Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQSZ159JVMEEX12J9BYZNH

The air changed the moment they stepped through. Rory felt it first in her lungs—a warmth that tasted of honey and overripe fruit, sweet enough to make her teeth ache. The shimmer they'd passed through, that faint distortion Nyx had found folded into the shadows beneath Waterloo Bridge, sealed itself behind them with a sound like a sigh. She turned to look. Nothing but a wall of amber light, seamless and vast, stretching upward into a sky that had no business being that color. "It's warm," she said, stupidly. She'd expected Hel to be cold. Or hot in the fire-and-brimstone way her mother's Sunday school lessons had always promised. Not this—not a sky the color of late afternoon sun filtered through a jar of marmalade, not a breeze that carried the scent of roasting meat and cardamom and something darker underneath, something fermented and rich. "Dymas," Nyx whispered. Their voice was what it always was—wind through a cracked window—but here it sounded thinner, stretched. Rory glanced at them. In the amber light, Nyx's form seemed more solid than she'd ever seen it, the edges of their silhouette sharper, their violet eyes burning brighter against the living shadow of their body. They stood very still, and if a being made of darkness could look afraid, they did. "I had hoped she was wrong." Isolde had not been wrong. She was never wrong, exactly. She just made you wish she had been. Rory's hand went to the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone pulsed against her collarbone, warm and steady as a second heartbeat. It had been doing that since they'd approached the rift point—gentle at first, then insistent, a drumbeat pulling her forward. Now it seemed satisfied, its rhythm settling into something almost smug. She wanted to rip it off. "Don't," Nyx said, catching the movement. "It's the only thing marking you as something other than a meal in this place." "Comforting." She let her hand drop. They stood on a ridge overlooking a valley that shouldn't have been possible. It rolled out beneath them like something from a fever dream painted by a Renaissance master who'd lost his mind—terraced vineyards cascading down hillsides of dark soil, the vines heavy with fruit in colors she had no names for. Not purple, not red, not gold, but something that existed in the spaces between those colors, shifting when she tried to focus. Orchards dotted the middle distance, their trees enormous, gnarled, hung with lanterns that burned without flame. And beyond them, far below and sprawling across the valley floor, a city. No—not a city. A market. A feast. A living, breathing monument to appetite. Long tables stretched between pavilions of draped silk, laden with platters and tureens and towers of food so elaborate they looked architectural. Figures moved between them—some humanoid, some decidedly not. She could hear them from here, even at this distance: laughter, the clatter of cutlery, music played on instruments that produced sounds just slightly off from anything she'd heard before, as though someone had taken a violin and a human voice and braided them together. "We need to move," Nyx said. "Standing on a ridgeline in Dymas is an invitation." "An invitation to what?" "Dinner." They paused. "As the main course." Rory pulled the Fae-forged blade from where she'd tucked it into her belt, the leaf-shaped dagger catching the amber light with a reluctant gleam. Moonsilver. It was always cold in her hand, cold enough to ground her, to remind her that she was real and solid and mortal in a place that seemed designed to make her forget all three. Isolde had pressed it into her palm that morning in the Grove, her lavender eyes distant with something that might have been pity. "The blade will cut what the blade must cut," the Seer had said, which was precisely the kind of unhelpful thing Isolde always said. Then she'd added, quieter: "Do not eat anything, Aurora. Not a seed. Not a crumb. Not a single drop." Rory gripped the hilt and started down the slope. The soil was soft beneath her boots, darker than any earth she'd seen, almost black, and warm. Living warmth, as though something pulsed beneath the surface. The vineyard rows closed around them quickly, the vines thicker than her arm, coiling around trellises made of some pale bone-like material she chose not to examine too closely. The fruit hanging in heavy clusters gave off a scent that hit her like a physical thing—sweet and complex, layered with notes she could almost taste on the air alone. Her mouth watered. Her stomach, empty since that morning, clenched with a hunger so sudden and sharp it made her stumble. "Keep walking," Nyx said from somewhere to her left. They were doing that thing they did—sliding between the shadows cast by the vine rows, their form flickering in and out of visibility like a skipped frame in a film reel. "The vineyards are designed to do that. Dymasian agriculture is an art form. The fruit doesn't just appeal to hunger. It creates