Rory drew it. Moonsilver slid from the sheath with a whisper . The dagger’s leaf-shaped blade shone faintly, despite the lack of moonlight, and frost filmed her fingers around the hilt.
She had never become comfortable holding it. A kitchen knife was a tool. A blade made in the Fae Courts was an opinion, and this one disapproved of nearly everything.
The invisible barrier glittered before her. Now that she knew where to look, she could make out strands within it: gold, red, and black, woven across the opening in a pattern like thorned vines.
Nyx leaned close, their wind-whisper voice stirring the hair beside her ear. “Cut the black strand.”
“Why black?”
“The others are meant to be seen.”
That was not reassuring. Rory studied the mesh until her eyes watered. The black thread vanished whenever she looked directly at it. She shifted her focus to the red and gold, followed the gaps between them, and found darkness winding through the centre.
Out-of-the-box thinking, her father used to call it, usually just before asking why she couldn’t apply the same determination to contract law.
Rory set the dagger’s edge against empty air and drew it down.
The ward parted without resistance.
A smell poured through: roasted spices, damp soil, wine, woodsmoke, and something sweet enough to turn her stomach . The archway widened. The joined oaks stretched upward with a grinding groan, roots clenching beneath Rory’s boots.
Beyond them, the road into Hel unfurled.
“Well,” Rory said. “That seems bad.”
She stepped through first.
Heat wrapped around her. The ground changed from soft loam to warm red stone, and her next breath tasted of cinnamon and lightning. For one dizzy instant she felt herself pulled in three directions, as if different versions of her had entered different worlds. Then they snapped together.
Nyx emerged behind her in a spill of smoke. Isolde followed, untouched by the ward. When Rory looked back, Richmond had become a green oval hanging between the two oaks, impossibly small and far away.
Dymas spread below them.
Vineyards rolled over the hills in mathematically perfect terraces. Between them stood orchards where every tree bore several kinds of fruit: pears nestled beside blue-skinned oranges, and clusters of translucent cherries glowed among broad silver leaves. Rivers wound through the valley, one dark as red wine, another creamy white. Along their banks, long tables gleamed beneath awnings, each set with empty golden plates.
There were thousands of chairs.
None occupied.
“Where is everyone?” Rory asked.
The valley answered with a soft clink.
Every goblet on every table had shifted at once.
Nyx became less solid. Shadows lifted from beneath the vines and reached toward them, drawn to their body.
“This road is old,” they said. “Older than the terraces.”
Rory looked down. The red paving stones were worn smooth in the centre. Fine grooves ran along both edges, and each groove was lined with tiny teeth.
She moved her boot away.
“Roads don’t generally need those.”
“In Dymas,” Isolde said, “all things have an appetite.”
They descended.
The amber sky had no visible sun. Light soaked the air evenly, erasing direction. Rory kept glancing at the shadows, but they pointed toward Nyx rather than away from anything. As the path curved between the vines, clusters of dark grapes turned to follow them.
Rory reached toward one, then stopped.
A mouth opened in the grape’s skin.
It had small white teeth.
She jerked her hand back. The whole cluster chattered, fruit knocking together in what sounded disturbingly like laughter.
“Alien grapes. Brilliant.”
“Do not eat anything offered freely,” Isolde said.
“What if it charges?”
“Then ask the cost.”
Rory shot her a look. Isolde’s smooth face revealed nothing.
They continued deeper. The air filled with faint music, though Rory could find no musicians. Strings thrummed beneath the earth. High notes drifted from flowers shaped like crystal bells. Somewhere among the orchards, a drum kept a slow, wet rhythm.
It matched the Heartstone.
Thump.
The pendant warmed.
Thump.
The unseen drum answered.
Rory closed her hand around the gem. Its beat pressed into her crescent-shaped scar, a small old mark on her left wrist suddenly white against flushed skin.
“Something knows we’re here.”
“Many things know,” Nyx said.
“Anything friendly?”
Their violet eyes swept the vines. “Friendship is a mortal solution to loneliness.”
“So no.”
They reached the first table. It stretched farther than Rory could see, following the curve of the hillside. Platters crowded its surface: lacquered birds with jewel-bright feathers, towers of pastries breathing steam, silver fish swimming through bowls of sauce. A roasted boar turned its head as they passed. Its cooked eyes followed Rory.
At one place setting, a chair scraped back.
The golden plate before it was empty except for a folded card.
Rory knew better. She still read it.
AURORA CARTER, it said in black, elegant lettering.
Beneath that, a second name slowly bled into the card.
MALPHORA.
Cold moved through her despite the heat.
Nyx leaned over her shoulder. Their form rippled at the edges.
“Do you know that name?” Rory asked.
“No.”
Isolde studied the card. “Names are doors. Some open inward.”
“That is spectacularly unhelpful.”
“It is also true.”
The empty plate chimed. A crimson drop appeared in its centre, swelling until it became a glossy fruit no larger than a plum. Its skin split. Inside, instead of flesh, Rory saw a room above a London bar.
Her room.
