Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR8GCSE6ENWNKYFAJAT28Q

The wildflowers shouldn’t have been blooming. They breathed anyway, their petals sighing open and shut in a rhythm that made Aurora’s skin prickle. Moonlight hung above Richmond Park like a pale coin lodged in the throat of the sky, and the clearing smelled of damp earth and something cleaner, like new snow. The ancient oaks that made the circle stood as they always had—gnarled, muscled with age, their bark crowded with lichen—but when Rory broke the line between two trunks, the air caught against her cheeks and went thin. “Step light,” Isolde murmured without moving her lips. She had hair like poured silver and eyes the soft purple of bruised crocus petals. Her bare feet brushed the grass and left nothing behind. “The hour bites true.” “I hate it when time has teeth,” Rory said before she could stop herself. Her voice sounded different, dulled to a whisper. Heat gathered at her breastbone. The Heartstone pendant warmed through the fabric of her jacket, a polite throb that steadied her like a metronome. She touched it with two fingers and felt it pulse harder, as if the clearing itself had leaned closer to listen. The dagger Isolde had pressed into her palm weeks ago lay cold against her hip, its moonsilver hilt always as frigid as river stones in winter. Fae blade. Her thumb kept finding the fine edge of its guard when she wasn’t thinking about it. “Do we have a plan?” Rory asked. “Or are we just—” “Wandering into temptation,” Nyx finished, their voice the hush of wind through a keyhole. They hung back among the longer shadows pressing in around the stones, taller than Rory by a half-head in the moment they chose a body. Their silhouette had shoulders and a throat and hands that could hold, but their edges blurred and went thin where the darkness deepened. When they lifted their head, faint violet light stirred behind what might have been eyes. “A plan is a paper umbrella in rain. Hold it if it comforts you.” “I’ll take any umbrella going,” Rory said. The breath she let out smoked in the cold. She glanced once over her shoulder, to where the park path should have been. The trunks were nearer and farther all at once, their arrangement unhelpful. An hour inside, Isolde had warned, could be minutes or days outside. Rory had left her phone on her pillow for the first time since she’d fled Cardiff. No pinging little lifelines. Just a necklace that warmed like a swallowed ember and a blade that kept telling her to hold tighter. Isolde raised a hand. A ripple moved through the clearing, as natural as heat over tarmac. It rolled like light off glass and hung there, a shimmer just at the edge of seeing, the world behind it warped the way a spoon warps your reflection. The spaces between the trees lined up like a hallway. “It is thin tonight,” Isolde said, with a satisfaction that never reached her face. “The shortest sun makes the longest reach.” Rory swallowed. “If this goes wrong—” “You’ll know,” Nyx said. That was not comforting. Rory shifted her weight and thought of the radius of her scar, the crescent that curved pale on her left wrist. She had got it when she was nine, catching herself on a broken kitchen tile. She remembered blood and the reek of bleach and her mother’s tea cooling on the table. And she remembered, absurdly, feeling embarrassed because the cut had made it look like she’d tried and failed at something more dramatic. The memory anchored her. She looked at Isolde’s back—straight, untouchable—and stepped through the shimmer. Her ears popped as if she’d climbed fast. Heat rolled up and over her. The smell hit her first: nectar and roasted sugar, wine so old it had gone medicinal, spices she didn’t have names for—wet cardamom, pepper that numbed the gums, something sharp as grated citrus peel. It layered on her tongue, insisting, and underneath it, the damp mineral musk of turned soil. Wind moved and it was like standing by restaurant vents, steam meat-sweet and yeasty pouring into a cold street. She blinked. The sky burned deep amber, spilled and held. No sun, not exactly; the light came from everywhere at once, syrup-thick. Vines ran in neat soldiers’ lines over the hills, their leaves as big as dinner plates, green so alive it glared. Grapes as long as her forearm hung in frosted ropes. Orchards unfurled to the left: trees furred with blossoms and fruit at the same time, fat pears splitting their own seams, oranges sweating oil that caught the light. Bees drifted, their bodies faceted like cut glass, their hum taut as piano wire. When they brushed a blossom, dust glittered