AI The first thing that hit her was the smell.
Aurora had expected sulfur or smoke or something that fit her secondhand notions of Hel. Instead, when Nyx pulled her through the fault in the world—a vertical shiver in the damp brick under the railway arch—the air on the other side struck her like opening an oven door in a restaurant kitchen at peak rush.
Heat, yes. But along with it: star-anise and roasting meat, sugar gone to the edge of burn, crushed grapes left too long in the sun, the mineral tang of spilled wine, yeasty dough, something floral and almost—but not quite—rotting. The scent of everything edible at once, layered and thick and wrong.
Her boots slid on something slick. She caught herself against Nyx’s arm. Their shadow-flesh felt like solid smoked glass beneath her hands.
“Careful,” their voice breathed, a whisper at her ear without the bother of passing through air. “The ground weeps.”
It wasn’t a metaphor.
Aurora looked down. She stood on pale stone that reminded her of marble , if marble decided to be obscene. Veins like marble d fat ran through it, and from hairline cracks, dark liquid bled up in slow beads, forming domed droplets that rolled together and slid into shallow channels carved in looping, decorative patterns.
Wine, her brain suggested. It was thicker than water, redder than red, and it moved with the lazy determination of syrup. It smelled like grape and iron and sweetness turned too rich to be safe.
“Don’t taste it,” Nyx added.
“I wasn’t going to,” she lied, because a small, traitorous animal bit of her brain had in fact thought: just a fingertip. Just to know.
Above them, the sky glowed a warm, dense amber, as if the entire world existed under the inside of a whisky bottle. No sun she could see, just an omnidirectional, caressing light that made the horizon hazy. It should have felt cozy. Instead it gave everything the faint unreality of a restaurant with too many heat lamps.
The Heartstone pendant at her throat throbbed against her skin like a second pulse. It had been warm in the archway in London. Here it was hot, a little coal of insistent warmth that made her acutely aware of the thready, mortal beat inside her chest by comparison.
She wrapped her fingers around it on instinct. The gem’s heat soaked into her palm, neither burning nor comfortable, simply there, inescapable.
“Welcome to Dymas,” Nyx murmured.
She had no idea if they’d meant her to hear that. Their voice always seemed to thread between the obvious and the private. Either way, the name settled in her mind with a weight like a judge’s gavel.
Dymas. The air tasted like it.
They stood near the crest of a hill. From here, the land rolled away in terraced waves. At first glance, it looked like countryside: vineyards, orchards, gardens, all laid out in orderly, aesthetic patterns, separated by paths of that pale, fatty stone and dark, crumbly soil the color of cocoa powder. But the more Aurora’s eyes adjusted, the less right it all seemed.
The vines below them sagged under fruits too large for any trellis. Clusters of grapes the size of bowling balls, each grape within the cluster the size of a child’s head, skins taut and bead-slick with condensation, all in shades of black and violet so deep they drank the amber light. Some of the fruit pulsed gently , like breathing. Some steamed. Some glowed faintly from within, veins of bioluminescent blue tracing their plump curves.
Beyond them, orchards stretched, trees bearing round, blushing fruit that looked like crossbreeds between peaches and hearts. The wind—or what passed for wind here, a slow, caressing movement of air—stirred their leaves and brought a whisper of sound. Not the rustle of foliage. Something softer, wetter.
She realized it was the sighing exhale of countless fruits splitting their own skins.
Farther still, gardens unfurled in precise geometric beds. Plants grew in impossible colors: leaves a shimmering, oily black; blossoms in improbable blues that hurt her eyes if she stared too long; creeping groundcovers that shifted through the spectrum in slow, hypnotic ripples. Giant mushrooms rose like tiers of wedding cakes, iced in something that dripped and refroze in crystalline swirls.
From various directions came noises: the rhythmic chop of knives far larger than any chef’s; the roar of ovens breathy as beasts; periodic bursts of laughter that were almost moans. Somewhere, a crowd applauded.
Aurora swallowed. Her throat felt dry despite the humidity.
“Lovely,” she said, because her mouth would keep moving whether or not she had anything useful to add. “So. Which way to… whatever we’re here for, exactly?”
Nyx turned their head toward her, the movement of an outline rather than a body. Solid, they still looked like a humanoid cut-out from the night itself: a taller, darker absence against the saturated world. Faint violet light glowed where their eyes would be, like the last color clinging to bruises.
