AI The last oak stood where no oak had any right to stand.
It rose from the thin winter grass at the edge of Richmond Park, black-barked and broad as a house, its branches bare against a sky the colour of wet slate. Beyond it, the deer paths and bracken lay silvered with frost. Behind it, though, there was only darkness.
Not night. Darkness with shape to it.
Aurora stopped beneath the low boughs and looked at the empty air between two ancient standing stones. The stones had been there a moment ago—crooked pillars of oak, roots sunk into the earth, their surfaces ridged like petrified muscle. Now they seemed farther apart than they should have been. A gap large enough for a road opened between them, full of green-gold light.
Her hand closed around the pendant at her throat.
The Heartstone had gone hot enough to sting.
“Well,” she said, because silence had begun to feel like an invitation, “that seems encouraging.”
Eva gave a small, unconvincing laugh beside her. She had both hands shoved into the pockets of her oversized coat, chin tucked into a mustard scarf. “You said it would be a grove.”
“I said Isolde lives in a grove.”
“That is not the same thing as saying her front gate is trying to set your necklace on fire.”
Aurora looked down. The deep crimson stone lay against the collar of her jumper, glowing beneath her fingers like an ember banked under ash. It had warmed before, near the warped shimmer of a Hel breach behind a locked service door in Soho. This was different. The heat did not feel hungry. It beat in a slow, deliberate rhythm, as if something on the other side of the stones had a pulse answering its own.
At Aurora’s left, Nyx extended one long hand toward the gap.
Their fingers were not quite fingers in the ordinary sense. Shadow had gathered into the suggestion of a hand, edges leaking smoke into the cold air. The green-gold light passed through their wrist and dimmed.
“The boundary is open,” Nyx whispered.
Their voice made the frost on the grass seem louder.
“Open for us?” Eva asked.
Nyx’s violet eyes lifted from the threshold. They hovered in the featureless black of their face, faint as distant stars. “For someone.”
That did not help.
Aurora pulled the Heartstone free of her jumper and tucked it beneath the fabric again. The silver chain felt strangely heavy around her neck. Beneath her sleeve, the crescent scar on her left wrist prickled as though a blade of nettles had brushed it.
She had spent most of her life believing that the dangerous things in the world had recognisable faces. Evan’s anger had always arrived in a familiar tone first: a door shutting too hard, a question repeated until it became an accusation, the small chill of discovering that anything she said could be used against her. Monsters, it turned out, had not improved matters by being real. They had only become harder to name.
Still, a door was a door. And if Isolde had sent the message—a folded scrap of leaf delivered to the Golden Empress in the beak of a magpie, bearing three words in silver ink—then Aurora was not going to stand in a freezing park and let fear decide for her.
She looked at Eva. “Stay close.”
Eva’s mouth tightened. “That was already the plan.”
Aurora stepped between the stones.
For an instant, every sound vanished.
Then the world inhaled.
Warm air swept over her face, rich with the scent of rain, crushed mint, and flowers she did not know. The frost vanished under her boots. The grey London sky folded away behind her, replaced by a vaulted canopy of leaves lit from above by no sun Aurora could see.
She stumbled one pace forward and caught herself.
The grove opened around them.
It was a clearing only in the loosest sense. Trees circled it in tiers, their trunks silver, blue-black, white as bone, each one unlike anything that grew in Richmond Park. Some bore leaves shaped like small green hands. Others carried blossoms despite the season: scarlet bells, pale violet stars, flowers with glassy petals that chimed together in the breeze. Vines climbed upward in spirals, threaded with pearl-coloured berries that pulsed softly when Aurora looked directly at them.
A stream ran through the centre of the grove, though its water flowed uphill.
It curled over smooth stones toward a low hill at the far end of the clearing, climbing rather than falling, and vanished beneath the exposed roots of an enormous yew. The water made a sound like whispered conversation. Not the babble of a brook—the distinct rise and fall of voices too distant to understand.
Eva stood utterly still.
“Oh,” she said.
It came out almost reverent.
Aurora had no answer. The place pressed against every sense at once. The air was warmer than it had any business being in December, but cool shadows moved between the trees and brushed her skin like fingers. Light pooled in the grass where no light source reached. Somewhere high in the branches, a bird called with a human laugh, then answered itself in a child’s voice.
Nyx passed through the threshold last. As soon as they crossed it, the space behind them sealed with a soft sound, like a book closing.
Eva spun. “Can we get back?”
“The way remains,” Nyx said.
Aurora followed their gaze.
There was no gap between the standing stones now. Only a curtain of willow branches trailing over a dark pool. In its surface she saw not her own reflection, but a stretch of frosted parkland beneath the dull afternoon sky .
