AI The first oak stood where no oak had any business standing.
Rory stopped beneath its black, leafless crown and checked the park behind her. Richmond rolled away in ordinary winter colours: wet bracken, dun grass, bare trees latticed against a white sky. Somewhere beyond the rise, a dog barked. A second bark answered, then both sounds vanished as if a door had shut between one heartbeat and the next.
Ahead, the oak reared from the earth in a column broad enough to swallow a car. No roots disturbed the ground around it. No moss silvered its bark. Its trunk had been worked into planes and angles, almost like a standing stone, though Rory could still see knots under the carvings.
“There wasn’t a tree here a moment ago,” she said.
“There was,” Nyx whispered beside her . “You simply occupied a world in which you could not see it.”
They had taken solid form for the walk through the park, though solid was generous. Their tall body resembled a person cut from midnight, edges feathering into the pale air. Two violet lights hovered where eyes should have been. The weak winter sun passed through one shoulder and painted no shadow at their feet.
Rory tugged her coat tighter. “That’s exactly the sort of sentence people use before something eats you.”
“Many things eat.”
“Reassuring.”
Nyx inclined their head toward the oak. “Not all of them are hungry.”
The Heartstone pulsed beneath Rory’s jumper.
She caught the pendant through the fabric. The thumbnail-sized gem lay warm against her sternum, its heat too deliberate to mistake for body warmth . Three slow beats. A pause. Then three more.
The rhythm had begun near the park gates and strengthened as they left the paths. It was supposed to react to portals into Hel. Yet nothing beyond the ancient oak looked infernal. No fire. No brimstone. No queue of solicitors.
Rory glanced down at the mud. Her boots had sunk deep enough to gather brown rims. Nyx’s passage left the dead leaves untroubled.
“We can still turn back,” she said.
“You can.”
That pricked. “And you?”
“I have been turning back for three hundred and eighty-two years.”
The wind moved through them, carrying a scent like extinguished candles. Rory studied those violet eyes. Nyx rarely mentioned the human life buried inside the Shade, and never by accident.
“Fine,” she said. “But if I’m transformed into a shrub, you’re watering me.”
She stepped around the oak.
The world changed without moving.
Cold mud became soft grass beneath her boot. Winter light poured into gold. A warm breeze touched her face, thick with honeysuckle and rain, and the dead silence broke beneath a rush of wings. Rory staggered. Nyx caught her elbow, their fingers momentarily solid and colder than iron.
Behind them stood not one oak but two, each carved into a tall, rough pillar . Their branches intertwined overhead to make an arch. Between the trunks, Richmond Park showed through in a narrow grey slice—but the view trembled like heat above tarmac.
The Veil.
She had seen its distortions around smaller rifts, usually in cellar corners and once across the freezer door at the Golden Empress. This was different. The shimmer climbed higher than the trees. Colours slid across it that had no names she knew, bruising from blue to silver to something that seemed less like a colour than the taste of copper.
Then the gap closed.
The two trunks leaned together with a groan, bark flowing over the opening until nothing remained but a single wall of living wood.
Rory spun. “Nyx.”
“Yes.”
“The door has gone.”
“Yes.”
“You might try sounding more concerned.”
“I am conserving it.”
The grass reached her ankles, green enough to look freshly painted. Wildflowers crowded every patch of ground—bluebells beside foxgloves, snowdrops under sprays of summer roses, crocuses pushing through beds of clover. Seasons had been thrown into a bag and shaken out together. Their scents tangled in the warm air, sweet enough to make her dizzy.
Above, the sky had no sun. Light simply existed, pearly and diffuse, though every blade of grass cast two thin shadows in opposite directions.
Nyx released her arm. Their fingertips left frost on the sleeve.
“The Grove,” they said.
Rory pressed the Heartstone through her jumper. It burned hotter now, pulsing faster than her heart. “This thinks there’s a Hel portal nearby.”
“The Heartstone was made in Dymas. It remembers the paths home.”
“Home is an interesting word for a lump of rock.”
“Stones have longer memories than people.”
“So do grudges.”
They moved deeper.
There was no path until Rory looked for one. Then grass bent ahead of her in a narrow line, pointing toward a stand of silver birches. When she glanced aside, the path vanished. It returned each time she faced forward.
She disliked that immensely.
Birdsong flickered through the canopy, but the notes ran backward: each call began as an echo and sharpened into sound. Tiny creatures darted among the flowers. At first Rory took them for mice. One stopped atop a mushroom and unfolded six translucent wings. Its body was furred and white, its face disturbingly human until it opened its mouth and showed a hummingbird’s needle beak.
