AI The first thing she noticed was the way the air changed.
One heartbeat, Aurora stood beneath a sagging London railway arch that smelled of diesel and damp brick. The next, the world shuddered sideways and the air hit her like she’d stepped into a kitchen moments after the oven door opened—thick, fragrant, cloyingly warm.
She staggered, boots scuffing on something that felt like stone but rang softer, almost hollow, under her soles.
“Steady,” Nyx’s voice curled around her ear like a draft, no breath, no heat. A cool hand of shadow pressed at the small of her back, more sensation than weight . “The crossing can…cling.”
Aurora blinked against a burst of amber light. The darkness under the bridge, the spray-painted brick, the glistening Thames—gone. Her stomach pitched, insisting she’d made a mistake and stepped off something solid without seeing the drop.
“Do not look back,” Isolde said, somewhere to her right. “A door that remembers you is a jealous thing.”
Aurora’s instinct was to look anyway. She ground her teeth and resisted. Forward, then.
The sky here was wrong. That was the easiest way to file it before her brain revolted. It glowed a warm, liquid amber, as if someone had poured whisky over the heavens and set a slow light burning behind it. No sun, just a diffuse brightness, like a clouded lamp. High up, threads of a darker gold moved lazily , currents or smoke or something else entirely.
She drew in a cautious breath.
It came hot and sweet, laced with scents that beat against one another: roasting meat, overripe fruit, fresh bread, some sharp metallic tang under all of it that made her tongue prickle. Her stomach clenched—not in hunger, exactly, but in reflex, like standing too close to a buffet where every thing gleams with oil.
“Where…?” Her voice came out thin. Useless question. She knew where. Hel. Dymas. Gluttony.
The word tasted absurd in her head, like something from a priest’s sermon or a metal band, not a place she could stand in, toes skimming this not-quite-stone.
“South of virtue. North of restraint,” Isolde said. Her bare feet made no sound as she moved to Aurora’s side, silver hair whispering against the pale, sleeveless fall of her dress. “Welcome to the Prince’s table.”
“The overindulgent one,” Nyx added, their outline firming as the ambient light brushed against them, trying and failing to throw a proper shadow. They remained a column of living darkness in a world saturated with gold. Their faint violet eyes were twin fractures in the silhouette.
Aurora shifted her grip on the strap of her bag. The Heartstone pendant lay warm against the hollow of her throat, heat pulsing in steady, measured beats. It had been merely warm back under the bridge. Here, it thrummed, as if answering a deeper heartbeat in the bones of this place.
She finally dared to lower her gaze from the molten sky.
Vineyards. Endless, impossible vineyards.
They rolled away from her in terraces that defied any logic she knew—curving up the sides of hills that bent back on themselves, spiraling around invisible centers, climbing, then plunging, then rising again. The vines grew thick as wrists, their bark glossy and dark, slick as if oiled. Grapes hung heavy in swollen clusters, some a familiar deep red, others a translucent jade, some the color of amethyst shot through with faint veins of light.
Between the terraces, orchards sprawled, trees fruit-laden to the point of obscenity. Pears the length of her forearm drooped, droplets of juice already pearling at their skins. Apples glowed like polished garnets. Here and there she saw stranger things: a pomegranate that bled actual, slow-moving light when it split; something like a fig that exhaled a faint mist, which curled in the air and dissolved in flashes of color.
“Oh,” she said, because there was nothing else to say.
The soundscape was wrong too. No wind, though the air pressed against her cheeks. No birdsong. Instead, behind the wall of scent, came a distant susurrus: thousands of tiny wet sounds. Bites taken. Tongues dragging. Lips smacking. Even from here, it rasped under her skin.
A path lay ahead, if it could be called that: a ribbon of pale stone—or what looked like stone—that snaked between the closest terrace walls. The surface had a faint sheen to it, like glazed ceramic, and faint depressions, as if countless feet had passed and passed again, wearing shallow beds in its length.
Aurora swallowed, flexing her fingers. Her left wrist twinged, and she glanced at the old crescent scar there, the pale reminder of a childhood bicycle crash. Ridiculous, how small it seemed. Hel, she thought, and her mind threw up the image of Evan’s knuckles, the bruise that had never quite faded from her cheek. Dymas. Different hells.
The Fae-forged blade at her belt was a cool line against her hip. Even through the fabric of her jacket, she could feel its steady cold, like compressed moonlight. She touched it briefly, not drawing it, grounding herself on the smallness of that simple, solid fact. Dagger. Hip. Belt. Aurora Carter, still Aurora Carter.
“Forward,” Isolde murmured. “Feasts do not walk to guests.”
“Ah,” Nyx said, the sound like paper rasping along stone, amused. “Depends on the feast.”
Aurora took the first step.
The path had give to it. Not much, but enough that her heel sank a hair, and there was a faint tackiness when she lifted her boot. She refused to look too closely at the surface. Stone, she decided. Glazed, maybe. Anything else…no.
Heat soaked up through her soles. Not painful—yet—but insistent. Sweat began to bead at her temples almost immediately.
“Drink?” Nyx said lightly , tilting their head toward the terraces. “We could be sociable.”
