Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQG0QFEHTQD6F70A412Y0V

The tunnel reeked of wet brick and old wine. Rory kept one hand on the rough wall to steady herself and the other closed around the little pendant at her throat. The Heartstone pulsed against her skin like a cat’s purr, heat seeping through her fingers in soft, insistent waves. Every time it throbbed, the light ahead atop the worn steps quivered and brightened, as if the tunnel itself breathed. “Still your heart,” Nyx whispered, their voice a thread drawn through the dark. “The door listens.” Rory exhaled, slow and thin. In the circle of their electric torch, the air at the top of the stairs rippled like heat over asphalt. The ripple spread to the edges of the archway, where mortar had slumped and wept in bulbous tears centuries ago. She had swept rain off the steps earlier with the toe of her boot, making some dent in the debris of leaves and crumpled takeaway wrappers. Somewhere above, London rain pattered on iron grates. She tasted metal under the damp. The season had already begun to lean towards winter, and the Veil did strange things when the days shortened. Isolde’s voice had been all riddles when she’d handed Rory the moonsilver blade two nights ago under a wet moon. A knife is a bridge, little swallow. Which edge do you cross? Cold had begged through Rory’s gloves when she took the dagger. It begged now through the leather as she touched the sheath under her jacket out of reflex. Her skin prickled. At her ankle, a thin trickle of water found her sock and kept going. Nyx didn’t mount the steps so much as unspool up them, shadow loosening itself from the places where light failed. In solid form, they were tall, a humanoid silhouette cut from misted black glass, but when they angled sideways underneath the arch, Rory saw the wall behind them through their ribs. The torchlight fretted at their edges. Their eyes, a faint violet, held her like the still surface of a well. “Ready?” they asked. Rory nodded. She closed her hand around the Heartstone one more time, felt its warmth anchor her pulse, and stepped forward into the ripple. The world slipped. For a blink, she was nowhere. Her stomach lifted and stuttered. The damp and stink of the tunnel peeled away. Heat gathered across her face as if someone had opened an oven a street long. Light shifted. In place of the torch’s yellow smear came a glow warm and steady, the hue of honey poured from a jar in late afternoon. She stumbled out onto a path of crushed shells or sugar crystals—she couldn’t tell until the grains stuck to the tread of her boot and crackled underfoot. Each crunch released a tiny gust of sweetness, vanilla and something like burnt orange. She lifted her heel and the dust clung for a heartbeat before letting go. Ahead, the path unwound through a garden that made her second-guess her own eyes. Vines slung themselves over trellises high as rooftops. Their trunks weren’t thin twines but braided ropes as big around as her thigh, bark glossy, oiled. Leaves the size of dinner plates lapped up the amber light curling around the sky. Grapes hung in vast chandelier clusters, some as big as plums, each their own candle-glow color—greens like glass, midnight blues, a blush that looked like pressed rose petals. The under-canopy was shadowcool and busy; bees nudged heavy flowers and left with pollen dusting their legs like gold. Beyond the vineyards, terraced hills opened in a fan of orchards. Pear trees bowed under fruit that shone like polished brass. Fig trees wept with figs whose split lips revealed hearts like garnets. Between the rows, herbs grew monstrous and complacent—banks of basil breathed pepper and sun-warmed grass; rosemary bristled like blue-needled hedgehogs. Every plant looked too pleased with itself. Every scent egged the next one on until the air saturated with wanting. “Dymas,” Nyx said, their voice a draft through reeds. “They favor introductions rich and thick.” Rory swallowed, and her throat remembered tea and pastries with Eva after a miserable shift. A dangerous thought. She shoved it aside. Under the amber sky, distant buildings crouched like confectioner’s fantasies—pale dome roofs like sugar scoops, chimneys that breathed not smoke but steam fragrant with thyme and clove. The clatter of pans and the high chop-chop-chop of knives rose and fell like a chorus, punctuated by laughter that rolled from someplace unseen, indulgent as a belly slap. Rory turned a slow circle. The path branched toward the terraces; another track slid left through an arched tunnel of pear branches, and a third led down to a bowl-shaped hollow where rows of long canopied tables glowed with candles despite the light. Figures drifted there, graceful and slow, their silhouettes blurred by heat haze, hands lifting goblets that gleamed. When a breeze came, it came warm and ribboned, bringing with it the scent of something frying in butter and the sugar-burn of caramel. It slid under Rory’s jacket and caught at her hair. She realized she’d been standing with her mouth