“Don’t touch anything,” Nyx murmured.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You leaned.”
“I looked.”
“You looked with your hand.”
Rory tucked both hands into her coat pockets.
The birches whispered as they passed. Not leaves stirring—words, too faint to catch. Her name surfaced once, spoken in her mother’s voice.
Aurora.
She stopped so abruptly Nyx drifted two paces ahead.
The nearest birch had a face in its bark. Not a carved face. Her mother’s face. Jennifer Carter stared from the white trunk, eyes closed, expression pinched with the tired concern Rory remembered from their last conversation.
The wooden lips parted.
Aurora, love—
Rory drew the Fae-forged blade.
Moonsilver flashed in her fist, leaf-shaped and pale. Cold bit into her palm even through the leather wrapping on its grip. The face disappeared at once, flattening into whorls of bark.
Nyx turned. Their violet gaze dropped to the dagger.
“Isolde’s gift knows its kin,” they said.
“Her kin has poor manners.”
“Her kin has curiosity.”
“My ex had curiosity. He read my messages while I slept.”
Something shifted around Nyx’s shoulders, darkness tightening like a cloak in wind. “This place is not Evan.”
“No. Evan was easier to punch.”
She kept the dagger out.
Beyond the birches, the ground dipped into a shallow valley. A stream curled through it, clear as glass and flowing uphill. Pebbles rolled in the current toward its source, clicking together like teeth. Fish hung above the water rather than in it, swimming through empty air. Their scales shone green and rose-gold. As Rory approached, they scattered into the branches and settled among the leaves.
Wonder slipped through her caution before she could stop it.
One of the fish circled a twig, fins rippling. A drop of water trembled on its tail and fell upward into the canopy. Rory laughed—a small, startled sound that felt too loud.
Nyx looked at her.
“What?”
“You sound different here.”
“How do I normally sound?”
“Armoured.”
She crouched at the stream, more to avoid answering than from any need to inspect it. The water reflected no faces. In its surface, she saw an amber sky and dark hills striped with vineyards. Lanterns floated above long tables. Figures feasted beneath trees heavy with purple fruit, and beyond them rose a palace of copper domes.
Dymas.
The smell hit next: roasted meat glazed with honey, hot bread, wine rich with spice. Hunger twisted through her with such force that her mouth flooded. She had eaten before leaving London. A bacon roll, half of Eva’s chips, coffee strong enough to scour rust. None of it mattered. The stream’s reflection offered platters piled high with jewel-bright fruit and pastries dripping cream.
The Heartstone thudded against her chest.
Rory leaned closer.
A woman in the reflected feast turned and looked straight up at her.
Her smile widened past the limits of a human jaw.
Nyx seized the back of Rory’s coat and wrenched her away. The image shattered . Water leapt upward in a glittering sheet. Something struck the underside of the surface with a wet boom, large enough to shake the bank.
Rory landed hard on the grass. The dagger remained in her hand.
“Still think nothing here is hungry?” she asked.
“I said not everything.”
The stream cleared. Only white pebbles showed beneath it now.
Nyx stood over her, shadow boiling from their arms. For one instant their silhouette stretched across the valley, enormous and antlered, before folding back into a human outline.
Rory got up. “That was a portal.”
“A reflection of one. Or an invitation.”
“Same difference if you accept.”
She pulled the Heartstone free. Its deep crimson glow shone through her fingers. A silver chain looped around her wrist, crossing the small crescent scar there. The gem’s warmth no longer felt comforting . It felt avid.
A bell rang somewhere ahead.
One clear note passed through the valley. Every flower closed.
The winged creature vanished into its mushroom. The fish fled the branches. Even the uphill stream stopped, its surface hardening to perfect stillness.
A second note sounded.
Nyx became incorporeal, their body thinning into tatters of smoke.
“Do you recognise that?” Rory whispered.
“No.”
“Wonderful.”
On the third toll, a bridge appeared across the stream.
It had not been hidden . It had not risen or unfolded. One moment there was water; the next, three slabs of black stone spanned it. Pale letters crawled over the central slab, arranging themselves whenever Rory tried to focus on them.
Nyx drifted to the bank, but stopped before the first stone.
“What is it?”
“I cannot cross.”
“You crossed the Veil.”
“The bridge objects.”
Rory studied the slabs. The Fae blade glimmered in her hand, though there was no moon. When she held it near the bridge, the shifting letters froze.
ONE SHADOW. ONE BREATH. ONE TRUE NAME.
“That seems unnecessarily theatrical.”
“All thresholds are vain,” Nyx said. “They believe themselves more important than the places they divide.”
Rory tested the first slab with her boot. Cold travelled up her leg. The bridge held.
