AI The first oak stood where the footpath ended.
Rory had walked Richmond Park in rain, in summer heat, and once at dawn with a hangover so bad the deer had seemed to judge her. She had never seen an oak rise straight out of the path, its trunk pale and smooth as weathered bone.
“Are we lost?” she asked.
Beside her, Nyx’s outline wavered against the grey afternoon. In the open, they were almost solid: a tall figure shaped from the shadow the tree ought to have cast. Their violet eyes lifted toward its crown.
“Not anymore.”
A second oak waited a few yards beyond the first. Then a third. Their roots showed above the soil in thick, rounded ridges, and no leaves stirred on their branches, though wind combed the grass behind Rory.
She checked her phone. Three bars of signal. The map insisted she was standing in the middle of a pond.
“Useful,” she muttered, and put it away.
The deep crimson stone at her throat warmed against her skin. She took it between finger and thumb, feeling a faint pulse through the silver setting.
Nyx noticed. “A portal?”
“I don’t know.”
The pendant had warmed near openings into Hel before. But the air between the oaks smelled of rain on leaves, and under that, something sharp and sweet, like a pear cut with a clean knife. Nothing like the furnace breath Rory remembered from the last tear she’d found.
They passed between the trees.
Her ears popped. The sound of traffic vanished.
Rory stopped so abruptly that Nyx’s shadow spilled across her boots before gathering back into their shape. Behind them lay the footpath and a low sky, ordinary enough except for the silence pressing against it. Ahead, sunlight fell through branches crowded with blossoms. Bluebells, oxeye daisies, and foxgloves grew together at the edge of a clearing, every flower in full bloom. Beyond them rose more oaks, trunks set at intervals too regular to be chance.
“Those were trees a moment ago,” Rory said.
“They remain trees.”
“They’re also standing stones.”
Nyx tilted their head. “Yes.”
Rory went to the nearest trunk. Up close, its bark had the grain of oak, but when she pressed her palm against it, the surface felt like stone left in shade . A row of tiny green shoots had sprung from a crack at shoulder height. Something moved among them. She leaned closer and found a beetle the colour of polished copper, carrying a fallen petal across the bark. It stopped, raised two delicate antennae toward her, and continued on.
A laugh escaped her. She looked over at Nyx, but they were studying the space between the trees with less pleasure.
“What is it?”
“The shadows here have edges I don’t recognise.”
Rory looked down. Her own shadow lay at her feet, shortened by the sun. Nyx’s reached in three directions at once, each thin as a ribbon. One had wound itself around an exposed root.
“Can you get through?”
“Yes.” Their voice came like breath through reeds. “I would rather walk.”
That was enough to make her fingers find the moonsilver dagger under her jacket. Its slender hilt was cold through the leather of its sheath.
She took the lead.
The clearing opened slowly , as if the trees were making room only when they saw her coming. Wildflowers brushed her jeans. At first she tried to avoid stepping on them; then she noticed each bent stalk lifting again behind her, petals unmarked. A pale moth settled on her sleeve. Its wings bore the pattern of a human eye, down to a brown fleck in the iris. When she turned her arm for a better look, it unfolded into an ordinary white moth and flew away.
Somewhere deeper in the grove, water rang against stone. The notes rose and fell in a pattern almost like speech.
They crossed a strip of moss so bright it hurt to look at. Rory’s boots left dark prints, which filled with green before Nyx reached them. Then they came upon another set of tracks: narrow impressions in damp earth, each with a split at the toe. Deer, perhaps, though the stride between them was much too long. The tracks ended beside a stand of hawthorn. Its branches were tied with lengths of faded thread, keys, a child’s brass bell, and the handle of a white china cup.
“Offerings?” Rory asked.
Nyx held their hand beneath the bell without touching it. The metal gave one small, clear chime.
Rory backed up a step. “Did you do that?”
“No.”