parted, breathing through her teeth like a dog catching a scent, and shut it with a soft click. Nyx’s head tilted. Shadows rolled across their collarbones. “You feel it.” “It’s like walking into a bakery at four in the morning,” Rory said, voice a little hoarse. “And your whole life is just… hunger.” “Gluttony wears its virtue on its sleeve,” Nyx whispered, amused. “This is the land where wanting feels like survival and satisfaction bruises like sin.” The Heartstone warmed, a steady, encouraging thud. Somewhere, under the orchard hum, something else beat a pulse in time with her pendant. The sound seemed to come from the hollow and beyond, under the domed buildings, deeper yet. “Isolde said the pendant would pull once we were close,” Rory said. Nyx’s violet gaze skimmed the terraces, the warm sky. “She also said not to bargain unless you mean to lose. And not to taste.” A flight of translucent butterflies drifted past in a glittering raft, each with wings like sugar glass. Their bodies were thin yellow threads. They banked around Rory’s shoulder, and as they did, the air seemed to tinkle as if tiny dessert spoons were struck together. Rory watched one settle on a grape. The grape itself sighed. No—that was ridiculous. But its skin did dimple faintly under the butterfly’s weight, and when the little insect pressed the tip of its abdomen against the surface, the grape darkened until it matched the butterfly’s wing exactly. The butterfly lifted off, light as a flake of almond, and the grape held its new color like a blush taking. She grinned despite herself. “Alright. That’s… not in any of my cookbooks.” A bell chimed. On a terrace to the left, a tall, dark archway yawned open in the side of one domed building, and a figure in a white coat emerged, carrying a stack of copper pans high. For an instant, the tilt of the coat collar, the assured way the figure balanced those pans with an elbow and hip, were so human that Rory’s throat tightened. The person turned their head. Their eyes were soft and far away like sleepwalkers. The copper reflected the amber sky so that the pans looked like cut suns. Rory took a step down the sugar path, and the path dipped towards the bowl. She felt Nyx’s presence lean with her, neither tug nor restraint, just there. As they descended, the hum of activity thickened. What had been sounds now resolved into textures: the springy thump of sponge cakes under hurried fingers, the leathery hiss of peppers blistering over open flame, the paperslap of parchment on pans, the sigh of something being whipped to peaks. Knives whispered against boards. Laughter rolled lazy and delighted from the shadow of the canopies. When Rory reached the rim, she saw that the tables weren’t wood at all but slabs of polished stone veined with something that looked like frozen cream. They ran the length of the hollow, end to end, the far end vanishing into a shimmer. Each was spread with platters and bowls and pyramids and tarts and meats and breads. The spread felt obscene in a way that had nothing to do with bodies. The breads still steamed and breathed; the meats, though carved, lay heavy and glistening, as if the animal lived a little still in its own reflection. Fruits wore jeweled rinds, stretched tight over impossible-seeded hearts. It all glittered faintly, a coat of sugar glaze on reality. The air was cooler in the hollow. Candles set at intervals under the canopies flickered and made the shadows dance. Hosts—if that’s what they were—glided among the guests. The hosts’ mouths were lovely and too generous, smiles that lingered a half beat longer than seemed kind. Their fingers were long and stained faintly with turmeric and beetroot and other bright wrong reds. When a guest laughed, a host leaned in with shining eyes, as if pulling a secret from a throat along with the bite of food. At the nearest table, a woman in a chef’s jacket piped something pale and stiff into perfect little rosettes. She must have been fifty or seventy-five or a hundred; time clung to her like flour. She nodded once to herself and reached for a jug of syrup. Her knuckles were scabbed over in neat, repetitive crescents. She glanced up, and her eyes snagged Rory’s. For a fraction of a second, the woman’s expression slumped—just the eyes, like a cake collapsing—but then she lifted the jug and poured a thin river of honey over the rosettes. Her hands didn’t shake. The honey beaded and then lay down flat like glass. The smell made Rory’s knees loose. Rory lifted her hand to her throat without meaning to. The Heartstone lay flat against her breastbone, hot. “Don’t,” Nyx said. They didn’t have to raise their voice for Rory to hear. The whisper slipped under everything else. “I know,” she said. “I’m not—” She swallowed. “I know.” They didn’t belong here. The thought came with cold clarity, slicing down through scent and sound. She was a delivery girl from Camden with a tiny flat above a bar that smelled of spilt beer and bleach. She had a moonsilver dagger at her hip and a pendant that pulsed like a heartbeat. She did