off like thrown sugar. Rory’s boot sank half an inch. She looked down. The path beneath her soles was not dirt. It was pressed herbs—rosemary, mint, crushed basil—that gave underfoot and released scent with every step. She took another, and the ground exhaled. Somewhere far off, a bell chimed. Not a bell. Metal clashed lightly, hundreds of blades hitting wood in a staccato rhythm. It washed over the hills; a peal of knives. “Right,” she said. Her throat had gone dry. “This place is… something.” “Some things are raveners,” Isolde said mildly. She had moved a little ahead. The hem of her dress didn’t pick up burrs, and when she turned, she left the air as still as she’d found it. “They eat what eats them until both are hollow.” Rory wasn’t sure if that was a warning, but she took it as one. The Heartstone lay warm against her; the beat had quickened. It tugged, almost. Not a direction so much as the sense that one way tasted better than the other. Nyx came to her side without moving—one shadow melting into the next, reforming as a long hand closed around a low-hanging vine. The vine twitched like an animal and eased away. “Don’t touch,” they said. “Even if it offers you a little.” Their eyes thinned to slits of violet. “Especially then.” “Noted,” Rory said. She wished suddenly for a bottle of water and some clean air that didn’t smell like a pâtisserie. “What do you call this place?” Nyx’s mouth bent, a suggestion where their face caught the light. “They call it by a thousand praising names. None of them are needed to leave.” A soft laugh carried on the wind. Rory turned, heart knocking once hard against her ribs. It was just trees and the slow, obscene swell of fruit bulging on branches. But something had moved where tree met ground—a slip of white, quick as a fox. A shape slid between trunks. Cloth. She glimpsed a pale sleeve, a gloved hand. Her skin prickled. “People live here,” she said. “People are kept here,” Nyx murmured. “Some by choice, some by choice that was eaten out of them.” “Don’t say that,” Rory said. “I can’t say what isn’t.” Isolde’s smile was sudden and small. “He can.” There was no path to follow, not in a way that would have satisfied the tidy part of Rory that liked maps. But the Heartstone warmed more when she looked to the right, towards a hedge knotted of fig and glossy bay leaves, its arch mouthed like a cave. She stepped toward it and the heat spiked. The pendant’s chain felt cooler than the air; the little gem shone slightly through her shirt, a low ember. Her pulse tapped at her neck in perfect time. They passed under the arch. The garden beyond knew what it was. Neat squares had been cut into the ground and filled with things that could not exist: cabbages unfolding into pale, spiraled shells with a shimmer inside like pearls; pumpkins furred with truffles, the black fungus webbing their orange flanks; vines heavy with lamps—fruit that made their own light, veins pulsing slow and red under translucent skin. Every bed yielded something that asked to be consumed. Every leaf, every stalk, each root had been trained to seduce. “Brilliant,” Rory said without meaning it to be praise. “This is brilliant.” Isolde tilted her head. “A hungry mind marvels at a hungry world.” “How about a terrified mind?” Rory asked. “Terrified minds fall quiet,” Isolde said. She looked at Rory’s chest, at the glow that was now obvious through the thin white of her T-shirt. The throbbing matched the not-bell’s rhythm. “Your stone beats nearer an open mouth.” Rory stopped. They weren’t alone. She realised it the way you notice when a conversation has hushed as you enter a room. Eyes. Dozens. She looked up and saw them set into the hedges at careful intervals: slicer’s knives hammer-turned to reflect, thin as suns, their polished faces catching and holding her. The impression of eyes faded when she looked directly. Just metal. Then it returned when she looked away. Her skin puckered. “Keep moving,” Nyx whispered. “Polished things here are never just for cutting.” They came upon the first kitchen built into the hill as if it had grown there. Rory would have thought it pretty, if not for the heat that rolled out like a living breath. The ovens were mouths. Black stone rounded into lips, heat prizing them open. Chimneys rose with the grace of minarets, white smoke curdled to creaminess as it went. Worktops grew from the rock, their surfaces worn to a shine, furred at the edges with herbs that sprouted without soil. No one worked them now. No clatter, no human hum. But the air shivered as if memory moved through it—hand to knife to bone to board. She stepped closer