They inclined their head toward the descending terraces. “Down. The kitchens cluster near the heart’s heat. Your trinket will know the way better than I.”
Aurora glanced at the pendant in her fist. The gem—deep crimson, thumb-sized—glimmered with a sluggish inner light, as if lit from its own molten core. It had been given to her in a plain envelope through the slot of the flat’s front door three weeks ago. No return address. No note. Just the thing itself, heavy as obligation.
Three weeks of telling herself she didn’t care who’d sent it.
Three nights of dreaming about doors in places there shouldn’t be doors.
She let it drop back against her sternum. The warmth pulsed, steady. When she turned toward the left-hand path, it remained the same. When she faced the right-hand one, the heat beat a little harder.
“Right it is,” Aurora said, setting off before she could think better of it.
The path sloped gently down between two descending banks of vines. Up close, the grapes looked even less like food and more like organs dreaming of being fruit. Their skins shivered as she passed. One cluster gave a wet, overripe sigh and split, a seam opening along its length. Thick, dark juice oozed out, steaming in the warm air. The scent hit her—sugar, meat, wine, something darker under it all—and her empty stomach twisted.
“Do not let it touch you,” Nyx’s whisper skimmed over her shoulder.
She flinched sideways on instinct, though the juice was nowhere near her. “Is it acid?” she asked. “Poison? Are we talking instant death, slow hallucinations, or—”
“Memory,” Nyx said. “Yours, if you’re lucky. Others’, if you’re not.”
She tried to imagine what it would be like, stepping in that viscous liquid and having someone else’s recollections flood her mind like cheap spirits burning her throat.
Then she stopped herself, because she could all too easily imagine it, and that way lay panic.
“Right,” she said. “No touching, no tasting, no… anything, really .” Her voice came out clipped and brisk, as if she were reading new hire safety rules at the Golden Empress. She tightened her grip on the pendant, felt its heat, and with her other hand, brushed the hidden weight at her belt.
The Fae-forged blade lay there in its sheath, cold even through the leather. Isolde’s gift. Moonsilver, leaf-shaped, light as thought. Effective against demons, the seer had said, in the way someone might say, That dress looks nice on you—faintly amused, as though it were all a game she’d watched ten thousand times before.
Aurora resisted the urge to draw it just for the reassurance. Flashing cold Fae steel around in Hel seemed like a sharp way to end up on the menu.
They walked.
The noise of the unseen kitchens grew as they descended. The path curved between the terraces and the sound rose up the slope in waves: the hiss of something dropped into oil, the metallic percussion of pans struck together, the wordless guttural vocalizations humans made around good food and no shame.
Every now and then, a breath of cooler air brushed her skin as they passed some invisible minor gate in the Veil—she could see faint ripples in the space between certain vine posts, like heat distortions on a road in summer. Dim shapes moved on the other side. Wardens, maybe, keeping watch from Earth. Or other hungry things pressing noses against the glass.
“Has it changed much?” she asked, because silence felt too much like being watched.
Nyx’s head tilted. “Since when?”
“When you were—” She caught herself. Human was the word, but it seemed impolite to say it. As if their current state was a disease they might remember resenting. “Alive,” she finished.
“Ah.” Nyx’s chuckle was a low thread of sound without breath behind it. “It was smaller. Hungrier. Less… curated.”
“Curated,” Aurora repeated, eyeing a tree whose branches bent under glittering, candy-like fruit, each piece encased in what looked like spun glass. A forked-tongue lizard no bigger than her thumb skittered along a branch, its skin patterned like tablecloths. It paused to lick at the glass, then shuddered as if in ecstasy.
“Yes.” Nyx gestured with a long-fingered hand toward the rolling abundance. “Mortals refined excess into an art. Hel paid attention. The prince here is nothing if not a lover of trends.”
“The prince,” she echoed carefully . She didn’t ask for a name. Names in places like this felt like signing receipts for charges she couldn’t see.
They rounded a bend in the path.
The land opened.
Aurora stopped without meaning to.
Before them the terraces fell away into a vast basin. At its center sprawled an impossible complex: not a single building, but a tangle of them, fused and flowing into each other like confections melting together on a plate.
There were dining halls with walls of translucent stone, lit from within so that she could see silhouettes moving in silhouette behind curtains of steam. Towers that looked like stacked copper pots, kitted out with balconies where figures leaned, smoking and laughing. Bridges of dark wood and bone arched over rivers of wine, their balustrades carved in looping patterns of grapes and tongues and hands.