Rain traced the window. Her unmade bed sat in the blue dark. On the bedside table, her phone lit up with an incoming call.
EVAN.
The sight struck lower than thought. Her fingers went numb. For one breath she was back in Cardiff with a hand tight around her arm, a voice explaining why everything was her fault.
The fruit pulsed .
“Rory.” Nyx’s whisper came from very far away.
She raised the dagger and drove its point through the vision.
The fruit screamed.
Black juice sprayed the plate. The image collapsed, and every dish along the endless table went still.
Rory dragged in a breath. “It’s rude to snoop.”
The black juice crawled toward the card. When it touched the name Malphora, both card and stain burst into blue flame.
Across the vineyards, something laughed.
The sound rolled from hill to hill, rich and delighted. Fruit dropped from the trees in a sudden rain. Goblets trembled . The pale towers in the distance bent toward them, their pointed roofs tilting like listening heads.
Isolde’s eyes had widened.
It was the first honest alarm Rory had seen on her face.
“What did I do?” Rory asked.
“You declined an invitation.”
“I gathered that.”
“In this realm, refusal whets the hunger.”
The table split down the centre.
They ran.
The wood opened behind them in a long, splintering maw . Plates and goblets toppled inward, vanishing between rows of grinding porcelain teeth. Nyx dissolved into shadow and streamed over the ground. Isolde moved with impossible grace, silver hair floating behind her, her bare passage leaving no mark in the red dust.
Rory sprinted after them as chairs snapped at her ankles.
The road ended at a pair of bronze doors embedded in the hillside. Each stood thirty feet high, green with age and carved with figures kneeling around a cauldron. Their faces had been scratched away. Between the doors ran a seam no wider than a hair.
“No handle,” Rory gasped.
The devouring table surged around the bend.
Nyx struck the bronze and sank wrist-deep before recoiling. Violet light flared through their body.
“Sealed.”
“Of course it is.”
The Heartstone burned against Rory’s chest. She hauled it free. Its crimson glow now blazed bright enough to paint her fingers red.
In the carvings, the cauldron held a shallow hollow.
Thumbnail-sized.
Rory pressed the pendant into it.
The doors inhaled.
Bronze figures lifted their faceless heads. The hillside shuddered, shedding soil and vines, and the seam between the doors opened upon darkness. Air rushed past Rory, carrying dust, ancient spice, and the mineral chill of a sealed tomb.
They slipped inside. Nyx crossed last, gathering themself from every surrounding shadow. The doors slammed as the first porcelain teeth struck bronze.
Silence fell.
The Heartstone’s glow revealed a vaulted chamber.
Rory forgot to breathe.
Stone trees supported the ceiling, their branches interlocking hundreds of feet above. Suspended from them hung enormous glass vessels, each filled with a different substance: drifting golden seeds, coiled violet mist, seawater in which tiny luminous creatures swam. One jar contained a storm. Lightning flickered soundlessly in its depths .
Below, narrow channels cut through the black floor carried streams of honey-bright liquid toward a central basin. Shelves climbed the walls, stacked with clay tablets, sealed amphorae, and bones carved into spoons. The chamber stretched into darkness, vast as a buried cathedral.
Nothing moved.
Then the stone trees began to whisper .
Not in any language Rory knew. The sound passed leafless branch to leafless branch, dry and urgent. The Heartstone cooled in her palm, but the Fae blade shone brighter.
Nyx looked upward. For once, their shadowed face seemed unguarded .
“I remember this place,” they whispered.
Rory turned. “You’ve been here?”
“No.” Their violet eyes reflected the bottled storm. “Aldric dreamed of it before the summoning. He thought it was a temple.”
Isolde approached the central basin. She moved slowly now, wonder softening her ageless features. Around the rim, words had been cut into the stone, their grooves dark with something that had never dried.
“A temple feeds a god,” she said. “This fed a kingdom.”
Rory joined her.
Within the basin lay a map fashioned from spices and salt. Rust-red hills rose from powdered saffron. Rivers of wine threaded valleys of crushed herbs. At the map’s edge, beyond the vineyards and pale towers, a black fissure split the land.
Something crimson pulsed at its bottom.
The pendant answered.
Once.
Twice.
Then all the glass vessels overhead turned toward Rory.
The storm jar rolled in its chains. The seawater climbed one side of its vessel. Golden seeds pressed against the glass like a thousand staring eyes.
At the far end of the chamber, an ancient mechanism groaned awake.
Lights kindled one by one into the depths , revealing a path between the stone trees. At its end stood a throne carved from a single colossal jawbone.
The throne was empty.
Its shadow was not.
The shape seated within it leaned forward.
Nyx hardened beside Rory, darkness gathering around their hands. Isolde’s expression closed into stillness. Rory drew the moonsilver blade, its cold biting her palm, and wrapped the pendant’s chain twice around her scarred wrist.
Beyond the bronze doors, the hungry feast scratched to be let in.
Ahead, the thing in the throne smiled without a face.
“Well,” Rory murmured, raising the dagger. “At least someone’s home.”