and the Heartstone nearly burned her. Heat threaded through fabric, tickled the fine hairs under her collarbone, made a drop of sweat slip cold down her spine. She tugged the chain out so the gem could sit against open air. It glowed like a coal. On the far wall, a shallow niche had been cut, hardly noticeable at first. It was a shape impossible to ignore now she’d seen it: a depression roughly the size of her thumbnail, edges smoothed by centuries of intention. Heart-shaped. A ridiculous detail, except nothing here had ever been subtle. Nyx’s presence sharpened next to her. They had gone more solid, the edges of their shoulders precise, the violet of their eyes concentrated to burning bellybutton bruises. “Careful,” they murmured. “That there is not a socket. That’s an oath.” “I wasn’t going to—” Rory began, but she had been going to. A small, traitorous part of her hand had already lifted. She closed it around the pendant instead, holding the heat against her palm until she could feel the outline of the stone imprint on her skin. “What happens if I put it in?” Nyx’s glance slid over the ovens, over the clean worktops that hadn’t seen service for a while and yet shone with an eager nap. “Then you’d give of yourself to close a hunger that is not yours. Or to open one.” “We came for this,” Rory said. “We came for what it opens.” “We came to look,” Isolde said, and in the two words there was something like kindness. “What goes down is slower to return than what rises.” Rory let out a breath. Fine. She could look without touching. She crouched, squinted, and for a second the niche seemed blank. Then it wavered. The stone around it moved. Lines thinned like held skin. She hated that image. She reached out with her free hand and didn’t quite touch the stone, letting her knuckles hover in hot air. The glow from the Heartstone painted the edge of the niche, and in the light, something wrote itself on the rock—a spiral like a fingerprint magnified until it filled the world. She blinked and saw it for what it was: a series of doors nested like shells. “The smell is wrong,” she said, before she knew why. She straightened. Went still. Listened past the syrup light. Past sugar and wine and herb breath. Under all that sweetness, something bitter ran, thin as a thread cut without care. Coffee scorched. A peel of blackened lemon. She could almost feel it skating over the back of her tongue. It didn't fit the rest. Her stomach gave a queasy twist. Nyx tasted the air without moving their mouth. “You’re right.” Isolde’s face didn’t change. “Bitterness binds sweetness to reason. But burn,” she said, and the word made the air go a shade thicker around it, “is ruin made useful.” “You’re doing the riddles thing again,” Rory muttered, but the Heartstone agreed with the bitter note. It beat like a quick heart when she turned toward the smell and went faint when she looked away. The garden sloped downward. The herbs underfoot gave way to a floor that shot hard light back: white marble veined in dark caramel. Rows of low tables formed an amphitheater curving like a half-moon around a sunken stage. Here and there, plates sat out. Glass covers fogged on the inside, as if something had just exhaled beneath. Banners hung limp from high beams: a stylized horned head crowned with wheat, a symbol sewn and sewn until it had become as invisible as a cliche. It watched without eyes. “Is that—” Rory began. “Don’t name what watches you,” Nyx said. She bit the inside of her cheek and tasted iron. The amphitheater was old, she realized. The marble had a wear at the edges that didn’t come from a decade or two of foot traffic. The grooves on the chopping blocks were too dense to map. Her law professor once had droned about precedent wearing ruts into thought; this was that, embodied in stone. How many competitions had cut themselves here? How many victors had eaten themselves sick? On the stage, set into the floor, lay a circle of metal the size of a manhole cover. It had been polished until it held its amber sky like a pool. The bitterness rushed off it in small, bitter gusts, as if it were exhaling old char every time the not-bell chimed. The Heartstone tugged toward it like a faithful hound. Nyx’s hand—cooler than the air—came to rest over Rory’s wrist. They didn’t squeeze. “Listen,” they said softly. She did. The blade-music had stilled. In the pause, she heard something else, faint as the first crackle of fat in a pan. Whispers. Not words, not even sounds you could call formed. The impression of mouths shaping things, an army of them. Her chest felt too small. “We should go back,” she said, which surprised her. “We’ve seen enough.” Isolde’s eyes half-closed, lashes pale as frost. “What you carry is nearer its own hearth than it has been in a mortal span.