The other objects remained still. The cup handle had been mended with red thread, each loop neat and careful. Someone had loved the cup enough to repair it, then carried part of it here. Rory thought of all the people who must have walked through the park never seeing the pale oaks. Or perhaps seeing them when they had something to leave.
A voice came from the hawthorn. “The bell remembers the hand that hung it.”
Rory turned, dagger half-drawn.
A woman stood on the far side of the tree. Her silver hair fell to her waist, and her pale lavender eyes held Rory’s without surprise. She wore a dark dress, plain except for a little embroidery at the cuffs. Rory had seen her once before, in a London alley where the light had been bad and Isolde Varga had given her a weapon instead of an explanation. Here, among the flowers, the seer looked less out of place. That did nothing to settle Rory’s nerves.
“Isolde.” She let the blade slide back into its sheath. “You could’ve said hello.”
“I did.”
Rory looked at the bell. “Right.”
Isolde stepped around the hawthorn. The damp earth kept Rory’s prints and the long, split-toed tracks. It took none of hers.
Nyx bowed their head. Isolde returned the gesture, though her gaze lingered on the ribbons of shadow trailing from their feet.
“You found the gate,” she said.
“The gate found us,” Rory replied. “I was looking for a path.”
“A path can do both.”
Rory had expected that kind of answer. She still wanted to throw her phone into a hedge.
The pendant pulsed again, stronger this time. Isolde’s eyes dropped to it.
“Is there a Hel portal here?” Rory asked.
“There is no open door to Hel in my grove.”
Rory waited. Isolde was bound to the truth, but she had a talent for leaving room around it.
“What about a closed one?”
Isolde smiled without showing her teeth. “Come and see.”
She turned and walked between two hawthorns so close together that Rory had to angle her shoulders to follow. On the other side, the grove changed.
The canopy vanished. Above them, a dark blue sky shone with stars, though daylight still lit the path behind Rory. She looked back through the branches. Grey afternoon. Forward: night. Cold air touched the back of her neck.
Nyx stopped beside her. Under the stars, their outline sharpened. For an instant Rory could see features in the dark where a face ought to be—a brow, a cheek, the suggestion of someone who had once stood beneath a different sky. Then the shadows settled.
“Can you see them?” Rory asked.
“The stars? Yes.”
“Are they ours?”
“No.”
That answer should not have thrilled her. It did anyway.
She followed Isolde onto a narrow bridge made from a single fallen tree. Its bark was silver with age. Below it ran a stream black enough to reflect the stars overhead, though the water itself moved fast. Pale fish travelled upstream in a tight school. Each carried a pinprick of light behind its gills. Rory crouched and watched them thread past a stone, turn together, and disappear beneath the bank.
The sound she had heard before came from the stream. Water struck the hollow roots under the bridge, producing clear, uneven notes. She rested a hand on the trunk to cross. It hummed faintly beneath her palm.
On the far bank stood a ring of stones, low and rough as old teeth. Vines had grown over some; others showed marks cut deep into their faces. Rory recognised a few shapes from the oaks at the boundary, but these looked older. In the centre of the ring sat a shallow basin filled with water.
Her pendant grew hot.
She caught her breath and pulled it away from her skin. The crimson gem glowed through her fingers.
Isolde stopped outside the stones. “Do not step into the ring.”
Rory halted with one boot inches from the first stone. “You might’ve led with that.”
“I have led you here.”
“Not the same thing.”
Across the basin, the air folded. For a heartbeat Rory saw a warm amber sky above a slope of vines. Fruit hung in heavy clusters, red and gold and near-black. Beyond the vineyard, long tables stretched beneath flowering trees. Though she could hear the stream at her feet, another sound reached her through the fold: crockery, laughter, a knife striking a board. The smell of roasted fruit flooded her mouth with saliva.
She took a step before she knew she was moving.
Nyx caught her wrist. Their hand was cool and solid. The little crescent scar on her left wrist stood white beneath their fingers.
