AI The stones shouldn't have been there.
Rory stopped with one hand on the low fence that bordered the path through Richmond Park, the other shoved deep in the pocket of her delivery jacket. Ahead, the trees thinned where by all rights the path should have opened onto the open grass toward Pen Ponds. Instead, a circle of ancient oaks stood where no circle had been this morning.
"That's new," she said.
Behind her, Isolde made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. "Nothing new grows here, Aurora Carter. Only things remembered."
Rory glanced over her shoulder. Isolde Varga stood a full head shorter than she was, silver hair down to her waist and catching light that didn't seem to come from the overcast sky. Her lavender eyes were fixed on the stones. The damp leaf litter beneath her bare feet was undisturbed. No footprints, again. Rory had checked three times since they'd left the car park.
"You said a door," Rory said. "You didn't say it would just... appear."
"A door appears where a door is needed," Isolde said. "Or where a door is called. Yours was very loud."
From the shadow under the fence, Nyx unfurled.
They had been a flat patch of shade a second ago, nothing more than the elongated dark thrown by the fence post. Now the shadow stretched, thickened, gained height until it stood six foot two and solid enough to have edges. The air went a degree colder around them.
"Veil's thin here," they whispered, and their voice was wind through dead leaves. "Can you see it, little flame?"
Rory could. She hadn't been able to before Isolde had touched her forehead two nights prior in her flat above Silas' bar, murmuring something about opening the second sight. Now if she squinted, the air between the oak stones shivered like heat haze over summer asphalt, a faint distortion. The Veil.
The Heartstone pendant at her throat pulsed once. Warmth bloomed against her skin under her t-shirt. Rory's fingers went to it automatically. The stone was the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson, on its silver chain. It had shown up in a takeaway bag from the Golden Empress three weeks ago with no note. Yu-Fei had sworn she didn't put it there. Since then it had been mostly inert, a faint inner glow if she held it to the dark. Now it throbbed again, insistent.
"It's reacting," she said. "You said it would pulse near a Hel portal. Is this Hel?"
Isolde tilted her head. "All doors lead to many places. This one, for you, leads in. That is what matters."
"Not helpful. Classic you."
"I cannot speak falsehoods," Isolde said, serenely . "So I must speak sideways to keep your feet on your path."
Nyx drifted forward, their form flickering at the edges. They reached what should have been solid earth between two oaks and their hand - when they had a hand - went through without resistance. "It wants us. Or it wants her."
The crescent scar on Rory's left wrist itched, an old childhood mark gone white and shiny. She rubbed it with her thumb.
"Stay close to me," she told Isolde, and then, to Nyx, "You first, since you're already half-gone."
Nyx inclined their shadowed head, violet eyes flaring brighter for an instant, and stepped.
There was no step. One moment they were at the boundary, the next the distortion swallowed them whole, with a sound like a deep exhale.
Isolde was already moving . She passed between the oaks as if the Veil wasn't there at all, her silver hair not stirring. Rory watched, held her breath, felt the Heartstone go hot and then, before she could talk herself out of it - lawyer's daughter, delivery girl, girl who had run from Cardiff to London to get away from a boy named Evan who liked to grab - she stepped.
The cold hit her first. Not winter cold; absence cold. The feeling of going underwater in a bath too hot and coming up. The shimmer clung to her face like cobweb, resisted, then popped.
She stumbled onto moss that should not have been moss.
The grove was larger on the inside.
That was the only way her brain could parse it. The circle of oaks from the outside had looked ten feet across. Inside, it was a clearing the size of a cathedral nave, ringed by trees so vast their trunks were buttressed like walls. The light came from nowhere and everywhere, amber and soft, like late afternoon filtered through honey. The sky above was not sky but a high canopy of interwoven branches and floating motes of pollen that glowed.
And the flowers.
Wildflowers bloomed year-round, Isolde had said. Rory had pictured a few stubborn daisies. Instead the ground was a carpet. Bluebells and foxglove and things she had no name for, star-shaped blossoms with petals translucent as glass, low creepers that unfurled as she watched. The air smelled of green sap and old stone and, bizarrely, cinnamon.
"Jesus," she breathed.
"Not here," Nyx murmured from beside her. They had gone mostly solid again, a tall silhouette of living shadow that made the flowers around their feet seem dimmer. "Older names."