not belong to this golden indulgence. She clung to that as to a rope. The far side of the hollow had no wall. It rose into another set of terraces, tamped earth and stone steps cut into the slope. A row of knife-grinding wheels turned there by themselves, showering sparks down their sides to be caught in buckets where apprentices, thin and intent, pulled out the hot pinpricks with tongs and dropped them into crystal jars. The jars hardly held anything, and yet glowed with a trapped weather. Rory stepped away from the tables, away from the hosts’ eyes like opened jars of preserves. She touched Nyx’s elbow—solid, surprisingly—and nodded up the steps. They climbed. The path took them along the edge of a pool in which floated hundreds of pears. The pears’ stems had been tied with three twists of silver thread apiece, and as they spun, the threads rang soft against one another so the whole pool breathed a music under the sound of the kitchen wheels. Where the path ran close to the pool’s lip, Rory could smell the pears. The scent ate the edges off her common sense in nips. She balled her fist inside her pocket and dug her nails into her palm. Her scar pulled along her wrist, a small crescent ache. She televised herself its history—a childhood bike pedal, blood, her mother’s flurry and her father’s too-bright cheer—and lurched past the water. At the top of the steps, the sound thinned. The amber sky poured itself into the gaps between domes and trellises, making long rivers of light across the packed earth. Buildings loomed close now, their walls pale and smooth like the insides of shells. Their doors were tall and rounded, no knobs, just a seam. When Nyx brushed one of the seams with the back of their hand, the door sighed and eased half-open, the scent of stock and bone-deep heat rolling out. Inside, the kitchen stretched in a long nave lined with work stations. Steam scribbled on the air. Pans hissed. Cookfires burned under copper pots, their flames low and steady, green at the faintest heart. People moved like school in a current—fluid, practiced. A boy in a flour-dusted apron looked up as Rory passed and in that look, for a flash, she saw all the cities she knew pressed flat like a recipe card, the black lines of their streets, smudged fingerprints where people had thumbed the same corners. He blinked and dropped his gaze. His knife continued to lift and fall, obedient. “Is that—” Rory began. “Helbound,” Nyx said softly. “An arrangement once signed is binding.” “Can they be—” “Not by us,” Nyx said. “Not today.” The Heartstone throbbed insistently. The tug wasn’t in her chest now but in the room—a pull towards a back corner where the heat seemed greater and the air shimmered above tiles. Rory wove past a baker pulling a tray of little golden fish from an oven mouth. Their glazed bodies winked at her, tiny scales catching. The smell made a place inside her turn toward it like a prayer. She shoved past that rising and set her eyes on the shimmer. It clung to the tile like the ghost of a window. When she stepped close, she saw nothing and everything—her own bright blue eyes reflected and then not, a suggestion of rain on old brick, a suggestion of the tunnel they’d left. The Veil was here, thinned, a seam. “Wards,” Nyx said from over her shoulder, the word a draft. “They’ve stitched a net to keep it open.” Their hand came up and hovered, fingers long as roots. They didn’t touch. Rory found the knife’s hilt without looking. The Fae blade was always cold. It bled that cold through the sheath the way winter bled through windows, numbing the web of skin between her thumb and first finger. When she slid it free, the air around it tightened and hummed. Moonlight clung to its edge, a pale floss. She didn’t know how she knew where to cut, only that the Heartstone and the blade were eager in the same direction, pulling the hand that held them into a small neat arc. She was careful not to let the blade touch the tiles. She’d been told, in not so many words, that Fae steel remembered what it loved. She slid the edge into the shimmer. The knife went in as into silk. A humming thread parted. The sound was so soft that she almost missed it, but Nyx’s hand shifted minutely as if they’d felt it in their bones. The Veil warped and snapped back. A pressure she hadn’t admitted feeling eased. The kitchen’s noises rushed in. Someone—a child, maybe the boy with the knife—gasped across the room. Rory didn’t turn. A gust pushed at her back and smelled like crushed mint and raw wine. It rolled up her spine and across her scalp, and in it was the suggestion of a voice, large and slow and bottomless, every syllable chewed and savored. Nyx’s shadow swelled, deepening around her feet, swallowing her ankles. “We have attracted attention,” they breathed, and their whisper was both apology and warning. “Cut and be gone.” Rory set her jaw. She cut twice more. Threads parted. The shimmer thinned to nothing. The corner of the room went ordinary in a way that felt indecent. Silence folded over the kitchen for a fragile second and