Rory pulled herself still. The vineyard vanished. Only the basin remained, reflecting unfamiliar stars.
“Dymas,” she said.
Isolde inclined her head.
“A door to Hel.”
“A view of one,” Isolde said. “Not an open door.”
Rory could still taste the air from that other place, rich and spiced. She swallowed. “What happened if I stepped in?”
“The ring was made to hold a boundary. It is old. I have asked you not to test it.”
For once, that was plain enough.
Nyx released her wrist, but their shadow stayed curled around her boots. “The Veil is thin here.”
“In places,” Isolde said.
Rory knelt outside the ring and studied the water. It showed her face now: bright blue eyes, black hair wind-tangled against her cheeks. Behind her reflection stood Nyx and Isolde. Behind them, the stars wheeled slowly through a sky she had never seen.
“What are the stones for?” she asked.
“Once, people brought what they could not keep.” Isolde glanced toward the hawthorn and its little brass bell. “The grove held some things for them.”
Rory thought of the cup handle, the keys. “And the basin?”
“That has held longer things.”
A low sound crossed the clearing. Not the stream. It came from inside the stones, a resonance Rory felt through the soles of her boots. One of the carved marks filled with amber light, then faded.
Nyx drew closer to her. “Is someone looking back?”
Isolde’s expression did not change, but she watched the basin rather than either of them. “Not yet.”
Rory rose. The view of Dymas had been beautiful. That troubled her more than if it had shown her fire and screaming. She had wanted to walk among those vines. Her pendant still throbbed in her hand, eager as a second heart.
At the edge of the clearing, a breeze moved through the wildflowers. It carried the pear scent again, clean enough to cut through the lingering spice. Rory let the pendant fall back against her shirt.
“How long have we been in here?” she asked.
Isolde glanced at the sky. “Here?”
Rory closed her eyes briefly. “Outside.”
“I have not looked.”
“Of course you haven’t.”
Isolde led them back by another path. This one passed a pool crowded with white water lilies. Their roots hung in clear water several feet above the earth; underneath, where a pond should have been, grew a patch of tiny yellow flowers. Rory reached out and touched one suspended lily leaf. It dipped beneath her finger, and ripples spread across empty air. She pulled her hand away, grinning despite herself.
Nyx watched a droplet fall from the leaf. It stopped an inch above the ground and drifted sideways into the pool’s reflection.
“I have crossed places between realms,” they said softly . “None of them were like this.”
The grove grew lighter as they walked. Birds began to call among the oaks, each note followed by a faint echo that came from somewhere ahead instead of behind. Once Rory heard footsteps keeping pace with them through the undergrowth. She looked and saw only flowers rising after an unseen passage. Isolde did not turn. Nyx kept close.
At the pale oaks, Isolde stopped.
Beyond them, Richmond Park lay beneath a dull sky. A jogger passed along the footpath, headphones on, oblivious to the three figures a few yards away. Rory watched him disappear around a bend. His ordinary hurry made her suddenly aware of the mud on her boots and the chill of the blade against her ribs.
“Will I be able to find this place again?” she asked.
Isolde looked past her, into the grove. “Perhaps. Remember where you were going today.”
“I was following the pendant.”
“You were looking for a path,” Isolde said.
Rory opened her mouth, then shut it. She could argue once she had a better question.
She stepped between the oaks. Traffic rushed back into her ears. The air smelled of damp grass and distant exhaust. Nyx followed, their shadow drawing in beneath them as the grove’s strange sunlight fell away.
Rory took out her phone. No signal. The screen showed a date three days later than the one she remembered.
She stared at it until Nyx leaned over her shoulder.
“Is that bad?” they asked.
“Yu-Fei will think I’ve quit.”
Behind them, the first oak was only an oak again, broad and dark-barked, with nothing pale about it. Rory looked down at her boots. A single bluebell clung to one lace, its petals fresh despite the cold.
She touched it gently . Then she started toward the road, already composing an apology she doubted anyone would believe.