Rory's boots sank a quarter inch into the loam, soft and springy. Next to her, Isolde's feet left nothing. The half-Fae woman walked ahead, her hand trailing not quite touching the blossoms .
"Listen," Isolde said.
Rory listened.
At first there was only a profound quiet, the kind you get in deep snow. Then underneath it came sounds layered like music heard from another room. Wind through leaves that weren't moving. Water running over stones that weren't there. Far off, laughter, then what might have been a harp string plucked once and left to resonate until it hurt.
The Heartstone was pulsing steadily now, warm against her sternum. The Fae-forged blade Isolde had given her last night - the slender, leaf-shaped dagger of moonsilver that was always cold to the touch - was an ice line against her ankle where she'd tucked it into her boot. The contrast made her feel lopsided, pulled between fire and winter.
"We shouldn't be able to see this far in," Nyx said, their whisper dropping even lower . "Pocket realms fold. They hide. This one is... showing off."
"She likes to be admired," Isolde said.
"The grove is a she?"
"The grove is a memory of a she who remembers being a grove."
Rory shot her a look. "Riddles do not help my blood pressure."
Isolde smiled, ageless and a little sad. "Then I will say: you are safe here, so long as you do not eat, do not promise, and do not apologize."
"Noted. No snacks, no contracts, no Canadian politeness."
They moved deeper. The trees grew stranger. One oak had roots that lifted from the earth and re-entered it like the arches of a bridge, and under each arch a tiny perfect mushroom circle glowed faint blue. Another had bark that peeled and reformed in slow motion, runes surfacing and dissolving. Rory reached out without thinking, her bright blue eyes catching the light, and brushed her fingertips against one.
The world lurched .
For a heartbeat she wasn't in the grove. She was somewhere else where the sky was warm amber and the air smelled of roasting meat and ripe fruit so strong it made her mouth flood. Dymas. The word came from nowhere, dragging its lore with it: Gluttony, endless vineyards, helbound souls cooking for Prince Belphegor. She saw a long table groaning, faces too hungry, hands reaching. The Heartstone flared hot enough to burn.
"Rory."
Nyx's cold hand closed around her wrist, right over the crescent scar. It yanked her back. The vision snapped like a rubber band. She gasped, hand flying to the pendant.
"What the hell was that?"
"Echo," Isolde said, not turning . "This place touches other places. The Veil thins on all sides, not just yours. Your stone remembers where it was born."
Dymas. The origin was Dymas on the scribbled note Yu-Fei had found taped under the pendant box after all - she just hadn't believed it. Rory forced her breathing steady, the way she'd learned to do when Evan's shouting got too loud and she needed her thinking brain to stay online. Cool-headed. Quick. Out-of-the-box.
"So Hel can see in here too," she said. "Great."
"Everything sees," Nyx whispered. "The question is what looks back."
As if summoned by the words, the trees ahead parted.
In the center of the grove was a well. Or the idea of a well. Stonework older than any human city, tumbled and moss-eaten, rising from the flowers in a perfect circle. No rope, no bucket. Inside, darkness so complete it drank the amber light. And around its lip, more of those glass-petaled flowers grew, leaning in.
Rory felt the unease first as a prickle at the back of her neck beneath her straight black hair, then as a deep, unreasonable instinct to go elsewhere. The dagger at her ankle went colder still, a line of frost.
Isolde stopped three paces from the well. For the first time since Rory had met her in Silas' back room three days ago, the seer looked hesitant.
"I have never seen inside," she said softly . "It was always covered."
The dark in the well shifted. Not deepened - shifted. Like something inside had rolled over in sleep.
Nyx melted. One second solid, the next a smear of incorporeal shadow sliding up the well's far side, trying to look down without being seen . Their violet eyes were the only solid thing left.
"Empty," they breathed. "No - not empty. Waiting."
The Heartstone was beating now, thump-thump-thump against Rory's ribs like a second heart, warm and insistent, and its faint inner glow was visible even through her t-shirt.
Before she could think, Rory crouched, pulled the moonsilver dagger from her boot. In the strange light it was faintly luminescent, leaf-shaped and beautiful and cold enough to make her fingers ache. She held it over the well.
The blade sang. A high, thin chime.
Something down in that waiting dark sang back.