Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6PBYY1SVNDPAQF57D3V

The wildflowers in the grove glowed as if lit from within, jeweled heads nodding in a wind Rory couldn't feel. Her breath fogged even though it was midsummer by every sane clock, and when she stepped off the path her boot crushed frost into glitter. The ancient oaks ringed them like a court of slender giants. Stones grown from trunks, Isolde had said. Trees that remembered a time before maps. Their bark rose and fell in long, ribbed swells like the sides of sleeping animals. Isolde moved ahead without disturbing a petal. The meadow’s beaded dew did not record her passage. Her silver hair drifted on an absent current, making its own tide. When she spoke, the words were soft with a smile that never reached her eyes. “Hunger is the oldest door. We knock with our tongues.” “That’s not ominous at all,” Rory said, because sometimes refusal felt like armor. She curled her fingers around the pendant at her throat. The little crimson stone warmed her palm like banked coals. The nearer they drew to the standing stones, the harder it pulsed—heartbeat against heartbeat. “You sure this is the right place?” “The right place is where the wrong answers hide,” Isolde said, delighted by her own unhelpfulness. Nyx slipped into existence at Rory’s shoulder like a smudge of night peeled from the underside of a leaf. Their shape only held if you looked slightly away; straight on and they blurred to shadow and cold, a rippling cutout against the meadow’s gold and green. When they tilted their head, faint violet light kindled where eyes should be. “The seam is weakest here,” they breathed, voice like wind burglarizing cracks under doors. “Listen.” Rory listened. At first, there was only the music of long grass, the buzz of midsummer, a lone bird screaming its disdain. Then, under it, a sibilant sound, as of silk pulled through a tight ring. The air there shimmered—only for a blink. A ripple that set her teeth on edge. The standing stones weren’t stones, not really. They were ancient oak trunks, peeled and polished by centuries of fingers that had traced old paths. They formed a crooked oval, bark pale in the star-slatted dusk, with sigils burned low at their roots. Beyond them, the grove’s shadows thickened into syrup. The way in was not a door so much as the idea of a door, half-remembered and stubbornly there. Rory’s heart found the strongest thud from the gem. Warmth leaked up her wrist. She tucked a stray strand of black hair behind her ear and let out a breath. “Let’s do it before I change my mind.” She stepped through. The world flexed. Like plunging wrist-deep into a bowl of jelly when you expected water—the shock of resistance and then sudden give. The air went sweet and hot. For an instant she was nowhere, every sense shouting nonsense: a pressure in her ears like being too deep under waves; a taste on her tongue of burnt sugar and iron; a fizz along her skin like moth wings. Then the pressure snapped, and she was there. The sky had gone wrong. It was amber from horizon to horizon, not with the thin pale of afternoon but full-bodied, like honey held to light. It made the vineyard sprawl look gilded. Ranks upon ranks of vines crept over low hills, trellised on lattices that gleamed dark as icing-slick iron. Grapes hung heavy, translucent spheres filled with slow cloud. In their bellies shape moved—shadows of tiny fish, or birds, or scraps of script, coiling on their own currents. Between the vines, narrow walks knitted with powdered sugar gritted underfoot. Heat swelled off the earth. Every plant sweated scent. Pepper, plum, roast chestnut, peat, butter browning in a pan. Rory’s mouth filled without her permission. She swallowed and it didn’t help. The air was full of a faint tink, tink, tink as something unseen plucked at glass. “Dymas,” Nyx whispered with a note like a laugh dying in a chimney. “He has made a heaven here for certain kinds of hell.” Isolde tipped her head back to look at the amber dome. The light made her skin otherworldly, moth-pale and almost translucent over bones that did not belong to any bird Rory had ever seen in a museum case. “A prince sates his court with craft and famine,” she said. “Gilded excess is still a cage.” Rory dragged in a breath thick as steam. The pendant had gone from warm to hot as a mug of tea. She let it hang back against her sternum, heat seeping through cotton. It pulsed in a rhythm that didn’t match her own, and, unnervingly, when she glanced sideways, the pulses seemed to bump the