AI She had been to Richmond Park a hundred times before, cutting through it on her bike with insulated bags of Golden Empress takeaway strapped to her back, but she had never seen the stones.
"You're sure this is it?" Rory asked.
The three of them stood at the edge of a dense thicket of hawthorn that hadn't been there a moment ago. Nyx rippled beside her, their tall form compressed to fit between two oaks, edges bleeding into the afternoon shade. When they spoke, it was like wind moving through dry leaves right against her ear.
"The air is thin here," they whispered. "Look harder."
Isolde Varga was already ahead of them, her bare feet silent on the leaf litter. True to everything Rory had heard, she left no prints at all, not even a bent blade of grass. Her silver hair caught what little light came through the canopy and seemed to make its own.
"To enter you must be invited. To be invited you must see," Isolde said, not looking back . Her pale lavender eyes flicked to Rory. "You see, don't you, little barrister's daughter?"
Rory frowned. The thicket was a thicket. And then it wasn't. If she relaxed her focus, the way you did when you were trying to see one of those optical illusion posters, there was a shimmer. A faint distortion in the air between two ancient oaks, like heat haze over summer tarmac, except the air was cold enough to see her breath. The Veil. She'd read about it, heard Nyx talk around it in their oblique way, but she'd never actually seen it.
There was a pulse against her sternum.
Rory's hand went automatically to the chain at her neck. The Heartstone Pendant was warm under her t-shirt, its deep crimson beating slow and heavy, roughly the size of her thumbnail but suddenly impossible to ignore. It had pulsed before, near the arches under Waterloo, near Silas' cellar. Hel places. Portal places.
"It's not Hel," she said quietly, more to herself. "Is it?"
"Opposite direction," Nyx whispered. "But all doors are built from the same wood."
Isolde smiled, and that was answer enough. She stepped forward into the shimmer and vanished.
The absence of her was startling. One second the Half-Fae was there, ethereal and ageless in her simple undyed dress, the next there was only empty air and the faint scent of wildflowers where there should have been rot.
Nyx extended a hand made of solidified shadow. Rory could see the faint violet glow of their eyes inside the hood of darkness they wore as a face.
"Together?" they asked.
Rory's left wrist twinged where the small crescent-shaped scar pulled. Old childhood accident. She nodded and took it. Their hand was cold in a way that went past skin.
She stepped through with them.
The world folded.
It wasn't a tearing or a flash. It was like ducking under the surface of a pond and coming up in a different summer. Sound changed first. The distant hum of the A3, the dogs barking, the jays shouting in Richmond — all of it cut off as if someone had shut a door. In its place came a low, live quiet, full of insect noise and wind in leaves that were too green.
Light came second. The park had been in late October, the trees stripping down, sky a flat English grey. Here the sky was not a sky at all, but a vault of warm amber light filtered through leaves that had no business being that color . It wasn't Dymas, not yet — she remembered the descriptions of Belphegor's endless vineyards and the smell of roasting meat that never stopped — but it wasn't Earth either.
She was standing in a clearing.
The ancient oak standing stones marked the boundary in a loose, imperfect circle, each one twice as tall as her and covered in lichen that glowed faintly at the edges. Inside the circle, wildflowers bloomed year-round, and the codex had not been exaggerating. Blues and whites and furious yellows crowded ankle-high, impossibly vivid, each one open despite the lack of direct sun. The air was warm against her cheeks and smelled like honey and turned earth and something sharper, like ozone before a storm.
"Oh," Rory breathed.
Isolde was waiting a few paces in, her feet still hovering a hair above the moss. "You feel it dragging," she said, and it wasn't a question. It was a riddle spoken plain. "One step out of time."
Her phone was in her delivery jacket pocket. She pulled it out. No signal. The clock read 15:42, then flickered to 15:41, then to 03:19, then went black.
Nyx released her hand and expanded, stretching up to their full approximate six-two, their silhouette less human now that there were so many shadows to draw from. Their form drank the amber light.
"Time moves differently," Nyx said, their whisper -voice threaded with something like awe . "An hour inside can be—" They tilted their head, listening . "Minutes. Or days. The Grove is breathing slowly today."
Rory took a careful step. The moss under her battered trainers sank and sprang back. It was impossibly soft. As she walked deeper, the wildflowers brushed her shins and did not break, bending and then righting themselves.
It should have been peaceful. It wasn't.
The further in they went, the more the clearing revealed that it was not empty. Half-buried in the moss and flowers were things that didn't belong. A rusted Roman gladius. A child's plastic action figure, its colors still bright. A whole, perfect pocket watch on a silver chain, ticking loudly despite being open to the elements. A pair of boots, laces still tied.