Chimneys vented fragrant smoke that made her eyes water and her stomach cramp with want. Above it all, the amber sky glowed thicker, almost syrupy, as if the heat from below were bending it.
People moved along the paths between buildings. People, and things like people.
Some were human—or had been once. Their skin carried the soft blurring of too much indulgence, or the gaunt, drawn sharpness of those who’d wanted more than their bodies could bear. Some wore aprons crusted with flour and blood, some uniforms, some finely tailored suits already stained at the cuffs. Many had something around their necks: collars of silver or paper-like parchment, edges flickering with faint, ember-orange script.
Contracts, whispered a thought she didn’t want.
Demons walked among them, supervising, directing, tasting. They wore flesh like expensive clothing, every form a little too exaggerated: too tall, too lush, too charming, too grotesque. One had four arms and a belly like a straining wine skin, his skin a polished onyx sheen. Another lounged across a floating divan of cushions and tongues, her hair a cascade of glossy black eels that writhed and whispered to each other between bites.
No one looked up the slope at Aurora and Nyx.
Relief stole a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“They can smell you,” Nyx said softly . “But they are busy. And you are… subtle, for a living thing.”
“I shower,” she muttered.
Nyx’s shoulders moved in what might have been a shrug. “Grief, fear, greed—those perfumes carry farther. You wear yours close.”
She didn’t ask which one they meant. She didn’t want to know which stain on her soul was most aromatic.
“How long do we have?” Aurora asked instead. “Before the Wardens notice a mortal’s gone walkabout through the Veil?”
“Time is a sticky thing here.” Nyx’s gaze turned toward the highest towers of the kitchen complex. “Long enough, if your feet are quick and your tongue quicker. Not long at all, if you dally.”
“Story of my life,” she said, and started down toward the basin.
The path here was different: the pale stone inlaid with swirls of something that looked like caramel set in intricate patterns. Her soles stuck and peeled free with each step, making faint, obscene kissing sounds. With every meter they descended, the heat rose, a heavy, damp embrace that pressed sweat from her skin. The Heartstone pulsed so hot now she half-expected to pull her hand away burned, but when she finally checked, her palm was unmarked.
The closer they got, the more details emerged.
A small orchard to the left held trees whose fruit dangled just above rows of benches. Figures sat there: diners? Supplicants? They leaned forward, tongues straining, as the fruits slowly , slowly swayed just beyond reach. A demon in a white coat strolled between them, taking notes on a grease-spattered clipboard.
“She’s tracking how long it takes them to break,” Nyx murmured, following Aurora’s gaze. “Some will hold out for decades, if they believe abstinence is a virtue.”
Aurora tore her eyes away. “And when they give in?”
“The fruit is excellent,” Nyx said. “And then they start again.”
Something in Aurora’s chest twisted in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
On the right, a series of low, open pavilions housed rows of long tables where helbound cooks worked. Their knives flashed, their hands moved in blurs, their faces wore the blank focus of people so deep in task they’d forgotten there’d ever been a world outside the edge of their cutting board.
The food they prepared defied logic. One man diced cubes of something translucent and shifting that smelled alternately like fresh bread, cigarette smoke, and the air in Cardiff the first time it had snowed when she was seven. Another woman plated what looked like fried roses, their petals crisped and golden, veins glistening with oil.
A young figure—a boy, maybe sixteen when he’d died—carefully iced a cake taller than himself, tier upon tier of impossibly light sponge. As Aurora passed, he glanced up. His eyes were the white of boiled eggs, pupils pale yolks. He smiled at her, quick and involuntary, like a muscle spasm.
She looked away fast, heat crawling up her neck. It felt like cruelty, returning a stranger’s hungry hope with her own fear.
Nyx drifted closer. Their presence blocked some of the heat, like standing in front of a cool draft. “Remember,” they breathed, “you are not here to rescue anyone.”
“I know,” she said. She kept her gaze trained ahead, on a narrow bridge arcing over a wine-channel that led, she thought, toward the heart of the complex. “We find out who sent the pendant, we get out. That’s it.”
“And,” Nyx murmured, “try not to be eaten.”
“Always on my to-do list.”
They reached the bridge.
Up close, the river below looked less like wine and more like liquid garnet, opaque, thick. The smell rising from it was heady, a thousand bottles of red uncorked in a small room. Faces drifted just below the surface—she saw them only in glimpses, features distorted as if seen through frosted glass. Mouths opened in silent speech. Bubbles rose where they moved.