very light, as if the world’s color hiccupped with each beat. From somewhere past the nearest knoll came a shout, rich with laughter. A bell clanged twice, long and low. Rory craned her neck. Pavilions sprouted like mushrooms in the distance, white canvas belly-round, flags pinned by the slow amber air. The faint clatter of bowls and knives drifted over the vines. The judges at their endless feast, she thought, and the thought made her tongue thick. “This was a bad idea,” she said cheerfully. It took the edge off the thrumming in her bones. “It was an idea,” Nyx agreed. “We will grade it later.” They took the narrow walk between the vines. The sugar crushed under their boots with small, despairing noises. The grapes nearest brushed her shoulder as if by accident, cool skins damp, whispering in tiny voices. Taste me. Try me. I am the first bite after long fasting. She kept her hands at her sides. The memory of being twelve and sneaking a grape from a market in Cardiff rose sharp as vinegar. Her father’s look when he caught her, the weight of that judgement. She set her jaw. Isolde didn’t trouble the grapes. They bent toward her anyway, drawn by her gravity, their skins opaline in her slipstream. The walk curled through the vineyard like a ribbon dropped by a careless god. Twice Rory thought she saw the way narrow and then widen again without moving, as if the vines breathed them in and out. Tiny insects stitched golden threads between the leaves. One landed on her wrist, and her little crescent scar rang like a tuning fork. The bug unfurled—no, not wings. Cutlery, minute and precise, a pair of scissors with dragonfly eyes. She shook it off with her free hand and laughed a breath through her nose, because otherwise she’d make a sound that carried. Past the third hill, the vines thinned to an orchard. Trees should not have been able to hold their weight. Boughs dipped under fruits so swollen they looked obscene. Not just apples and pears and peaches but things that didn’t belong on any taxonomy chart: a fat blue gourd with slits like eyelids that blinked lazily; a pomegranate beaded not with seeds but gummy drops of wine that ran when the rind split; a quince knotted around a knife that might have grown there like a thorn. The ground was carpeted with fallen and fermenting gifts. The sweet turned under to rot and gave the air an edge like teeth. “Remember,” Isolde said mildly, “if you eat their food, it eats you back.” Nyx put their head on one side, considering a low-hanging orange that unfurled when they drew near, its segments separating into a spiral staircase bright as yolk. “Some kinds of devouring are mutual,” they mused. Rory shoved her hands deeper into her jacket pockets. The gem knocked her sternum in gentle panic. It wanted something. In its rhythm she could feel a direction, like a bird that knows shore is that way because its bones say so. She stopped and turned slow, letting the heat shift. The pull tugged her left, toward a squat building hunched between two glossy pear trees. Just past it, the earth fell off steeply into shadow. The building looked like a farmhouse if a farmhouse were carved by someone who had only ever eaten farmhouses. Its corners were too thick, its eaves too weighty, its door a maw with a lip of polished stone. Above the lintel, reliefs writhed: open mouths, tongues like vines. Someone had inlaid blue glass where the tongues would catch the light. The effect made Rory’s stomach do a slow spin. “This way,” she said. The words came out steadier than she felt. As they climbed the two broad steps, the tink, tink from earlier resolved into the delicate chime of tools against glass, knives knocking boards, spoons tapped in shallow cups. The sounds were distant and everywhere at once. Inside, the heat eased. The air turned cool and reverent. It smelled like cellar and cold iron. Benches crouched under dust. Racks climbed the walls to a rafters’ walk hung with ropes and hooks. A press slumped in the corner, its timber stained dark with long-ago tannins. Under the layers of abandonment, everything was clean. The kind of clean that came from attention, not from neglect. Rory ran a finger across the workbench. No dust came away. Her fingertip burned instead, a flash like touching a griddle. She hissed and stuck it in her mouth before she could stop herself. It tasted of lemon peel and old coins. “What is this place?” “A kitchen,” Nyx said, soft as a secret. Their hands drifted above the table and small shadows crawled from their palms, tasting the grain. “Also a