Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR6F00V7DDNM3GGGQY6PVA

The tear in the air opened like a mouth, a thin, trembling seam in the underbrush that smelled faintly of iron. Aurora felt the pendant press warm against her sternum as if it sought the seam with its own small pulse. Light bled from the gap—no colors she could name, just a wash of amber that made her pupils smart—and beyond it the world tilted. She had expected something theatrical. Instead the Veil undulated and emptied them into a vast valley under a sky the color of old honey. The light there wasn't sunlight; it was an indulgence, soft and thick, blotting the edges of things and throwing everything into a gilded, endless afternoon. Vineyards rolled like sleeping beasts. Trees bowing with fruit dipped low over paths paved in seeds. The air tasted of sugar and citrus, of warm bread and something darker that clung to the back of her throat: a tang of copper and smoke. Aurora blinked, and the pendant flared. Not warm now, but a small, urgent beat against her ribs. The silver chain caught the amber light and threw a red mote across her palm. She had no map for this. She had only the blade at her hip—Isolde had given it to her in the grove, an elegant leaf of moonsilver that was always cold—and a name that still felt like a foreign script when she said it aloud: Dymas. She had read the wardens' archived scraps about rifts and sins and the Veil's behavior around solstices. Those were cautionary footnotes. Here, the rules of the world rearranged themselves without consulting her. Nyx was the first to move, their silhouette folding and refolding like smoke in a breeze. In solid form they stood taller than she did, taller than she could have imagined, a column of shadow threaded with faint violet like a starless sky. Their voice was a sound that slid over leaves and embers. "Hungry place," they said. "Hunger dressed as abundance." Isolde moved last, ghost-silver hair loose around her shoulders, robes that drank the amber light and left no footprints. Aurora had watched the Fae step into the Grove in Richmond Park and become part of its hush; now Isolde drew in the valley's light like a drink and exhaled a riddle. "Where trees bear teeth," she said, like someone naming a child, "you'll learn how to eat carefully." They walked, and the ground itself seemed to lean toward them. Paths unfurled like the hem of a gown, bordered by hedges that bore tiny, laughing mouths between their leaves. A brook gurgled, not with water but with a syrup so viscous it moved like molten glass; when a drop struck a stone it sang a note that made Aurora's molars ache. Overhead, birds the size of cats with plumage like candied peel perched in branches, preening themselves with servile, glassy eyes. Their calls were not birdsong but the clink of cutlery on crystal. Every taste was doubled here: sweetness that skirted the edge of nausea, beauty that tasted of iron. To the left, a grove of pomegranates the size of pumpkins split like small suns when the wind passed through them, spilling seed-pearls that rolled and rolled and never quite stopped. To the right, vines coiled thick as ropes, hung with fruit whose skins shimmered with a faint, inner glow. One brushed Aurora's sleeve; the skin yielded to her touch as if tested, and for a blink she could smell a kitchen she had worked in on cold London nights—Yu-Fei's restaurant: garlic, ginger, the clamor of pick-up orders—and then the scent curdled into something like pleading. "This place doesn't taste like home," Rory said, hearing her own voice small among all that abundance. She felt ridiculous and unmoored. The veil had thinned for them, but Dymas had a gravity that was not the world's. Nyx's shadow fingers traced a line over a stone wall carved with reliefs—banquets etched in bas-relief, plates stacked like towers, faces turned upward in rapture. Their faint violet eyes caught on something smaller: figures in the frieze with their mouths sewn, or with masks of old coin. "Contracts," Nyx breathed. "Signatures dressed in sugar." Isolde paused before a fountain from which a dark, syrupy liquid flowed. She dipped a finger into it, let the stream slide between her skin, and smiled somewhere only Aurora could see. "Promises keep you fat if you're willing to be lithe with truth," she remarked. Her voice was honey and ice. "The fat here remembers everything." They kept walking. The pendant's pulse quickened into a steady thudding, as if it beat in sympathy with some enormous, unseen heart. Aurora could no longer pretend to be a part-time delivery person winding through London's narrow backstreets. The pendant's heat seeped into her palm; the silver chain hummed against her collarbone. An indescribable ache rose under her sternum—not fear, exactly, but a pressure that made her think of a throat being gently squeezed. A banquet hall loomed like a landed whale. Its doors were not so much doors as open mouths of carved oak, flanked by columns hewn into clasped hands. Inside, the air was warmer still, laced with spices she'd never learned to name. Long tables ran like rivers through the hall, heaving under platters piled high with impossible things: birds braided with pastry, candied roots woven into crowns, loaves the size of shields studded with jewels that made the light wink. At the far end the table curved and narrowed, where a shadow of a throne waited like a patient tooth. People crowded the hall—if one could call them people. Many had the familiar shape of human bodies, but their eyes were glazed or hollow, their mouths full of silverware they would never chew. A woman carved the fruit with a fork and did not taste it. A man in tattered finery laughed in a way that sounded like a kettle boiling; he rolled grapes across his tongue like marbles. The grotesque sat beside the exquisite without shame. Waitstaff with faces like watches moved in precise, mechanical loops, their hands steady as they refilled goblets that never emptied. Aurora felt a cold of recognition: hunger masquerading as plenty. There was beauty, yes, and flourish. But even that beauty had a seam. The more she watched, the more she noticed the way the guests leaned, always toward the center, like moths to a lamp. There was a magnetism here, a pull that made the limbs of the hall reach inward. Isolde's footsteps made no sound, no dip in the flouring dust. She moved