The sight steadied her. London was still there, however far away it felt.
“Isolde?” Aurora called.
Her voice travelled through the grove and returned in pieces.
Isolde.
Solde.
Old.
A faint laugh rippled through the flowering trees.
Eva moved closer to Aurora. “I hate that.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I hate that I love it.”
That, at least, was familiar enough to make Aurora smile.
They started along the stream.
The ground was springy beneath Aurora’s boots, thick with moss and a carpet of tiny blue flowers. They bowed away from her feet before she stepped down, then rose behind her, uncrushed. Eva noticed too. She crouched and reached toward one.
“Don’t,” Aurora said.
Eva froze with her fingers an inch from the petals. “Reason?”
“None. Yet.”
“That’s somehow worse.”
Nyx drifted ahead, their silhouette thinning beneath the shifting light. In the deeper shadows between the trees, they almost disappeared entirely. Aurora found herself watching for those violet eyes, relieved each time they glimmered through a veil of fern or branch.
The grove had no straight paths. Every route bent around something: pools full of pale fish that hovered without moving their fins; boulders covered in markings that rearranged themselves when Aurora blinked; hollow trees whose interiors held night skies. Through one split trunk she saw a moon hanging above a black sea, broad and white as a coin. Waves rolled soundlessly toward a shore she could not see.
Eva leaned toward it.
Aurora caught the back of her coat.
“Rory.”
“You were about to stick your head into a tree that contains an ocean.”
“I was looking.”
“You can look from here.”
Eva gave the hollow trunk a rueful glance. “You have become very sensible since monsters got involved.”
“I was always sensible.”
“You delivered dumplings by bicycle through central London during a thunderstorm because Yu-Fei offered you an extra tenner.”
“That was calculated risk.”
“That was soup in a paper bag.”
Before Aurora could reply, the whispering stream changed pitch.
The voices within it sharpened.
She stopped.
At first she heard nothing she could make out. Then a word rose from the water, clear as a bell.
Aurora.
Her name.
The stream slipped uphill between mossy stones. Within its bright surface, images flickered : a narrow Cardiff lane slick with rain; her mother’s red umbrella; her father at the kitchen table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, tapping a legal brief with one impatient finger. Then Evan’s face, too close, his hand closing around her arm.
Aurora stepped back so quickly her heel struck a root.
The image broke apart.
Cold went through her despite the warm air.
Eva had heard it. Her expression had changed, all wonder driven out of it. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Aurora said automatically.
Nyx turned from several yards ahead. “The waters remember those who pass.”
“That seems invasive,” Eva said.
“The grove does not share mortal customs.”
“It could try.”
Aurora swallowed. Her wrist ached beneath her sleeve. She looked at the climbing water and saw only her own distorted reflection now—black hair loose around her face, bright blue eyes too wide, a woman trying not to look frightened in front of people who knew her well enough to notice.
“Keep moving,” she said.
This time, neither of them argued.
The trees grew closer as they went. Their branches knitted overhead, turning the grove’s strange daylight into green dusk. The flowers changed too. The bright bells and starbursts gave way to clusters of white blooms that opened and closed in time with Aurora’s breathing.
She tried not to notice.
The Heartstone pendant cooled, then warmed again.
A low hum began somewhere beneath the ground.
Nyx halted before a wall of thorned bramble. The brambles climbed from the earth to the canopy in a dense, dark lattice, each thorn long as Aurora’s little finger and glazed with a wet black sheen. No path led through it.
“You said the boundary was open,” Eva said, looking back toward the vanishing way.
“It was.”
“And this is?”
Nyx tilted their head. “A choice.”
“Of course it is.”
At the base of the bramble wall, half-buried in moss, lay a slab of pale stone. Aurora knelt beside it. The surface carried an inscription in a script she did not recognise, carved so shallowly it might have been made by a fingernail.
As she watched, the letters shifted.
Not into English exactly. Into meaning.
Give what wounds. Take what guards.
Eva read over her shoulder. “I don’t like that either.”
Aurora ran a thumb along the edge of the stone. It had no sharp corners. No obvious mechanism. Her gaze dropped to the thorns, then to her own hands.
Give what wounds.
The old crescent scar burned.
“No,” Eva said immediately.
Aurora pulled back her sleeve. The mark on her wrist was small, pale, almost hidden against her skin: a crooked moon from a broken jar when she was eight years old. It had never meant anything except an accident. A stupid, ordinary accident.
Here, beneath the impossible trees, it glowed faintly silver.
Nyx’s eyes brightened. “The grove has recognised you.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“Few true things are.”
