AI The ancient oaks stood in a ring where no ring had been a moment before.
Rory stopped between two bramble thickets and checked the map on her phone. The blue dot insisted they were halfway across a footpath in Richmond Park. According to her own eyes, they were facing twelve grey-barked trunks broad enough to hide cottages, their roots sunk deep into a bank of white flowers.
“This wasn’t here yesterday,” she said.
“Yesterday is a poor guide to this place.” Isolde stepped past her, silver hair stirring though the evening air had gone still. “So is tomorrow.”
Eva muttered something uncomplimentary behind Rory.
Nyx stood under the last ordinary oak, taller than any of them and far less solid. The dusk showed through their shoulders in smoky seams. Only their eyes held steady, two points of violet light fixed on the ring ahead.
Rory slid her phone into her pocket. “You said standing stones.”
“Did I?”
“Ancient oak standing stones. Those were your exact words.”
“And there they stand.”
Rory stared at the trunks. Their bark had the ridged, mineral grain of weathered rock, but high overhead their limbs carried leaves of luminous green. Acorns clustered among them like small gold bells. None moved. She could hear the traffic beyond the park, the distant burr of London’s evening, yet the leaves remained perfectly still.
Eva touched Rory’s elbow. “We can still go back.”
The Heartstone answered before Rory could. Beneath her shirt, the pendant gave a slow pulse of warmth against her sternum.
Not hot. Not yet.
She curled her fingers around the deep-crimson stone through the fabric. It was roughly the size of her thumbnail, but in that moment it felt as heavy as a door knocker.
“We came for answers,” Rory said.
“Answers are rarely where one leaves them,” Isolde replied.
Eva glared at the seer. “Do you practise being maddening, or is it a gift?”
Isolde’s pale lavender eyes rested on her with serene consideration. “Both.”
Nyx crossed the path. Their feet made no sound on the damp earth. Where the fading light struck them, their edges frayed into ribbons.
“There is a threshold,” they whispered.
Rory saw it then. Between the two largest oaks, the air shimmered like heat above summer tarmac. Dusk lay on this side. Beyond it, impossibly, moonlight silvered a narrow path.
The Veil.
She had seen distortions around rifts before: a shiver over brick, a crease in the dark where no crease belonged. This was different. The boundary looked less torn than folded, two realities pressed together until one had bled through the other.
“Is it safe?” Eva asked.
“No,” said Isolde.
Eva threw up both hands.
“But it will admit us.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It was the answer.”
Rory pulled the Fae blade from the sheath beneath her coat. The leaf-shaped dagger rested cold against her palm, moonsilver catching the dim light. Its edges held no reflection. Instead, they seemed to pare the darkness away.
Nyx recoiled half a step.
“Sorry,” Rory said.
“You are not.” Their windborne voice carried the ghost of amusement. “But you are cautious.”
“Someone has to be.”
Rory approached the threshold. The pendant warmed another degree. That made no sense. The Heartstone reacted to portals into Hel, not Fae pockets. Unless something from Hel waited on the other side.
A useful thought. Also a deeply unpleasant one.
She extended the dagger. Its point touched the shimmer.
Moonlight spilled along the blade.
The air parted without resistance, opening in a vertical seam. Through it came the smell of rain on stone, woodsmoke, crushed mint, and something sweet enough to make Rory’s teeth ache. A sound followed: three low notes played on an instrument too large to exist, each tone trembling through her bones.
The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled.
Isolde moved through first. Her bare feet touched the moonlit path without bending a blade of grass.
Rory followed.
Cold swept over her face. For one blind instant, she felt herself being measured —not her height or weight , but every promise she had kept, every lie she regretted, every time she had stayed when she should have run. Then the pressure released.
She stumbled into summer.
Wildflowers spread in every direction, though frost glittered on the path. Bluebells, poppies, foxgloves, and flowers Rory had no names for bloomed shoulder to shoulder. Some held tiny flames in place of stamens. Others turned their faces toward her, petal by petal, with the attention of a crowd watching someone enter late.
Above them arched a violet sky.
No—two skies. Violet lay beneath a darker vault crowded with enormous stars. Between the layers swam pale shapes like deep-sea creatures glimpsed through black water.
Eva came through behind her and swore softly .
“Fair,” Rory said.