temple,” Isolde said. “It is very difficult to tell the two apart when the object of worship is consumption.” She smiled at the racks as if they had just paid her a compliment. To the rear of the room a second door waited. It wasn’t wood. Its surface was a knitted lattice of something clear and brittle as spun sugar, each strand beaded with captured light. Behind it, stairs fell away into a dark that wasn’t absence so much as a presence waiting its turn. The pendant beat at Rory's chest in a rhythm that made her wrist bones want to echo it. It was close. It was behind that door. Between braids of the candy, sigils had been pricked out in dots of caramelized gold. Even if she hadn’t spent months watching her life split along seams where rationality simply did not apply, she would have known what it meant: a ward. She pulled the dagger from the inside pocket of her jacket. Isolde had called it moonsilver, which fit. It was a narrow leaf of a blade, pale as breath, its edge blurred with its own ghost-light. Cold soaked her palm through the hilt. “Careful,” Isolde said lightly. Rory looked at her. “Is this a very bad idea?” “It is an idea that will have a bill.” The Seer’s pale eyes held approval and regret in equal measures. “Pay now or later. You cannot dine and slip away.” Nyx leaned close, the shape of them feathering into the stairwell’s shadow so their mouth was a darker notch against the darker air. “Cut it where it thinks it is strongest,” they advised. “Helpful.” Rory drew the blade through the lattice where the caramel dots brightened brightest. Resistance, then a sound like a violin string letting go. Cold leapt from the blade into the sugar, and the sugar sobbed. The scent of burnt marshmallow filled the room. The sigils bled honey that steamed where it hit the floor. The ward did not shatter explosively. It wilted, shied from the knife’s kiss, and opened a grudging hand’s width wide. Down the steps, the dark was cooler and clean. She swallowed and started down. The stone under her boots had the slick of worn bone. Her shoulder brushed the wall and a shiver ran up her arm like someone dragging a finger over her skin from nowhere to elbow. “Is that—” Rory frowned and craned to see as the steps turned. Light bled up from below, not bright but saturating, as if the nearest candle were red and set under water. It pulsed. Her pendant agreed, hot-cold, hot-cold. She put a hand to it because it felt as if her sternum itself might open. The stairs delivered them into a long, low hall, half cellar and half nave. Columns speared up irregularly like vertebrae. The far wall was a single slab of dark stone shot through with veins of a color Rory wanted to call black-red, but the words argued. It was the color of a tongue pressed to a finger nick. It was the color of a ripe plum caught in shadow. It was not still. It swam, very slowly, like something breathing under glass. The slab wasn’t flush. It rose from the floor like a cliff from a tide, and in its face were inset shelves and niches. In some rested jars with wax nodules braided with hair; in others, stoppered bottles that held little storms. One jar held what looked like an egg, but within, instead of yolk, a swirl of summer air turned—mown grass, cicada drone, the sharp of a cricket ball in small fingers. Another had a coil of smoke looped in a patient infinity, and Rory could smell, even from where she stood, cinnamon, salt, a mother’s hand over a pot. On a dais in the room’s spine lay a heart. Not flesh. Stone. Smaller than her two fists together, the size of a deer’s. It was carved from the same material as the cliff-face, its surface polished to a luster that made her throat work. It beat. Not fast, not slow. Steady as kitchen clocks. With each contraction, a faint inner glow heaved through it and back. Her pendant dragged toward it. It didn’t matter that it was on a chain, that it should have weighed grams; it had found its parent and wanted to leap. The tug lifted the silver away from her neck and set it singing a tiny tremolo against her collarbone. For a moment Rory saw double: the pendant small and domestic against her shirt, and another, gargantuan, embedded in the far wall behind the shelves where veining converged in a dark navel the size of a shield. A web of fracture lined out from that buried heart and laid heat down every path. “I thought,” she said softly, throat tight around the shape of her voice, “I thought this was just a trinket.” Isolde’s lashes lowered over her pale eyes. “Trinkets are only little doors. They do