AI The doorway had not been there the night before.
Aurora stood at the edge of the clearing with one hand wrapped around the Fae-forged blade and the other pressed against the Heartstone pendant at her throat. Beyond the ancient oak standing stones, the air had split open.
Not torn. Split.
A vertical seam of darkness hung between two stones, too narrow for a person and too deep for any shadow cast by the moon. Amber light leaked through it in slow pulses, as if something on the other side breathed against the wound in the world.
The wildflowers at Aurora’s feet bowed toward it.
“Is that normal?” she asked.
“No,” said Nyx.
Their voice moved through the grove like wind through dead leaves. They stood beside her in a tall, humanoid shape, six feet of living shadow gathered beneath a hooded outline that had no face except two faintly glowing violet eyes. The amber light from the rift passed through one of their shoulders and turned the darkness there thin as smoke.
Isolde approached without disturbing a single flower. Her silver hair fell to her waist, bright as frost in the moonlight. She stopped before the seam and tilted her head.
“Where a door is born, a road has died,” she murmured. “Where the hungry earth opens wide, the lost may walk—or be swallowed inside.”
Aurora stared at her. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is the answer that has arrived.”
“That may be the least useful thing anyone has ever said to me.”
A small smile touched Isolde’s lips. “Then you have lived a fortunate life.”
The pendant warmed against Aurora’s sternum. Not gently . Heat spread through the silver chain and settled beneath her skin, a pulse matching the slow breathing of the rift.
She pulled it free of her shirt. The deep-crimson stone glowed faintly in her palm.
Nyx leaned toward it. “It recognizes the passage.”
“Or it wants me to go in.”
“Those are often the same thing.”
Aurora looked back through the grove. Richmond Park lay beyond the boundary stones, though it seemed impossibly far away now . The bare trees and pale grass had blurred beneath a wash of pearl-colored mist. Somewhere outside, London continued with its traffic, sirens, late trains, and locked doors. Inside the grove, time had always behaved badly. An hour could pass in minutes, or minutes could rot into days.
But this was different.
The rift smelled of warm metal, fermented fruit, and something sweet enough to make her teeth ache.
Isolde’s pale lavender eyes fixed on the pendant. “The red heart calls to its buried kin.”
“Dymas,” Aurora said.
She had heard the name once, spoken by a demon with a smile too wide for its face. A realm beneath the world. A place of gluttony, where the gardens grew beneath an amber sky and master chefs cooked for princes, monsters, and souls who had signed away their freedom.
The thought of it had seemed ridiculous then .
It seemed worse now.
“What’s on the other side?” she asked.
“Feasts without endings,” said Isolde. “Vines that remember every hand that has harvested them. Rivers thick with honey and blood. A prince who smiles when his kitchens burn.”
Nyx’s violet eyes brightened. “You’ve been there.”
“I have seen it in a mirror.”
“That is not the same.”
“No,” Isolde agreed. “It is safer.”
The seam widened.
The two standing stones groaned. Their surfaces were carved with symbols Aurora had never noticed before—spirals within mouths, hands clasped around fruit, faces with their eyes sewn shut. Amber light spilled over the grass. Wherever it touched, the flowers unfolded too quickly , bloomed, blackened, and collapsed.
Aurora tightened her grip on the dagger. The moonsilver was always cold, so cold it seemed to draw heat from her fingers. A faint line of light ran along its leaf-shaped edge.
“We go in, find out why the pendant is reacting, and come back,” she said.
Nyx looked at her. “That is an admirable plan.”
“You say that like you expect it to fail.”
“I expect the place to object.”
Isolde stepped through the rift.
There was no flash, no thunder. One moment she stood beneath the moon, and the next she vanished into amber radiance.
Aurora followed.
Cold seized her first. Then heat.
For an instant she felt herself stretched between two points, every bone pulled thin as wire. The pendant burned against her chest. The dagger dragged at her wrist. Her left hand brushed the small crescent scar there, and the familiar raised skin gave her one solid thing to hold on to.
Then the world snapped into place.
Aurora stumbled forward onto black soil.
The rift stood behind her, suspended between two pillars of pale stone. Through it she could see the grove, the silvered grass, and Nyx stepping across the threshold. The image shivered like a reflection disturbed by rain.
Ahead, an amber sky pressed low over an impossible landscape.
Vineyards covered the slopes in orderly terraces, each vine twisted into the shape of a human spine. Their leaves were dark green and glossy, with veins that flashed gold whenever the wind moved through them. Beyond the vineyards rose orchards heavy with enormous fruit—pear-shaped things with translucent skins, clusters of blue apples, flowers as wide as cartwheels. Farther still, gardens climbed toward a range of black mountains whose peaks disappeared into a haze the color of old blood.
The sky had no sun.
Light came from everywhere, warm and coppery, without casting a single consistent shadow.
Aurora took a careful breath. The air was thick with sugar, smoke, and the damp mineral smell of deep caverns. Underneath it ran a low vibration, almost too deep to hear. She felt it in her teeth.
“Welcome to Dymas,” Isolde said behind her.
Aurora turned. “You said you’d only seen it in a mirror.”
“I have seen the mirror.”
Nyx emerged from the rift last. The amber light made their silhouette ripple. For several seconds, they seemed unable to hold a solid shape . Their arm lengthened, collapsed, and re-formed. The shadows beneath the stone pillars crawled toward them like curious animals.
“The passage is unstable,” they whispered.
The rift shrank to the width of a hand.
Aurora swore.
The opening flickered . Through it, Richmond Park appeared distant and warped . A flock of birds crossed the view, each one flying backward.
“Can you keep it open?” she asked.