Nyx passed the threshold last. They did not step through so much as flatten into the oaks’ joined shadow and rise from the shadow of a flowering thorn on the other side. For a moment their form broadened, stretched thin by the crossing. Then they gathered themselves into a familiar silhouette.
The opening sealed.
The oak ring was gone .
Behind them stood a wall of white birches, every trunk engraved with a single closed eye.
Eva spun around. “Isolde.”
“I am here.”
“How do we get out?”
“The grove will offer a road when it has finished considering us.”
Rory looked at the eye-carvings. One opened.
A black iris rolled toward her.
She turned away. “Let’s make a good impression, then.”
They followed Isolde along the path. Frost cracked under Rory’s boots, but the air held the soft warmth of June. To either side, wildflowers whispered among themselves. It took her several steps to realise the sound was not the breeze.
Names moved through the blossoms.
Aurora.
Carter.
Laila.
Malphora.
That last one tightened something low in her stomach . She stopped.
The flowers stopped whispering.
Eva nearly walked into her. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Ahead, Isolde glanced back. Half-Fae and unable to lie, she still managed to make silence feel deceptive.
Rory resumed walking.
The grove unfolded as they went. Its distances refused to remain sensible. A hill that had loomed miles away appeared beside them after a dozen paces, its slope covered in red grass . A brook ran uphill over black pebbles, carrying silver fish backward through the current. Whenever one leapt, it became a bird for the length of its arc, sprouting glassy wings before slipping into the water with scales restored.
Eva laughed.
The sound startled Rory more than the fish. Wonder softened Eva’s face, driving the strain from around her mouth. She crouched at the bank as another fish took flight.
“Did you see that?”
“I did.”
“Tell me this isn’t the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.”
The Heartstone pulsed , warm and slow.
Rory watched the brook climb toward a stand of crimson trees. “Ask me when we know what’s heating the pendant.”
Eva’s smile faded. “Right.”
Nyx stood with one hand suspended above the water. Their fingers had lengthened into smoke, probing the brook without touching it.
“This water remembers the sea,” they said. “Though it has never reached one.”
“Can it remember what passed this way?” Rory asked.
Violet eyes shifted to her. “Everything remembers. Most things are not persuaded to speak.”
Isolde stepped into the brook. The water divided around her ankles. She left no ripples and, when she climbed the opposite bank, no wet footprints.
Rory tested the nearest stone with her boot. It chimed.
The next answered in a higher note.
By the time all four of them had crossed, they had played a broken melody over the running water. The final note hung in the air long after Eva stepped onto the bank. Somewhere deep among the trees, something vast played the same melody back.
This time, the last note was wrong.
Nyx turned toward the sound.
“What was that?” Eva whispered.
“A correction,” Isolde said.
“To what?”
“To us.”
The path narrowed between crimson trunks. Their bark was translucent, and amber sap moved visibly beneath it like blood through veins. Fruit hung overhead in intricate clusters: pears striped with blue, pale figs breathing through tiny gills, grapes with seeds that flashed like distant lightning.
The sweetness in the air thickened.
The pendant became hot enough to hurt.
Rory hissed and pulled it from beneath her shirt. The crimson gemstone glowed against her palm, its inner light beating in time with her pulse .
Isolde’s gaze sharpened.
“You knew,” Rory said.
“I suspected.”
“Of course you did.”
Eva moved closer. “Hel?”
“Nearby,” Rory said. “Or something connected to it.”
The grove answered with a wet crunch.
All four looked up.
A pear above Rory’s head had split open. Inside was a miniature banquet hall lit by amber chandeliers. Tiny figures crowded a long table, eating with frantic, jerking movements. Platters arrived faster than they could be emptied. At the head of the table, a broad shape in gold reclined beneath a canopy of vines.
The vision lasted one breath.
The fruit collapsed in on itself, spilling a ribbon of dark juice down the trunk.
“Dymas,” Nyx whispered.
The word rustled through the orchard. Leaves turned their pale undersides toward the group. The air took on the yeasty warmth of a kitchen and the copper tang of fresh meat.
Rory wiped sweat from her palm onto her jeans and kept hold of the pendant. “Gluttony is leaking into the grove.”
“Leaking suggests accident,” Isolde said.
“You think someone opened a route deliberately ?”
“I think hunger seldom waits for doors.”
From beyond the trees came the clink of cutlery.
Then laughter.
