Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQMZXVNZJP51KPP5ZBYK8S

The world folded like a page and she stepped into a sky the color of old brandy. Aurora felt the fold before she saw it: the faint tug at the base of her skull, like a blind hand drawing a curtain. The pendant at her throat warmed, a thumbnail of heat against cold skin, and the little crimson gem pulsed once, twice, answering a rhythm she did not know how to name. She tightened her fingers around the hilt at her hip—moonsilver always thrummed with a thin, metallic chill—and glanced sideways at Nyx. Nyx was a wrongness and a comfort all at once. Where a person should have been, there was a silhouette that drank the light. In solid form they were tall and lanky, the edges of their shadow always shifting as if wind passed through them even when the air was still. When they turned to Aurora, their voice scraped like silk across glass, a whisper that seemed to come from behind the trees rather than from the mouth she could not so much as see. “Welcome,” Nyx said, and the word rippled through the amber heat like sound through honey. “Dymas, if you like names.” For a moment she forgot to breathe. The air smelled like roasted figs and iron; thick, sugared warmth hit her chest and made the inside of her mouth water and the back of her throat ache for something she did not want. Beyond Nyx, the land unfurled—orchards massed in orderly rows only to spill into tangled wild groves, vines that wound through themselves and sprouted flowers the size of dinner plates. Grape clusters hung like lanterns, each skin translucent and veined with faint, inner light. Wind moved the leaves, and for a second Aurora thought she heard soft laughter threaded with sobs. “It's beautiful,” she said, because sometimes naming things anchored her. She felt absurdly like a student on a field trip, notebook in hand, except the lilies at her feet were the size of washbasins and moths the color of midnight circled their cups. Nyx smelled faintly of ash and rain. “Demascal vocabulary,” they replied. “Feastland, glutton. Things here bloom on appetite. Watch your pockets.” They moved forward. The ground under her boots alternated between warm loam and a stone smooth as a table top. Puddles reflected the amber sky and, when she peered in, the puddles did not show her face. Instead she saw plates set for meals that stretched away into impossible distance—silver platters like moons, heaps of meat carved so cleanly it seemed the flesh remembered being animal and appreciated being eaten. In the distance an enormous table rose like a road and vanished into a line of pillars crowned with gilded fruits. The warmth at her throat increased incrementally, a metronome that matched the prickle on her skin. The pendant, given by hand she couldn't name, thrummed as if a distant heartbeat had found resonance with her own. She caught herself touching the crescent scar on her wrist, a childish memory in flesh that somehow steadied her. She couldn't afford to be taken by the place's prettiness. She knew indulgence had teeth. They passed a vineyard where the vines hung heavy with porcelain apples. When a breeze moved through, one fell silent to the grass. It cracked open on its own and a slow, honeyed steam rose. Something small and human-shaped crawled from inside—a helbound, hair plastered to its forehead, wrists marked with rings of dull brass. Its eyes were empty, milky. It started polishing an invisible surface of air and did not see them. Aurora's throat went tight. She had seen enough to reconstruct the come-and-go of this realm: souls bound into labor, contracted like tools, their faces set into duty. The sight of a person with the same vulnerable, tired tilt to their chin made her chest drop in a way rationality could not reach. She forced the feeling down, filing it away like evidence that might be useful later. “Are they—” she began. Nyx's silhouette hunched, an almost-laugh in the folds of shadow. “Purchased hands. Earth breeds them in plenty. They come sweet and hungry. Dymas keeps them fed for the show.” A sound rose up then, threaded through the trees—a clatter of knives on bone, the low, pleased murmur of someone tasting success. The noise came from a clearing, and when they entered it the world opened into a kitchen so large Aurora's mind wanted to reassign numbers. Tables taller than houses were stacked with porcelain, and chefs—glossed with sweat and fat, their smiles too wide—worked like conductors. The air was thick with spices she could not name; something bitter slid under it like coal. An enormous spit turned of its own volition, skewering a beast that looked woven from bread and meat and glazed sugar, and from its ribs a green light pulsed in time with Aurora's pendant. She felt the pulse as a charge across her skin—a tug not of pain but of alignment. The pendant's warmth swelled into a steady flame. Her breath hitched. Nyx drifted forward, tensile shadow folding like fabric. “Belphegor likes spectacle,” they murmured. “He commissions tables that unroll for years and never end. The cooks are artists and tyrants.” Aurora moved between the tables, keeping her hands empty and her mind busy. The blade at her hip nudged her thigh occasionally, cold as a river. She liked the blade for its honesty; it told her nothing except what it did. Now, with the scent of roasted things thickening, she rested her palm on the hilt anyway. The heat from the pendant slid down into the moonsilver and the metal took it without warming, an absorption that felt like an answer but offered none. On a distant dais, a centerpiece spun. It was a bowl large as a moon, filled not with food but with reflections of faces—children, old women, men with teeth missing. They surfed the liquid surface like swimmers watching themselves, rippling with hunger. The faces turned to look at her and the sensation of being seen knifed through her ribs. For a moment later she recognized a photograph tucked into a seam of a face's memory—someone in a red