it." "You could have mentioned that before we walked into one." "I could have. But you needed to feel it to guard against it." She gritted her teeth and pushed forward. The Heartstone pulsed, and she tried to match her breathing to its rhythm—in and out, steady, real. The hunger receded to a dull roar. It didn't leave. They emerged from the vineyard onto a path of crushed stone that wound downhill toward the first of the orchards. Here the trees were massive, their canopies spreading wide and dense, leaves in a deep emerald that seemed to drink the amber light and give back something richer. She could see the fruit now—globes the size of grapefruits, their skins translucent, revealing the flesh inside in swirls of color like trapped sunlight. One hung low enough to brush her shoulder as she passed. The skin was warm and it hummed, the faintest vibration, as though something inside it was alive. She jerked away. "Good instincts," Nyx murmured. A sound reached them from further down the path. Not the distant revelry of the feast-market, but something closer—rhythmic, deliberate. Chopping. The steady thock-thock-thock of a blade meeting a cutting board. They rounded a bend and found a clearing. A broad stone table sat at its center, rough-hewn and ancient, stained with the evidence of ten thousand meals. Behind it stood a figure—human, or close enough. A man, thick-armed and sweating despite the pleasant warmth, wearing a stained leather apron. His hands moved with mechanical precision, reducing a pile of unfamiliar vegetables into perfect brunoise. He didn't look up. "You'll want to keep to the left fork," he said. His accent was Northern. Manchester, maybe. "The right takes you straight into the competition grounds. They'll have you peeling something before you can say your own name." Rory stopped. "You're human." "Was." Thock-thock-thock. "Still am, depending on who you ask and what you mean by it." He glanced up, finally. His eyes were ordinary brown, tired, and very old in a face that looked no more than forty. "Helbound. Sous chef to Belphegor's third kitchen. Twenty-seven years left on my contract." He looked at the blade in her hand, then at the pendant at her throat, then at the space where Nyx flickered in and out of the shadows. His expression didn't change. "You lot aren't supposed to be here." "We're looking for something," Rory said. "Everyone in Dymas is looking for something. Usually it's the next meal." He set down his knife—a massive thing, well-used and lovingly maintained—and wiped his hands on his apron. "That pendant. Where did you get it?" The Heartstone pulsed, harder now, almost urgent. She covered it with her hand. "I don't know." The chef studied her for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression—not recognition, exactly, but a kind of grim understanding. "Left fork," he said again, picking up his knife. "And when you reach the fountain at the crossroads, don't drink from it. Don't touch the water. Don't even look at it for too long." "What happens if we do?" "You forget what you came for. And then you're hungry. And then—" He brought the knife down. Thock. "—you're one of us." Rory nodded, once. "Thank you." He was already cutting again, his eyes fixed on the board, his movements precise and endless. She wondered how many travelers he'd warned. She wondered how many had listened. They took the left fork. The path descended into a grove of trees older than the others, their trunks twisted into shapes that suggested faces, limbs, reaching hands. The lanterns here burned a deeper amber, almost red, and the shadows they cast were long and strange. Nyx moved closer to her, their form compacting into something almost fully solid, a tall dark figure at her shoulder. "This place remembers," they said softly. "Remembers what?" "Everything anyone has ever wanted." A pause, and when they spoke again, their wind-whisper voice carried something ancient and raw. "I have been between realms for nearly four hundred years. I have slipped through shadows in places mortals cannot name. But I have never been here. Aldric—" They stopped. The name hung in the air, unexpected, and Rory knew without being told that it was the first time they had spoken it in a very long time. "The man I was would have been destroyed by this place. It feeds on want, Aurora. Every kind." She looked at them—really looked, past the shadow and the violet eyes, to whatever remained underneath. "What do you want, Nyx?" They were quiet for a long time. "To go back," they said at last. "To the moment before the ritual. To choose differently." Their form flickered. "But Dymas doesn't offer what you need. Only what you crave." The Heartstone pulsed three times in quick succession, then went still. Ahead of them, through a break in the trees, she could see it—a fountain carved from black stone, water cascading in ribbons that caught the amber light and turned it to liquid gold. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She kept her eyes on her boots and walked past it without stopping.