It was distant at first, bright and civilised. More voices joined it. Glasses rang together. Chairs scraped. Underneath ran another sound, low and constant: chewing.
Eva’s face went pale. “We should leave.”
“Yes,” Rory said. “As soon as we find what the Grove brought us here to see.”
“The Grove brought us?”
Rory pointed down.
Their path had vanished behind them. The red grass knitted itself over their footprints, blades rising in neat, silent rows. Ahead, the frost-white trail curved toward the laughter.
“We’re being herded.”
“Guided,” said Isolde.
“By a place that puts eyes in trees.”
“The distinction is often one of manners.”
Nyx flowed forward until their body merged with the orchard’s shadows. Their violet eyes drifted between the trunks without any visible face around them.
“Something waits ahead,” they murmured from everywhere at once. “Something that casts a shadow into another realm.”
Rory drew the Fae blade again. Moonlight lived along its leaf-shaped edge, though the double sky above held no moon.
They continued.
The orchard ended without warning at the rim of a vast hollow. Rory stopped so abruptly Eva bumped her shoulder.
Below them lay the grove’s heart.
A lake as smooth as polished obsidian filled the basin. An island floated several feet above its centre, trailing roots that vanished into the dark water. Upon the island stood a tree made of antler-white wood. Instead of leaves, silver keys covered its branches. Thousands of them. They turned slowly in the still air, each one reflecting a different sky.
Around the shore stood doorways.
No walls. No buildings. Only doors in free-standing frames: iron doors filmed with frost, lacquered doors painted with unfamiliar constellations, narrow wooden doors scored by claws. Some opened onto darkness. One showed a storm over a green sea. Another revealed a corridor of red marble under a warm amber sky.
Rory’s pendant burned.
The amber doorway stood ajar.
Through it, vineyards rolled beneath that golden heavenscape, their fruit hanging heavy and black. Farther off, domes and towers gleamed like sugar sculptures. Music drifted through—strings, drums, and the roar of a crowd greeting some extravagant triumph.
The beauty of it caught Rory off guard.
It was not fire and screams. It was abundance. Every vine sagged with grapes; every tree bent under fruit. Long tables shone on terraces in the distance, laden with silver dishes. The air smelled of roasting spice, caramel, wine, bread just broken open.
Her empty stomach clenched.
Then she saw the workers among the vines.
Men and women moved in rows, cutting fruit with raw, bleeding hands. Chains gleamed at their throats. When one stumbled, the earth opened a mouth and bit down on his foot.
The crowd’s roar rose again.
The door widened by an inch.
Warm amber light spread over the black lake.
“There,” Isolde said.
At the base of the floating island, something crimson glinted among the hanging roots. Not a reflection. A second Heartstone, larger than Rory’s pendant, had been driven into the white wood. Thin red cracks spread from it, pulsing through the island’s underside.
With every pulse , the Dymasian door opened farther.
Rory’s wonder curdled into certainty. “It’s an anchor.”
“Yes,” said Isolde.
“You could have led with that.”
“You would have brought the blade either way.”
Rory looked at the black water between the shore and the floating island. No bridge crossed it. Beneath its mirror surface, immense pale forms circled slowly , too deep to identify and too large to dismiss.
“How do we reach it?”
A key fell from the tree.
It struck the lake without sinking. The note rang clear as a bell.
Every door around the basin slammed shut except the one to Dymas.
The laughter beyond it ceased.
A figure now stood among the vineyards, facing them from the other realm. Tall. Motionless. Dressed in white that the amber light turned gold.
Even at that distance, Rory knew it had seen her.
The figure lifted one hand and beckoned.
The Heartstone in her palm answered with a savage pulse .
Across the lake, the crimson anchor beat in reply.
Nyx rose beside her, solidifying into six feet of living darkness. “We are no longer exploring unnoticed.”
Eva picked up a fallen branch and gripped it like a club. It was not much of a weapon, but the way she held it steadied Rory .
Isolde regarded the circling shapes under the lake. “The shortest path is rarely the one that crosses least distance.”
Rory tucked the pendant back beneath her shirt and tightened her grip on the moonsilver blade.
“Good,” she said. “I’ve never trusted shortcuts.”
The key on the water turned.
One by one, more keys began to rain from the white tree, chiming against the black surface until a silver path formed toward the island. Beneath it, the pale shapes changed course.
Rory stepped onto the first key.
The lake opened an eye.