People had been here. People had left things. Or hadn't left at all.
"The grove keeps what it is given," Isolde said. She knelt beside the wildflowers and did not touch them. "And what is not freely given, it keeps anyway, for a time. Look."
She pointed to the center of the grove, where the amber light pooled thickest. A pool of water so still it didn't look like water at all, more like polished glass set into the earth. And hanging low over it, from branches that didn't seem connected to any tree, were what looked at first like lanterns.
They were fruit.
Translucent, apple-sized, each one glowing with a faint inner light not unlike the Heartstone at her chest. The pendant was no longer pulsing hot. It had gone cold and quiet, as if holding its breath .
"What are they?" Rory asked. Her voice sounded too loud.
"Memories," Isolde said. "Possibilities. Promises the forest overheard. Choose, and choose poorly, if you like. The Fae are fond of poor choices elegantly made."
Nyx drifted closer to the pool. Where their shadow fell, the moss paled. "She laughs," they whispered, staring into the water. "Aldric? No. Nyx. I am Nyx."
Rory moved to them quickly , her cool-headed mask slipping. "Hey. Hey, you're with us."
Nyx's violet eyes snapped to her, focused. "The water shows the space between. I can see the other door, Rory. The warm one. The hungry one." Their form flickered , incorporeal for a heartbeat. "Your stone remembers it."
In Dymas, sprawling vineyards provided exotic ingredients for master chefs, often helbound souls contracted from Earth. The thought surfaced unbidden, textbook words from lore she'd skimmed in Silas' back room. For a second she could almost smell it under the honey — roasting fat, spiced wine, sugar burning. The grove was a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm, but pockets had thin bottoms.
She reached for the blade at her hip to steady herself. Isolde's gift. The Fae-forged leaf-shaped dagger in its plain leather sheath. It was always cold to the touch, even through the sheath, moonsilver that never warmed. When she brushed it now, the unease in her gut receded an inch. It could cut through magical wards. It was particularly effective against demons. That second part hadn't been relevant until about ten seconds ago.
Isolde had risen without Rory noticing. The seer stood at the edge of the pool, her silver hair moving without wind.
"You brought the cold iron that is not iron," she said, pale eyes on the hilt. "Good. The road from here to there is shorter than you think. All indulgence begins in a garden. All gardens end in hunger, if you tend them long enough."
"Is she ever not cryptic?" Rory muttered to Nyx.
"She cannot lie," Nyx whispered back, a hint of dark humor in the wind-voice . "But she can mislead. Which is worse, sometimes."
Despite the warning threaded through every too-perfect flower, wonder was winning . Rory crouched by the pool and looked.
Her own reflection looked back — straight shoulder-length black hair tucked behind her ears, bright blue eyes narrowed in concentration — but younger, maybe, or older, the light making it hard to tell. Behind her reflection, not in the clearing but in the water, stood Richmond Park in full winter, bare branches black against snow. And behind that, a flash of something else: a long table groaning with food under an amber sky, faces flushed with wine, a prince in gold at its head, watching her.
The pendant gave one sudden, sharp throb against her skin, burning now, and the image vanished.
She stood up too fast, heart hammering.
"We need to go," she said. The logician in her, the pre-law dropout her father Brendan still called brilliant, was cataloging : time dilation, Veil distortion, dual resonance , Fae compulsion, Shade instability near liminal water. The rest of her, the part that had fled from Cardiff to London after Evan, just knew when a room had stopped being safe.
Isolde tilted her head, listening to something none of them could hear. She finally nodded.
"The Veil weakens when the world turns dark," she said. "Tonight it is not yet winter. Tonight you may leave as you came, and remember the way."
She turned and walked back toward the standing stones, and this time Rory could see the path between them — not a gap, but a fold, a faint shimmering distortion identical to the one they'd entered through, visible only because now she knew what looking felt like .
Nyx took her hand again, more solid this time, anchoring. Their grip was still cold, but familiar now.
"Did you see something beautiful?" they whispered as they walked.
Rory looked over her shoulder once. The fruit-lanterns swayed though there was no wind. The wildflowers were turning , very slightly , to watch them go.
"Yeah," she said, and her voice was steady again, cool-headed, Rory being Rory . "I saw a lot of things I don't understand yet. Which means I need to come back."
Isolde's laugh ahead of them sounded like bells heard underwater .
"Spoken like a true Carter," the seer said. "Always quick out of the box, even when the box is the world."