not say where they open.” Nyx glided nearer the dais until their shadow washed the heart’s polish in a moving stain. The faint violet of their eyes glowed from that umbra like stars looked at from the bottom of a well. “The stone remembers the mouth it fed,” they murmured. From above, very far away, the bell clanged again; three beats this time. The vibration traveled down through ceiling, stairs, into the soles of Rory’s boots. The heart on the dais did not change its pace. Her own heart did. “Do we take it?” she asked, half to herself. Her mind did quick arithmetic: weight, chain, speed of retreat, what the blade liked to cut and what it did not, the way the veins in the wall recoiled from air and then relaxed again like sleepers turning their faces to a breeze. Isolde’s mouth curved. Pity and amusement and the old ache of someone who had stood where she now stood more times than anyone ought. “Would you pluck a star because you needed a candle?” “Sometimes the house is dark,” Rory said. She reached out, then drew her hand back. The polished stone held cold like a promise. She cleared her throat. “If I touch that, is something going to latch onto me?” “If you do not touch it,” Isolde said, “something will latch onto you.” Her smile brightened, sudden and wicked. “The world is not a buffet. You will be eaten. Choose your bite.” Nyx’s laugh rustled like paper. They turned their face as if listening to a wind the others could not. “The ward above noticed us notice,” they said. “A hand comes to see what thumb failed. Not many heartbeats left before we are company.” Unease crawled down Rory’s arms in pricks. The room was beautiful. It was also a lung in a larger beast, and somewhere that beast had lain still too long. She knew this feeling: standing in a courtroom an hour before a trial, the empty benches waiting, every surface poised to record and hunger. She’d left law behind, but the shape of it had not left her. “Right,” she said. Her voice steadied. “We’re not leaving without proof.” “What is proof?” Isolde asked brightly. “Is it something you can put in a pocket?” Rory almost smiled. “Sometimes.” She shrugged off her jacket, folded it once, set it on the flagstones to keep the hem from catching, because dignity mattered even in hells built of appetites. She slid the moonsilver blade back into her pocket. She set her hand, fingers splayed, on the heartstone on the dais. Cold shot through her palm into bone and from there into breath. She had expected pain. Instead she got a pressure like someone familiar taking her hand across a table crowded with plates. In her throat a name rose and lodged with the dusty catch of something she hadn’t had since childhood: a prayer to no one in particular. For a beat the light inside the heart answered the pulse in her wrist. The pendant at her throat spun on its chain, struck her skin hard enough to sting. A whisper flooded her mouth. Not words, only the sense of fullness after a fast gone too long, or the first swallow of water after a run that went a mile farther than it should. There were flavors buried in it—orange pith, winter smoke, the bitter of black tea left too long. Rory thought absurdly of the little crescent on her wrist and how, in certain weathers, it ached as if remembering metal. She blinked hard. When she pulled her hand back, a smear of her warmth stayed behind. The heart’s glow calmed to its regular measure. The veins in the wall shifted, fat pulses pushing through like snakes under a blanket. The bell above went silent. In its hush Rory could make out the delicate sigh of plugged bottles, as if what slept inside them exhaled. Footsteps moved on the stairs above them. Not many. Measured. The kind of stride people learned when others always got out of their way. Rory scooped her jacket up one-handed, shrugged it on. Her fingers found the blade again and the cold of it was a tonic. She met Nyx’s violet gaze, then Isolde’s and found both reflected her like a coin: one side shadow, the other riddle. “Later,” she said under her breath, to the wall, to the heart, to whatever had given her the pendant without a name. “We’ll come back.” The pendant smoldered against her chest, a small, furious coal. “Hungry doors do not close themselves,” Isolde said lightly, her voice almost fond. She stepped back among the columns. No dust marked where she had stood. “Do try not to be a meal.” Rory rolled her shoulders. She had walked out of smaller hungers with skin intact. She took a breath thick as butter, electric-sweet, and moved to meet what came.