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means,” Nyx said, gentle, “that if you’re going to say no to the meal, say it before they lay the first course.” Something in Rory unclenched. She’d run before. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other until a door closed behind her. She opened her mouth to agree, and the circle in the floor sighed. Not gas, not mechanical. The sigh came like centuries. A seam cut around its circumference thinned and ink bled up, luminous and pale. No—citrus. The air sharpened; it lifted the little hairs on her arms. The scent was delicate and so clean it brought tears to her eyes, the way an onion will make you cry even if you swear you don’t feel it. Not sugar. Not wine. Something else waited there, patient and precise. The Heartstone grew almost too hot to hold. An edge of the circle raised a hair’s breadth, and ran, and lifted again in a slow spiral you could have set a metronome to. Beneath, stone steps twisted down, their treads catching light like frost. Salt. She saw it when she leaned. The spiral had been carved from a pillar of translucent rock salt, pink-veined. Her tongue tasted it without her mouth moving. “She’s opening for you,” Isolde said. She had the peculiar, absent wonder of a child watching a magic trick she’d never seen, though Rory knew—knew—there was nothing Isolde hadn’t seen. “She doesn’t do that often.” “She?” Rory echoed, because it was easier than thinking about the part of her body already moving to stand at the top of those steps. “Places with mouths,” Nyx said wryly, “often want to be called she.” Their hand slid away from Rory’s wrist. “Make your choice. In or out.” Rory swallowed, the sound loud in her own skull. Her heart fluttered, misfiring against the heat of the stone. The idea that she had been given this thing by someone—unknown, unnamed—rose up. That they had expected her to come here. That they had trusted her with an hour whose teeth were sharp. The blade at her side stayed cold, a clean line pressed against her. She closed her fingers around the Heartstone and for a ridiculous, floating second imagined pushing it into the silly little heart-shaped niche. She didn’t. She stepped to the edge of the salt steps and looked down into the amber-edged dark. “I’m not hungry,” she said aloud, to the air, to the ovens and their stone tongues, to the trees swollen with their own juice, to whatever waited below. And she felt it: a faint, annoyed twitch run through the space, like a hostess adjusting a menu. “Then walk as if you don’t long,” Isolde said, and her voice, for once, had no riddle in it. “And don’t look back. Looking back thickens the sauce of regret.” Rory snorted, unexpectedly. “Brilliant pep talk.” Isolde’s small smile returned. “Truth has teeth too.” Nyx bent enough to meet Rory’s eye. In their violet gaze, a human steadiness flickered so quickly she might have imagined it. “If you start to want what isn’t yours,” they murmured, “call my name in your head. I will step between.” “Thanks,” Rory said. She put her right foot on the first salt stair. The crystals sang faintly under her weight, a thin tone like the rim of a glass wet with wine. The bitterness rose like a ribbon, guiding. She went down once, twice, her hand grazing the salt, the grain catching against her palm. Behind her, Isolde drifted, leaving nothing for anyone to track, and Nyx slid like a second darkness attached to her heel. The amber light narrowed above them, and the amphitheater of empty tables shifted out of view. The heat dimmed. The air sharpened. Sweetness cut away. The pendant went from burn to steady warmth, and the blade’s cold kissed her hip bone. Past the third curve, sound changed again. It had weight now, a pulse in the stone, in her bones. Not knives ringing. Not ovens sighing. A slow, endless chewing. Not teeth. Earth. The old, patient appetite of it. She had never found it lovely before. Here, for a breath, she did. She kept moving. She did not look back. She let the alien world close over her shoulders like a coat, and when the darkness pressed in to take her measure, she pressed back. She had learned how to breathe in other men’s kitchens. She could learn to breathe here. The steps went down and down, obedient as laws. Somewhere below, something waited with a citrus-clean tongue and a purpose as old as hunger. Rory tucked the heat at her throat into her jacket, held her cold blade like a truth, and went to meet it.