to the table's edge and let her fingers skim a platter. "They say he eats the debts," she whispered, because she could not lie and yet could mislead as deftly as any seamstress. "Belphegor eats what people owe him. He is patient. Patient like yeast." Nyx's form tightened, shadows clinging to them like wet cloth. "And when the bread is baked from debts," they said, voice softer than the scrape of a spoon, "the crust remembers the hands that kneaded it." Their eyes slid to Aurora. "You carry a little warmth for that door. It hums." Warmth thrummed against Aurora's ribs until it felt like a separate heartbeat. Her free hand went back to rest on the hilt of the moonsilver blade. It was always cold. In the hall's warmth it felt like her only true anchor. She pulled it free and the metal sighed; a breath of moonlight seemed to surface along its length. When she cut the air near the braids of ivy that dangled from the ceiling, they parted as if surprised to be cut. The blade made a sound like breaking ice. A child—no older than ten, in clothes too fine for his age—came forward, dragging behind him a tray heavy not with food but with letters folded and sealed in wax. He looked at Aurora as if he had always known her name; his eyes were a pale, dull green, and there were lines of something that could be tears or candle wax tracked down his cheeks. "Guests," he said, voice a scratch on parchment. "Do you have paper to fill for the banquet?" Aurora's throat closed. "No," she said, which was true, and the word seemed to offend some invisible host. The pendant on her chest pulsed so hard she could feel it through fabric. The child smiled without humor and offered her a quill as if this were a matter of course. Every face turned, for a sliver of time, not to the throne but toward her. The room's hum shifted, like a chord bending. Isolde had already stepped between Aurora and the child, placing a hand on the boy's shoulder that left no indent in his garb and no mark on the floor. "We keep no ledgers in our pockets," she said, and the sentence was riddle enough. "We eat, we speak, we go. Sometimes the debt is language." Nyx moved like smoke around the table. They collected shadows in their hands and let them spill along the floor. The shadows uncurled and reached toward the guests, touching cheeks, stroking forearms, but the guests barely noticed. Nyx's fingers brushed the hem of the banquet cloth and drew from it something fine—a thread that vibrated with a tone like distant bells. "Ties," Nyx said. "They braid obligations into cloth and call it hospitality." Somewhere deep in the hall, a low laughter unfurled, patient and slow. It sounded like someone unwrapping a fruit with a hundred layers. Aurora felt the pendant answer, as if some distant organ of the place throbbed in an old rhythm. She edged forward despite the way her knees trembled. The blade at her hip was a cool, righteous thing; it felt wrong to bring violence into a place that celebrated abundance. And yet abundance here tasted like entrapment. She reached toward a platter of glistening fruit, hands steady because of the blade's cold. When she took one, the flesh gave with a sound like silk tearing. The moment the fruit touched her tongue, the hall swam. Colors deepened like bruises. The joy around the table became a pressure, a mood that bent toward possession. Faces softened into pleading. Laughter pressed against her teeth like sugar stuck to a roof. She spat the fruit into her hand, and the juice that streamed over her palm was not juice but a thin ribbon of ink—black with dust. It smelled of letters, of obligations written and forgotten. Nyx's fingers closed around it and it coiled into nothing. Isolde's eyes, pale lavender, reflected the room back to itself without distortion. "There is sweetness for a price," she said. "Here the world trades in full plates and empty pockets." A movement at the far end of the hall made them all turn. The throne's shadow shifted. At once the guests inhaled as if to take a collective taste. The air tightened, like an elastic band pulled taut. Aurora felt the pendant's pulse flatten into a single strong beat. Her mouth went dry. "We came to see," she said aloud, though she didn't quite know what she had hoped to see. The pendant had led her this far, led them past the stones that marked the Valley's border. Maybe she had thought she would find an answer there, something small and concrete: a name, a face, a contract to tear up. Isolde watched the throne with an expression that gave nothing away. "Every banquet is an altar when someone's appetite is sharp enough," she said. "Choices begin to taste like ornamentation." Nyx slid a hand along the table and brought away a place setting that was not for a living mouth: a silver knife that hummed with old, satisfied songs. When they held it, the room's light seemed to swallow a little. "Belphegor notices new teeth," Nyx whispered. "And likes them polished." The throne rose then, as if pulled by strings, a slow, deliberate lifting that made Aurora's stomach lurch. It was not empty. Someone—something—sat and folded a hand across their lap. The figure was more shadow than flesh, and yet around it the light refracted into appetites. It regarded the small group like a diner listening for a new story. "You shouldn't be here," the voice that came did not so much speak as press against their bones. It read like an advertisement and a threat at once. Aurora felt the blade in her hand go colder still. She could feel Isolde's heartbeat near her, steady and ancient; she could feel Nyx's shadow pooling at her boots, protective and hungry in its own way. She swallowed, and the pendant pulsed one last, urgent time. The hall leaned closer, its weight pressing against the space between breaths. Aurora thought of back alleys and Yu-Fei's kitchens, of the flat above Silas' bar with its sagging couch and the small crescent scar at her wrist. She thought of promises, and of the little acts that added up to a life. Her voice came small, but it held like a key. "We're guests," she said. It was a truth, and not a lie, and in this hall such distinctions were currency. The figure on the throne smiled with mouths that had no need for lips. "Guests," it echoed. "Then taste, and talk, and tell me what you owe." Around them the valley breathed in amber and warmed, all the while patient, waiting to see what they'd answer.