Aurora put her hand on the bridge’s rail to steady herself. The stone thrummed faintly under her palm, keeping time with the Heartstone’s pulse.
“Don’t look too long,” Nyx said.
She looked straight ahead.
Halfway across the bridge, something stepped into their path.
For a second, her brain tried to categorize it as a person. It had limbs, a torso, a head. Then she focused on the details.
It was made of cutlery.
Knives formed its legs, blades buried in the stone, hilts jutting up. Forks hooked into an approximation of arms, tines splayed like fingers. Spoons clustered for a head, bowls reflecting her distorted face back at her from dozens of warped angles. Its body was a tangle of whisks, tongs, ladles, skewers. A stained white linen napkin draped over its shoulders like a shawl.
It rattled as it shifted, metal on stone, and when it spoke, the sound came from the friction of its pieces.
“Guests,” it scraped. “Unregistered. How… deliciously irregular.”
Aurora froze. Her heart thudded, fast and stupid. She could feel the dagger’s chill through the leather, the pendant’s heat against her chest, Nyx’s presence at her back like a patch of shadow deeper than all the rest.
She smiled.
It was the expression she used on drunk men at Silas’ bar when they leaned too close and she needed them to underestimate her. Polite, a little weary, a hint of apology—sorry, mate, can’t give you what you want, nothing personal.
“New hires,” she said, letting her accent go a little broader Cardiff than usual. People always assumed idiots came with regional vowels. “Got papers waiting at central. First shift. We’re late.”
The cutlery construct tilted its spoon-head. Her faces slid and warped across its surface, dozens of Auroras biting their lips, narrowing their eyes, none of them quite aligning with how she felt.
“No uniforms,” it rasped.
“Lost in transit.” She shrugged, as if that were the most tedious thing in the world. “You know how it is. Some courier takes a wrong turn between realms, poof.” She flicked her gaze over its assembled body. “At least we didn’t show up missing the knives.”
There was a beat. Then a faint clatter from its torso, almost like a laugh.
Nyx stayed silent behind her.
“Proceed,” the construct said at last, stepping aside with a squeal of metal on stone. “Do not touch the reduction. It is… temperamental.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Aurora said, and walked past, every muscle in her back tensed against the expectation of a skewering.
They reached the far side of the bridge without incident.
Only when they were clear, swallowed by the shadow of an overhanging balcony dripping with ropes of what might have been candied intestines, did she let herself breathe.
“That,” Nyx whispered, “was clever.”
“If you tell anyone I improvise like that, I’ll deny it,” she muttered. Her hands were shaking . She flexed them, one at a time, until they obeyed.
Ahead, the corridor opened into a high, vaulted space.
The ceiling arched above them in curves of bone-white stone, inlaid with gold that pulsed faintly, as if molten just beneath the surface. Chandeliers made of hanging cut-glass decanters and hooked meat glittered in the amber light. Long tables stretched away into the distance, set with plates that waited, steaming faintly with heat and anticipation though no food yet lay upon them.
At the far end of the hall, a set of doors taller than any cathedral’s loomed . Their surface was carved in relief: figures eating, drinking, devouring themselves and each other in an endless, looping frieze.
The Heartstone at her throat beat harder, hotter, so intense she half-expected to see smoke.
“There,” Nyx murmured.
“I gathered,” Aurora said, voice thin. She reached down, unfastened the dagger’s strap with fingers that had learned from a year of deliveries how to tie and untie knots one-handed while balancing a takeaway bag and fending off alley cats. The blade slid free with a soft, cold whisper. Its moonsilver surface drank the warm light around them, glowing faintly with its own coolness.
“Last chance,” Nyx whispered, their breathless voice close and almost gentle. “We can turn back. Say we never found the source. Leave the gift unanswered.”
Aurora stared at the doors.
Someone had sent her a piece of this place. Either as a warning, a debt, or a hook.
She thought of the envelope on her worn kitchen table. Of London’s grey light on the sink full of plates. Of Evan’s voice once upon a time, calling her Laila like he owned the name. Of Isolde’s pale eyes looking through her, seeing futures she’d refused to explain.
The pendant burned. The blade chilled. Between the two, she felt acutely, painfully alive.
“I hate unanswered questions,” she said.
And she stepped forward, deeper into Dymas, toward the doors that waited and whatever waited beyond them.