AI The first thing Aurora noticed was the smell.
Not brimstone. Not rot. Nothing as obliging as the sulphur-and-fire nonsense films had taught her to expect.
It smelled of warm bread split open by impatient hands, of citrus peel, dark wine, roasting meat glazed with something sweet and sharp. Beneath it all ran an earthier scent: wet black soil after rain, rich enough to plant a hand in.
She stood at the threshold with her fingers curled around the Heartstone pendant beneath her jacket. The crimson gem had gone hot against her sternum. Not painfully hot, but insistent . A second pulse answered her heartbeat, then a third, as if some enormous creature on the other side of the doorway were breathing in time with her.
Behind her, Richmond Park was a dark spill of winter grass and bare oak limbs. The ancient standing stones rose around the grove in their familiar ring, silvered by the thin moon. They should have looked solid. They should have looked like stone.
Instead, the gap between two of them shivered.
Aurora could see the park through it if she looked directly at the opening: a black path, a low hedge, the vague yellow wink of distant streetlamps. But the moment she shifted her gaze, amber light bled across the gap. The air folded inward, deepening into a corridor of gold haze.
Nyx stood at her shoulder, a tall cutout of darkness where darkness did not belong. Their edges loosened and reformed with every silent movement, smoke trying to remember the shape of a person. Two faint violet eyes watched the threshold.
“Still time to turn around,” Aurora said.
Nyx’s voice brushed past her ear though they had not moved. “You say that as if the path behind us is less hungry.”
Aurora glanced back.
Isolde stood beyond the stones, one pale hand resting against the weathered oak of the nearest marker. Her silver hair streamed loose down her back, untouched by the wind. Snowdrops crowded the grass around her bare feet, blooming in the dead of winter. She left no mark in the frost.
“You’re not coming?” Aurora asked.
The Seer’s pale lavender eyes held hers. “The thorn may point at the rose, child, but it does not enter the bloom.”
“That means no, then.”
“It means the garden has rules.”
Aurora had learned that arguing with Isolde was like trying to wrestle fog. You could spend an hour grasping at it and still come away empty-handed, damp, and annoyed.
She adjusted the strap of the satchel slung over her shoulder. Inside, the Fae-forged blade lay wrapped in cloth. Even through the fabric she could feel its cold, a precise little winter against her hip.
“What exactly are we looking for?” she asked.
“A door that has forgotten which side it opens from,” Isolde said.
“That clears everything up.”
“The thing seeking you has left a trail of appetite. Follow what has been consumed without teeth.”
Nyx tilted their head toward the trembling gap. “And if we find it?”
“Do not feed it a name.”
Aurora stared at her.
Isolde’s face softened, just slightly . “Come back before the amber sky becomes violet.”
Aurora looked through the portal again. Somewhere beyond that wavering curtain, an impossible horizon burned the colour of late afternoon. The Heartstone throbbed beneath her palm.
“Does that mean we’ve got hours?” she asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Days?”
“Perhaps.”
Aurora breathed out slowly through her nose. “Brilliant.”
Then she stepped forward.
The portal took hold of her like cold water.
For one sickening instant, every part of her went in a different direction. Her stomach seemed to lag behind her body; her skin prickled as if the air had become a field of static. The amber light swallowed the grove, the stones, the night.
Then her boots struck ground.
She stumbled two steps before catching herself.
The soil beneath her was dark and soft, springy with root systems. When she straightened, the sight of the place emptied her lungs.
They stood on the crest of a low hill overlooking a valley that could not have existed on any map of Earth.
Vineyards swept away in orderly green-black rows, climbing slopes and descending into hollows as far as Aurora could see. The leaves shone as if varnished. Grapes hung heavy beneath them in colours that did not look natural: translucent blue, smoky gold, a purple so deep it was almost black. Between the vineyards ran orchards. Trees bent under fruit shaped like pears, only their skins gleamed copper and their leaves were a pale, trembling silver. Beyond them, fields of red-tipped wheat rippled in a wind Aurora could not feel.
The sky was amber from horizon to horizon.
There was no sun in it. The light simply existed, thick and warm, painting the distant hills in honeyed gold. Great white clouds drifted low enough to snag on mountaintops, and in their shadows stood buildings too grand to be farmhouses: towers with onion domes, long halls roofed in green tile, terraces threaded with lanterns.
At the valley’s centre lay a city.
Its walls were the colour of browned sugar. Its rooftops flashed copper and scarlet. Smoke rose in graceful plumes from hundreds of chimneys, carrying that unbearable fragrance of food. The city looked almost welcoming from a distance. It looked built for music, laughter, and people leaning from balconies with wine cups in their hands.
Aurora knew better than to trust somewhere that made her hungry the moment she arrived.
Nyx emerged beside her, their shadowed form briefly unstable. For a few seconds, their shoulders blurred into the air, their limbs thinning until the landscape showed through them. Then they drew themselves together again.