A line of silver flashed as Isolde turned slightly , pale lavender eyes half-lidded. “The first sip is free,” she said. “The second is already too late.”
“So…no.”
“As your heart screams.”
They moved.
As Aurora walked, the sense of scale warped. The first terrace wall rose on her right, tall as a building, its stones a strange mottled material between marble and fat, faintly translucent. The vines curled out from its top and face, roots embedded in the wall itself, tendrils spilling down. She realized with a start that the grapes nearest her were almost level with her shoulder. Farther along, higher up, they were the size of her head.
One cluster sagged perilously low beside the path, fruits so bloated they looked ready to burst. She stepped around, careful not to brush them.
A soft pop sounded. One grape split under its own weight , a slow arc of juice spilling down. It hit the path in a tiny splash…then began to creep, thick and glossy, gathering itself and inching toward her boot like a slug of wine.
Aurora swore under her breath and sidestepped.
“Careful,” Nyx breathed beside her ear. “It would love to know how you taste.”
She shot them a look. Their shape shimmered faintly, edges fuzzing where the ambient amber light met their shadow body. It was like watching oil refuse to mix with water.
“How are you…okay here?” she said.
Nyx’s eyes glowed a little brighter. “Hel is…adjacent.” Their not-shoulders lifted in the ghost of a shrug. “I spent three hundred years half-dislocated. This just feels like a particularly gaudy limbo.”
“Flatterers find full bellies,” Isolde said. She trailed fingertips along one vine as she passed. It recoiled from her touch, curling back, leaves folding. “This place remembers its architects, though they sleep elsewhere now.”
“Architects?” Aurora echoed , but Isolde was already gliding ahead.
The path led them between another pair of terraces, then opened suddenly onto a wider lane. Here, the vineyards broke to reveal a panorama.
Aurora stopped dead.
In the distance, the landscape unrolled like a fever dream banquet. Rivers—not water, but something thicker and richer—wound between the orchards, their surfaces catching the amber light in jewel-toned streaks: molten gold, deep burgundy, velvety black. From here she could smell them individually—honey, wine, something coffee-dark. Tiny bridges arched over them, delicate constructions of bone-white stone.
Beyond, low structures rose, built not in straight, sensible lines but in voluptuous curves. Domes swelled, plastered in something that glittered wetly. Columns twisted like pulled sugar, supporting balconies piled with platters and goblets. Smoke curled from dozens of chimneys, carrying with it ghosts of spice, char, scorched sugar.
Movement flickered every where. Figures bustled along the lanes between buildings, their forms distorted by distance and the shifting warmth in the air. Some were tall, some stunted, some hunched under impossible burdens: skewers the size of lances, slabs of meat on hooks, baskets so full of bread the loaves toppled and reformed themselves.
She could hear them now, over the chewing and sipping: laughter, shrill and booming; the clatter of pans; knives on chopping blocks; the crisp tear of bread.
“Culinary hell,” Aurora muttered. “Of course.”
Her stomach, traitorous idiot, gave a low growl. She hadn’t eaten since a pasty at noon. The idea of food now made her queasy and ravenous at once.
Nyx tilted their head as if listening to something beyond her hearing. “They’re arguing over a reduction,” they said. “And over who gets to carve the last soul on tonight’s menu.”
“Cheerful,” Aurora said.
“Honesty,” Isolde said softly , “is rarely kind. Yet it feeds.” She stepped up beside Aurora, eyes on the far-off grander structures. One in particular dominated: a massive hall, its roof an undulating series of domes like a cluster of overfilled bellies. Chains of lanterns hung from its eaves, each lantern a glass fruit with a flickering heart.
The Heartstone at Aurora’s throat flared, heat spiking.
She hissed and grabbed it through her shirt. It pulsed harder, the warmth radiating into her palm like the thud of a second heart.
Isolde’s gaze flicked to her hand. “Ah,” she said, in the tone of someone watching a puzzle piece snap into place. “The lure remembers the hook.”
“What does that mean?” Aurora asked.
“The stone knows its nursery,” Isolde replied. “The cradle and the chain are seldom far apart.”
“Comforting,” Aurora said, even as a thin thread of wonder wound through the unease. This was it, then. Whoever had slipped the pendant into her life had tied it to this place, this obscene, beautiful sprawl.
She forced her feet to move, following as Isolde led them down the broader lane. The air grew thicker with every step. Their path took them past one of the rivers. Up close, it was worse. The liquid—wine, surely wine—flowed with sluggish, viscous ripples. Faces surfaced now and then in the current, pale and blurred, mouths open as if drinking or crying out, impossible to tell which before the flow closed over them again.
Aurora kept her eyes fixed ahead.
They passed a crooked tree bent over the bank. Instead of leaves, napkins fluttered from its branches—linen, silk , paper—each one stained with a different color. As they walked by, the highest branches rustled, and a single folded square detached itself, drifting down.
It landed in front of Aurora, neatly unfolded midair. Words bloomed across it in red, wet script: A TASTE? JUST ONE?
“Nope,” she said, stepping over it.
The letters smeared, twisting, following her boots along the surface. PLEASE.