then the room exhaled as one, and the movement resumed. Someone had begun to cry without sound. Rory slid the blade back into its sheath and grabbed the pendant through her shirt. It burned hot under her palm and then cooled, as if pleased. They turned. As they slipped back into the amber lanes, the world outside had changed its posture. The laughter from the hollow had turned a shade sharper. A figure had taken up station on the terrace above the pool of pears, a person tall and elegant as the polished columns that held up the palace of sky, and though Rory did not let her eyes catch their face, she felt a gaze lower over her like a lid. “Don’t run,” Nyx murmured. “Running tastes like fear. You must not taste like that here.” She didn’t. It took every scrap of cool that people accused her of, every childhood memory of exams sat through with a fever, every delivery made through sleet and catcalls and tinny Christmas music, but she walked. She smoothed her face. She breathed sugar and smoke and butter and thought of grey London brick and bus exhaust and the crackle of rain on her window. Her hand at her side brushed Nyx’s, and their cold looked after her heat the way shadows drink firelight. They took a different way down, not through the hollow but along a narrow path that wound behind the domes. Here, the garden grew stranger. She passed a stand of eggplants that purred when the wind gusted, their dark skins vibrating like cat throats. Beneath a lattice, small bright peppers flicked themselves like snakes’ tongues. She saw a tree that bore bottles instead of fruit, their long necks clinking as bees went in and out, drunk with syrup. The path turned and presented them with a fountain of broth that poured from a handful cupped in stone. A hand enormous and generous, carved from something like fat and alabaster layered, held broth high. The liquid fell and fell and never spilled. It smelled like grandmothers. Rory paused. The fountain’s steam curled around her fingers in that coaxing way of heat. The broth was brown and rich and familiar; it tugged on her like a child tugs on a sleeve. She thought of losing herself there, laying her cheek against the warm stone, dipping her fingers in and tasting and letting the tears come. The grief that had tightened under her ribs this whole time—an ache for what the bound chefs had lost, for what this place wanted her to become—lurched. Nyx put their palm to the small of her back, careful. “Later,” they said softly, a lie made kind. She blinked hard and stepped past. The Heartstone had gone quiet now. The pressure of the attention from the terrace still pressed but at a distance, as if whoever had watched them was tasting other things now, distracted. They came under an arch of figs, the skins burst slightly like parted lips, and the air grew cool in their shadow. When they emerged, the crushed-sugar path ran toward a small stand of oaks—no, not oaks, something reminiscent of oak but wrong, bark polished and fluted, leaves like spoons. Between their trunks, air puddled in a familiar distortion. Nyx inclined their head. “After you,” they said. Rory swallowed the last of the broth’s ghost, the last of the laughers’ gaze, the last of the curious sweetness that had walked its thin line inside her this whole time. She nodded once, squared her shoulders as if they might catch a wind, and stepped forward. For a heartbeat, again, she was nowhere. Then the damp and stink of the wine tunnel embraced her with both arms. She stumbled on the last step and put a hand out for the wall, missing and catching Nyx instead. They were ice and then some softer temperature underneath, like the cool left when a candle is blown out. Rory laughed once—a scrape of sound that surprised her. The laugh echoed off brick and came back sounding younger. Nyx’s violet eyes found her face, luminous in the dark. “You did well,” they said. She didn’t trust herself to answer. She touched the pendant and found it had cooled. The blade at her side hummed faintly as if amused or smug. Rory blew out a breath, crooked, and looked back at the arch where the Veil rippled faintly, nowhere near as eager as it had been. In her mouth, the air tasted flat as dust. For a fraction of a second, she missed the sugar and the salt and the butter. Hunger, she understood suddenly, wasn’t just for food. The place had known that. It had offered exactly what it thought she wanted. She set her teeth. “Right,” she said, words fogging in the cold. “Tea, then.” Nyx’s laugh was a whisper brushed along the rind of the world. “And bread,” they suggested, mischievous. “Ordinary bread. Dense. Burnt a little on the bottom.” Rory smiled into the tunnel’s dark. “God, yes,” she said, and the word held gratitude and defiance and a small, warmed, resolute joy. Behind them, invisible past brick and rain and city, the amber sky went on glowing, inexhaustible. The heavy vines grew heavier. Knives fell and rose. Pears rang. And for now, for today, a seam in a kitchen lay plain and whole, the air there ordinary in the most blessed way.