“The Veil is thinner here,” they murmured.
Aurora touched the pendant. “You all right?”
“I have been worse.”
“Comforting.”
Nyx looked over the valley. Their violet eyes narrowed . “This is Dymas.”
The name settled heavily in her mind. She had heard it only once before, spoken by Isolde in the grove with a kind of careful distaste. A realm in Hel. A place ruled by a prince whose domain was hunger turned into ceremony.
From somewhere below came a ringing bell.
Not a church bell. Too rich, too low. It rolled through the vineyards in a single, resonant note, and every bird in the nearest orchard took flight at once.
Aurora watched them rise. They were bright green, with long narrow wings like strips of folded leaves. Their calls sounded almost like laughter until they passed overhead, and she heard the panic in them.
“What was that?” she asked.
“A meal bell,” Nyx said.
“You can tell that from one ring?”
“I can tell from what answered.”
The birds vanished into the amber distance.
Aurora swallowed. A taste of spice lingered at the back of her throat. She had not eaten since a limp sandwich halfway through her delivery shift, and suddenly she could picture the café opposite Golden Empress with obscene clarity: the steamed windows, the tray of pastries by the till, the smell of coffee. Her stomach tightened.
She unzipped the satchel and drew out a bottle of water.
Nyx’s gaze flicked toward it. “Do not drink anything here.”
She paused. “Even my own water?”
“Especially if it has become something else.”
Aurora looked down. The clear plastic bottle had clouded. Tiny beads of condensation slid along its surface, though the cap remained tight. The water inside had turned the colour of pale rosé.
She screwed the cap on harder and shoved it back into the bag.
“Right,” she said. “Good rule.”
They descended the hill.
At first, a narrow road led through the vines. Its surface was packed reddish clay, warm under Aurora’s boots. Flat stones had been pressed into it at irregular intervals, each one carved with an image: a loaf, a pomegranate, a fish, a grinning skull. The carvings repeated in no pattern Aurora could discern.
The vines grew close on either side. Their leaves whispered against one another despite the still air. Once, she saw a grape split on its stem. Thick crimson juice ran down the fruit and dropped to the dirt with the sound of something small taking a breath.
Aurora stopped.
Nyx halted half a pace ahead. “What?”
She pointed.
The grape had closed again. Its skin was smooth and unbroken.
“Nothing,” she said, though the hairs at the nape of her neck had risen.
They walked on.
The further they went, the stranger the cultivated land became. An orchard of pale trees stood to their left, each bough bowed under dozens of golden fruits. Some were as small as plums; others as large as a child’s head. The fruit gave off a low, harmonious hum. Aurora could feel it in the bones behind her ears.
A path branched from the road and led between the trees. Halfway down it stood a stone table laid for a feast.
No one sat there.
Platters covered its surface: glazed birds with crisped skin, dark cakes wet with syrup, wheels of cheese, a silver bowl overflowing with figs. Steam rose from several dishes. A white cloth lay spread beneath the food, unstained despite the windless orchard.
At the head of the table, a single chair faced away from them.
Aurora could not see who sat in it.
“Keep walking,” Nyx said.
The chair creaked.
She kept walking.
A voice drifted from the orchard, gentle and warm.
“Rory?”
Her feet nearly stopped on their own.
It was her mother’s voice. Not merely similar. It was Jennifer Carter exactly as Aurora remembered her on winter mornings, calling up the stairs when Aurora had slept through her alarm. The lilt in the final syllable. The affectionate impatience.
“Rory, love. You’re skin and bone. Come have something.”
Aurora’s hand tightened around the pendant until the heat bit into her palm.
Nyx made a sound like wind dragging through a crack in a window. “Do not answer.”
The voice laughed softly .
“I made cawl. Your father found those little rolls you like.”
Her chest hurt. She saw the kitchen in Cardiff as sharply as if she had been there yesterday: pale yellow walls, rain beading on the glass, her father’s newspaper folded by his mug. The world tilted toward that image. One step off the road. Another between the humming trees.
Then the smell changed.
Under the broth and bread came the scent of old meat.
Aurora looked toward the table.
The seated figure had turned its head.
Its face was hidden by a polished silver serving dome, the kind restaurants lifted with a flourish. Beneath the metal rim, something dark leaked down the throat of its cream-coloured dinner jacket.
Aurora drew the Fae blade.
The cloth fell away with a whisper . Moonlight did not touch the dagger here, yet it carried its own thin luminance along the leaf-shaped edge. Cold spilled over her fingers.
The figure laughed with her mother’s voice.
Nyx moved.
One moment they stood beside Aurora. The next, their darkness stretched across the road, long as an ink spill. It swept into the orchard and climbed the table legs. The things on the platters shuddered. A roasted bird opened a row of tiny human teeth.
The figure in the chair rose.