Aurora shot them a look. “You could work on that.”
Their silhouette seemed to incline, perhaps the closest Nyx came to a shrug.
The thorns rustled without wind.
Aurora stared at them. She had a blade in the inner pocket of her coat, wrapped in a strip of dark cloth. Isolde’s gift. The Fae-forged dagger had felt wrong from the first moment Aurora touched it—too cold, too light, its moonsilver surface catching moonlight even in a room with no window. A weapon meant to cut wards, Isolde had said. A weapon particularly effective against demons.
Aurora did not want to draw it in a place that felt as though it had grown around the rules of magic.
But the brambles were a ward. She could feel it in her teeth, a pressure behind her eyes. They did not block a path. They decided who deserved one.
She took out the dagger.
Even under the green dimness, its slender leaf-shaped blade held a faint white gleam. Cold bit through the cloth as she unwound it. Eva watched her with her jaw clenched .
“Just say we can turn around,” Eva said.
Aurora looked at the inscription again. Then at the black thorns.
“We can,” she said. “But Isolde called us here.”
“She wrote, ‘When the red heart wakes, follow the root that drinks the sky.’ That could mean anything.”
“The stream flows uphill.”
Eva sighed. “I know. I hate when riddles turn out to be practical.”
Aurora pressed the pad of her right thumb against the blade.
Pain flashed quick and bright. A bead of blood welled at once.
The brambles shuddered.
Every flower in the grove closed.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the blood slid down the moonsilver in a thin red line. Where it touched the blade, the white gleam deepened, turning almost blue.
Aurora raised the dagger.
She did not slash wildly. She chose a single point at the centre of the thorn wall, where three heavy vines braided together over a knot of shadow, and pushed the blade in.
The grove screamed.
Not loudly. Not in any one voice. It was a cry in the roots beneath her boots, in the leaves overhead, in the stream’s rushing speech. The brambles recoiled from the dagger as if it had struck fire into them. Black sap hissed where the moonsilver cut. The vines peeled apart, writhing backward.
A gap opened.
Beyond it lay a narrow passage, carpeted with silver leaves.
Aurora withdrew the blade. The cut in her thumb had already stopped bleeding, though the sting remained.
For a moment she expected the brambles to strike.
Instead, the thorns bowed.
Eva let out a breath . “Right. Great. Very normal. You’ve been accepted by homicidal gardening.”
“I didn’t say accepted.”
A voice spoke from the other side of the opening.
“Nor rejected.”
Aurora knew the voice before she saw its owner. It carried through the grove like wind through long grass—soft, musical, impossible to pin down.
Isolde stood at the end of the silver-leaf path.
She was smaller than Aurora had expected, though perhaps that was because the trees around her seemed enormous . Silver hair spilled to her waist, unbound and shining with its own quiet light. She wore a gown the colour of deep water, its hem trailing across the leaves without disturbing a single one. Her pale lavender eyes held Aurora’s with unnerving patience.
No footprints marked where she had come from.
Eva whispered, “That’s her?”
“No,” Isolde said. “That is the question.”
Eva blinked.
Aurora, despite herself, felt a laugh threaten at the back of her throat. It did not escape. “You sent for me.”
“I sent a road.” Isolde’s gaze drifted to the Heartstone hidden beneath Aurora’s jumper. “You chose to walk it.”
The pendant pulsed once, hot against Aurora’s sternum.
Isolde smiled, but there was no warmth in it. Not cruelty, either. Recognition, perhaps. The kind a person might show a storm rolling in across a familiar field.
Behind Aurora, the bramble wall sealed itself with a whisper .
Eva looked back at the vanished opening, then at Isolde. “I assume that means we’re not leaving yet.”
“The road behind you is not gone,” Isolde said. “It is merely elsewhere.”
“Comforting.”
“No,” Isolde agreed. “But true.”
Nyx stepped forward, their shadow darkening the silver leaves. “The Veil is thinning.”
At that, something changed in Isolde’s face. The ageless stillness tightened.
“Not thinning,” she said. “Tearing.”
The grove seemed to listen.
The strange birds fell silent. The flowering branches stopped moving. Even the uphill stream quieted until its water slid over the stones without a sound.
Aurora felt the hairs rise along her arms.
“Where?” she asked.
Isolde looked toward the immense yew at the end of the clearing, where the stream disappeared beneath its roots.
“The root that drinks the sky,” she said. “It has tasted hunger from below.”
The Heartstone burned like a live coal.
And from somewhere under the hill, far beneath the roots and rising water, Aurora heard the deep, distant sound of a feast beginning.