Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQZDX63JJYK19GP7Y9FG7W

The rip in the air folded like a seam. One moment the grove was a ring of ancient oak bones and wildflowers that owed nothing to season; the next it was a bruise of amber light and a smell so sweet it made Aurora's teeth ache. The Heartstone at her throat thudded against her collarbone, a thumbnail of crimson that pulsed in time with some slow, hungry heartbeat beneath the sky. She had expected cold, or a smell of metal, or the sterile sting of some ward. Instead there was abundance everywhere: vines knotted across terraces, leaves like coins, fruit swollen as if they'd swallowed whole orchards. Grapes the color of sunset clustered heavy on low trellises; olives glinted like polished jet; figs split to show inner glows. Air tasted of caramel and citrus peel and the oily perfume of frying things. Bees the size of her palm blinded themselves glittering in a blossom-threaded hedge. Nyx moved through that light like smoke through fingers, their silhouette hiccupping between presence and absence. In solid form they stood taller than Aurora, a man-shaped dark that drank the amber and gave back only violet in the hollows where eyes should be. Their voice arrived on a breeze—less a sound than the memory of a sound. "Warm as a mother's oven," Nyx said, and the words carried a smile that never touched anything human. Isolde walked ahead of them, as if she were simply another shadow cast by the trees. Her silver hair fell like moonlight behind her; she left no footprints. The standing stones at the grove's edge had been cool when Aurora touched them, carved with weather's patience; now one was a pillar of polished bone that hummed under Isolde's palm. The Seer closed her eyes and the grove shivered. "Where plenty feeds itself, appetite writes its own rules," Isolde murmured, her speech folded into the pattern of riddles Aurora had learned to unpack slowly. "Listen for the table's echo—every chair has a hunger." Aurora kept her hand on the Fae-forged blade strapped at her hip. Moonsilver went cold through her palm even in the heat that rolled off the terraces. The dagger never warmed; it was like holding a sliver of night. That cold steadied her more than the pendant's warmth. She was not a reckless woman—she had a history of measuring exits, of cataloguing threats into neat bins—but the world that unfolded was not calculable in the metrics she knew. Her brain kept hunting for analogues and finding none: it felt like stepping into a painting that had started to taste. They moved down a slope cut with orchards. Table-sized shrubs bowed under clusters of something that looked like pomegranates but opened like little bellows, releasing a muffled sigh when a breeze ran through. Tiny fruit-sprites—if Aurora could commit to the word—darted between branches, carrying candles and measuring spoons as if they were clerks. Helbound souls trailed through the avenues on their way to work, faces slack with a servitude that was less labor than breath. Their eyes were hollowed not by cruelty but by a different pact: they wore aprons embroidered with unfamiliar sigils and carried platters lacquered in sugar that drifted in ribbons across the path, dissolving into the dust. Someone set a platter on a low stone and it seemed to multiply. Pastries unfurled like flowers, shells of sugar cracking to pour molten creams; meats gleamed with a lacquer that captured that amber sky and threw it back. Conversation slipped from the tiers of a far-off dining room: a clinking like a conspiracy of spoons, a murmur of voices praising textures, an occasional moan that might have been bliss or the sound of someone remembering their old life in the echo of a spoon. "Belphegor's market," Nyx said. They drifted closer to a stall, and in the shade between two columns of grapevines Aurora could see something written on a hanging tag: contracts, small parchment slips threaded to hooks like price tags. When a merchant plucked one down and read, his face unfurled in a smile that did not reach his eyes. The slip was not a price; it was a name. "These are not debts," Isolde said in the low riddle-voice that sounded like wind through silver leaves. "They are recipes for staying. A line for a lifetime, folded and stamped with a masterchef's seal." Aurora suddenly felt very small. She moved closer, drawn by that combination of terror and curiosity that had always driven her—ever since Cardiff, ever since London, ever since nights spent learning to read a room for exits. Her hand tightened on the Heartstone so hard that the chain squealed. The pendant warmed into a steady flare, a little sun caught in silver. It pulsed faster when she passed the stall. When she leaned, an entry in the merchant's