Nyx extended one black hand. The rift shuddered and widened by an inch.
“For a time.”
“Then we find what we came for quickly .”
“Ah,” said Isolde. “The knife-wielding mortal has discovered urgency.”
Aurora ignored her and looked down at the soil.
Something had grown there.
At first she thought it was a root, pale and thick, pushing through the black earth. Then it shifted. A knotted hand emerged up to the wrist, fingers flexing blindly. Gold rings circled each finger. A second hand clawed its way free beside it.
Aurora sprang back and raised the dagger.
The hands did not attack. They gripped the ground and pulled. A head followed, then shoulders, then the rest of a man in a stained white apron. He dragged himself from the soil as if climbing out of deep water . His skin was gray and tight over his bones. A chef’s hat sagged on his head. His mouth opened, and a small black moth flew out.
“Please,” he rasped.
The word hung in the air .
Aurora smelled burnt meat.
“Please what?” she asked.
The chef looked at the pendant. His dead eyes widened .
“Do not let them taste you.”
A bell rang somewhere in the distance.
The sound rolled across the terraces, rich and resonant. Every vine bent toward it. The fruit in the orchards quivered .
The chef’s fingers dug into the soil. “Too late,” he whispered.
Something moved among the vines.
Aurora saw a flash of white cloth, then another. Figures walked between the rows carrying baskets on their backs. They were tall and thin, with antler-like branches growing from their skulls. Their baskets overflowed with pale fruit that blinked wetly in the amber light.
Nyx turned their head toward the sound. “We should leave.”
The chef made a desperate noise. “The road is watched.”
“By whom?” Aurora asked.
The dead man pointed with one shaking hand.
At the top of the nearest terrace, a woman stood in a field of scarlet flowers. She wore a gown made of layered silk , each fold patterned with open mouths. Her face was beautiful in the way a polished knife was beautiful. A crown of blackened vines circled her dark hair. Behind her, the air bent around a shape too large to be seen all at once.
She lifted one hand.
The figures in the vineyard stopped.
Even the wind went still.
Aurora felt the Heartstone pulse . Once. Twice.
The woman smiled.
“The little thief has come home,” she called.
Her voice carried effortlessly across the fields. It sounded warm, amused, almost maternal.
Aurora’s scar prickled.
“I’ve never been here before,” she shouted back.
“No,” the woman said. “But something that belongs to us has.”
Her gaze dropped to the pendant.
The stone flared crimson.
Pain lanced through Aurora’s chest. She staggered, gripping the chain as the warmth became a brand. For half a second, another place flashed inside her mind: a vast kitchen lit by green fire, copper pots hanging from chains, a table set for hundreds. At its center lay a dark shape wrapped in red cloth.
A heartbeat pulsed beneath the cloth.
Aurora jerked back into herself.
Nyx caught her arm. Their touch was cold and insubstantial, fingers passing through her sleeve before solidifying around her wrist.
“Rory.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are bleeding.”
A thin line of red had appeared beneath the pendant . It ran down her chest, bright against her skin.
Isolde stepped in front of her. “The crown remembers the hand that planted the seed. The seed remembers the mouth that spoke its name.”
The woman on the terrace laughed softly . “Still dressing warnings in riddles, little exile?”
Isolde’s expression did not change, but her shoulders had gone rigid.
The dead chef began to crawl away.
Aurora glanced toward him. “Wait. Who gave me this?”
The chef’s head snapped toward her. Terror widened his eyes.
“Ask the prince,” he said.
The flowers around him opened.
Their petals were lined with teeth.
The chef vanished beneath them in a blur of red and gray. His scream rose once, then broke apart into a wet choking sound. The flowers closed, heavy and satisfied.
Aurora’s stomach turned.
The woman on the terrace took one step down.
“Come,” she said. “You have been expected.”
Nyx’s shadow spread across the soil. “The door is closing.”
Behind them, the rift had narrowed to a vertical thread.
Aurora stared at the woman, the vineyard, the gardens beyond. Somewhere in this impossible place lay the answer to the pendant, perhaps the reason an unknown benefactor had placed it around her neck. The answer might be waiting in a prince’s kitchen beneath a red cloth.
Or it might be waiting with its mouth open.
The Fae blade trembled in her hand.
Not from fear. From recognition.
A thin blue-white line appeared along its edge, shining through the amber gloom .
The woman saw it. Her smile disappeared.
“Where did you get that?”
Aurora backed toward the rift, keeping the dagger raised. “A friend.”
“Fae gifts are never friendships.”
“Then it’s a good thing I don’t owe them anything.”
The woman’s face hardened. The vines behind her began to writhe, roots tearing free of the soil. The antlered figures lifted their baskets and started down the terraces.
Nyx pulled Aurora backward. “Now.”
Isolde turned, silver hair whipping around her like a banner. “Run where the feast has no table, and follow the fruit that bears no flesh.”
“That means nothing!” Aurora shouted.
“It means turn left!”
They ran.
The black ground sank beneath Aurora’s boots with every step, soft as wet ash. Behind her came the scrape of roots and the clatter of baskets. Something enormous moved among the vineyards, snapping vines as it pursued them. The air thickened with the smell of roasting sugar.
Aurora saw the path split ahead.
To the right, a broad stone road descended toward distant towers, their windows glowing like furnace mouths.
To the left, a narrow trail vanished into an orchard of blue-black trees.
At its entrance hung a single fruit, pale and smooth, with no face, no eyes, no teeth.
Aurora veered left.
Nyx followed without hesitation. Isolde did not ask why.
The first tree swallowed them in shadow.
Behind them, the amber world roared with hunger. Ahead, branches closed over their heads, and somewhere deep in the orchard, something began to sing.