scarf, laughing, a smear of flour on their cheek. The photograph lasted three beats and dissolved like sugar in tea. She had expected grotesques, but Dymas did not rely only on grotesque. It slummed its opulence with beauty: fountains of curdled milk that sang in vocal harmonies when sun struck them; hedges trimmed into chevrons and busts of princes with fruit dripping from their mouths; loaves that grew small wings and fluttered away when no one watched. The hunger here was creative, and its craft made Aurora uneasy because craft invited imitation. She imagined the same inventiveness turned to other ends and felt the shiver that came before a plan. If an appetite could be taught taste, taste could be taught to want something dangerous. They paused by a table where a lone plate sat, empty except for a tiny pile of crumbs. A second later, invisible hands assembled an entire meal from nothing—soup that rose from a steam without a pot, silverfish that folded their scales into delicate fans midair. Aurora's rational brain catalogued techniques, ingredients from names she had learned from Isolde's riddled lectures, and recipes that tasted of oath and sin. Her fingers fumbled inside a pocket and closed on a scrap of paper Isolde had pressed into them: a line of her prophecy in Isolde's riddle-grammar, something about "where the boundary thins, the stone will bleed fruit." The words seemed both warning and invitation now. Nyx dropped a tendril of shadow into a fountain and it came back wet and shimmering, not with water but with a dusting of ground star-sugar. “They entangle,” Nyx said. “A clever lure. Souls come to feast on memories of home. They stay for the praise.” Aurora swallowed. Praise was poison here. Belonging too. People who wanted to be seen would take it in the form of roast and applause until their names were engrained on skewers and sold back as seasoning. Her mouth tasted like iron. They kept moving. The deeper they went, the stranger the gardens became. Trees grew grafted to other trees, trunks braided together so the wood hummed with a subterranean song. A grove of citrus hung with lanterns; when one lantern was plucked it whistled a single perfect note and then fractured into a swarm of silver moths that settled on the shoulders of anyone nearby, their wings like cashmere and their touch like falling sleep. “Time slides here,” Nyx said, as if reminding her of the obvious. “An hour for you could be a year for the bound.” She thought of Isolde's grove—of standing stones and wildflowers that forgot to die. Here, the law was appetite. Time could be remade to feed the table. The sky, perpetual amber, bled into a horizon stitched with towers of sugar and bone. Poultry strutted like small coronations among the hedges. And somewhere deep within the orchards a bell chimed once, long and sonorous, and the sound fell into her sternum like a stone. Aurora found herself walking toward the sound until she understood she had been pulled. The bell hung not from a tower but from a tree, a bell of hammered silver whose clapper was a tooth. Beneath it an alcove had been carved, and inside the alcove somebody—someone—had left a single, unbitten apple. It was ordinary and obscene: small, dull red, flesh perfect and untouched. She reached for it because ritual is a thing humans inherit. Her hand closed around the fruit, skin warm like a palm. For a beat she understood nothing but the apple's simple fact. Then the pendant flared hot enough that she swore she felt the heat in her fingertips. The gem pulsed a third time and the warmth ran up her arm, through the crescent-scar and into the muscles at her throat. Her breath came sharp and fast. The world sharpened, colors no longer like music but like carved glass. Nyx's silhouette leaned close; their voice was almost a sigh. “You have it,” they said. “You carry a thing that remembers the Border. That apple is a calling. The farther in you go, the more the world will try to name you by what you want.” It was not a warning. It was a simple statement of law. She could feel something else then: a pressure, soft as a hand at the back of her neck, coaxing her to eat. Not hunger—something subtler, older. The feast wanted her to answer, to prove she could be tempted and tasted. Images flickered at the edge of her sight—tables that had welcomed mothers and sons and lovers, faces turned toward platters, the memory of being fed and of being loved and of being noticed until the noticing felt like breath. Aurora put the apple back. She did it because small refusals could be weapons. Because the blade at her hip hummed sympathy with the gesture. Because the crescent scar under her fingers remembered a childhood scrape and a lesson taught: survival required the ridiculous discipline of saying no. Nyx watched, not unkind. “Good,” they said. “The place learns. It catalogues, yes, but it respects the defiance in you. For now.” They turned then, shadow-slit hand folding like a cloak. A path opened where vines interlaced to form an arch. The pendant's warmth calmed to a persistent glow as if someone had left a candle burning in a window. Aurora followed, watching the way the light bent, the way the trees tilted their heads as if in curiosity. Behind them, the groves hummed and spat and sang for their own nourishment; ahead, something bigger awaited—an edifice of glazed brick and soundless laughter, the outlines of a hall reflected in the river that might be a moat or might be a mirror. She did not know the purpose of the thing they sought. She only knew the rules of her life: identify, calculate, move with care. The Fae blade at her hip confirmed the plan by the way it burned less when danger neared; Nyx's shadow confirmed it by the way they slipped ahead without moving their feet. She walked deeper into a world that looked at her and learned. The pendant at her throat beat in time with their steps. The amber sky tried to name her appetite. She tightened her fingers on the hilt of the blade and told herself she would not be named by hunger.