ledger shivered; fumes of a spice she could almost place—cardamom and smoke—rose and made her eyes water. "No one's name is mine yet," Aurora said. She could not tell if she was stating a fact or bargaining with fate. Her voice sounded small under the great cookery of the place. Isolde tilted her head. Her pale lavender eyes, oddly young amidst agelessness, regarded Aurora like a person reading a single thread of tapestry. "There are things that choose you," she said. "You may think yourself unlisted, child of lawyer and teacher, but paper is patient. It keeps waiting for the day your hunger will answer." She folded her hands so their palms were invisible; under her thumb a leaf trembled and left no mark in the dust. Nyx hummed, which in their case was a sound like fabric rubbing. "The pendant wants the boundary," they said. Their eyes—those faint violet stars—blinked. "Hel likes a human's name affixed to a bowl. It makes the taste." The thought scraped along the inside of Aurora's throat. She had fled before, taken refuge in a flat above a bar and in a route that could fit in the back of a delivery van. She had learned to keep lists of who could be trusted. But this place ate lists and wrote its own. The sense of being catalogued, of being a potential ingredient in someone else's course, put a prickle along her spine. They left the market and followed a path paved with shells of caramelized sugar. The landscape leaned toward the monumental. Vines rose into arbors that assembled into archways the size of cathedrals; fountains ran with something that vaporized at the surface into an aroma like roasted quince. Beyond those arches lay a hall—an open courtyard with a table longer than a city block and chairs carved from a single great bone. Chefs paraded along it like generals, gleaming knives in hands that were steady and beautifully manicured. They moved with a choreography Aurora had only imagined in the rehearsal of late-night cooking shows: hands that could portion a single grain of salt as if it were a jewel. The longer table glittered with dishes impossible in origin: soups that reflected sky rather than surface; breads that exhaled steam in the pattern of distant lullabies; jellies that turned to smoke and a dozen memories as you swallowed. The scene was so extravagant it became obscene, and Aurora's stomach clenched without registering hunger. There was too much. The way the world piled abundance upon abundance didn't make it generous; it made it heavy. They found, at the head of that table, a room where the air was thicker. The Heartstone's pulse leapt. For a moment Aurora could not hear anything but the beat against her chest—the little drum of blood—and the vibration of the pendant. She had no proof of why the object had heat at its center, only the fact that it grew alive in this place. Isolde halted at the threshold and put one hand out, not touching but near the carved bone. "Names are marinated in promises," she said. "There is a seasoning of contracts. You will smell it. You will want to taste justice but remember: justice rendered by a prince of gluttony comes salted with bargains." Nyx stepped forward, not showing fear but moving with that peculiar confidence of things that do not fear consequence. Their shadow extended across the tabletop like ink across vellum. "And Belphegor?" Nyx's whisper slid through the air. "He is a gourmand with a crown. He will not waste a good dish or a good debt." At the name, the air shifted. Not wind, exactly—more like a change in attention. Somewhere beyond the corridor the murmur of diners slowed. A choir of spoons paused mid-chorus. Even the bees seemed to hush. It was as if someone had turned a giant's head toward them. Aurora thought of Evan with a flash that was sharp enough to burn: the way closeness had felt like being paced at a border until she learned to hold her lines and step past. Being watched here was not the same as being watched by a person who wanted to control a life; this gaze felt like a census. It catalogued molecules, appetite, desire. It would not be satisfied by a refusal. She slipped her fingers under the Heartstone for a second and felt the warmth move like an answering pulse into her wrist. The old crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist prickled as if the skin beneath it recognized a chord. A memory slid into place—standing before a window in Cardiff, rain on the sill, older father voice like a knife; the pendant's giver forgotten but their choice tangible in the object's weight. Aurora tightened her grip on the Fae blade until the moonsilver bit a cold line into her palm. The cold was a clean line between her and something. Isolde turned to her and, for once, did not riddle. "The blade will cut promises," she said