Nyx ground a heel into it with unnecessary relish. The napkin gave a small, muffled whimper and went still, color draining, becoming ordinary cloth.
“Rude,” Nyx murmured. “Every thing here just wants a little piece of you.”
Aurora licked dry lips. “They can—get in line.”
The lane curved, and with it, the world narrowed, buildings pressing closer. Here, the curved facades had windows—round, mouth-like openings without glass, curtained by hanging meats or strings of dried herbs. Voices spilled from within.
In one window, a massive chef with arms like ham hocks chopped something that looked disturbingly human-shaped, though she told herself it was just a trick of distance and the wrong color of light. In another, a thin figure in a stained apron leaned over an open mouth set into a table, spooning some glittering, grainy substance down a tongue that writhed, desperate.
The table moaned. The chef laughed, a high, keening sound.
Aurora’s fingers tightened on her bag strap until the canvas bit her palm. Her heartbeat had accelerated without asking her permission, thudding against the Heartstone’s alien rhythm.
“Remind me,” she said, voice terse, “why the hell we thought this was a good idea?”
“Your benefactordwells where appetite reigns,” Isolde said, as if discussing the weather. “You wished answers. All answers have a price. Here, the coin is…obvious.”
“And you can’t walk in Hel alone,” Nyx added. “Eat or be eaten, and all that. We will attempt the third option: observe.”
“Oh, good. I always liked being out of menu categories.”
The heat grew more oppressive . Her shirt clung to the small of her back. Around them, the smells intensified, resolving into specific things: cinnamon and charred pepper, rendered fat, blood, citrus zest, vanilla, yeast. It should have been mouthwatering. It was, in the way staring at a bonfire was beautiful right up until your skin began to blister.
They emerged abruptly into a broad courtyard before the enormous hall Aurora had seen from the heights.
Here, the ground changed. The glazed stone gave way to something darker, veined with pale lines like marble with fat marbling through it. The courtyard was ringed by low tables groaning under platters, all of them laden but untouched. Steam rose in slow, lazy curls. Goblets brimmed with jeweled liquids that never quite spilled over.
At the far end of the courtyard, the doors to the hall towered—two great slabs carved with riotous scenes of feasting. People and beasts and things in between, all mouths and bellies and reaching hands. Some of the carved eyes glinted, as if something watched from behind them.
The Heartstone kicked hard against Aurora’s chest. Pain shot along her collarbone, hot enough to draw a gasp.
“Aurora,” Nyx murmured, their hand—cool, shadowy—closing around her elbow. “Your little trinket is excited.”
“Good for it,” she said through her teeth. “I’m…not.”
Isolde turned to face her fully now, silver hair spilling down her back like liquid mercury. Up close, in the rich light, Aurora could see the faint, inhuman undertone to her skin, the almost opalescent sheen.
“You asked for a path,” Isolde said. Her eyes were very clear, very old. “The path ends, for now, at that door. Beyond, the Prince’s domain. Kitchens. Archives. Ledgers of bargains bound in hunger and ink. Perhaps a note in the margin with your name.”
Aurora swallowed. Her mouth tasted of salt and copper.
“And the price?” she asked.
Isolde’s lips curved, not quite a smile. “In a house of gluttony, payment rarely leaves the tongue untouched.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is every answer.” Isolde tipped her head toward the hall. “The more you bite, the more you owe. Ask wisely. Taste carefully .”
Nyx leaned in, violet eyes a little brighter, voice a little lower. “We don’t have to go in now. We can…linger. Observe more. Turn back. Your world still waits…for now.”
Aurora looked past them, letting the world soak in again.
The amber sky, pulsing like liquid light.
The impossible vineyards, heavy with fruit that shifted and glowed.
The rivers of not-quite-wine sliding by, faces drowning in their own want.
The tables in the courtyard, perfectly set, eternally steaming, waiting with the patience of predators.
Her pendant, beating hot against her, called home.
Her hand drifted, unbidden, to the cold hilt at her hip. The Fae blade’s chill sank into her skin, quiet and pure and clean in a place of excess.
Wonder and horror twisted together in her chest until she couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. She had run from fists and slammed doors and the small, grinding cruelties of an ordinary man, and somehow ended up at the threshold of a Prince’s dining hall in Hel.
“Turn back?” she repeated, mostly to herself. The thought was a relief and an ache. Go back to the Golden Empress, to deliveries and narrow streets and damp London nights. Pretend Hel and Fae and shadows were someone else’s problem again.
She exhaled slowly , the hot, spiced air burning down her throat.
No. Too late for pretending.
“We go in,” Aurora said.
Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, too steady for the way her fingers trembled where they brushed the dagger. But the path behind her felt thinner now, half-forgotten already, like the taste of a meal from long ago.
Isolde’s gaze flicked once to the Heartstone, then back to her face. “Then step, Carter,” she murmured. “And mind what hungers. Not all of them wear fangs.”
Nyx’s laugh was a soft scrape. “After you,” they said.
Aurora squared her shoulders, tasted fear bright and sour at the back of her tongue, and walked toward the carved doors as the alien sky of Dymas burned amber above her, watching.