“One shadow.” She looked at Nyx. “That’s you.”
“I possess none.”
“You are one.”
“Semantically persuasive. Metaphysically uncertain.”
“One breath. Me.”
“The true name is the price.”
“Mine or yours?”
The letters rippled, then formed a fourth word.
GIVEN.
Rory’s grip tightened on the blade. Names mattered here. She knew that much . Give a Fae creature your true name and you might as well hand it the deed to your bones.
The trees began whispering again. Aurora. Rory. Laila. Carter. Malphora. Every name she had worn or been called crept through the leaves.
Nyx’s wind-soft voice cut beneath them. “Do not answer.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
The third bell note still seemed to vibrate in her teeth. Across the stream, beyond the bridge, a narrow trail had opened between thorn hedges. Silver hair glinted at its far end, there and gone.
Isolde was waiting .
Or something wanted Rory to think she was.
Rory looked at the inscription. “It doesn’t say the true name has to belong to either of us.”
Nyx’s violet eyes brightened.
She knelt and set the moonsilver point against the slab. The dagger slid through whatever magic guarded the stone as if cutting wet silk . A thin scream rose from the bridge. Rory carved slowly , letters biting black against black.
EVAN.
The name of fear. The name of bruises hidden under sleeves. The name that had once made her check every passing car and every unknown number. True enough to have ruled her, once.
The bridge shuddered.
Then the carved letters drank the name. Black stone rippled over it, swallowing each mark.
ONE TRUE NAME, the inscription flared.
GIVEN.
A sharp pressure left Rory’s chest. Not pain. The absence of it.
She stood.
Nyx stepped onto the bridge. This time it accepted them.
They crossed together. Halfway over, Rory glanced down despite knowing better. No amber feast waited in the stream. She saw Cardiff rain on a childhood window, her father bent over a legal brief, her mother grading papers at the kitchen table. She saw herself at nineteen, laughing before she learned to measure every word. The images tugged, tender and cruel.
She kept walking.
On the far bank, the bridge disappeared behind them.
The thorn hedges rose twelve feet high, woven with white roses. Their petals turned toward Rory as she passed. Each flower possessed a closed eye at its centre.
“Don’t say it,” she murmured.
“I said nothing.”
“You were about to tell me they were watching.”
“They are listening.”
“That’s worse.”
The trail twisted. Warm air cooled. Light gathered overhead in drifting globes, each one holding a tiny scene: a coronation under green stars, a child sleeping in a ring of salt, soldiers marching backward into an unburning city. When Rory reached toward one, the blade’s cold deepened in warning. She lowered her hand.
At last the hedges fell away.
A vast clearing opened before them, far larger than the pocket of woodland could contain. Ancient oak standing stones ringed it, their bark carved with symbols that shifted like the bridge’s script. Wildflowers spread in bands of impossible colour. At the centre stood a tree whose silver roots gripped a pool of black water. Its branches bore candles instead of fruit, thousands of flames burning without smoke.
Beneath it waited Isolde Varga.
Her silver hair fell to her waist. A pale gown stirred around her though the clearing was still. Her lavender eyes fixed on Rory with the unsettling patience of someone who had already watched this meeting happen.
She crossed the flowers toward them.
No stems bent beneath her bare feet. No footprints marked her passage.
“You crossed on the name of a wound,” Isolde said. Her voice sounded young and ancient at once. “Clever knives cut more than flesh.”
Rory raised the Fae blade slightly . “You gave me one.”
“I gave you an answer. You decided which question to ask.”
“Did you bring us here?”
Isolde smiled. “The lost are not always summoned. Sometimes they are merely noticed.”
The Heartstone flared hot enough to scorch. Rory hissed and yanked it away from her skin.
Across the black pool, between two candle-laden roots, the air shimmered .
The Veil appeared as a vertical wound of amber light. Through it sprawled vineyards beneath a warm orange sky. Music and laughter spilled into the clearing, accompanied by the clink of a thousand glasses. A banquet table stretched toward a distant copper palace.
At its near end sat a single empty chair.
A place had been laid before it.
On the white plate rested a card bearing Rory’s name.
Not Aurora. Not Carter.
Malphora.
Nyx recoiled, darkness peeling from them in streamers.
Rory could not move. The Heartstone beat in her fist like a second heart.
“Is that an invitation?” she asked.
Isolde’s pale gaze settled on the amber rift. Because she could not lie, her silence carried its own answer.
Then the empty chair scraped backward, as though someone unseen had risen to welcome them.
Isolde turned to Rory.
“In the house of hunger,” she said, “an invitation and a mouth are often the same thing.”