plainly. "It will not cut consequences. Know the distinction." "Can it cut Belphegor?" Aurora asked—because cold steel seemed a ridiculously small answer to a realm that devoured promises. Isolde's mouth tilted. "Belphegor cannot be carved like meat. But he tastes of fear and favors. The blade will let you open a seam. How you sew it back is another matter." Nyx inclined their head toward a ledger propped against a tap-stand. It was bound in skin that was not human—darker, like bark—and the chords that bound it pulsed faintly in rhythm with Aurora's pendant. The pages inside did not smell of paper; they smelt of oven-door steam and something like memory. Nyx drifted closer, their fingers passing through the air as if through steam. They closed around the ledger's edge and a sound like an old page sighed. "Look," Nyx breathed. Their eyes, those violet pinpricks, reflected words. "Bindings. Recipes for holding—names, dates, spices of the soul." Aurora leaned. The first page she could see had a list of offerings—a bird, a rare salt, a debt in favor. But as she scanned, breath pruning itself to careful lines, she found notation in a hand that made the skin at the back of her neck prickle. There were initials, a looped scrawl she would have thought nowhere—A. C. Her own initials, not a stranger's. A small and ridiculous laugh burst from her like breaking glass. "Stop," she told herself. "Names are easy to find. People sign things every day." But the Heartstone flared hot as if someone had set a match to the silver chain. Isolde's hand brushed Aurora's wrist. The touch left no mark. "A name is a sauce; it marinates. Perhaps someone has left you an invitation. Perhaps someone has plated you." "Who would—" Aurora's throat closed. She could not name the face that would do such a thing. The unknown benefactor who had given her the pendant stayed nameless like a god choosing a favourite. The doubt was a slippery thing; it could mean protection or it could mean bait. Nyx closed the ledger with a sound like velvet. "You are noted," they said. "Whether they meant to note you down as an ingredient or a guest remains to be hung." Their hand moved through the air and the violet in their eyes bled into the shadows, as if in that liquid they could unbind pages without fingers. A gust moved along the table, and with it came the sense of being evaluated. Plates turned like heads. Something beyond the terrace gave a long, satisfied sound—neither laughter nor growl but something with the memory of both. Aurora swallowed. Her voice was steadier than she felt. "We came to see," she said. "We are seeing." "Seeing is the first course," Isolde replied. "Taste sparingly." They turned away from the hall, the ledger clutched by Nyx as if it were both prize and poison. The market swallowed them back into its alleyways—less garish now, the excess a second skin. As they walked, Aurora catalogued: the way leaves of certain trees looked like spoons; the steady, mechanical gait of helbound porters; the strings of jars that caught the sun and glowed faintly with preserved earlier twilights. She noted the way her pendant throbbed in a rhythm that was not hers and wondered if, when she slept, it would hum louder and pull dreams out of her the way a skimmer pulls cream. When they reached the grove again, the standing stones were once more weathered and kind; the wildflowers trembled in a breeze that was sentimental and small. The Fae Grove's air made their lungs feel like new instruments. Time unraveled itself. The amber sky knifed behind them like an afterimage and then was gone. Isolde stepped through the seam first and left no footprints on the packed earth of Richmond. Nyx paused on the lip of the rift, their shadow a soft wave. "We may have eaten course one," they said. "Or we may have had a sample." Aurora looked back over her shoulder. In the rift the amber sky still glowed like a fever lamp. She felt as if she had left a piece of herself on that long table, a tiny thread that might be tugged at by hands that liked to collect names. Her hand went to the Heartstone and felt the warmth sink into the skin of her chest. It was not only a charm now; it was a map with a single bright point. Whoever had given it to her—guardian or trap—had also given a key. Isolde's voice brushed her ear, a low riddle she could not ignore: "There are doors you open and doors that open you. Remember which is which, Aurora Carter. Otherwise you will be eaten by invitations." Outside the grove, the world smelled of rain and city and the faint grease of a bar downstairs. Above the smells was the small, ordinary sound of time passing: a tram's distant sigh, a dog barking. Aurora held both worlds between her ribs like two small birds and wondered which one would learn to fly first.