Aurora did not wait to see more. She seized Nyx’s hand—or tried to . Her fingers closed around something colder than smoke and solid enough to pull—and ran.
Behind them, the orchard erupted in clattering crockery and delighted shrieks.
The road bent around the hill. The sounds followed for a while, then fell away as abruptly as if a door had shut.
Aurora stopped only when her lungs burned.
Nyx released her hand. Their outline trembled at the edges, violet eyes dimmer than before.
“You did not have to do that,” she said between breaths.
“I know.”
“Was it difficult?”
“A little.”
She leaned over, hands braced on her knees. “You have a very unhelpful definition of a little.”
When she looked up, Nyx was watching the road behind them.
“Your mother is not here,” they said.
“I know.”
But she had wanted to answer. That was the part she could not forgive herself for. Not because she believed it. She had seen enough in the last few weeks to stop assuming that impossible things were harmless. Still, the voice had found a gap in her and slipped neatly inside.
She forced herself upright.
The road had become stone, leading toward a low bridge that arched over a narrow canal. The water below moved sluggishly, black as ink and slick with reflected amber. Along its banks grew enormous flowers with waxy white petals. Each bloom was wide enough to cradle her head.
One opened as they approached.
At its centre sat an eye.
It blinked.
Aurora drew a careful breath and crossed the bridge without looking down again.
On the far side, the cultivated fields gave way to something older.
The city remained distant, but the land between them was no longer neat. Great roots broke through the earth like the bones of buried giants. A forest climbed the slope ahead, though forest was not quite the word . The trunks were smooth and pale, rising in spirals that vanished into a canopy of broad, dark leaves. Their bark bore shallow impressions like fingerprints. Some of the trees had mouths.
Not open mouths. Merely shapes in the wood: lips pressed together, teeth suggested under pale grain.
Between their roots stood ruins.
A colonnade leaned at an angle, half-swallowed by vines. Broken statues lay scattered among the ferns, their faces worn away. Here and there, carved stones jutted from the soil. Aurora recognized letters on one, but not any language she knew. The symbols seemed to rearrange whenever she tried to hold them in focus.
The Heartstone pulsed harder.
She stopped at the forest’s edge.
Nyx was already looking toward the ruins. “There.”
At first she saw nothing.
Then the air between two fallen pillars shimmered .
It was a distortion, barely visible, like heat haze over pavement in summer. Except the amber light bent around it in jagged colours—violet, blue, a slick green that made her eyes water. The weeds closest to the shimmer had browned and curled. A line of small animal bones lay scattered in a rough semicircle before it: delicate ribs, bird skulls, something with too many joints.
Aurora’s skin went cold despite the warm air.
“A rift,” she said.
“The one Isolde sent us to find, perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
Nyx looked at the bones. “This is not a natural wound.”
The Heartstone burned against her chest. Through the distortion came a sound like someone eating with their mouth closed.
Slow. Wet. Patient.
Aurora unslung her satchel and took out the bottle of transformed water. The liquid inside had deepened to red. She held it up near the rift.
The bottle buckled inward.
A small dent appeared in its side, then another. The plastic crackled under invisible pressure.
Nyx’s shadow lengthened over the ground. “It is feeding.”
“On what?”
A gust moved through the forest.
The leaves did not rustle. Instead, every mouth-shaped knot in every trunk sighed.
Aurora looked beyond the rift, and for one moment the shimmering tear cleared.
She saw a room on the other side.
It was not Dymas. The walls were made of rough grey stone, familiar in a way that caught at her nerves. A pub cellar, perhaps. Wooden shelves. A bare bulb swinging overhead. On the floor lay a scatter of takeaway containers and paper bags darkened with grease.
Above the room, faintly, she heard music.
A bassline. Glasses clinking. A burst of laughter.
Silas’ bar.
Her flat was upstairs.
The rift rippled shut before she could make out anything more.
Aurora’s hand went to the scar on her left wrist, her thumb pressing unconsciously over its pale crescent. Her mind began to race , sorting fragments. The portal in Richmond. The Heartstone. The gluttony realm. A tear that opened into the building where she slept every night.
“Someone made this,” she said.
Nyx’s eyes brightened, violet sharpening in the amber gloom . “Yes.”
“Someone from Earth, or someone here?”
“The answer may be both.”
The rift gave a violent twitch.
Something pushed from the other side.
At first, Aurora thought it was a hand. Five dark shapes pressed against the distortion, long fingers spread wide. Then the surface bulged farther, and she saw that the fingers were not fingers at all. They were fork tines, blackened and fused into a palm of shining metal.
A second hand appeared beside it .
The air filled with the smell of burnt sugar.
Aurora drew the Fae blade fully and stepped in front of Nyx before she could think better of it.
The thing behind the rift made a sound that might have been a laugh.
Nyx’s shadow flowed around her boots, cold and close.
“Do not let it speak,” they whispered.
The metal hands began to tear the world open.